[China’s production of material such as aluminum, copper, lead and zinc, known as base or nonferrous metals, has soared as the country has become the world’s factory floor. Combined output was 57 million tons last year, up from 6 million in 1998, according to the China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association.]
By
Gerry Shih
 |
|
Villagers
in Jingxi County look over a massive processing facility owned
by
Xinfa Group, an aluminum producer. (Gerry Shih/The Post)
|
The trucks load up on metal ore in the valley
below, where 13 miners died in October in underground shafts laden with tin,
copper and zinc. Then the trucks motor up the mountain toward belching smelters
— the culprit, researchers say, behind arsenic levels in Dachang’s dust
reaching more than 100 times the government limit.
Across southern China — far from the affluent
coasts and Beijing’s gaze — a vast metals industry has fed the country’s
manufacturing boom and sated global demand for components used in products from
smartphone batteries to electric motors to jet airframes.
China’s production of material such as
aluminum, copper, lead and zinc, known as base or nonferrous metals, has soared
as the country has become the world’s factory floor. Combined output was 57
million tons last year, up from 6 million in 1998, according to the China
Nonferrous Metals Industry Association.
But some of the country’s most isolated,
impoverished communities are paying the price.
In Guangxi, a balmy southern region that has
some of China’s most concentrated mineral deposits, large tracts of farmland
lay wasted by runoff carrying cadmium and lead. Metal miners toil in shafts
deadlier than China’s notorious coal pits.
Villagers roll up their sleeves to show
deformities caused by ingesting food contaminated by heavy metals. Residents
wait daily for shipments of fresh water.
In the past decade, China’s top leaders have
steadily tightened regulations on the metals industry, including introducing
the country’s first soil pollution law last year.
After an eight-year study that began as a
state secret, the Chinese government said in 2014 that 20 percent of the
country’s farmland was contaminated and a third of its surface water unfit for
human contact. Top officials said last month that they had set aside $4 billion
to clean up contaminated soil — similar to the U.S. Superfund — yet it’s a
fraction of the $1 trillion that some Chinese experts predict is needed.
A review of soil and water data, interviews
with environmental researchers, and a 500-mile journey through Guangxi
illustrated how the sheer financial cost is only the tip of the challenge
facing China.
“Central leaders may have a great vision,”
said Song Guojun, a former environmental-protection official who studies policy
at Renmin University. “But at the local level, there is no transparency, no upward
accountability, no money.”
As a result, metal producers appear to
operate with a degree of impunity — and leave a toxic trail — as they transform
crude mountain ore into the essential nuggets of modern life. There are zinc
slabs for coating steel, copper cathodes for wires and transformers, and grains
of nickel matte, a step in making purified nickel used in batteries and other
products.
From his soot-smeared home on Nanjiu Road,
Wei Shujian has watched the trucks multiply since the 1970s.
“They are unstoppable,” the farmer growled,
wheezing from an incurable lung disease caused by dirty air.
Wei nodded toward the hillside, where a huge
elevator reached deep into the source of fortune and grief: the mines.
'No
other choice'
Meng was sitting deep underground at the end
of a 1,000-yard mineshaft, waiting to start his shift around 7 p.m. on Oct. 28,
when the damp air was blasted by a shock wave.
Meng fled in a trolley to the surface, where
he listened to the groaning earth: A branch of the Qingda No. 2 tin mine had
collapsed. State media later said two miners were confirmed dead and 11 “had no
chance of survival” inside the mine, about 10 miles north of Dachang.
Twenty years ago, Chinese coal miners had,
statistically speaking, the deadliest job on Earth. Today, more metal miners
are dying — 484 in 2017 — than their coal worker counterparts, according to the
most up-to-date government data.
That’s partly because China’s coal mine
safety has improved significantly under pressure from Beijing. But less
attention has been paid to the metal industry, where about 83 percent of
outfits are small and loosely run.
“The fundamental situation hasn’t changed,” a
government cabinet spokesman said. “Production accidents are extremely likely.”
The Qingda No. 2 mine, run by a local mining
boss, Chen Xiangsheng, is a case study.
