thought was actually plausible. But Cecily went ahead with something like
“What if they start asking me questions?” I whispered.
Don’t worry, Cecily said. We just have to tell them something.
In the gear house behind us, a large wheel fitted with a cable began to turn. The two lengths of the cable descended into the tunnel-like mouth of the mine; each end was connected to a train of five mining carts. If they ever got started, one set of carts would descend, empty, while the other rose up from belowground, full of coal. But that was some time off. There was no coal to be seen, except for everywhere. The wheel was only turning so the crew could apportion the slack on the lines.
The track on which we stood ran through nearly five hundred feet of tunnel to reach the loading area, which the supervisor told us was located three hundred vertical feet belowground. Several hundred miners were down there, powering their way through seams of coal. Workers at the mine usually got a day off for every ten they worked. But lately, he said, they had been working constantly, week after week without any days off.
The mine produced a thousand tons a day, which was on the small side, now that so many illegal operations had been shut down. Mines with a daily production of three or four thousand tons a day were not uncommon. In a few years, the supervisor told us, this mine would either be retrofitted with new systems to replace its antiquated technology or be shut down entirely.
In this, it was part of a grand shift in China’s coal industry. New mines were being built with more recent technology; mines like this one, which had been open since the 1940s, were being phased out. A similar shift is happening across a wide range of Chinese industries, a shift that promises to restructure the country’s economic and industrial landscape. Heavy industry is moving inland, to areas where both natural resources and cheap labor are plentiful. Just as the United States and Europe have sent much of their heavy industry overseas, economies within China are bifurcating between industrialized and developing, between high and low income. The tidal wave of industry is moving farther and farther inland from the coast. In its wake stand places like Shanghai and Shenzhen, which have been transformed into resource-hungry approximations of the countries whose consumerist economies they have emulated.
“Do you use this kind of technology in America?”
It was the supervisor. He nodded toward the mining carts, the cables, the giant wheel that drove it all.
I had by now perfected the gesture: a faltering, circular motion with my head that was neither a shake nor a nod.
“Somewhat,” I said.
To kill time while things got going, Cecily and I walked up the road that led over the waste rock pile, a mountain of shattered scree that partially filled the narrow neck of the valley. There, accompanied by two men with strong Shanxi accents, we looked over the vista of the mining operation: the dorms to the right, the throat of the mine tunnel to the left, and beyond it the hopper and conveyor system, which separated the coal from the waste rock.
One of the two, a rosy-cheeked man in his thirties, told us he was the manager of the explosives storehouse. He had previously worked underground as a miner, a job that had paid more. Cecily asked about his wages, and told me they compared favorably to the salary a recent college graduate could hope for in Beijing.
I found it suggestive about mine safety that someone would prefer to make less money, and to work with explosives, than to be underground.
“It’s safer than it was,” the man said. “But it’s still not that safe.”
Our other companion was an elderly man who said he had worked in the mine for several decades. Now he was retired.
“Before the 1980s,” he said, “we did everything manually. We dug with tools. It was hard work. It’s much better now. It’s all machines.”
“Did you like the work?” I asked. “Was it good work?”
“It was
Whether or not he had liked the work, though, he had decided to spend his retirement here. His children worked in the mine, and he saw no reason to leave. He smiled as he looked down over the mining complex, and not for the first time, I reflected that there was more than one kind of health.
The explosives man broke the spell. “Why did you come here?” he said, laughing. “It’s so dirty and black!”
Back at the extraction area, below, I stood by the cave-like mouth of the tunnel for a long time—hours, it seemed—and smoked, and lay on a pile of corrugated sheeting in the sun, and smoked, and eventually wondered if anything was ever going to happen.
The tunnel mouth had walls and a metal ceiling, and a sign over it with two golden characters, and the tracks in the ground, and it all sloped down at a steep grade away from the daylight, to a second, deeper, older mouth, a tunnel mouth built out of stone, and then disappeared into the earth. It was a tunnel, but after staring at it for an hour, I decided that really it was a cave in the end.
I tried to offer a cigarette to the guy next to me, and was again too slow, and again accepted one of his.
Then there was a grinding sound, not quite a rumble, and the cable went tight, and the man whose cigarette I was smoking went and stood on the tracks. The grinding grew louder and louder, and everyone started paying somewhat more attention.
At last the tunnel roared, and a train of five mining carts shot out of its mouth. I felt the urge to dive for safety, even though I wasn’t in the way. The man standing on the tracks—who
The cable-release man hopped off and another man stepped on. He threw aside another pin and the link that connected the lead cart to the train. The cast-off gear hit the black ground with a deep, metal clank. Another worker had put a block on the track to stop the following carts, and now the lead man coasted free, riding his cart along a wide arc of track, all the way to the hopper, where yet another man waited, also with coal on his face, also wearing a jacket and sweater, work gloves and trousers, dark with coal—everything black with the stuff. The lead man stepped off his cart just as it crashed into the hopper, and the two men pushed on the levers, using the cart’s momentum to upend it. They dumped its contents into a chute, where the rocks were shaken out of it, and then the coal was sent along the belt of the conveyor-sorter and onto the heap, where a loader was now scooping huge shovelfuls into a truck.
The cart crashed upright, and the workers pulled it backward, steep into the task, grimacing it into motion until the lead man could pull it back toward the tunnel on his own, and onto a side track where the cart would await its next descent into the mine. Already the second cart had been detached, and shouldered down the faint slope by the next member of the crew, the worker who had been napping when we arrived, his eyes still drowsy now, as he pushed his ton toward the hopper.
We had hung around all afternoon, and watched the workers crack jokes, and shared the international ritual of looking at pictures on the display of a digital camera, and now we saw the workers work. Coal kept shooting out of the mine, in five-cart loads, and the not-so-sad coal men swung through their practiced motions. They would have made a great advertisement for Chinese Communism in its pre-capitalist days. Each worker had his role, each role its place in the chain, a choreography of labor, skilled in a way that only unskilled work can be. They brimmed with rugged, coal-stained intelligence, pausing between mine trains to smoke and to talk. Sad Coal Man was not debased and morose. He was sharp. He was witty. He smiled in the sun when he had a few minutes to himself. Maybe he was just glad to be aboveground.
In the lobby of the hotel, Cecily tried the automatic shoe polisher on her sneakers, completely black from our afternoon at the mine. It had no effect except to blacken the spinning brush of the machine.
I went to my room. I took off my clothes. They were covered in black stains, although I had pushed no carts, handled no coal. It just happens when you’re at a coal mine. Liu had driven down to town ahead of us, so at lunchtime the miners gave us rides down the mountain on their motorcycles. And as soon as you rub shoulders with
