In traditional Chinese architecture, a small wall stands a few feet in front of the entrance to a home. According to the principles of feng shui, this wall shields the occupants from malign energy forces. But in the city of Handan such walls have acquired another significance: as protection against acrid smoke billowing from the city’s factories. One summer evening in Sihoupo, a western suburb of Handan with three hundred residents, the glowing yellow flames of a coking plant erupted into the sky. Clouds swirled up around the factory, saturating the air with the smell of rotten eggs. Coking concentrates soft bituminous coal into hard briquettes that are used to smelt iron into steel, but it also produces carcinogenic emissions. “We can’t open our windows at night,” Hu Xuhui, a man in his late sixties who lives across from the factory, told me. “The days are bad, but the nights are worse.”
Handan, which is two hundred and fifty miles southwest of Beijing, has an urban core of 1.4 million inhabitants and a sprawling rural region of eight million more. It abuts the Taihang Mountains, a range of rugged, sharp peaks that runs from the western outskirts of Beijing in the north down toward the river basins of the country’s fertile south. For millennia, these mountains have been a crossroads of legend and history. In Chinese mythology, they are home to the goddess Nüwa, the creator of human beings, while their narrow passes were greatly prized by military strategists. Today, thanks to rich deposits of coal and iron ore, the mountains are one of the world’s great centers of steel production. One of the provinces that border the Taihang range—Hebei, where Handan is situated—accounts for ten per cent of the world’s output.
Although pollution in Beijing has attracted global attention in recent years—and has sometimes caused expats and tourists to flee—environmental damage is much worse in smaller industrial cities. According to government figures, of the ten most polluted cities in China, seven are in Hebei Province, and Handan is one of them. On bad days, you cannot see to the other side of a four-lane road. Earlier this year, a factory leaked a toxic chemical into the Zhuozhang River, which feeds the city’s reservoir. The river turned brown, dead fish were found floating on the surface, and the city’s water was cut off overnight. Supplies had to be trucked in, and there was a run on bottled water.
For decades, activists and economists have warned that China’s economic boom is ruining the environment and posing serious health hazards. A recent study reported that in 2010 outdoor air pollution contributed to 1.2 million premature deaths in China, nearly double the number of deaths worldwide from malaria. Another study noted that pollution from coal reduces average life expectancy in northern China by five and a half years. Although government restrictions on civil society make it hard for informed citizens to organize into pressure groups, people in Handan and its surrounding villages are speaking more freely. Mothers say that their children have chronic respiratory illnesses. Old people complain of digestive troubles that they attribute to locally grown food. And many people talk about neighbors dying of cancer. Even the government has acknowledged the existence of “cancer villages,” which activists have identified in hundreds of places around the country, including Handan.
“This factory definitely hurt us,” a Sihoupo resident named Song Lingdi told me. She was sitting in her living room, holding a plastic-wrapped picture of her husband, a burly man of forty-four with a brush cut, who died three years ago of lung cancer. She said that she has petitioned the government for compensation but has been denied benefits. The more affluent residents protect their yards from the fallout with zinc-plated roofs. Children are supposed to stay underneath these shelters, and their mothers sweep up dustpans of gray soot each day. In late summer, the green fields surrounding the city are full of corn, but parents know better than to let their children play there.
Handan has been a center of industry since the third century, when sulfur was first mined there. Even earlier, it was the capital of the State of Zhao, and its position at the intersection of two major trading routes made it a cultural center, too. It is celebrated as the source of hundreds of idiomatic expressions—four-character phrases rooted in Chinese folktales and history. One of the best known is “Handan xue bu” (“learning to walk in Handan”), which refers to the story of a young man from the provinces who hears that the people of Handan are so sophisticated that they walk in a special way. He goes to Handan to learn, but, years later, he still hasn’t mastered the gait. Dejected, he heads home. He finds that he can’t remember his own way of walking, and has to crawl. The moral: don’t copy others, or you’ll lose yourself.
