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CHANG’GOU TOWN, China — Digging coal deep underground, Luo Xianglai learned to listen hard to the sounds the rocks made when struck with his pickax.

A dull thud usually meant solid rock and safety. A whistling noise signaled an impending cave-in.

"Usually you could tell it was coming,” said Luo, a squat 33-year-old with broad shoulders, a buzz cut and a worried look. "The rocks would start singing, letting off a whistling sound. We would get out in a rush.”

On a cold December day two years ago, the rocks did not sing, but disaster struck anyway. A cave-in buried Luo under fallen ceiling planks and more than 6 feet of rock, 300 feet down a mine shaft. His right leg was crushed, returning him to the life of an impoverished farmer — this time, with a steel rod in his leg.

Coal mining remains one of the world’s most dangerous trades. In China, more than 4,700 people died last year in coal mines.

The deaths underscore the human cost of a worldwide boom in coal use, driven by economic growth in China and India and a return to coal for cheap electric power in the U.S. and elsewhere. While Chinese miners toil for a couple hundred dollars a month, mine owners in Taiyuan, the sooty capital of Shanxi province, drive BMWs and invest in real estate in Beijing, the capital.

Miners themselves are often complicit in the deadly bargain. Many face reprisals if they report accidents. And some do not want to see their mine shut down for an accident investigation, depriving them of work.

"Some miners fear poverty more than mining disasters,” said Cao Yu, a senior at Hunan Normal University who conducted surveys among miners in Hunan province in 2005 and 2006. "Mining accidents create great stress. For them an accident means a colleague has departed the world but it also means the mine will stop work.”

Even in wealthy nations, where mining is more mechanized and safety regulations better enforced, risks remain.

The U.S. has had three major fatal accidents in the last two years. Most recently, a collapse at Utah’s Crandall Canyon Mine in August left six miners presumed dead. Federal inspectors had warned of hazardous conditions, though another federal agency had approved the work.

"Mining is inherently high risk and will always remain so as long as it is done by people,” said Dave Feickert, an independent mine safety consultant based in New Zealand, who has worked extensively in China. "All underground mines face the same problems. It takes eternal vigilance to stay on top of it.”

In northern India, 50 miners died in a methane gas explosion last year in the hilly coal country around Dhanbad. Small operators cut corners, putting profits ahead of safety, inspectors and miners say. "We are often trapped in the coal mines during monsoon,” said Jeetan Ram, who recalled a mine flood that drowned 29 fellow miners in 2001. "We are at the mercy of the rain god.”

But the death toll in China is on another scale. By official count, 4,746 workers died last year in coal mines. China’s fatal accident rate of two deaths per million tons of coal mined is 50 times higher than America’s and nine times that of India. Many more deaths and injuries go unreported at China’s smaller mines, which routinely cover up accidents, as Luo’s did.

Efforts to buttress mine safety are being made worldwide. A fatal methane gas explosion at a West Virginia mine in early 2006 set off a flurry of new regulation in the United States. Likewise, China has cracked down on unsafe practices in the past two years, bringing down the number of deaths by 20 percent from a peak of nearly 7,000 in 2002, even as coal production has increased.

But gaps remain. U.S. inspectors acknowledge they failed to carry out mandated quarterly inspections at every underground mine this year. A new federal law requires air packs, which give miners about an hour’s worth of oxygen in an emergency; while 125,000 have been distributed, an equal number remain on back order.

In China, the progress has come mainly at large, state-owned mines, the best of which now have safety levels approaching western standards. But 80 percent of the casualties occur at small operations, many of which dodge government crackdowns, often aided by local officials who sometimes are part-owners.

It was into that world that Luo entered. Raised in an isolated valley of terraced fields, about 20 miles down a dirt road that hugs mountainsides, Luo never thought about becoming a miner. Farming small plots of wheat and corn has been the way of life ever since his ancestors migrated north a century ago to the central China town of Chang’gou — a name that means "long gulch.”

But China’s economic boom led to previously unimagined opportunities and a growing income gap between cities and countryside. As countless other young rural Chinese have done, Luo left his village in 2002 for Xi’an, the provincial capital 150 miles to the north.

"When you farm, all you can do is make ends meet,” Luo said. "If you want to live otherwise, you have to leave home and find work as a laborer.”

