When a Billion Chinese Jump

persisted all four hours to Taiyuan Airport. Even on the plane, we failed to climb above it. The pilot saved fuel by flying at a low altitude, entirely through the smog. When we landed forty minutes later, the familiar murky shroud was there outside the plane to meet us. It was almost comforting.

Satellite images of northern China show this is far from unusual. In the energy-intense seasons of winter and summer, when millions of heaters and air conditioners are switched on, all it takes is a few windless days and a murky haze thickens over Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, and Beijing. It is usually darkest in Shaanxi, where the smog becomes trapped by the Qinling mountain range. Traffic is only partly to blame. Coal-fired industrial boilers, furnaces, and home heaters are the main source. They belch out 85 percent of the country’s sulfur dioxide,¹⁷ which—mixed with another coal by-product, soot—forms the acid rain that now falls on 30 percent of the Chinese landmass, ruining crops and corroding buildings.¹⁸ The World Bank estimates the damage caused by acid rain at 37 billion yuan every year.¹⁹

Air pollution is appalling in almost every city in China. The toll on human health is enormous.²⁰ Barely 1 percent of the urban population breathes air considered healthy by the World Health Organization, and it is worst in northern China. The result is premature death, lung cancer, bronchitis, and other respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. Another high-risk group are poor peasants who slowly poison themselves by heating their homes with dirty coal. But the full risks are obscured. The toxic buildup of lead, mercury, and other heavy metals in the soil and water near coal plants and smelting factories is not usually measured. Entire communities are being poisoned without realizing it.²¹

Yet coal mines are as much a part of China’s civilization as paddy fields. Mining and industry have been crucial in ensuring the longevity of the Middle Kingdom. Despite its reputation as an agricultural civilization, for most of the last 2,000 years China has been by far the biggest producer of coal and iron in the world, a status lost only temporarily in the early nineteenth century when Britain began industrializing. It is no coincidence that the country’s recent return to great power status has come at a time when it is once again number one in these basic industries and when large numbers of peasants are working below rather than on the surface.

People in northern China have been burning coal since the Neolithic era 10,000 years ago, which is said (by the China Coal Information Institute) to be a first for the world. The fuel was a source of power and survival. Coal was used to smelt iron as early as the Warring States period (475–221 BC), when it was considered essential to mass-produce weapons. By the Song dynasty (960–1279), smithies were so expert at steel production they could equip an army of a million men with swords, armor, and steel-tipped arrows.

The black fuel was the basis of the world’s earliest military-industrial complexes. In the late sixteenth century the army commander on the northwestern frontier, Tian Le, sent out excavation teams into the mountains to search for the ore and trees needed to smelt iron for weapons. He requisitioned foundry workers from Shanxi and Shaanxi to help. Their success was lauded in dispatches.

“In Hexi, the region where the wars are conducted, iron smelted in the morning can be put to use the same evening,” wrote an admiring deputy. “The barbarians within our frontiers have repeatedly been given a bloody nose in recent times, and have been sticking out their tongues in astonishment, speaking of an ‘iron wall’! When they now further hear that we are smelting iron here, won’t they be inclined to behave themselves?”²²

As in films and art today, the misery and dangers of mining were another frequent theme of poems. Few are more evocative than Wang Taiyue’s description of environmental destruction and the grim life of a copper miner in the eighteenth century:

They gather at dawn, by the mouth of the shaft
Standing there naked, their garments stripped off,
Lamps strapped to their heads in carrying baskets,
To probe in the darkness the fathomless bottom.

Grazed by the stone’s teeth, the sharp-edged projections,
They grope down sheer cliffs, and across mossy patches
The hot months tempt them with harsh epidemics,
When poisonous vapors mix with hot gases

In the chill of the winter, their bodies will tremble,
Hands blister with chilblains. Their feet will be chapped.
Down the mine for this reason, they huddle together,
But hardly revive, their life’s force at a standstill…

The wood they must have is no longer available,
The forests shaved bald, like a convict’s head. Blighted.
Only now they regret—felling day after day,
Has left them no way to provide for their firewood.

Worse still, as the mountainsides’ bellies were hollowed,
The subsidence this caused demolished the rocks,
And smashed them to fragments, like scattering pebbles,
As, in one death, a few hundred perished.

Their spirits were heard, in the depths of night, wailing,
As their ghost fires were flickering, chilled in the gale.
How worthless, alas, is a human’s existence,
Its price even less than a chicken’s or piglet’s.²³

This lament echoes the coal-mining literature of many other nations, where appreciation for the warmth and power the fuel provided was mixed with horror at the conditions of miners and industrial pollution. In English, the earliest record of urban smog dates back to 1661, when the British diarist John Evelyn penned “Fumifugium,” an appeal for the government to clean up the air of London. In words that would sound familiar to the residents of early twenty-first-century Linfen, he noted:

By reason of the excessive coldness of the air, hindering the ascent of the smoke, was so filled with the fuliginous steam of the sea-coal, that hardly can one see across the street, and this filling the lungs with its gross particles exceedingly obstructed the breast, so as one would scarcely breathe.

The smog worsened during the Victorian period. In 1852, Charles Dickens vividly described the “London particulars” in the opening of Bleak House:

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full- grown snowflakes—gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.

It was not until 1956, after a “great smog” killed 12,000 people in 1952, that Britain cleaned up its skies with the Clean Air Act and a shift to oil, gas, and cleaner coal-burning technology. China has found it harder to escape the carbon that appears to choke the sky and the sun.

With 20 percent of the world’s population and an economy that continues to grow, China needs huge amounts of fuel. Deposits of oil and gas are small relative to the country’s size, but coal is abundant.²⁴ Unfortunately, it is mostly of low quality and inconveniently located in the northwest, the