Filings with the Industry and Commerce Bureau
show that a government inspection in August found that Chen’s mine didn’t
obtain approval for an expansion and that its construction blueprints “lacked
authenticity.” Chen was fined twice in June for “substandard equipment and facilities”
and “illegal production.”
Yet his mine kept humming around the clock,
employing about 800 locals like Meng, a 32-year-old father of two young
children.
Chen’s small operation paid $1,140 a month,
Meng said. The state giant Gaofeng, which owns a maze of shafts directly under
Dachang’s streets, is considered more professional but pays $300 a month.
“You can’t raise a family on that,” said
Meng, who spoke on the condition that his full name be withheld. “The
difference is, private bosses go wherever there is ore. State companies might
leave it if it’s dangerous.”
After the Oct. 28 collapse, local authorities
briefly froze mining in the county. One month later, Dachang’s miners were
heading back to their shifts. The township of 30,000 lives in the shadow of a single
industry with a chilling legacy.
In 2000, a toxic tailings pond broke and
washed away an entire village, killing 28.
Dachang’s worst accident came a year later.
Local officials tried to cover up a flood that killed 81 miners; the news got
out after a week. Prosecutors later said that the mine contributed a third of
local tax revenue and that its owner, the richest man in Guangxi, had
transferred 15 percent of company shares to local officials.
The mines north of town continue to regularly
experience explosions and collapses, killing one or two workers, residents
said. Fatal accidents are not always reported.
“These tuhuangdi” — local tyrants — “get away
with everything,” said Pan, a fruit seller who quit mining last year at age 34.
Many Dachang residents, like Pan, declined to
give their full names for fear of reprisal. One taxi driver trembled when he
was asked to drive by a three-story home owned by the mining baron Chen. After
Chen’s mine collapsed in October, local authorities said, they arrested eight
executives.
Meng shrugged off his recent brush with
disaster, which he called “unavoidable.” He’s considered working as a security
guard, he said, but would prefer going back to a small mine.
“If you want higher pay around here,” he
said, “there is no other choice.”
Lead-poisoned
children
Outside the mines, the risks don’t end.
Water used to separate the valuable minerals
must be carefully stored and treated. The minerals are then purified at
temperatures up to 1,800 degrees at smelters — a process that, without proper
controls, releases harmful levels of heavy-metal byproducts including lead,
cadmium and arsenic into the atmosphere.
Researchers from the Guangxi Institute of
Occupational Technology and Nanning University sampled dust on road surfaces
around Dachang. A study published in June said they found heavy-metal
concentrations far above national safety limits: arsenic at 111 times, cadmium
at 55 times and lead at 2.45 times.
Heavy-metal levels inside homes were only
slightly lower, according to the researchers.
Off National Road 210, Wei Chun, a farmer,
said more than 20 out of 25 children in his village, Tanghan, tested positive
as early as a decade ago for excessive lead levels in their blood. For years,
he said, county officials gave households with poisoned kids 30 eggs and liters
of milk every month as compensation.
In another village, Tanghuang, people pointed
to chestnut trees that no longer bore fruit and loquat trees and squash vines
that turned yellow during summer rainstorms. Evaporating puddles left reddish
circles on the ground, they said.
Between the villages was a swollen lake
covered in a shimmering film. A sample of the water contained eight times the
lead content deemed safe to drink by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency,
according to an independent lab test commissioned by The Washington Post.
Unlike in the United States or Australia,
many polluted areas in China overlap with its southern agricultural heartland,
which poses unique challenges. National panics have broken out in the past
decade after consumers discovered high heavy-metal content in rice grown near
smelters.
China has “a phenomenon of mining-agriculture
mixed areas,” said Chen Nengchang of the Guangdong Institute of
Eco-Environmental and Soil Sciences.
Yet talk of rehabilitating spoiled farmland
often collides with reality.
In Daxin County, a four-hour drive south of
Dachang, Huang Guiqing passed the field office of a soil cleanup operation and
sighed.
“They’re still doing preparatory work,” he
said.
In a bare living room, Huang struggled with a
paper folder, his fingers distended like misshapen balloons. Growths the size
of golf balls bulged out of his forearm and elephantine ankles. His documents
told the full story: Huang spent years eating crops and drinking water laced
with cadmium.
