Chinese coal capital Fushun faces doom as boom winds down

FUSHUN (China) — The descent into the pit was steep, and the car skidded down a bumpy serpentine road.

“The road is supposed to be smooth, but last night’s storm and the following landslides make it so rough,” said the head of the Fushun Geological and Environmental Monitoring Station, Cui Yuan, 44, who is in-charge of monitoring the landslides, which leave the road littered with coal byproduct.

Towards the bottom of the pit, a decrepit four-storey building was perched at a dangerous angle. Half of the tall, thin pillars supporting the conveyor belts that transport coal to the surface were tilted precariously.

The few miners at Fushun’s West Open Mine, the largest open coal mine in Asia, were not mining coal but clearing roads blocked by landslides and putting out coal fires, which erupt spontaneously when buried coal is exposed to air for the first time in millions of years.

The city of Fushun, one of many so-called coal capitals of China, is struggling. Two-thirds of its estimated 1.36 billion tonnes of coal have been mined, and today the mineral that helped turn the city into a booming metropolis of 2.2 million threatens to bury it.

The coal mines here are winding down and shedding jobs. Decades of destructive mining techniques are causing frequent landslides that threaten to sink the city. As miners scrape out the last layers of minable coal, buildings near the mine have been abandoned and underground water pipes are cracking.

Today, Fushun produces fewer than 2.72 million tonnes of coal a year, a drop from a peak of 16.6 million in 1962. All five main coal mines here could close by 2030, Mr Cui said.

At the bottom of the West Open Mine, a 10.9sq km pit some 305m below the surface, coal glistened in the sun, but digging deeper would cause more landslides and more damage that the city is ill equipped to handle.

When the Japanese occupied the region in the early 20th century, they refilled the pits as they mined to prevent landslides.

“But after Chairman Mao came, the open mine only got bigger and bigger,” said Mr Zhang Jun, 52, former head of the project department at Fushun’s Development and Reform Commission, the local agency that oversees economic development. “Since the 1980s, we have been in what I call a ‘savage mode’ of mining.”

The state-owned mining companies cut dangerously steep angles into the ground without refilling, a practice that has put Fushun’s future at risk, he said. Landslides now threaten 42.5 per cent of Fushun’s urban areas, according to a government report.

The city has begun refilling part of the West Open Mine with soil from another active mine, the East Open Mine, but it may be too little too late.

Just south of the mine, groups of bungalows are half immersed in water. Abandoned factories, shut down because of falling coal production and sinking ground, silently testify to the consequences of unsustainable development.

The demise of the coal industry in Fushun also exacts human costs, as displaced workers worry about the future.

“We don’t receive much help finding new jobs, and the old factories don’t have funds to rebuild,” said one woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. She had recently moved with her family, mostly factory workers, from a landslide zone to a new apartment.

Although Fushun’s coal was discovered centuries ago, it was not exploited on a mass scale until 1901, during the Qing dynasty.

Japan joined the coal rush in 1903, first by renting land and then, in 1931, by seizing it. According to an exhibit at the Fushun Coal Mine Museum, Japan mined 202.30 million tonnes of coal here at the expense of nearly 300,000 casualties among Chinese miners before the end of World War II.

“But it was the Japanese who laid the industrial foundation for Fushun, and Fushun became a city built around coal mines,” Mr Zhang said.

Later, under Communist rule, Fushun became a pillar of the Chinese economy, a leading centre for not only coal, but also the production of aluminum, steel and excavation machinery.

Fushun’s decline began in the 1980s, when China’s economic liberalisation drive no longer favoured heavy industry. Now, mired in a chronic economic slowdown like much of the rest of the country’s industrial northeast, it is grappling with the slow death of the coal mining industry.

“Without reform, the city waits for its doom,” Mr Zhang said. “With the wrong reforms, the city may be asking to be doomed.” THE NEW YORK TIMES