A Shanghai Educated Youth's 40-Plus Years in Maanshan, Where the State-Owned Enterprise Was His Whole Life | Housing and Our Lives 13

A city held up by a single steel plant

Shi Lei, born in 1953, calls himself a "Nanshan person." Nanshan isn't a place — it's the name of a mine. He was born in a lane behind the Catholic cathedral in Xujiahui, Shanghai; the "up to the mountains, down to the countryside" movement cut a whole generation loose from their birthplaces. In the 1970s, Maanshan Iron and Steel Company (Magang) was hiring, and Shi Lei came to Nanshan Iron Mine, the largest unit under Magang.

Less famous than Anshan or Panzhihua, Maanshan is a "steel city" all the same, built on heavy industry. In the 1980s and 1990s, Magang supplied about 85% of the city's tax revenue, and at its peak the company employed 90,000 people.

Today there's no trace of Shanghainese in his accent. Like most people in this city, his "dialect" is close to Mandarin, studded now and then with slang from Anqing, Nanjing, or the northeast. This city, founded only in 1956, has no real "locals" to speak of. The first group of steelworkers, who came from the northeast and Shanghai in the 1950s to support construction, and the second group, the educated youth and demobilized soldiers recruited through the 1970s, made up the backbone of the steel plant — and became the city's first pioneers.

"The second generation, who grew up in Maanshan, might be called small-town youth, but when we arrived there wasn't even a 'town' to speak of — we were steel-plant youth." Enterprises running their own "society" was common to nearly all of China's heavy industry in the 1950s and 60s. They built everything from scratch and tried to cover everything — worker dormitories, hospitals, schools, workers' clubs, sports grounds. A person could go from birth to death without ever leaving one factory.

Young people from every corner of the country, the glory of being a worker, and the enthusiasm for building all ran together. The "iron rice bowl" gleamed for decades, and inheriting a parent's job to get into Magang — becoming a "second-generation Magang worker" — was once the best option a young person in this city had. That lasted until the restructuring of state-owned enterprises, when the new words became "cutting overcapacity," "shutting down production lines," and "shedding the burden." Today Magang employs 32,000 people.

In 2017, the Aoshan open pit, the largest at Nanshan Mine, was closed. This mine, worked since the Republican era, is now a huge sinkhole. A placard beside the pit says this was once the "grain silo" of Nanshan and of Magang.

Shi Lei has retired, and he still lives in Maanshan. His father advised him not to move straight back to Shanghai, worried that after growing so used to the rhythm of the state-owned enterprise and of Maanshan, he would find his own hometown didn't agree with him.

We did this interview at the Nanshan Mine television station, which stands on the highest point of a small hill, ringed by apartment blocks. Shi Lei says you can still see the city's original logic here: no mature urban planning, just a few buildings wherever there was open ground, interlocking and jagged, growing bit by bit.

1973: I Thought I'd Been Tricked Into a Secret Facility

I spent two years in the Anhui Production and Construction Corps. In 1973, Magang happened to be hiring, so I went from Anqing to Magang's Nanshan Mine. I arrived at two in the morning.

Maanshan had no passenger dock then, so we took a boat to Wuhu. Two vehicles Nanshan Mine had sent to meet us were waiting by the dock — a Jiefang truck and a Soviet "Gazik" jeep. The Gazik carried the luggage, and we sat in the back of the canvas-covered Jiefang. From Wuhu to Maanshan — forget expressways or national highways, there wasn't even a paved road. Four hours, pitch dark the whole way, no tall buildings, not a house in sight.

At about two in the morning, the truck came around a long bend and suddenly there was a blaze of lights ahead, built into the mountainside, from that distance as tall as a ten-storey building. My first thought was: this is bad, we've been tricked into some military base. I'd heard of it really happening — the recruiters wouldn't tell you where you were going, or they'd make up a unit name, and only after you got there did you find out it was a nuclear test site.

Four hours through empty country, then a blaze of lights in a mountain gully — my first reaction was that this had to be a secret facility. Only later did I learn that mine equipment runs 24 hours a day, unlike an ordinary factory that works by day and stops at night. It's still that way; the machines stop only for the one or two days of maintenance at the end of each year.

