The Sinking of the Proletariat
Jan 7, 2007
FUXIN, in Liaoning Province, is a pretty typical northeastern rustbelt city, constructed in the 1950s by Soviet experts on conventional heavy-industrial lines and now languishing in a sort of post-Communist limbo, depleted and exhausted by decades of aggressive coal mining and trying desperately to find a role in the new and more flexible economic era.
This is the city that globalization forgot. It still hits the headlines occasionally, usually after an explosion at one of its negligently regulated coalmines, but despite Premier Wen Jiabao's emotional visit to the city four years ago - as well as the "Rejuvenate the Northeast Campaign" that followed - it has continued to fall well under the news radar.
Taking a hard seat on a nine-hour train from Dalian to Fuxin, I was given fleeting glances of some of the nation's more troubled cities - pallid, dirty and overworked industrial conurbations like Anshan and Benxi, Panjin and Dashiqiao, built around the region's sprawling ore deposits, oilfields and coal reserves, most of which are now running out.
The Liaoning provincial waiban - or Foreign Affairs Office - tried to talk me out of visiting Fuxin, saying that it would be "inconvenient" for me to interview local officials at this time. In fact, the city is precisely the kind of place that the increasingly PR-savvy PRC would prefer to conceal from foreign journalists. While the waiban arranges tours to flourishing "model villages" on the Yangtze Delta and the rejuvenated port cities of the eastern coast, areas like the industrial northeast are left to languish in obscurity. Fuxin has sacrificed everything to post-Liberation reconstruction, pumping out the coal and power required to feed the chemical plants and machinery factories that turned the northeast into China's economic powerhouse during the Maoist years, but it was given very little in return. By now, with many of the mines shut down, the city is having to deal with crippling subsidence problems, and a third of its population is unemployed. The air is heavy and acrid, the tenements bare and stark and coated with soot. Antique steam-trains lurch through the city's centre, and fifty year-old Soviet smokestacks continue to pump black smoke into the atmosphere. Breathing in, you feel like you are eating spent matches.
I was invited to visit by the heads of the local Tourist Bureau, who - in the frigid, grey cold of a northeastern Chinese winter - were determined to look on the bright side. They believe that they can turn Asia's biggest open-cast coalmine - which has now been declared bankrupt - into a historical attraction, and that the city's ethnic background - it lies on the frontier with Inner Mongolia - can also draw in a better class of visitor.
I stumbled down the embankments and into the depleted mine, squinting into the smog to see the sad remnants of the mine's workforce. I climbed a few crumbling walls and tried not to draw the attention of the guard-dogs - one of which was being kicked violently by a bored machine operator - and I couldn't help being sceptical about the city's ability to transform itself.
And yet, the effervescence of China's economy and the verve for change in the Chinese government mean that almost anything is now possible.
The local Tourist Bureau chief treated me to a brainstorming session in which he envisaged hordes of Chinese tourists flooding into the area in an attempt to understand their heritage. They could see the remnants of Japanese occupation and forced labour, as well as the Chinese civil war, the surviving influences of the Soviet Union, and the "wild overdevelopment" of the Great Leap Forward. They could view the shattered old industrial buildings decked out in fading Cultural Revolutionary slogans, sit for a while on the vintage steam engines and enjoy - above all else - the sense of progress that is implicit in the vision of an abandoned mine.
The bureau chief also talked about coal mining theme parks in which tourists could enjoy the experiences of a coalmine explosion - "We can bombard them with black ping-pong balls!" - and emerge intact. He cited Premier Wen Jiabao, who on his visit to Fuxin in the Spring Festival of 2003, urged all Chinese people to learn from the suffering and sacrifice of our coalminer comrades.
In the end, it was hard to imagine, say, Shanghai's nouveaux riches choosing to spend a weekend in the dingy and sulphurous basin of the open-cast mine, even if the plans to surround the place with hotels and cafes are actually brought to fruition.
On the northern bank of Asia's biggest open-cast mine, the authorities are also trying to recover the dead earth with the hope of eventually creating Asia's biggest golf course. Hope springs from this grim proletarian wasteland. Fertile soil from the nearby hillsides has been trucked into the area, and fragile saplings are already emerging. Golf seems an anticlimax to the region's struggles, but the Chinese government are nothing if not pragmatic.
