Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
In this, it was part of a grand shift in China's coal industry. New mines were being built
with more recent technology; mines like this one, which had been open since the 1940s,
were being phased out. A similar shift is happening across a wide range of Chinese indus-
tries, a shift that promises to restructure the country's economic and industrial landscape.
Heavy industry is moving inland, to areas where both natural resources and cheap labor
are plentiful. Just as the United States and Europe have sent much of their heavy industry
overseas, economies within China are bifurcating between industrialized and developing,
between high and low income. The tidal wave of industry is moving farther and farther in-
land from the coast. In its wake stand places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have been
transformed into resource-hungry approximations of the countries whose consumerist eco-
nomies they have emulated.
“Do you use this kind of technology in America?”
It was the supervisor. He nodded toward the mining carts, the cables, the giant wheel
that drove it all.
I had by now perfected the gesture: a faltering, circular motion with my head that was
neither a shake nor a nod.
“Somewhat,” I said.
To kill time while things got going, Cecily and I walked up the road that led over the
waste rock pile, a mountain of shattered scree that partially filled the narrow neck of the
valley. There, accompanied by two men with strong Shanxi accents, we looked over the
vista of the mining operation: the dorms to the right, the throat of the mine tunnel to the left,
and beyond it the hopper and conveyor system, which separated the coal from the waste
rock.
One of the two, a rosy-cheeked man in his thirties, told us he was the manager of the ex-
plosives storehouse. He had previously worked underground as a miner, a job that had paid
more. Cecily asked about his wages, and told me they compared favorably to the salary a
recent college graduate could hope for in Beijing.
I found it suggestive about mine safety that someone would prefer to make less money,
and to work with explosives, than to be underground.
“It's safer than it was,” the man said. “But it's still not that safe.”
Our other companion was an elderly man who said he had worked in the mine for sev-
eral decades. Now he was retired.
“Before the 1980s,” he said, “we did everything manually. We dug with tools. It was
hard work. It's much better now. It's all machines.”
“Did you like the work?” I asked. “Was it good work?”