We got off the Jiefang and went straight to the canteen — the mine had laid on a late-night meal to welcome us. We were young and full of energy then, and Nanshan Mine was new too. In the 1950s the first group came from Anshan Iron and Steel and elsewhere to support construction; my father-in-law was one of those first pioneers. In the 1970s we were the second group. If a young woman among the educated youth arrived, even in the middle of the night, people lined both sides of the road to welcome her.

After three days of training, we toured the production workshops, and only then did I relax. I was assigned first to the machinery workshop as a fitter — that counted as the heart of the mine.

Not long after I arrived, my father happened to be in Nanjing for a meeting and took leave specially to come and see me — in that era of "class struggle as the key link" you still needed a letter of introduction; everyone's nerves were taut, and an outsider couldn't just wander in to look around. I showed him Aoshan, the production line, the ore trucks with tires more than two meters tall, the sheer scale of the open pit.

I still remember my father saying that now he could finally give his colleagues an account of things — his son's unit was an advanced, modern one. Back then the word "mine" made people picture a man with an oil lamp clenched in his teeth and a bamboo basket on his back, the way people worked in coal pits before Liberation, scraping at the ground with soot-black faces. And yes, the word he used was "modern"!

The "36 Legs" in the Guesthouse

The first place I lived at Nanshan was the guesthouse — a single room of 18 square meters, already far roomier than the 11 square meters my family of five had squeezed into in Shanghai.

I got married in that same guesthouse room in 1978. We found a way to borrow a Jiefang truck from the plant and hauled a whole load of furniture back from Shanghai to that room — it caused a sensation across Nanshan. Old Shanghainese may have heard of the "36 legs," much like the "three rounds and one sound" (sewing machine, bicycle, watch, radio) — back then what a mother-in-law demanded before a wedding wasn't an apartment, it was these.

My set was made by my father, in the "Czech style" — of course nobody had ever seen Czech furniture; it was just an old style in which every piece had 4 legs that splayed outward instead of running straight down. A bed, a nightstand (in old Shanghai, a "chamber-pot cabinet"), a wardrobe, a chest of drawers, table and chairs — one full set came to 36 legs.

Even now, if you meet someone my age at Nanshan Mine and ask, they may still remember my "36 legs." When it arrived, plenty of people came by to look, and some even brought a carpenter to measure it in my home. There was no internet then — not like now, when you search online and the pictures come right up; even cameras were rare.

That furniture packed the 18-square-meter guesthouse room to the brim. Nobody cared about living space then, not like later, when people started saying a home is more comfortable with some room left empty. In an era of scarcity the space was small to begin with, and beyond that, a room crammed full gave you a feeling of plenty.

But the wood for those "36 legs" was pieced together by the whole family. There were no furniture stores, and making your own furniture had to be done on the sly. It was 1978, the Cultural Revolution had just ended — not like now, when nothing seems impossible if you have money. Of course, nobody had money then either.

What does "the whole family" mean? A stick saved here, a plank begged from a relative there, a few boards pried off the bed my grandmother used to sleep in, the wooden attic stairs from an old house. Near what is now the Hengshan Road cinema there was a timber supply station, where the packing boards and wood shavings left over from a Shanghai lumber mill were collected and handed out to residents, mainly to light coal-briquette stoves. A household's monthly allowance was only a jin or two (half a kilo to a kilo), so we saved coupons for several months, borrowed more from relatives and neighbors, and once we had enough of a "quota" we went to the station to trade them in. We also had to call in favors to get pieces that were bigger and sturdier. Besides shavings, the station did have some timber salvaged from demolished houses.

In that era the people who worked at supply stations held real "power," and so did the people selling meat at the market. You can't imagine it now, but the pork butcher had more power than a doctor does today. Every household had to eat meat, and fatty pork was the prize back then — it put oil in your diet. With the same one-jin meat coupon, one stroke of the knife gave you a jin of fat; another gave you a jin of lean meat with the bone still attached. That was the difference.

