A billboard on the motorway into China’s steel capital evokes the golden era of the country’s blistering economic rise. “Gathering great wealth!” it boasts. “Business wins the future!”
But at the Fufeng steel plant on the outskirts of Tangshan, a once booming industrial hub about 200km south-east of Beijing, there is scant sign of those glory days.
Since Fufeng’s owners declared bankruptcy early last year – laying off about 2,000 workers and sparking protests in the process – weeds and rust have begun to consume the steel mill’s industrial ruins.
“There’s nobody here – just us,” said one of three security guards braving snow and sub-zero temperatures to watch over the dilapidated facility, which, like many others in the region, has been forced out of business by massive over-capacity and plummeting demand.
Tangshan, a city of about seven million inhabitants in Hebei, China’s steel-making heartlands, was levelled by a devastating 1976 earthquake that is said to have claimed 250,000 lives.
But it rose from the ashes to become a heavy-industry powerhouse, propping up a massive Chinese construction boom and churning out more steel in 2014 than the United States.
Those days now appear over, as concerns mount over the health of China’s economy and its possible impact on the rest of the world, and Beijing fights to reinvent the world’s second-largest economy and clear its smog-choked skies, in turn piling the pressure on heavily polluting steel plants.
Since China began ramping up efforts to slash steel over-capacity and transition to a more sustainable, consumption-led economic model, some corners of Tangshan’s once bustling industrial sprawl have taken on the appearance of ghost towns.
Near the Fufeng plant, homes vacated by laid-off workers have been sealed up with metal sheets, snowflakes fall on eerily deserted streets, and those steelworkers who still have jobs complain their salaries have been cut as steel prices fall, government support is withdrawn, and their employers struggle to stay afloat.
A few hundred metres beyond the shuttered Fufeng complex, the premises of another company, China Metallurgical Hengtong Cold Rolled Technology, also lies abandoned, electricity cables drooping on to a corrugated iron fence blocking its unused entrance.
Source: The Guardian