The modern origins of Handan’s industrial power go back to the nineteenth century, when Li Hongzhang, one of the country’s ablest administrators, opened a coal mine near the city. When the Communist Party took power, in 1949, it saw heavy industry—steel in particular—as the way to modernize China. The government founded the Hansteel works, in Handan, in 1958. The next year, during the Great Leap Forward, Chairman Mao came to the city and proclaimed, “Handan should revive! It has an unlimited treasure in iron, and there’s a great hope for it to become a great steel city.” Soldiers and civilians worked non-stop shifts, hauling bricks to the building sites on bicycles and in hand-drawn carts.
At first, the mill produced only low-quality iron. Then, finally, in 1965, it was able to generate the temperatures necessary for steel. Even so, production remained small-scale. In 1978, Hansteel was producing fewer than two hundred thousand tons of steel a year. But that year Deng Xiaoping came to power and began to initiate economic reforms. Private enterprise, largely banned under Mao, was allowed. In 1979, China produced just 34.5 million tons of steel; by 1996, it was producing more than a hundred million tons.
As Hansteel expanded, it swallowed up neighboring villages or left them almost uninhabitable, because of the heavy pollution. Residents still speak about demonstrations in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, when people lay down across railroad tracks to keep the coal cars from entering, in protest against the factory’s encroachment and its pollution. Hansteel began paying residents in the adjacent communities a “pollution fee,” typically several hundred dollars a year. Residents say that they still receive this fee.
Further liberalization of the economy in the nineties accelerated growth, creating an almost insatiable demand for steel. Manufacturers bought decommissioned steel mills from the West at minimal cost and reassembled them in China. Last year, China produced seven hundred and sixteen million tons of steel, nearly half the world’s output. Hebei Steel, the conglomerate of which Hansteel is now a part, is the country’s biggest producer.
But steel production follows a beggar-thy-neighbor pattern common throughout China’s economy: successful ventures attract imitators, but inefficient producers are only rarely weeded out. Instead, they continue to operate. Supported by local protectionism, they grimly pursue market share, even when profits are negligible. Enforcement of pollution controls is another problem. The Ministry of Environmental Protection has more power than in the past, but local officials often ignore it. Their priority is economic growth, which for years has been the second most important factor in an official’s chance of promotion. (Avoiding unrest is the first.) Handan’s surging steel industry has made the city a valuable posting for ambitious politicians, who are quickly promoted, and then move on.
When I tried to arrange a visit to Hansteel, local officials told me that it was forbidden to report on pollution in the city. If I lingered near a factory, a Party functionary would shoo me away and warn people not to talk to me. But an acquaintance at the plant agreed to give me a tour. I drove there with another steelworker I had got to know, a wiry thirty-nine-year-old named Han Zhigang. As we drove, he told me that he was a second-generation employee. His parents were originally farmers in a nearby village in Hebei Province, who had moved to Handan during Hansteel’s Maoist-era expansion. They had what was known as an “iron rice bowl”—a job for life, with all the perks of a big state-owned enterprise in a Communist system. There was free day care, schooling, and health care, and subsidized housing and food. They even got free shampoo, which was just as well, because the part of Handan they lived in was covered with soot. “I grew up in that system,” Han said. “We had everything, and all the workers lived together. It was like a family.”
As we drove, we passed a new theatre, large public parks, and pleasant downtown streets canopied by gingko trees. There is an impressive museum containing artifacts that chronicle two thousand years of the city’s history. But as we approached Hansteel the road became pitted from the steady pounding of trucks that transfer coal to coal-washing plants. One such plant, on our left, was temporarily closed, following a government anti-pollution initiative. We passed under a railway line, which brings fifty-car freight trains loaded with coal to Hansteel.