"Don't Have It? Then Make It!"

Hauling the "36 legs" from Shanghai back to Nanshan Mine took nearly 10 hours on the road. It was a struggle from the moment we left the lane in Xujiahui — the lane was narrow, and back then, forget trucks, even cars were rare. Once you were out of Shanghai there were no gas stations, not like today when they're everywhere. You had to prepare a drum of fuel in advance, stop halfway, and fill up yourself.

Even so, the inconvenience couldn't stop goods moving privately. Take mailing a parcel: it had to be inspected at the post office before it could be sealed. Cigarettes, liquor, soap and other rationed goods weren't allowed to be sent to other regions — the state allocated all of it, and if everyone shipped it out, wouldn't that throw the whole system off? You could only slip a little in when nobody was looking, like a small cloth bag of sugar.

Every trip back to Shanghai felt like running a one-man trading route — everyone wanted me to bring something back. Hard candy, wool yarn, fabric, soap, polyester shirts. Shanghai's light industry was simply the best in the country then, there was no getting around it. Hauling all of it back was so much trouble that it could even cost you a friendship — bring something for one person and not another, and there was friction; people's feelings are hard to figure. I still have the notebook from those years, recording what I brought for whom, and how much. The palest ink beats the best memory.

One colleague insisted I bring him a Shanghai-brand watch, even though the department stores in downtown Maanshan already stocked it — he just felt only one bought in Shanghai was truly the real thing. But think about it: back then there were no fakes, no knockoffs, no counterfeits. Being able to manufacture anything at all was hard enough.

The worst were the cream cakes. People really did ask me to buy cream cakes in Shanghai and carry them back, quite a few of them — five or six each trip. Everyone thought they tasted wonderful, and one made an impressive gift. The problem was, with the train so packed, how could a cake survive more than ten hours intact? One fitter was clever about it: he welded a movable "washbasin rack" out of a few rollers and steel rods, five or six tiers, so the cakes could be stacked layer by layer without being crushed. In the end we carried this big contraption onto the train, and we used it many times after that.

People in that era were truly poor, and truly willing to rack their brains. We were a mine, a machinery workshop — the workers had materials if they needed materials, tools if they needed tools, skills if they needed skills. Don't have it? Then make it!

Magang workers were proud people. I still remember my "kit" when I went back to Shanghai in the 1970s: a homemade stainless-steel soda-bottle opener and a steel ruler hanging from my belt, my Magang work uniform, my toolbag on my back. My dad joked that I looked like a plasterer, but at the time I simply felt like a worker, and that alone was a source of pride. Of course, workers had high social standing then — the "iron rice bowl."

In the 1970s there was the "100,000-person Aoshan campaign" (1977), the whole city mobilized to save Magang. The goal was for Aoshan to reach an annual output of 6 million tons, but with the machinery of the day, stripping the overburden alone would take a year. That's how mining works — you can't just dig up pure iron ore, you first have to clear away the soil on top. In today's terms, stripping overburden has no "return"; it's the ore that's worth money. The "campaign" used sheer numbers, pulling manpower from every unit in Maanshan to do this unprofitable work in shifts. In the end they cleared in under a month what would normally have taken a year.

Looking back, throwing bodies at a job like that with no regard for labor or cost seems almost unthinkable — people in that era were pure to a degree that's hard to fathom now. But it's also possible they weren't acting out of conviction; the whole mood of society was simply like that. Young people were full of fight, and when the leadership called on them they'd tighten their belts and do it, running on enthusiasm alone — plainly unsustainable by today's standards.

You could say the whole country pulled together as one and really did accomplish some impossible things. You could also say people were afraid of being reported and denounced. I still remember a classmate who liked practicing calligraphy with a brush, using newspaper as a mat; the ink soaked through and stained a picture of Chairman Mao. He was so frightened he burned it at once — and was reported anyway, and branded "thoroughly reactionary." People were forced to be careful about everything; there was no procedure to speak of then, nowhere to appeal, and if your "class background" was bad, worse still.

