March 13th 2007
Yesterday I went with the photographer, Lucy Cavender, out to the area around Shougang, Beijing’s vast Capital Iron and Steel Works. Part of my next book, The Pool of Unease, is set out there, and I wanted to go and take another look at the area I’d explored more than a year ago. We had to drive – by which I mean Lucy had to drive – due west out of the city. Which sounds – and looks on the map – simpler than it actually is, given Beijing’s ever-evolving and badly signposted road system. Soon we reached the huge smokestacks and blast furnaces which make up Shougang and the adjacent electrical power plant. Around here, all the residential housing has a thick grey grime on the windows, because this is where much of Beijing’s smog is born. Shougang is being downsized. Over the next few years it will be removed entirely from Beijing, because the city government knows they can’t solve the city’s air quality problem while it sits there, puffing out smoke rings, on the edge of the city.
There was one particular place I wanted to get to – all I could remember was that we had to follow the periphery of the wall of the power plant. Eventually we found it – a dirt track that rose along the wasteland at the back of the power plant, the industrial landscape on one side, and an unused quarry on the other, much of which has been turned into a dump. It is home to a vast multi-coloured collection of plastic bags tangled around skeletal trees, tumbling down the side of the quarry, floating on the top of pools of wastewater. The area is populated by crows, mangy dogs, and a community of scavengers.
We saw a group of people using metal detectors, and went to speak to them. They came from rural Henan, one man told me, where he said there were too many people to live off the land. I asked how, once they got to Beijing, they knew where to go to find work. He said that there was a network of Henan people already in Beijing, who had directed him to the area around Shougang. He had come to the capital with his wife, and their entire income came from the scraps of metal they scavenged. Two of the scavengers spent some time bashing with a mallet at a concrete bollard they suspected harboured metal. The concrete splintered and flew away in all directions to reveal a six-inch iron rod at the centre. It was worth about 1 yuan, they said, just a few pence. They said they made ‘a few tens of yuan’ a day. Ten yuan is just over one US dollar, or about seventy pence. One man told me that he and his wife paid 200 yuan a month for housing, and 800 yuan a term for their child to go to school. Even with their expenses, their income in Beijing is far higher than what they would earn in the countryside. But it's not an easy life.