Twenty years ago, when Han was in trade school, he found a job selling maps for a company in southern China. New, private-sector jobs abounded at the time, paying far more than traditional positions in state-owned companies. But Han’s parents couldn’t imagine anything safer than a job at the mill and urged him to return. He also worried that his generation had grown soft. “I didn’t think I could eat bitterness,” he said. “So I asked for a job in front of the blast furnace. I wanted to see how tough life could be in a steel factory.” After four years of pouring molten iron, he got a desk job, in the logistics department.
The Hansteel complex covers some fifteen hundred acres, and makes up essentially the entire western third of Handan’s urban center. We drove along the southern perimeter of the site, on a road lined with boarded-up restaurants and other broken-down buildings. Behind them, Hansteel’s towers and chimneys rose like a city skyline. The road was dark with ground-in coal dust. We parked by the factory gates, and I got out of Han’s car and into the car of my contact, whom I’ll call Teng. We drove past two checkpoints and entered Hansteel.
The roads inside the complex were lined with newly planted poplars and bushes sprouting red, purple, and yellow blossoms. There were mowed lawns and perfectly trimmed hedges. Sprinklers watered the gardens, and teams of women in straw hats tended to the plants. A large banner read, “Spread the Hansteel Spirit. Together Forge the China Dream.”
“We’re under pressure about the environment,” Teng explained as we cruised down the broad, empty streets. He said that the factory had installed new dust-collection equipment on the blast furnaces and had fenced in the iron-ore storage depot, which had been open to the sky, allowing the wind to blow dust over the city. Trucks patrolled the streets, sucking up dirt and ash and hosing the streets clean. Locals used to say that you’d lose thirty years off your life the moment you passed through Hansteel’s gates; now it was the cleanest part of the city. Hansteel was what any government official would want to see on an inspection tour; unseen would be heavily polluted districts like Sihoupo, where the neighboring coke plant was owned by Hansteel.
But even if the main Hansteel coke facility was cleaner, it smelled intensely of sulfur. A few men pushed carts filled with equipment and trash. Others sat on the curb, looking exhausted and smoking cigarettes. Teng told me that this section had opened in 2008. It was up-to-date and highly profitable, but had just four thousand employees. Twenty thousand people worked in an older section, next door, which he said had antiquated equipment, with fewer pollution controls, and operated at a loss. If Hansteel, by far the biggest local employer, were to close that section down, it would be greener and even more profitable, but it would have to lay off thousands of workers. “I don’t think that you could do that in any country, could you?” Teng said. Large-scale production and employment were part of the company’s social responsibility, he added.
After leaving the factory, I walked around the perimeter. In a neighborhood called Mengwu, I talked to Yang Xiuying, a woman in her fifties who is employed a few hours every morning sweeping the coal dust off Hansteel West Road. Like many locals, she was still bitter about the land that Hansteel had appropriated during its various expansions. She described the pollution of the worst years. “It used to rain black rain,” she said. “You couldn’t wear white clothes. The cabbage was all black, so we had to peel off the outer layer.”
Although black soot no longer falls inside Handan’s urban area, the houses in Mengwu and other neighborhoods are jolted every few minutes by the coal trains. Some of the houses have cracks in the walls, and many of the upper floors can no longer be lived in. Residents have petitioned the government for compensation, in vain. Like most of the people I talked to who live near factories, Yang had no expectation of change. “Chinese journalists never report anything—it’s pointless talking about it,” she told me, turning away. “You can’t fight Hansteel. Hansteel is Handan.”
For decades, the Chinese government ignored evidence of pollution, or tried to cover it up. In 2007, fearing social unrest, the government pressured the World Bank to censor a report about pollution deaths in China. After a leak of aniline at a chemical factory in Jilin, twelve hundred people experienced convulsions, nausea, breathing difficulties, and temporary paralysis. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency describes aniline as a probable carcinogen; it has been connected to cancer outbreaks in industrial cities along the Rhine as early as the nineteenth century. Health officials from Beijing, though, attributed the symptoms to “mass hysteria” and walked around the hospital where the afflicted were being treated telling them to pull themselves together. In 2009, after the U.S. Embassy in Beijing started using Twitter to distribute readings from a pollution monitor on its roof, a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official complained that the United States was meddling in China’s internal matters.