A while back, when I was in Shanghai, I went to see the film Youth (《芳华》). People with different experiences will surely see different things in it. I count myself lucky, both in the Corps and at Nanshan Mine — but take the people who went to the Corps and were put in the farming companies; they really suffered, in ways ordinary people can't imagine.

Now everyone belongs to the "propertied class," it's different — to put it bluntly, whatever people do, they weigh what they get for it first.

A Factory Town Held Up by a Steel Plant

When we first got to Nanshan Mine there was nothing here. Maanshan had nothing either — much of it was reed marsh.

At first some employees were given single-story houses, and there were plenty of "grass huts" as well. Besides the pioneers recruited from the northeast and Shanghai, and educated youth and demobilized soldiers like us, some workers were recruited from the countryside. These young, able-bodied men came to Magang with their families in tow, and their wives and children had no household registration. If you could find a patch of open ground, you could put up a shelter however you managed. The mine turned a blind eye and left you alone. Those grass huts were like the shantytowns of early Shanghai.

Not long after we married we had a child, and we moved out of the 18-square-meter guesthouse room into a slightly bigger apartment we were allocated. Many Chinese enterprises worked this way then — housing ran on a "rotation" system. If the enterprise did well one year, it put up a few buildings, three or four scattered ones, not the huge blocks a property developer builds all at once today. Once they were finished, they were allocated by rank, or model-worker or advanced-worker status — there was no way to house everyone at once. "Rotation" meant the first group to move in got the better housing, and others could then apply for the units they had vacated, one batch after another.

The place I live in now is the fifth apartment I've had in Maanshan — 89.9 square meters. There was a state policy at the time that let enterprises find their own sites and pool funds to build housing, but no household's floor area could exceed 90 square meters, so that nobody could use it to build a villa.

The standards for allocating housing were probably much the same nationwide: division-level cadres got three bedrooms and a living room, section-level cadres two bedrooms and a living room, ordinary clerks one bedroom and a living room, or two rooms with no separate living room. I remember reading in the news last year that Nanshan Mine was the first in all of Maanshan to achieve "housing for everyone." It took all these years to clear the "households without housing," but I doubt many other work units can say as much — I'm still quite proud of it.

Walk around Nanshan Mine and you may find it strange: the buildings are squeezed into every gap, interlocking and jagged, not the neat rows of a mature housing complex elsewhere. That's simply how it was built — wherever there was open ground, up went a building, scattered about with no plan. The whole of Nanshan Mine grew this way, bit by bit.

At first it was "Learn from Daqing in Industry," production before living conditions. Later, by the 1980s, Nanshan Mine looked more and more like a complete little society of its own.

Cultural life during the Cultural Revolution was barren. Xiangshan Town, the area Nanshan Mine sits in, had a single movie theater, which counted as the best social hub of the day. Tickets cost three to five fen, and the theater was the hottest place around — when I first came to Nanshan Mine I even stood guard at its doors as an armed militiaman.

Later the workers organized a choir of their own. I still have the sheet music we used, all cut on steel stencils — there were no printers, so we "rolled" the sheets out one at a time with ink.

We built a basketball court too. "Building sports facilities for employee welfare" — that was how it was described from above. In reality it was nothing like today, when an enterprise puts the job out to tender, allocates funds, hires designers and contractors. Back then it was all on us, volunteer labor. We found a small hillock, leveled it, built a road, and welded a hoop out of steel pipe. All of it after work, hauled and carried by hand, unpaid.

Once it was finished that court became the center of the whole mine — after their shifts, young people crowded in and took turns on the court. Later, lights went up, turning it into a floodlit court, and it became a place where many men and women fell in love. That was possible because Nanshan Mine had its own electricity supply.

After that came a track-and-field ground, a swimming pool, and a sports meet every four years, its opening ceremony modeled on formal athletic competitions — a military band, the meet's anthem, doves released. In the 1980s the prizes were towels, notebooks, and enamel mugs printed with the character for "prize." People thought them precious at the time — more of an honor than cash would have been.

