Caught between a fossil fuel past and a green future, China's coal miners chart an uncertain path

The Guardian

2 days ago

Gazing over the remains of his home, Wang Bingbing surveys a decades-old jujube tree flowering through the rubble, and the yard where he and his wife once raised pigs, now a pile of crumbled brick.
In the valley below, a sprawling coalmine is the source of their dislocation: years of digging heightened the risk of landslides, forcing Wang and his family out. To prevent the family from returning, local authorities later demolished their home.
'We really didn't want to leave,' Wang's wife, Wang Weizhen, says ruefully.
Wang's life is the story of coal's past, when the industry was notoriously dangerous but booming. His children and grandchildren are facing coal's future, an economic and environmental predicament that China's policymakers have yet to solve.
As the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter transitions to cleaner energy, families like Wang's are on the precipice of being left behind by China's green revolution, fearing for their economic prospects as the country charts a delicate path between its fossil fuel foundations and clean energy ambitions.
Looking older than his 55 years, Wang's body is marked by years in the industry. Above his right eyebrow rests a faint scar from a mining accident in his 20s that killed two of his colleagues. Ten years ago, he stopped working completely due to a liver illness, and he and his wife now survive on a monthly government welfare payment of 500 yuan (£52).
Born in 1971 in Lüliang, a small city in western Shanxi, China's coal heartland, Wang joined his local mine at the age of 18. 'My family was poor and there was no work to do,' he says. 'I didn't have much education either, so I had no choice but to work in the coalmine.'
As the country grapples with its shift away from coal, it is also dealing with the increasing fallout from natural disasters, with 25 million people affected in the first half of this year, according to China's emergency ministry.
Coal is at the heart of Shanxi's economy. Between 2018 and 2023, more than 10% of all the coal produced globally was dug up from Shanxi's dry, silt-covered valleys, according to analysis from Global Energy Monitor, a US-based NGO.
But the natural resource occupies an uneasy place in China's national plans. On the one hand, the country is pursuing renewable energy at a jaw-dropping scale. In May, China installed enough wind and solar to generate the same amount of electricity as Poland. On the other, the majority of China's power generation still comes from coal, with officials seeing it as essential for ensuring energy security and jobs.
Although China is now the dominant producer of the technology such as solar panels and electric vehicles that will underpin the world's green transition, it is also the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, which contribute to natural disasters such as the extreme floods that hit Shanxi in 2021, displacing nearly 2 million people.
But climate change means little to Wang. 'I don't know about national policies on reducing emissions,' he says, although he hopes his grandson can avoid a life in the mines. 'It's too dangerous,' he says. But he admits there are few alternatives. About one in 10 people in Shanxi are employed in coal and related industries.
Even in Shanxi's urban areas, researchers and activists have largely focused for years on air pollution rather than climate change, says Du Jie, the director of Jinqing, an environmental NGO based in Shanxi. It wasn't until the catastrophic flooding of 2021 that many people's eyes were opened to the existential risks posed by a warming planet.
'The floods were truly a once-in-a-century event for Shanxi,' Du says over coffee in the lobby of a shiny office building in Taiyuan, Shanxi's capital, about 175km (110 miles) and decades of modernisation away from the Wangs in Lüliang.
'After the disaster relief ended, when we looked back, what struck me most was climate change. In the past, we all knew that climate change was a serious issue, right? But for us in Shanxi, life had been relatively comfortable – we had never really experienced major droughts or floods like this before.'
The floods prompted Du to start thinking about how to raise awareness about climate change and low-carbon lifestyles in a more systematic way. One project involved surveying more than 1,000 people across Shanxi about how to reduce emissions in daily life. But making the connection between the coal industry and environmental damage is tricky. A recent survey of Shanxi citizens conducted by People of Asia for Climate Solutions, an NGO, found that more than 40% opposed the closure of mines, and less than half agreed the coal industry was a major cause of climate change.
However, economic prosperity has encouraged a shift in attitudes.
'Now, as basic needs are more or less met, people do recognise that protecting the environment is important,' Du says.
In Zhuangshang, a state-backed 'zero carbon village' in southern Shanxi, residents are paid to install solar panels to generate electricity for their own needs, with excess supplied to the local grid. One resident, surnamed Li, receives a subsidy of 2,000 yuan a year to rent out his rooftop in the village. That, plus reduced energy prices for solar-generated power, means electricity is basically free for him and his neighbours. 'How can you not be happy?' he says.
But Zhuangshang is just one village.
'At the national level, there's strong support and hope for Shanxi to undergo industrial transformation,' Du says. 'But the question is: how do we get the public ready for this change?'
Additional research by Lillian Yang