But at the start of this year the Chinese government began disclosing extensive air-pollution data from seventy-four Chinese cities. It collected hourly readings from monitoring stations in each city—Handan has four—and used a scale known as the Air Quality Index. The scale includes a measurement known as PM2.5, which quantifies the concentration of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometres. When inhaled, these tiny specks can increase the risk of heart attacks, cancer, and acute respiratory infections, especially in children and the elderly.
Environmental activists in China believe that the release of more data may represent a tactic by the Ministry of Environmental Protection to create public pressure that will force pro-industry wings of the government to accept stricter pollution controls. There have been other signs of change in official attitudes. In May, Xi Jinping, China’s new leader, announced that environmental protection would be one of the factors used to assess the performance of public officials up for promotion. In July, the government said that it would spend two hundred and seventy billion dollars over the next five years to improve air quality, much of the money earmarked for the region around Handan. And after the Communist Party plenum earlier this month the government announced a bold series of economic reforms that promised to remake the functions of local governments, emphasizing services, such as environmental protection, instead of the blind pursuit of growth. While I was in Handan, senior officials at the local office of the Ministry of Environmental Protection held a series of meetings, and within a few days signs were posted around town and in the industrial suburbs saying that government controls on unfiltered pollution would be enforced, and that factories operating illegally would be shut down.
The government’s actions reflect concern that pollution is one of the few issues that can arouse public discontent across class and ethnic lines. The Party has made rising standards of living its benchmark for success, so a bad environment and attendant health problems damage its credibility. In Beijing, I met Li Bo, a veteran of the Chinese environmental movement, who told me that pollution “challenges the Party’s legitimacy, and the Party knows this.” He went on, “This is why it has announced all these measures this year. It is also why there is now more space to discuss this.”
Li, who is forty-three, has spent twenty years working on environmental causes, and is now a board member of China’s oldest environmental N.G.O., Friends of Nature. Chinese law makes it difficult for N.G.O.s to organize nationally, but Friends of Nature, which is based in Beijing, has affiliates across China. Since the late nineteen-nineties, it has stopped a power-plant project on the Yangtze River and the felling of virgin forest in Yunnan, and it has helped protect the Tibetan antelope. Its most high-profile campaign at the moment concerns a cancer village in Yunnan, where for years a chemical factory had been dumping toxic waste that seeped into the water supply. Friends of Nature has helped the villagers file a lawsuit demanding compensation from the chemical company. This is the first time that an environmental organization has taken a chemical company to court.
Li told me that the new freedoms come with clear limits. “Everyone talks about pollution, but, if you follow a specific pollution to a specific polluter, you might get into trouble,” he said. “The local officials might say you’re hindering development.” Last year, he travelled to southern Hunan Province to defend Chen Fengying, a prominent activist who had been jailed by local authorities for protesting against a chemical company. After initially being denied access to her in jail, Li helped organize a legal team that secured her temporary release, while she awaits sentencing.
In Beijing, I also met Wang Jun and Zhang Bin, software engineers who have developed a smartphone app called the China Air Quality Index. They told me the app had been so successful that they were considering renting an office rather than working out of their apartments, as they do now. The app can pinpoint air-pollution levels down to the neighborhood, with hourly updates and data going back months. You can spend hours following the trail of pollution, as clouds of bad air moving across cities and provinces cause the indices to rise and fall. Sometimes, a station’s reading jumps from one or two hundred (already ten to twenty times as high as the World Health Organization’s target level) to eight hundred. The exact reason for these fluctuations isn’t clear: are they errors or does a blast of smoke from a neighboring factory inundate the measuring equipment? No one seems to know. More significant than these momentary fluctuations are the daily and monthly data, which reflect long-term effects on people’s health. Handan’s average PM2.5 for the first half of this year was 130.5. By comparison, Beijing’s was 101.3 and Manhattan’s was 8.3. The W.H.O.’s guidelines say that any particulate matter is potentially harmful, but it sets a PM2.5 target of 10. In other words, the concentration in Handan was thirteen times worse than the W.H.O.’s target.
