we can bombard them

A Me Old China correspondent visits Fuxin, part of China’s Dongbei rustbelt:

Fuxin has sacrificed everything to post-Liberation reconstruction, pumping out the coal and power required to feed the chemical plants and machinery factories that turned the northeast into China's economic powerhouse during the Maoist years, but it was given very little in return. By now, with many of the mines shut down, the city is having to deal with crippling subsidence problems, and a third of its population is unemployed. The air is heavy and acrid, the tenements bare and stark and coated with soot. Antique steam-trains lurch through the city's centre, and fifty year-old Soviet smokestacks continue to pump black smoke into the atmosphere. Breathing in, you feel like you are eating spent matches.

But hope springs eternal.

The local Tourist Bureau chief treated me to a brainstorming session in which he envisaged hordes of Chinese tourists flooding into the area in an attempt to understand their heritage…The bureau chief also talked about coal mining theme parks in which tourists could enjoy the experiences of a coalmine explosion - "We can bombard them with black ping-pong balls!" - and emerge intact.

Funnily enough this made me think of Chatterley Whitfield colliery back in Stoke. It was closed in 1978 and then reopened as a museum in the eighties, in one of those desperate regeneration through heritage strategies adopted by many cities across the North after Thatcher collapsed their industries. That shut down in 1993, but now there are apparently plans to reopen it as part of an attempt to reclaim the heritage of industrial heritage museums, which shows you how really desperate Stoke is these days.

Comments

[a very public sociologist]

Aha, by chance I've come across another Stokie!

Yes, Stoke really is desperate.

By way of an example, the city has all these wonderful plans for canal side apartments, a fancy new shopping centre, a bus station down in Stoke, and a thousand and one other things. But as some developers have recently discovered to their costs, there's no one in Stoke who has the money to splash out on swanky pads. Given the economic base of Stoke I doubt it could successfully keep another shopping centre going either.

Ho hum.