DATONG, China (AP) — Yang Haiming, who retired from a coal mine at 60, didn’t stop working and jumped into a new industry.
Yang is part of a generation of workers who fueled China’s economic growth by extracting coal from Datong’s underground mines. Datong is a city in northern China’s Shanxi Province known as the coal capital of China. Now, as China prioritizes renewable energy over coal, Yang is ahead of the changes his colleagues are being forced to face.
He now runs a restaurant selling mutton kebabs to tourists visiting the Yungang Grottoes. The Yungang Grottoes are a historically important site that features Buddhist carvings within the caves and attracts millions of visitors each year.
If Shanxi Province were its own country, it would be the world’s largest coal producer. By 2025, approximately 800,000 miners will mine 1.3 billion tons of coal, equivalent to nearly one-third of China’s coal production. Millions more work in jobs that rely indirectly on coal, from logistics to restaurants. With China’s rapid growth in renewable energy accounting for almost all of the country’s electricity demand growth last year, the province is set to undergo major changes, and developing tourism is a major goal.
Experts say it’s crucial to ensure coal workers aren’t left behind – a concern for many.
“It feels like there’s no money coming in from this industry,” said coal miner Zhou Hongfei.
The evolution of Coal City
As is typical of Chinese state-owned enterprises, the coal company built Yang’s village (called Mine No. 9) next to the coal mine where residents could work. The place was once packed with thousands of workers and their families, as well as a school, a daycare center and a sports center. An elevated railway line runs through it, transporting coal to other parts of the country.
Today, Mine Nine is primarily a museum, but part of it is still under construction. The school was deserted and the doors were locked. Many low-rise apartment buildings were only partially occupied, and the residents were often not miners but people attracted by cheap housing.
Yang recalled the prosperous days before surrounding villages were demolished.
“There are too many people, especially during New Year’s Day,” he said. “There are people everywhere, the bustle is gone now and that feeling is gone.”
Those who stayed, like Yang, tried to take advantage of the tourists at Yungang Grottoes. On the day the AP reporter visited, a retired coal miner struck up a conversation on the street, hoping to bring customers to his noodle shop. Most of the people walking on the street are old people, bathing in the sunshine.
The transition to tourism is difficult
Yang is one of the few employees who has made the transition successfully.
There are a lot of people “who don’t know what to do, and they say they don’t have the skills for others. They just know to become a coal miner, or the easiest fallback option is to go back to agriculture,” said Tom Wang, a Shanxi native, environmental activist and founder of People’s Climate Solutions in Asia.
Zhou, 36, said he had considered turning to tourism but didn’t know how. He also worries about how to support his wife and 8-year-old daughter.
“It’s very difficult to actually be exposed and enter a new industry, in fact, I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “If you leave this industry, you don’t know if it’s going to be successful. Can I adapt? What if this ends up being a burden on my family?”
Mining wages rise and fall with demand. Before Yang retired eight years ago, his monthly income was as high as 10,000 yuan (about $1,450). He said he now makes more money from the restaurant.
The province is working to develop several alternative industries, from investing in coal-to-hydrogen projects to promoting local “youmai,” a type of oats used by locals to make special noodles.
But Shanxi’s main focus and greatest success after coal is tourism. Last year, Hang Kan, a deputy to the National People’s Congress and president of the Yungang Research Institute, called for accelerating the development of the culture and tourism industry into a “strategic pillar” for Shanxi to “enhance people’s well-being.”
His comments came after the protagonist of the popular video game “Black Myth: Wukong” visited the grotto and a number of nearby attractions, causing a surge in tourists. That number will jump to 4.5 million in 2024 from 3 million the previous year, state media reported.
Yan Jiali, a tour guide in the area, said the economic boom has led to growing interest in jobs like hers, which require passing government tests before being licensed.
“Even my mom’s friends would come up and ask me about taking the test,” she said.
Activist Wang hopes high-tech industries, now a national priority, can help Shanxi transform by providing jobs. After all, he said, the province’s coal fueled China’s transformation into an economic powerhouse.
“What if DeepSeek comes to Shanxi and says, okay, we’re going to build a data center here? What if Baidu comes to Shanxi?” he said, referring to local Chinese technology companies.
Coal still matters
Few people think Shanxi can completely abandon coal mines. Experts see coal as a vital safety net for China’s security needs, and the Iran war has once again highlighted how vulnerable energy supply chains are to disruptions.
Analysts at the Center for Energy and Clean Air said the government had recently refused to limit coal use, backtracking on its pledge to gradually reduce coal consumption.
“Confidence has not grown to the point where we can rely entirely on renewable energy,” said CREA analyst Qi Qin.
In fact, China continues to build coal-fired power plants on a massive scale and will generate 78 gigawatts of electricity by 2025, more than India produced in a full decade. One gigawatt can power approximately 320,000 Chinese households for a year.
Even if demand doesn’t drop, workers have to worry about their mines running out. Some old mines in Datong are nearing the end of their service life. When this happens, workers can be reassigned to other mines that may be further away and pay lower wages.
Xu, another coal miner, took a second job as a ride-sharing driver, spending about five hours behind the wheel every day after work. Xu declined to give his full name because of concerns about the impact of state-owned coal mines. He said he doubted the benefits would be evenly distributed among industries that replace coal, whether it’s tourism or renewable energy.
“How do I get into this tourism industry?” he asked. “For Datong, those who can enjoy the benefits brought by the tourism boom are mainly big hotels, and maybe some restaurants and noodle shops. But what do you think ordinary people can get?”
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