Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Linfen may well have improved since those days. Blacksmith is mum on the topic of
late. After a couple of years they realized that providing fodder for sensationalist head-
lines—and alienating local governments and industry—was not in their strategic interest.
They moved on to list toxic
problems
instead of toxic places. But the taxi driver was right.
By the time the 2007 list was released, Linfen was no longer number one. It had lost out to
some place in Azerbaijan.
Coal pervades Linfen. It feeds the furnaces of power plants and of single-family homes.
In the form of coke, it fuels the sprawling steel plant just east of downtown, a coal-fired
fantasia of industrial power that is the last thing an American expects to see in the middle
of a residential area. Our very casual attempts to stroll into this steelmaking city within a
city were shut down right at the gate, but the guards were friendly enough to let Cecily use
the bathroom just beyond the checkpoint. (I recommend trying the coffee shop's restroom
first. Cecily described the one at the guard post as “horrible.”)
We wandered the plant's margins, through a crowded neighborhood, poorer than the
ones we had found near the drum tower. A small pack of boys bearing plastic firearms be-
came our escort.
“Where is he from?” they asked.
“America,” Cecily said.
“How long have you been traveling?”
“Three years,” she answered.
Perhaps more than for the actual coal, Shanxi Province is famous for the coal bosses, a
class of nouveaux riches that became astronomically wealthy as the Chinese economy took
off. They were legendary for their appetites, for showing up in Beijing and buying one of
everything. The most expensive watch, the most expensive car—it was all fodder for a coal
boss's rapacious lifestyle. I had heard the tale, probably apocryphal, of a coal boss who,
liking the looks of an apartment building under construction in Beijing, had decided to buy
every unit with a southern exposure. Cecily told me that her friends would joke about mar-
rying coal bosses, in much the same way, it seemed, that I had heard young American wo-
men joke about finding an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.
I suspect the coal bosses personified certain anxieties about the way capitalism was driv-
ing China's transformation. They were a farcical overstatement of the consumerism that
was spreading through the middle class in general. And worse, the coal bosses' wealth was
exploitative, in that it came from a dangerous and often illegal industry. China's coal mines