Gyms are everywhere now, and the people under Nanshan Mine's hoops keep getting older. We joke that at every sports meet the retired workers' team gets fiercer, always taking first place in the overall team score — the athletic mainstays of the 1980s have all retired. Nanshan Mine rarely recruits young people anymore, and the ones it does recruit are hard to keep.

The mine covered a person's whole life, from birth to death — from a new life born in the hospital to a death, when the plant would send a bus to carry relatives and friends to the crematorium for the funeral. All of it handled here. We had our own kindergarten, elementary school and middle school, and for a time even ran a Worker-Peasant-Soldier University. We had our own propaganda system — a newspaper, a television station, a broadcasting station — our own fire brigade, as many as 11 canteens at the peak, and workers who commuted to work by train.

From 1973 to today, I've spent more than 40 years at Nanshan Mine. You could say our generation watched it grow from nothing.

An Inward-Looking, Closed Society

My son was four months old when my parents took him back to Shanghai. He came back to Nanshan Mine in the fourth grade. Later, when Shanghai brought in a policy letting the children of educated youth return, he went back again. He works at SAIC now, as a senior technician.

Years later he said something that left me speechless for a good while: "Why on earth did you pick Anhui to settle in? Heilongjiang would've been so much better — forests and snow as far as you can see! Inner Mongolia too, endless grassland." They think being sent down to the countryside was a sightseeing trip.

His generation is different, of course. He talked about Volkswagen: on the German side there was no such thing as "allocating housing"; employees got a subsidy when they bought a home. Everything was "solved outside," a completely different way of thinking from ours. The Germans said: don't we pay taxes? The police, the public security bureau — taxpayers support all of it. Why would I need to fund my own security department, my own canteen?

Nanshan Mine is like a small society that circulates within itself, barely touched by the outside. It's somewhat closed, and the connections run deep — you never know whose relative heads which department. Whichever way you turn it's the same people, a bit stifling, not like Shanghai, which still has real life in it.

With reform and opening-up, Shenzhen was the first to say "time is money." Look at the streets of Shanghai: everyone walks in a hurry — "chasing a living" means running back and forth. Here things stayed slow; reform and opening-up had little effect on Nanshan Mine, and not many people rushed south.

That's the defect of the iron rice bowl: it gives able people nothing. Even if you had the skill to invent something, there was no patent system yet (it only came in 1985), and it wasn't like now when you can look on Taobao — back then you couldn't even find a manufacturer. Nanshan Mine was Magang in miniature, and Magang was China in miniature.

In the 1980s a resourceful man at the plant arranged something: he traded surplus steel from Nanshan Mine to a Shanghai television factory for a batch of black-and-white sets, and it caused a huge stir. For us it was a straightforward exchange of what each side lacked — we'd produced more than the plan called for, and televisions were rationed by coupon and in short supply. The same logic held for the Shanghai factory: they might have no direct use for the steel, but they could trade a scarce commodity for something else — doesn't that get things moving? And yet the deal nearly got him labeled a "speculator and profiteer." Today it's easy enough to call him "the first man to eat the crab," but at the time, in Maanshan and in Shanghai alike, it was still a planned economy — a pool of stagnant water.

With the restructuring of state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, the little society we had just built "from nothing" began to change, and so did the way people thought. The "iron rice bowl" slowly disappeared, replaced by another phrase: "shedding the burden," which is a heavy one. But even the canteen, a department that sounds trivial, was hard to "spin off." Older employees couldn't be moved into production jobs, and learning new skills was out of the question. Yet they had spent most of their lives here — how were they to live once they were laid off?

In recent years the steel industry has been in decline, and steel, cement and coal have all been told to "cut overcapacity." We used to say Maanshan was "a city that rose on steel." Now it's building development zones, ports and software parks, and growing industries that have nothing to do with steel.

I've lived here more than 40 years, and looking back I feel a great deal. Outsiders find it easy to say the place is no good, to say how heavy a burden state-owned enterprises are — I still think it has a chance. Not every city has to be Shanghai or Shenzhen.

Illustration: Lin Yuyao

Cover image from BBC