Henan: heavy industrial melancholy

November 5, 2021

WE ARRIVE in the dinky Luoyang airport at around 10. My colleague Ping immediately hires a car, so we are - at least - not at the mercy of a capricious local driver. My other colleague Zhang offers to take the wheel. I feel like I am very much the junior partner on this trip, unable even to help out with the apparently simple task of driving. 

My enthusiasm is at quite a low ebb. And it soon becomes clear that the story I am planning to write - something about one of China’s oldest coal mining regions pulling out all the stops to raise production - is not borne out by the facts on the ground.  There’s just no more coal to produce.  

We head to our first destination, a new mining project at Xiadian. I always associate Henan with white mist. Its countryside - its colourless, overworked farmland and its ramshackle concrete village settlements - always seems hazy and indistinct.  

Amid the usual rural blur, I saw the occasional cooling tower dominating the farmland that surrounds it, and there were a few scattered housing projects being picked at by cranes. The closer we got to the mine, the more dense our surroundings became, with ceramic plants and textile factories soon giving way to rows of crumbling old workshops and truck repair stations. 

Along the narrow roads connecting the mine with the main highway were the usual coal trucks and the diesel-powered livestock vehicles chugging noisly along, and I was struck by all the miscellaneous construction - a yard here, an outhouse there - all erected without any apparent plan, or any awareness of how this should fit together or minimise disruption. 

There was only a sort of proxy evidence to suggest that the Xiadian mine was being built at all. Four bright-white office buildings had been constructed at the mine site, which had been completely sealed off, while outside were rows of brand-new residential complexes and a line of empty retail venues. My colleagues were disappointed that there was nothing to photograph and we headed off. Along the way, dangling on two trees outside a cluttered old convenience store, was an ominous red banner: “Study and implement the anti-espionage law; protect state security together.” 

It was hard to imagine what any self-respecting foreign spy could possibly be doing in the rural outskirts of an obscure coal mining city in central China. It then occurred to me that the people living in this benighted region were precisely the kind of uneducated folk who were capable of believing that a foreign reporter hanging around their coal mines was actually involved in espionage.

Our next stop is a restructured coking coal mine, which wasn’t particularly frenetic either: steel production has plummeted and there is no indication here that coke supplies are under any sort of pressure. Hanging around the mine’s perimeter, we come across an old farmer woman wearing a thick quilted jacket and carrying a bucket, looking absolutely baffled at the notion of a foreigner being in her midst.

“Have you eaten?” she asks, politely.

“I have,” I reply.

At our third destination, things seem a little busier. We watch trucks wend their way from the mine. We find dunes of rock and low-grade coal on the edge of the mine. We talk to a very old man, his back bent by decades of drudgery, raking through the black dregs in search of something to sell to the local brick kilns. Beneath him was a pit filled with the carcasses of dead livestock.

I start to think of the often neglected difference between work and labour, as elaborated by Hannah Arendt in Human Condition. This is how Jenny Turner puts it in her invigorating essay on Arendt in the latest issue of London Review of Books:

From the time of Aristotle, European languages have maintained “two etymologically unrelated words for what we have come to think of as the same activity”: work and labour, oeuvrer and travailler, werken and arbeiten, ergazesthai and ponein. Happy meanings, to do with craft, achievement, stability, tend to cluster around one member of each pair, and sad ones, concerning pain, trouble, waste, sheer unending graft and repetition, around the other. Labour was exhausting, dirty, unending, a constant battle to beat off death and decay, which is the reason the citizen kept slaves at home, along with women, to do it for him… Work, on the other hand, makes the stuff that constitutes what Arendt calls “the world”, the coating of “human artifice” we build over earth and nature, without which the “common world” of human civilisation could not exist.   

It struck me that this poor man’s life of toil and suffering was completely unnecessary. That’s to say, it could have been completely otherwise. Anyhow, my colleague Ping mocked Zhang for interviewing the old man as if he were a sophisticated city dweller with opinions to share about the price of coal. In fact, he knew next to nothing other than the imperatives of survival. 

Nearby, scrambling near another cluster of dunes, is a scruffy, iodine-deficient youth picking through the detritus and trying to evade the attention of a old, bumptious security guard riding through the hills on his scooter. The youth didn’t have much to say either, but I suppose the picture here tells the story. We could see that coal had shattered the landscape and the environment, leaving it prone to subsidence and catastrophic landslides. At the same time the economy was allowed to become almost completely dependent upon mining, and remains so even as the last vestiges of coal are scraped from the mountains. 

Other more fortunate workers were using excavators to shovel the coal onto a large sieve, separating the smaller cleaner-burning pieces of coal from the large chunks of rock that are allowed to topple down the side of the cliff. There’s still a bit of money to be made here, if they sell to less discerning customers - the brick kilns and the streetside barbecues and the old workshops, for example - but they are hardly reaping the benefits of a nationwide coal shortage. 

It was clear that for these old mines, most of the good stuff had already been extracted and consumed, with only the leftovers remaining. It was clear that there was no slack, no surplus that could be unleashed. Dozens of small mines have been forced to shut in Pingdingshan but there was no question of reopening them. All this showed that the market is simply not flexible or sufficiently responsive to price signals. There is simply no supply left to respond to the rising demand. 