Like many migrants, Luo found the city hard going. He picked up low-paying jobs as a carpenter, a baker and a brewery worker hauling crates of bottles. Soon he headed four hours east to the coal fields in neighboring Shanxi province, with an introduction from hometown friends who had worked as miners.

At the Zhaoduo mine, Luo did odd jobs for a month before getting a chance to dig. He lived in a dorm room with two or three others and shared a communal shower with 200 miners.

Water often seeped into the mine, making it damp and cold. When there was no water, the air was dense and hard to breathe. Luo worked 10-hour shifts, with no breaks, and a day off every 10 days. Diggers were paid by the number of carts they filled, so no work meant no pay.

"Basically you had to see how much your body could take,” Luo said. "If you could take it, you kept working. If not you rested.”

Luo found he was good at digging. For the first time in his life he had money, about $160 a month, nearly as much as he made in a year back home.

He moved to a bigger mine for better pay, then up a road clogged with coal trucks to the Dayangou mine, a small two-shaft operation set in eroded hills below bluffs farmed by villagers. Its owners were furiously trying to ramp up production in the 650-foot-deep shafts.

Along the way, Luo’s per-cart pay rose with the market price of coal, from a low of 75 cents to $1.75, raising his monthly income to $250. His wife and daughter joined him, the family living in one room next to the mine. They bought a television and were flush with cash when they visited their village for the Chinese New Year.

"When I was working, all I thought about was making money and meeting my responsibilities to care for my family,” he said.

Accidents were commonplace, Luo said. He saw three miners die: one fell down a shaft, another was crushed in a cave-in and the third smashed his head on the mine roof when his clothes got caught on an automated coal lift. And he heard about many more deaths — talk that mine bosses tried to suppress with threats of dismissal.

"If someone died in the tunnel next to you, you wouldn’t know about it,” Luo said. "The mine bosses would keep the miners in the shaft and tell them not to talk about it to anyone. You would think, ’That’s not fair.’ But you were always worried about losing your job.”

Such fears are pervasive in Chinese mines. At the Huayuan Mining Co. in eastern Shandong province, miners said they continued to work as water began seeping into the mine last summer, because they feared fines or dismissal. When a rain-swollen river breached a dike in August, the mine flooded, drowning 172.

"To enter the gates of the Huayuan company was to enter a prison,” said a handwritten letter by a miner who asked that his name not be used out of fear of reprisals.

On Dec. 27, 2005, Luo was strengthening ceiling beams when part of the shaft started to crumble. Another miner shouted to Luo to help repair the breach.

"The ceiling beam, the lifeline of the mine, came down on me,” Luo said.

A Dayangou mine official denied any collapse occurred. Zheng Hailong, a straight-backed wiry miner of 30 years and deputy manager of the mine, said Dayangou has a perfect record on safety and the environment.

"Safety here is guaranteed,” Zheng said, repeating the government’s campaign slogan: "Safety first, production second.”

Dayangou produces more than 100,000 tons annually, according to mine officials, though it is only licensed to produce 30,000 tons. The county says it owns the mine, but Luo and others say it is privately owned.

A government safety campaign is closing down mines that produce less than 300,000 tons a year. Two hours’ drive west of Dayangou, in Shanxi’s Liang mountains, inspectors have repeatedly raided mines, sometimes dynamiting miner dormitories and destroying weighing scales to prevent the mines from reopening.

But the crackdown never reached Dayangou. After his accident, Luo said, mine employees drove him 155 miles across the province to the People’s Hospital in Hejin so that no one would know of his injuries and the mine could deny there had been an accident. After 45 days, when he could walk again, hospital administrators told him to leave, handing him $1,200 that the mine had left for him.

Luo spent another three months on crutches in a rented room in Hejin, still hoping to return to the mines. But he finally gave up.

"I realized I would never be the same, never totally healed, so I came back,” Luo said at his half-acre farm in Chang’gou.

He has no money for an operation to remove the rod in his leg. Standing for long periods is painful. He finds it hard to till his plots of wheat or climb the trees to gather chestnuts, which are the area’s sole cash crop. But he has no choice: He must feed a family of four — his wife gave birth to a son early this year.

Though he misses the money they once had, he now says he would not return to mining, even if he could. "I’ve learned a bitter lesson,” he said. "Life above ground is better than life below.”

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Gavin Rabinowitz in New Delhi, India, and Tim Huber in Charleston, W. Va., contributed to this story.