山西省

choi

Shanxi province | King Coal’s Misrule; The rise and fall of a corrupt coal-fuelled economy. Economist, Nov 28, 2015.
http://www.economist.com/news/ch ... -king-coals-misrule

Quote:

"IT TAKES half an hour to walk down 1,400 rickety wooden steps from a pithead of Jinhuagong mine 晋华宫煤矿 [now 晋华宫国家矿山公园; 与云冈石窟仅隔一河] to the coal face, 400 metres below. * * * the pithead, in the northern province of Shanxi near its coal capital, Datong 大同市, is not operational. It was closed in 2012 and converted into a tourist attraction (with a theme: 'the glory of Datong coal'). Perhaps put off by the trek [down the coal shaft and back], on most days visitors are rare. The mine’s state-owned operator, Datong Coal Mining Group [Co, Ltd 大同煤矿集团公司], is trying to revive its fortunes by diversifying into tourism. * * * As at the Jinhuagong mine-cum-theme-park, it takes even longer to trudge back up to the surface than it does to walk down.

"It [Shanxi] has a population of 36m people, about the same as Canada’s

"Three factors explain Shanxi’s failings: coal, corruption and construction. The province is the historic centre of China’s coal industry. Though its output was overtaken by that of neighbouring Inner Mongolia in 2009, Shanxi still produces a quarter of the country’s coal. About 60% of provincial GDP is tied to the black stuff.

"Because so many of Shanxi’s mines are old they are relatively expensive to run. Most are losing money. The response has been a wave of consolidation. In 2008 the province had 2,600 coal mines. Many of these were small privately owned collieries, at which safety standards were usually atrocious.   Most of the private ones have been closed or taken over by state-owned enterprises (SOEs). The number of mines has fallen by almost two-thirds. Safety standards have improved considerably. * * * State firms are reverting to type: keeping everyone they can on the payroll, squeezing wages, and hoping the provincial government will bail them out.

"It [Shanxi] has two smartphone factories owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese consumer-electronics company, which are its main source of foreign-currency earnings.

"The country’s inadequate provision of pensions and unemployment benefits results in workers preferring to stay with SOEs which promise to look after them rather than strike out on their own.

Note:
(a) “At the bottom [of 晋华宫 coal shaft] stand a theodolite, a flame-proof telephone [to be used when miners are trapped] and a double-drum electrical traction shearer—a behemoth of a machine designed to chew up the coal face and excrete its fragments onto a conveyor belt."
(i) theodolite
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodolite
("for measuring angles in the horizontal and vertical planes. Theodolites are used mainly for surveying applications")
(ii) Google (electrical traction coal shearer) without quotation marks.  Then you google (double-drum  electrical traction coal shearer)/

(b) pithead (n): "chiefly British:  the top of a mining pit or coal shaft; also : the immediately adjacent ground and buildings"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pithead

In other words, a pithead is on the ground level.
(c) " Shanxi, 250 miles (400km) east [sic; should be 'west'] of Beijing, would seem a good candidate for catch-up growth."

Actually “250 miles” is the distance between Beijing and Taiyuan 太原市, not   
(d) revert to type: "to resume characteristics that were thought to have disappeared"
www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/revert-to-type
(e) "In 2014 Caixin, a magazine in Beijing, investigated Luliang county 吕梁市 in the west of the province. * * * Wang Rulin, Shanxi’s party chief 山西省委书记 王儒林, complains that he cannot fill about 300 local-government posts "