In China’s coal capital, a promise remains elusive

DATONG (CHINA) — At first glance, the coal city of Datong in northern China displays the hopeful signs of change that President Xi Jinping had in mind when he promised his nation a new “China dream.”

Rows of shiny solar panels have mushroomed on farmland ruined by mining. Some 74,000 villagers are being moved into newly built apartments. A drive to clean up government has brought the arrest of several city officials who grew rich on kickbacks.

In an agenda-setting report at a Communist Party congress in Beijing this past week, Mr Xi, who also leads the party, held out a new dream of a China that would become cleaner, more prosperous and fairer in sharing the benefits of its increasing wealth.

This vision of a brighter future is aimed at fixing social ills created by three decades of often-breakneck growth: polluted skies and waters, deep-rooted corruption and growing inequalities.

To succeed, Mr Xi’s China dream must take root in rural and rust-belt backwaters like Datong, where many of China’s almost 1.4 billion people still live.

But to hear locals in this former capital of China’s coal industry tell it, the bustling scenes of construction mask a stark disconnect between Mr Xi’s bright promises and their hardscrabble reality.

While China’s overall economy has clocked dazzling growth rates, workers and farmers here say their lives have not improved nearly as quickly, if at all. Despite Mr Xi’s promises of a cleaner and more responsive government, they complain that local officials still ignore them or run roughshod over their lives.

Most important, they said, Mr Xi’s China dream had yet to deliver what they needed most: better jobs, improved health care and affordable housing.

In interviews here, the same refrain was often repeated: “Xi Jinping is good, but. ...”

“Xi Jinping is a good president, but his policies aren’t implemented here,” said Ms Hu Wenxiang, who lives in Ronghuazao, a village in a rural part of Datong.

Most of her village has been razed as part of a programme to relocate residents away from fields where subsiding coal mines have left the earth sagging and unstable. But Ms Hu refuses to leave. She said moving to one of the new apartments in an urban part of Datong would deprive her of her income, which comes from helping her son breed goats.

Her rejection of the local government’s one-size-fits-all approach to rural redevelopment has left her to fend for herself in a dying village. The people who benefited most from the forced relocation seemed to be the officials who ordered it and construction companies who built the new units, she said.

“The government’s policies sound good, but we don’t see the benefits,” said Ms Hu, a thin, sun-hardened woman in her 60s. “Why does the government hand out money here and there, but not to us?”

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of industrial towns and cities like Datong across China, where living standards remain far from the “moderate prosperity” that Mr Xi has promised.

Experts say the grassroots grievances in provincial China do not pose an imminent threat to Mr Xi and the Communist Party. But they warn that there is risk as Mr Xi raises expectations.

He must now deliver on a new social contract that is offering a more equitable and better managed China in exchange for continued public acceptance of party rule.

“The sources of party legitimacy are no longer as tightly tied to the pace of economic growth, and Xi sees that,” said Mr Wu Qiang, a political scientist in Beijing. “He wants to offer society a deal. The party won’t tolerate opposition or civil society or calls for democracy and freedom; it will offer more balanced development. But even that’s a daunting transformation for this government.”

Mr Xi began proclaiming his dream since taking power five years ago, though he focused much of his early efforts on battling corruption. In Shanxi, the province that includes Datong, investigators have arrested so many corrupt cadres that the national government has declared the region to be in a state of “implosive corruption.”

However, even in his first term, Mr Xi recognised that he must offer more than just the crackdown. In 2013, he laid out a list of 60 reform commitments that he said would make China greener, safer, fairer and more prosperous. His government is credited with delivering some progress, such as toughening pollution controls and shutting down excess mines and factories that had fed a glut in production.

In the run-up to the congress, such accomplishments were celebrated in television shows, speeches, editorials and exhibitions. And as Mr Xi begins his second term, experts say the public still seems willing to give him a chance to deliver on more of his promises.

But that could change if Mr Xi proves unable to deliver results. And experts say Mr Xi faces an uphill battle.

Closing outdated factories and mines may bolster economic efficiency but at the cost of eliminating jobs, which brings the risk of unrest. The slower growth rates of China’s maturing economy have made it harder for the government to increase spending on health and education.

“So far, the central government has been really good about making promises and commitments but then passing the buck onto local governments,” said Professor Bruce Dickson of George Washington University whose book, “The Dictator’s Dilemma,” examines how the Chinese Communist Party stays in power.

“At some point, you can’t simply go after corrupt people. You have to do something,” Prof Dickson said. “And the question is what.”

In his opening speech Wednesday to the congress, Mr Xi warned that the party had to improve its performance at addressing social grievances.

“The principal contradiction facing society in the new era is that between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing need for a better life,” he told delegates in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

But in Datong, a broad area of 3.4 million people that includes an urban centre and surrounding coal fields and countryside, locals say that the official fixes often create their own new problems. They said the directives from the capital were enacted in a heavy-handed manner that could hurt locals. And even with the anti-corruption crackdown, local officials benefit the most from the changes, not regular people.

In Datong, the sense of dislocation is especially acute.

Famed for its ancient Buddhist rock carvings, the city became China’s coal capital as demand for the energy resources that lay beneath its surface took off along with Chinese manufacturing in the 1980s. A decade later, at peak production, Datong provided 7.5 per cent of China’s coal. The result was an extended boom that created a wealthy class of mine barons and officials.

That ended when demand for coal slumped three years ago, leaving mines and miners idle. As production dropped, the city fell on hard times. It also struggled with the environmental burdens left from its reliance on coal, including smog, contaminated soil and entire swaths of farmland that are now sinking as the mines underneath them collapse.

Mr Tong Yanlin, who works in one of Datong’s still-operating mines, said wages had plummeted. He now works only three or four hours a day and earns slightly more than US$700 a month (S$952), about half what he earned in the boom years. Still, he said he preferred earning lower wages if it meant keeping the mine open and himself employed.

Datong’s government has tried to create new jobs by encouraging solar and wind farms on top of exhausted coal mines. Despite their efforts, the economy grew at just 1 per cent last year, officials said, much lower than the national growth rate of 6.7 per cent.

The new investments, and a frenzy of urban renewal, have also created new burdens, leaving the local government heavily in debt.

“For Shanxi, this transition is a profound revolution,” the province’s Communist Party secretary Lou Yangsheng said at the party congress in Beijing on Thursday.

Locals wonder what Datong has to offer that could replace coal. With an ironic smile, Mr Tong, the coal miner, said the city still had plenty of one thing: corruption.

Despite Mr Xi’s efforts, local officials remained as crooked as ever, he said: “They could still haul away corrupt officials in one railway wagon after another.” THE NEW YORK TIMES