More than 46 other residents of Huang’s village
were poisoned as early as the 1970s as a lead-zinc mine funneled wastewater for
years into a ditch that locals used to irrigate their fields of cassava and
sugar cane. The stream turned turbid, Huang said, “the color of soy sauce.”
Officials came in 2000 and found soil cadmium
levels 30 times the national limit. But the local government didn’t take action
except to pay each resident 15 kilograms of rice, according to a letter the
villagers wrote pleading for help.
The mine went bankrupt in 2002. It wasn’t
until 2015 that local officials responded.
In a directive to various departments and
residents, a copy of which Huang provided, the local government acknowledged
that it had neglected the disaster but said its hands were tied. “The polluted
area is vast and the cleanup cost is tremendous,” officials wrote, estimating a
$33 million bill. “The financial resources of Daxin County are utterly
limited.”
The directive set a deadline for soil cleanup
in late 2017. Then there was a new date that came and went: late 2018.
“Maybe they’ll start in 2020,” said a
villager, Wei Tianlai, 68.
Local government agencies did not respond to
faxed questions and requests for comment.
It’s the same story for communities across
China, where local authorities are grappling with a sharply slowing economy and
soaring debt levels.
“There are pressures on national
expenditures,” said Chen Youjian, chief scientist at BCEG, an environmental
remediation firm in Beijing. “As for the historical debts incurred, we do what
we can.”
Red
mud, undrinkable water
In 1986, Chinese officials informed leader
Deng Xiaoping of Guangxi’s wealth of aluminum deposits. “It must be done!” Deng
famously snapped back.
Two decades later, Xinfa Group, an aluminum
conglomerate from northern China, has brought $2.4 billion in investments to
sleepy Jingxi, the next county over from Daxin.
“You can see this from space,” Huang Qi said
as he strode across a dam holding back a small valley filled with goopy red
mud.
It was a reservoir of spent bauxite —
aluminum ore — left by Xinfa, which has been locked in repeated disputes with
locals going back 10 years. Three times in the past 18 months, waste has seeped
out of such reservoirs, jamming underground rivers, flooding village streets
and rendering the local reservoir water undrinkable.
In June, dozens of locals blockaded a Xinfa
facility for three days to demand water before police dispersed them.
Chen Wenxi, a Beijing-based environmentalist,
helped sue Xinfa on local villagers’ behalf in August 2018, seeking $2.8
million in damages. A preliminary hearing in local court in June lasted 15
minutes, he said. Chen has sought Xinfa’s environmental records, but the
government denied him on the grounds that they were state secrets.
“There are biases, certain political factors,
when one side has so much money and the other side is so poor,” Chen said.
Xinfa, whose chairman sits in China’s
National People’s Congress, has been named a “core enterprise” in Jingxi’s
five-year development plan.
Huang Lituo, a Jingxi deputy propaganda
chief, acknowledged several “unavoidable” industrial accidents involving Xinfa.
The local government would hold it accountable for the cleanup, he told The
Post.
In recent months, the local government has
fined Xinfa $15,000 for illegal prospecting. Officials have also ordered the
company to truck in potable water to communities stranded without it.
But the influence of Xinfa’s presence is
undeniable. Last year, Xinfa contributed more than $100 million in tax revenue,
more than any other source.
“If not for Xinfa, we couldn’t carry out
poverty alleviation, build schools, build kindergartens, build medical
clinics,” said Huang Lituo.
Huang Hua, a villager in his 30s, saw bitter
irony in depending on the firm for survival.
“We were fighting a water war with Xinfa,” he
said. “Now if Xinfa moved away, we might actually die of thirst.”
Huang Hua looked out a car window at the
Caterpillar excavators chipping away in the distance, turning verdant mountain
faces into rust-colored terraces.
He wondered what Beijing was like and what he
could possibly do to get help from the Chinese president himself.
“I wish Xi Jinping would see this,” he said,
referring to China’s leader.
Then he quoted a proverb suggesting central
authorities can have little sway over local affairs: “But the mountains are
high, and the emperor is far.”
Wang Yuan and Lyric Li in Beijing contributed
to this report.
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