Zhang and Wang told me that they had stumbled into their role as environmentalists. “We hadn’t really paid attention to pollution, but in 2011 there was a period of very bad air,” Zhang told me. “We wondered if there was a more convenient way of following it.” In the beginning, the app had information only from U.S. Embassy and U.S. consulate Twitter feeds, but earlier this year the developers upgraded it to include the new government data, historical information, comparisons among cities, and the ability to pinpoint any monitoring station on a map. The app has been downloaded two and a half million times—including fifty-eight thousand times after one infamous day in January, when a cloud of smog in Beijing caused flights to be cancelled and led foreign companies to distribute face masks to their workers. Zhang and Wang now average four thousand downloads a day, and have been looking to expand to other countries. They said that although the government had mostly left them alone, officials were unnerved by the strong public response. “They’ve never had a third party broadcasting their numbers,” Wang said. “They don’t oppose it, but it’s strange for them.”
One Saturday morning, on a quiet ridge of the Taihang Mountains, I met up with the Handan Sunshine Outdoor Activity Club. The club was founded by Han, the steelworker who drove me to the factory. In the late nineteen-nineties, wanting to escape the city’s pollution, he started organizing trips into the mountains with friends. “I didn’t have a goal—I just wanted to go into the mountains,” he told me. “Maybe subconsciously it was because I’d been at the steel mill and needed nature.” A few years later, after he married and had a daughter, he took her into the mountains with him, to expose her to the clean outdoors. By 2008, the Handan Sunshine Outdoor Activity Club had taken shape. Through it, Han got to know people outside steelworking—government officials, professionals, and entrepreneurs. He found that there was widespread unease among ordinary people about how China had put economic growth above all other considerations.
A few years ago, Han leased a twenty-five-acre plot in the mountains, where club members could grow organic vegetables. With the help of local farmers, he hopes eventually to start an organic restaurant there and gardens where people can pay to pick their own vegetables. “People don’t trust the vegetables they buy in the city,” he said as we tramped through freshly plowed fields. “They feel that they’re poisoned.”
Han was dressed in a T-shirt, hiking trousers, and a rumpled bush hat, and he led our group up the mountain to pick wild celery that was growing on a plot of fallow land. The day was clear, as Handan days go, which is to say that the air was about five times as polluted as Manhattan’s. An occasional patch of blue sky could be seen. The adults stuffed plastic bags with wild celery, while the children ran to an abandoned farmhouse and clambered onto the roof. Han had hopes of renovating the building and turning it into a clubhouse. “People can sit around, eat, and drink beer,” he said.
Eventually, our bags were bulging with green shoots; we were going to make dumplings for lunch. One of Han’s friends, a former steelworker with a shaved head who goes by the name Monkey, picked us up in a purple Jeep Cherokee, which he had souped up with enormous tires, roof lights, and a throaty diesel motor taken from a bus. We zigzagged down the hills, stopping at a village to buy pork. Suddenly, we were enveloped in a cloud of dust. Han yelled “Windows!” and Monkey quickly toggled them up.
Over the next few hours, at the home of another of Han’s friends, we stuffed dumplings with celery and pork and chatted about life in Handan. I learned that women had started to wear cotton face masks with scarves attached that protect the throat and chest from grime. A few weeks later, I noticed them in Beijing, too. The club members also told me that real-estate prices were higher in the eastern part of town—Hansteel is in the west.
One of the guests was a young woman who worked at a Communist Party school that trains people for work in natural-resource industries. One might have expected the rising young official to be defensive about the government’s environmental record, but she was forthright. “Everyone is aware of pollution, and there’s a desire to improve it,” she said. “We’re even training managers in pollution control. It can’t continue like this.” She had joined Han’s club because she worried about the health of her daughter.
