From a cart, we bought two rou jia mo, large flat biscuits stuffed with pork and onions and peppers. In the cold air of winter, devouring my sandwich, I decided it was the most delicious thing I had ever eaten.
Next to us was a large sign with a picture of the Hua Gate, a sort of oversize Arc de Triomphe. ONE OF THE FIFTY MOST WORTHY PLACES FOR FOREIGNERS TO VISIT, the sign read. NATIONAL AAAA TOURISM SCENERY.
Good enough for me. We started toward the far end of the mall, passing carnival games and rides, hangers-on from a Spring Festival installation that gave the whole place a Coney Island feel. We stopped for a bit to explore a large, concrete relief map of China, its crumpled mountains reaching halfway to my knee. We stomped over the earth, leaping from one stone section of the mini-Great Wall to the next, clearing entire river systems at a stride. I happened upon Sichuan, the home province of the Han family, and from on high peered down on its rosy surface, the paint coming up in flakes.
At the far end of the boulevard was the Hua Gate. Only a few years old, it was the largest gate in the world, a man told us. But it could only generously be called a gate.
“If it’s a gate, you should be able to drive through it, or something,” Cecily said.
But the Hua Gate’s purpose was not to be driven through. Instead it was some kind of Chinese national bicep for the flexing, the gaudy ornament of a nation newly confident of its dominion. It was a monumentally ornate, gate-like building, its vast doors closed off with walls of glass. Inside we walked across its marble floors and past its huge, colored pillars to find the stairs. Three stories up, under colored LED lights that gave the place a definite Vegas sheen, we encountered a Hall of Great Chinese, with thirty-two gilded statues of this emperor or that navigator or that inventor, all of them ancient, dating to an era somewhere between history and mythology.
In the center of the room was a translucent hemisphere with the outlines of what looked like seven continents floating on its glass surface. It took me a while to realize that they were not the seven continents but rather seven different iterations of China, the outlines of seven different dynasties through the ages, now floating free across the globe, unimpeded by other land.
The next hall up hosted the statues of thirty-two famous Chinese women. They floated in the moody, blue-pink light. Cecily’s eyes went from one to the next, wondering if someday there might be room for her.
Lying in the middle of the room, twenty feet tall if she had stood up, was the grandly naked figure of Nu Kua, the goddess who first created human beings. The humans she had created frolicked all around her: freaky little golden babies that looked to me like they were up to no good.
On the city outskirts, we stopped so I could take some pictures of the billboards. There were advertisements for SUVs and sixteen-wheelers and even coal trucks. What had caught my eye, though, was a series of municipal ads. One had a picture of the drum tower under a suspiciously blue sky. The adjacent billboard showed an idyllic meadow scene, complete with fluttering doves. In the distance were city buildings; in the foreground, a ladybug perched on a photoshopped leaf. Above it all lorded a brilliant, shining sun. It’s always nice to find propaganda that has an element of farce.
Overlaid on the picture was a message: LOVE LINFEN. PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT. ESTABLISH THE IMAGE.
“Does he work for the environmental protection bureau?” the taxi driver asked.
“No,” said Cecily. I was glad to hear her back away from that one.
The driver was a waggish young man who liked to talk. “I heard that foreign media declared Linfen the most polluted city. That was embarrassing,” he said. “Is that why he’s taking pictures of the ads? During the Olympics they shut down a lot of coal mines and polluting industries, so it’s better now.” They were no longer the number-one polluted city, he said.
Cecily asked him who had taken the lead spot. “I don’t know,” he said. “It doesn’t matter. At least it’s not us.”
It was five years earlier that Linfen had first been declared the most polluted city in the world. The rankings were the work of the Blacksmith Institute, a New York nonprofit dedicated to fighting toxic pollution in developing countries. The group’s website notes that, thanks to decades of environmental activism and legislation, “gross pollution” has been radically reduced as an acute problem in countries like the United States, but that in the developing world—out of sight and mind to most of us in the West—more than a hundred million people still face serious health effects from rampant industrial pollution and toxic waste. Blacksmith’s mission is to attack this issue by pinpointing locations where concrete action could have major benefits for the health of a lot of people. The organization then provides grants and other support to local partners, who attack specific problems.
Blacksmith released its first public report in 2006, as part of its campaign to bring attention to such areas. Called The World’s Worst Polluted Places, the list provided a thoughtful, data-driven glimpse of places where pollution had severe everyday effects—effects that could be mitigated, if anyone bothered.
