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Mountain Disappeared Villagers Used AI to Investigate 20 Years of Illegal Mining

https://qindawu.pages.dev/en/
2•yueq54211•1h ago

Comments

yueq54211•1h ago
Author here. Some context and technical details:

  What happened: In 2006, a man named Qin Dawu in Fengdu County, Chongqing, China forged deceased villagers' signatures on land transfer contracts and used those forged documents to obtain mining permits. He was approved for 272 acres. He mined 1,800 — 6.6x the legal limit. Several mountains are now gone. When villagers reported him, they were arrested for
  "creating disturbances." 20 years, zero accountability.

  Verify it yourself in 30 seconds: Open Google Earth → type 29.9908°N, 107.9636°E → toggle historical imagery between 2003 and 2017. You'll see multiple mountains simply vanish. No earthquake. No natural disaster. Just mining.

  How AI was used: The villagers are farmers with no technical background. AI (primarily Claude) was used to:

  - Organize and catalog 133 evidence photographs
  - Translate the entire investigation from Chinese to English
  - Build the website from scratch (static HTML/CSS, Cloudflare Pages)
  - Draft formal complaint letters to 100+ government agencies
  - Analyze legal options under Chinese criminal law
  - Generate multilingual reports for international organizations

  Tech stack: Static HTML/CSS/JS on Cloudflare Pages, Leaflet.js for interactive satellite maps, Cloudflare Workers for analytics, R2 for video hosting. Total hosting cost: $0.

  Key evidence (all publicly verifiable):

  - Satellite imagery: GPS 29.9908°N, 107.9636°E (Google Earth, Bing Maps, Baidu Maps — all show the same thing)
  - Company registration: USCC 91500230774891898M (searchable on China's National Enterprise Credit System)
  - Court case: (2019)渝0102民初7008号 (searchable on China Judgments Online — the plaintiff and defendant are the same party)
  - Government-confirmed worker death at Lvdaoyuan facility in July 2025 (source linked on site)

  Video evidence: https://www.youtube.com/@qinyue-l2z

  Everything on the site is designed to be independently verifiable. We're not asking anyone to trust us — we're asking people to check.

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