I was trying to invest significance into the old man. He could serve as proof, I thought, that Pingdingshan’s 100-year old coal industry no longer has the high-quality, readily-available resources that are capable of responding to unexpected supply crunches. 

Coal is supposed to be the safe, energy-secure option for the more conservative elements of China’s policymaking insitutions. Before 2020, some researchers were calling for China’s coal supply and its coal power fleet to be expanded rapidly in order to head off potential shortages over the 2021-2025 period. 

But critics say the recent supply crunch has proven the opposite: that coal can no longer be relied on in a crisis. Some other big state firms in Henan have been given permission to expand and build replacement mines, but by the time it goes into production, the boom is more than likely going to be over.   

Propaganda is everywhere, and far more prolific than in Shanghai and probably even Beijing: the Regime continues to infantilise its rural population with inanities such as, “Listen to what the Party says; go where the Party goes”. 

We head east to Liangbei, another old state coal mine with plans to expand. Again, there are no signs of hyperactivity. At a depot nearby, a coal train shudders and then creaks forward as an excavator slowly fills its carriages. We watch a queue of red trucks line up for their loads as the daylight fades and a pack of hungry dogs mooch around the depot. 

I had been using my colleagues’ caution about being seen with a very conspicuous foreigner as an excuse not to do any work, but this was untenable. I got out and started chatting with one of the drivers about how long he expected to have to wait here, and what business had been like these days.  

The driver, who is mercifully articulate though heavily accented, confirms my thesis that in Henan, there just isn’t the slack in the market that is capable of responding to the price signals, however loud they have been.   

On the way to the hotel, I ponder how much this industry has changed compared to twenty years ago, when thousands of private owners built mines with no regard for safety, quality, or pollution in order to feed a massive and unprecedented surge in energy demand. Dozens of accidents later, the state then started to “rectify” the sector, holding it to far stricter standards and even arresting bosses and government officials for violating the rules.  

In search of good visuals, we head onto a bridge spanning a railway line, hoping to catch a glimpse of a fully-loaded coal train. We chat with an old timer who tells us that the coal industry is basically a closed system these days: it is mostly delivered by rail, directly from the pithead to the power plant, and you’d be hard-pressed even to see a miner covered in soot as he emerges from the pit. The cargoes in the trucks are usually lower in quality. China has been trying to tackle this “scattered” direct combustion of low-grade coal in village brick kilns, workshops, barbecues and heating systems, but it seems the transition is a slow and painful one. 

I start to doubt the wisdom of choosing Henan as a destination. It hasn’t suffered profoundly as a result of the energy shortages, even if there have been a few temporary supply disruptions, especially during the floods, which had a knock-on effect elsewhere. Still, I try to figure out how to frame my story and come out with this: 

For the mines of Inner Mongolia and Shanxi, the crisis has created an opportunity to raise output and profits, but the ageing and depleted pits of Pingdingshan are not in a position to respond to market signals, or to China’s campaign-style efforts to tackle supply shortages over the winter.  

Locals said there was still a lot of coal, but not necessarily of the right quality. What little surplus they have is low-grade coal that power plants aren’t allowed to burn anymore, and the new capacity now being built will only be available in a year or two, when most expect the boom to be long over. 

On the final leg of our slightly underwhelming trip, we head to the district of Baofeng and watch a lone excavator weave its way through another storage site, shovelling coal into neat piles. There is something melancholy about heavy industry.

There is something to be written, by someone more talented, intelligent and disciplined than me, about the lot of a foreign correspondent in China, trying haplessly to report honestly on a country that even after twenty years remains so discordant with his or her formative experiences, and seems to close further in on itself with each passing day. At the same time, I find it problematic to think that history and culture somehow mean that Chinese values and human rights are different from my own, or that this world and all its miseries are somehow impenetrable to me because I happened to have been born several thousand miles away. 

As we drove past the scruffy apartment blocks of Pingdingshan, I once again felt a vertiginous sense that I was about to fall into this Brownian motion of humanity. The vertigo seemed to arise from an instinctive awareness that I am actually a part of their mass, that we are all higher mammals and as such are occupying a privileged part of the Earth’s food chain, but are nevertheless aspiring to something more, and are still all struggling to reconcile our animal nature with our uncanny and inexplicable self-consciousness. 

At so many stages of our development, in China and in Europe, we converged on an explanation that involved the notion of a supreme being or higher intelligence of some kind, on an all-powerful celestial pivot around which all our existences turned, and on which we depended for meaning. That, for most of us, is no longer an option. This is what Sartre understood and explained so well: humanity is marooned, isolated from itself and from the rest of the world by its own self-conscious subjectivity.  

For years, I have been looking at the countless windows of the multitudinous residential compounds in a myriad of overpopulated Chinese cities and have felt overwhelmed by them, understanding at once how difficult it is for all of us everywhere simply to be, with all that being entails. This is not a matter of looking at the masses of Chinese people, the billion individuals crowded into a million towerblocks, and seeing how dehumanising it can be to live in such conditions. What China illustrates better than any other country, simply by sheer force of numbers, is the fundamental conflict between individual consciousness and society that Sartre described so well. But that conflict is everywhere.