PR-wise, this was a stroke of genius. People love top-ten lists. Top-five lists, top-one-hundred lists, lists of any length. Anyone who craves hits for a website need only publish an article with a headline like “Seven Most Egregiously Philandering Basketball Players,” and watch the traffic flow. Blacksmith’s list was no exception. The report was splashed across magazines and newspapers around the world.
But because the real point of any list, however long, is to know who’s at the top of it, a lot of the coverage focused on Linfen, which had taken the number-one spot. The city became instantly notorious as the most polluted spot on the globe. (Not incidentally, I believe this report to be the original source for the picture of Sad Coal Man.) And this is the continuing source of the city’s fame, fueling article after article about how Linfen is—or was, or may one day be again—the most polluted city in the world. It was the reason I’d first heard of Linfen, and the reason I was now there.
There was, however, a problem with the list.
It wasn’t Blacksmith’s fault, really. The report’s authors clearly understood that coming up with a list of the ten most polluted places in the world was, at some level, silly. It was the same silliness I encountered when I set myself the task of choosing destinations for this book. By what standard do you make the judgment? Health effects? Contribution to climate change? Simple grossness? Blacksmith’s focus—namely, industrial pollution with large affected populations in the low- and middle-income world—was tidier than mine. But even within that niche, it is ultimately fruitless to declare that the radiation in the Exclusion Zone is better or worse than the smog in Linfen. It’s comparing cesium apples to carbon oranges.
To account for this, Blacksmith did something very reasonable: it refused to rank the places on the list. The report even says so, on page 6: “It was not realistic to put [the locations] into a final order from one to ten.”
Instead, the list was ordered by country. Alphabetically.
Nobody noticed. Such distinctions are no match for a reader’s desire to know who’s number one. And so Linfen took the crown…because the C in China comes near the top of the Roman alphabet.
Also unnoticed was that Blacksmith intended Linfen merely as an example of its kind. “Linfen acts in the Top Ten as an example of highly polluted cities in China,” reads a note on page 14. “In terms of air quality, the World Bank has been quoted as estimating that 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world were in China.”
Have a little sympathy, then, for the citizens of Linfen, who instead of a one-in-ten or a one-in-sixteen ranking had to carry the gold medal all on their own. Meanwhile, the Russian city of Norilsk, also on the list, dodged a cannonball of bad press, simply because R comes after C.
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 headlines—and alienating l
ocal 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 became 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 marrying coal bosses, in much the same way, it seemed, that I had heard young American women joke about finding an investment banker or a hedge fund manager.
I suspect the coal bosses personified certain anxieties about the way capitalism was driving 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 were notorious for collapses and explosions, with a cost in lives that outstripped any other nation’s mines.
But the golden age of the Shanxi coal boss was drawing to a close. The government had consolidated or closed thousands of coal mines, in a bid to increase efficiency and safety. And the future of the industry lay in less-developed provinces like Inner Mongolia, where huge reserves of coal waited in the ground.
Linfen isn’t really a coal baron town; I hear they prefer the provincial capital of Taiyuan. But even in Linfen, a crust of luxury is overlain on the economy. There was, for example, the Audi dealership—a striking mesh-clad box that housed a sleek, museum-like showroom.
“Our customers are mostly from coal mines,” said a young salesman called Yanlin. And he didn’t mean the miners themselves. Industrialists liked Audis, he told us. Executives from coal mines, metal mines, coke factories. They came here to buy their cars.
A brand like Mercedes-Benz attracts too much attention, Yanlin said. Audi is a good car, very good quality, but not as gaudy. It shows they are the boss, but is a little more low-profile.
Even so, an Audi could go for two million yuan—three hundred thousand dollars. And sales were still good, even with the recent consolidation of the coal industry.
Yanlin seemed to be getting a little nervous at all the questions, so we thanked him and went to roam the showroom floor. I was less drawn to the cars themselves than to the display cases of Audi-branded accessories: leather wallets and portfolios, pens, an iPod case or two, all stamped with the quadruple circle of Audi. The placard for a handbag read, in Chinese, “This purse is a miracle.”
A pair of cufflinks caught my eye. They were engraved with the logo for the Audi R8, a high-performance sports car. The face of each cufflink was mounted with a small, lacquered checkerboard of carbon fiber. This was probably a reference to carbon-fiber components used in the cars, but here, in coal country, the cufflinks took on special meaning.
“Everyone has to have their own style,” said Cecily, reading the placard. “These cufflinks show your spirit and taste. Made with real carbon and stainless steel.”