Working-class people and white-collar government officials don’t normally socialize together, and Han kept the conversation going with lighthearted banter. “There’s a joke that a Handan person went to Switzerland and the air was so good that he began to feel sick from all the oxygen,” Han said. “So they quickly hooked a tube up to a car’s exhaust pipe and he sucked on that for a while until he felt better.”
Toward the end of my stay in Handan, I went to a branch of the Zhuozhang River with Wang Xiaohong, a former civil servant who is the head of Handan’s Winter Swim Club, a group of enthusiasts not unlike the members of Han’s outdoors club. Wang, who now runs a tea shop with his wife, organized the group several years ago, as a kind of polar-bear club that meets at swimming holes on the river. After the chemical spill this year, Wang’s club filed suit against the factory, but it dropped the case, apparently under pressure from the government. Still, members were determined to continue their daily swims.
Wang is an adherent of Taoism, China’s indigenous religion, which places a high value on closeness to nature. For much of the past two millennia, Taoism was politically eclipsed by Confucianism, with its more worldly concern for family and society. Mark Elvin, a professor emeritus of Chinese history at the Australian National University, has argued persuasively that China’s disregard for the environment has roots in this heritage. The ideal Confucian ruler saw the mastery of nature as part of humanity’s triumph over barbarism. Taoist philosophers were in the minority. Han, from the limited time I’d spent with him, had seemed more Confucian than Taoist. His mountain retreat was a refuge from Handan’s pollution, but it was also a useful way for a steelworker to advance in society. Wang’s interest in the environment was of a piece with his other activities—meditating, practicing calligraphy, and distributing copies of the classic text the “Tao Te Ching.”
As we stood on the banks of the river, Wang asked if I minded swimming nude. Twenty or so men had turned up that day and were undressing energetically. I did the same, thinking that my trunks would be spared the water’s toxicity. I wore my goggles, though. The water was cool and refreshing. Wang dove in. He is forty-six, with broad shoulders, a crewcut, and a triangular beard set off by thin sideburns.
We started out at a brisk pace. I flipped onto my back. Someone swam by doing a choppy breast stroke. I got a mouthful of water. It tasted sour, like a dirty swimming pool recently bombed with chlorine.
“How clean is this?” I asked.
“It’s not drinkable,” Wang said. “But a bit in your stomach won’t kill you.”
“Why is it a men-only swimming area?”
“A few years ago, the water quality was so bad that our female association members wouldn’t swim with us,” he said. “We men didn’t mind, so, after a while, since there weren’t any women, we decided we might as well strip down and swim without our suits.”
The chemical that leaked into the Zhuozhang River turned out to be aniline. If that was the only spill, we were in no danger—it had been six months, and the chemical breaks down in water—but, given the number of factories that line the river, it was hard to tell what was in it. “Let’s go back,” I called out, and the current speeded us to shore.
We drove to Wang’s tea shop, a narrow store with bricks of pu’er tea and Yixing teapots stacked on steel shelves, and rooms upstairs for meditating and sipping tea. Wang told me that among the swim-club members were a lot of company bosses. “G.D.P.”—he used the English term—“doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have your life.”
We said goodbye, and I walked out to buy dinner at a night market. I checked the Air Quality Index app, and my smartphone showed that at that moment Handan was the most polluted city in China. I could see and smell the smog. According to government guidelines, on days like this people should wear masks and stay indoors. I passed through a park where elderly people were dancing to music emanating from loudspeakers. In the yellow haze, they seemed to float across the ground. I met a retired dancer who was playing a kind of reed pipe made from a gourd and three bamboo shafts. She said she believed that there was more oxygen in the park, near the plants, than if you stayed at home. I found a kebab stall with a small table and chairs next to a former canal, now dried up and strewn with garbage. Across a bridge was a statue immortalizing the story of the man trying to imitate the locals. His body was off-kilter and his knees were buckling as he tried to make his way forward. He still hadn’t mastered the Handan walk. ♦
