Story and picture by Chua Chin Hon

FUSHUN (Liaoning) - First came the tremors. Then the apartment would shake so badly that 77-year-old Madam Wu Ruifang thought an earthquake had struck.

""Every time they use explosives in the underground coal mines, it would feel as if the whole building is about to come crashing down like there's an earthquake,'' she said, pointing to the cracks on the floor and walls of her apartment in the Xinguang Community of Fushun city in north-eastern China.

The decline of the coal industry in Fushun and neighbouring Fuxin, once known as the booming ""coal capitals'' of the industrial north-east, is sending shockwaves through their communities beyond the rattling of a few buildings at night.

""The depletion of coal means the depletion of job opportunities and human resources as well,'' said Jilin University's Professor Liu Shaojie, who made a field visit to Fushun in mid-August to assess the fallout.

He told The Straits Times: ""People are pessimistic about their future, especially coal miners whose skills have become irrelevant, and those affected by land subsidence need to be relocated to safer areas urgently.''

Sinking land from years of coal mining has left huge cracks on Madam Wu's house. Fushun, China. Sep 2003.

Fushun's Xinfu District is the one of the areas worst hit by environmental damage from decades of underground coal mining. The Youth Road, the district's main thoroughfare, was once the best-paved in Fushun. It is now a broken dirt path where some sections have sunk as much as 3-5m into the ground due to land subsidence, a problem common in coal-mining cities.

Houses and shops on both sides of the Youth Road, as well as a nearby steel market, are under several metres of water after the ground beneath them gave way gradually about five years ago, residents said. The China Newsweek magazine said in a recent report that land subsidence had worsened over the years. The mining companies stepped up the pace of underground coal extraction, but did not refill the disused mines and shafts because it was too expensive.

Despite the obvious danger, many residents like Mr Li Jian, 54, still persist in living in houses along Youth Road. They have no money to move elsewhere. Sadly, as in Mr Li's case: local officials declared his house to have been built illegally, and hence he is not entitled to any resettlement programme or compensation. Officials declined to be interviewed, but reports in the state media suggest about 50,000 residents in Fushun, and 28,000 households in Fuxin need to be relocated from unsafe houses threatened by landslides and subsidence.

The economic cost of land subsidence has also been high. Factories, such as the Fushun Porcelain Insulator Factory, have been forced to relocate or demolish entire blocks affected by huge cracks, worsening a tense employment situation. In Fuxin, the Southern Weekend newspaper estimated that the economic damage caused by land subsidence came to nearly 1.5 billion yuan (S$214 million) .

And in both cities, retrenched workers who cannot find work end up depending on their parents' retirement funds to support the family, creating a topsy-turvy situation in which the weak and elderly end up supporting the young ones. Residents in Fuxin and Fushun have a term for this trend: ken lao, or literally, gnawing on the elderly.

""The problem is multi-faceted, and resource-depleted cities like Fushun need more than an economic solution,'' said Prof Liu. But experts and ordinary residents alike agree that the first step to recovery for cities like Fushun and Fuxin is to undertake painful restructuring and diversification of the coal-dependent economy.

In its study of problems faced by resource-based cities, the government's National Development and Reform Commission warned: ""If the problems are not addressed soon, they could affect the pace of the country's economic growth and social development.'' And there is growing frustration in cities like Fushun, where residents feel they have been forgotten after the city outlived its economic usefulness. ' ' - Published in The Straits Times on 20 Sep 2003.