Were there Shanxi coal men driving around wearing cufflinks made of carbon? It was too good to be true, but one of the salespeople assured us that it was. He also told us that there were health benefits to wearing the cufflinks—the carbon in them absorbed toxins. But this harebrained theory was less interesting to me than the idea that the cufflinks were some kind of badge of honor, a Masonic ring for that brotherhood of men who are helping us seal the deal on climate change. (Order your own from the Audi Web site for $169.)
The dealership’s customer service director, a young man called Jun, had taken an interest in us. He had nobody to eat lunch with that day and offered to take us out. I noticed that he drove a Nissan.
I don’t make enough to buy an Audi yet, he said.
We had lunch at the Taotang Native Association, an ornate wonderland of executive schmoozing. It was a recent building, set down on a stretch of land not far from the Yao Temple and the Hua Gate, near the construction site of a huge shopping mall. We made our way through a warren of courtyards and corridors, into a small ballroom with a stage, and finally to a private room with a large circular table outfitted with a lazy Susan.
Jun ordered lavishly, without looking at the menu, and soon there were something like fifteen dishes on the table, including foie gras, shredded rabbit with cabbage, tofu, fried buns, garlic broccoli, and something Cecily translated as “specialized noodles.”
Jun was twenty-eight, with an attentive face and a crown of wiry hair bursting off his head. He smoked between his measured assaults on the food, and atomized the conversation into small sections divided by the rings of his two cellphones—one white, one black—sometimes stepping out of the room to talk. The white phone was for regular calls, he said. The black one was for his most important customers. The black one he answered twenty-four hours a day.
The guy was unstoppable. “Car sales depend on personal relationships,” he said, and pushed the turntable so the pile of foie gras was in front of me.
He told us that, in sales, you have to put yourself in the customers’ shoes. Anticipate their needs. Become their friend. Then, when they have to choose a car, they will come to you. “Competition is very fierce here,” he said. “You win not by price, but by personal relationships.”
He had majored in car repair in college, but had been doing this job for four years now.
“So you went from servicing the cars to servicing the customers,” I joked.
He nodded. “That’s correct.”
There was nothing Jun wouldn’t do for his clients, whether it was helping them with personal business, running errands, or doing other favors. For one customer, he had recommended a stock pick—and promised to reimburse him if he took a loss on the investment. And he told of having to talk one powerful client down from a drunken rage after a relative received some minor injuries blamed on a faulty Audi air bag. Many of Jun’s clients were rude, he said. But no matter how rude they got, he couldn’t allow himself to lose his temper. In the end, the rudest ones ended up trusting him the most, because he tolerated their behavior more than anyone else would.
The most important part of his job, though, was to smoke and eat and drink without cease. He drank and smoked much more than before. Nothing got done in Shanxi without drinking, he said. It was a hard job. His family didn’t like it.
The conversation had somehow turned, and suddenly, instead of telling us about his ability to manage the personalities of truculent coal men, Jun was talking about how depressed he was.
He had taken a test on the Internet, he told us. A score above fifty meant you were depressed. He scored eighty.
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nbsp; He was under a lot of pressure, he said. He wanted to keep making his salary. He was making five times what he had hoped for when he graduated, and had bought a house for his parents, but he was too busy to enjoy life. He couldn’t relax. He had no time to socialize, and was starting to lose friends. They assumed he was avoiding them, that he thought he was better than them, because of the money he made. But that wasn’t it. He was just busy. The only people he really talked to, he said, were friends he had made online, whom he would never meet in person.
He wanted to have a plan for the future, he said. He wanted to get married. But he didn’t have time to think about himself, to think about his “self-strategy.” The only time he could think about such things was late at night. Or while sleeping.
He lit another cigarette. All he knew was that, if he left the car business, the connections he had built in Linfen’s industrial community would be valuable, whatever he did. Relationships weren’t important just for selling Audis.
I wanted an audience. I wanted to smoke and eat and drink with one of the coal princes of Shanxi. I wanted Jun to help me get a glimpse of the top of the food chain.
He shook his head, a faint smile on his face. It’s impossible to meet those people, he said. Then he got the check, and we rose from the table to go. But before we left, I took another bite of shredded rabbit. You have to eat the year, or it will eat you first.
The closest I got to meeting a coal boss was Liu, the driver who had picked us up at the airport in Yuncheng and driven us to Linfen, and whom we had hired again several times. A middle-aged man with a sleepy expression and a wry smile, Liu and his family had started a coal mine of their own. Only in Shanxi, perhaps, does a taxi driver start a coal mine on the side. Before the recent spate of shutdowns and consolidations, the province had been riddled with small, illegal coal mines.
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