The Anthropocene and a Small Place in China

Introduction

Universal acceptance of the term “the Anthropocene” remains elusive. It is most broadly used to describe the relationship between diverse anthropogenic phenomena: climate change, deforestation, mass biodiversity loss, pollution, resource exhaustion, ocean acidification, freshwater depletion, and increased zoonotic diseases. The concept is predicated on the evidence that human activity, above all else, has left indelible markers in our planet’s geological and atmospheric records. ¹ Some scholars argue that the Anthropocene’s beginning “would be optimally placed in the mid-twentieth century,” corresponding to the enormous explosion in population growth, industrial activity, and human technological capability after World War II—the “Great Acceleration.” ² Others propose it began earlier, with the steam engine, industrialization, and the dominance of capitalism as an economic system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (the “Capitalocene”). ³

Some critics of the Anthropocene concept reject the suggestion that all of humanity—an undifferentiated anthropos—is responsible. These scholars point to the late-twentieth-century global consumption and gross domestic product (GDP) of developed, capitalist democracies as the real movers of the Anthropocene. In this view, the Great Acceleration only “spread” to places like China, India, Russia, South Africa, or Brazil (BRICS) closer to the last two decades of the twentieth century. ⁴ National or continental frameworks help capture patterns at these large scales. Approaching the Anthropocene at a smaller scale, however, brings into higher fidelity other sets of actors and processes.

To this point, some scholars have suggested the terms “Urbanocene” or “Urbicene” given the central role that cities and global urbanization trends have played in Anthropocentric processes. ⁵ “Planetary urbanization,” argued geographer Erik Swyngedouw, “is of course the geographical expression of this anthropocenic process. Therefore, Urbicene might be a more appropriate term to capture the sociomaterial form that the Anthropocene takes.” ⁶ It is certainly the case that global urbanization of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, characterized by extensive land transformation, resource consumption, waste production, human migration to cities, energy usage, and greenhouse gas emissions—among other things—has “function[ed] as an accelerating aspect of the Anthropocene.” ⁷ Historian Carl Nightingale has likewise called our planet an “Earthopolis” and an “urban planet” to denote how it has been predominantly through and from cities that humans have exercised their “precarious command of Earth’s fertile lithosphere, its watery hydrosphere, its Sun-moderating atmosphere, and the entirety of its profuse halo of life.” According to Nightingale, cities are the “cockpits” of the Anthropocene, such that our “Earthopolis is at once the Anthropocene’s avatar in time and its spatial manifestation today.” ⁸

By underlining the intricate, complex interdependencies between cities and their hinterlands, such as through natural resource commodification, scholars have shown how the “spatial reach of urban influence” can never be drawn on top of their political borders. ⁹ “For this reason alone,” wrote historian Martin Melosi, “separating cities from nature makes little sense, and is all the more difficult to justify. An ‘urban system’ is much larger and complex than a traditional view of a city within narrowly conceived political boundaries.” ¹⁰ This point hints at a basic fractal pattern whose very planetary ubiquity defines the Urbanocene: the distinction between “urban” and “hinterland” is irretrievably entangled, obscured, and blurry—both physically and conceptually—such that the dichotomy makes less and less analytical sense. This is not to say that Manhattan is now indistinguishable from the Alaskan wilderness. Rather, the point is that these two vastly different locations have become so intricately, extensively, and intensely interconnected that they effectively constitute a singular, integrated system, wherein each influences and is influenced by the other. Changes in urban areas, through political programs, consumption patterns, and socioeconomic trends, have tangible impacts on remote hinterlands. Conversely, changes in these hinterlands, such as through climate shifts, resource availability, and ecosystem health, reverberate back to the urban centers.

This planetary dissolution of the urban/hinterland, or urban/rural dichotomy as it sometimes has appeared, has a history that operates differently at different scales. While the planetary, humanity-implicating Anthropocene reveals a graph rising simply and steeply left to right starting around the year 1950 (see Figure 1), zooming in on a single data point—a city—tells a different, much less linear story, even if the aggregate effect remained the same. Certain megacities might fit the pattern particularly well. Others may not at all, increasing erratically or only at a very late or very early stage, or even reversing the pattern. Looking at the Anthropocene through the scale of a city brings into focus how the local manifestations of a global process always tell a different story. It can also depict in more granular detail the history of human activity that extended the fractal pattern of the Urbanocene within a certain context.

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Figure 1.

A graph from Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration” depicting the growth in urban population among OECD (dark orange), BRICS (medium orange), and Other (light orange) countries. ¹¹

This article does just that through a case study of the city of Baiyin (白银, literally “white silver”) in the western Chinese province of Gansu, once one of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) most significant copper and nonferrous metal mining cities. It draws on official Chinese archival documents, scientific journals, global financial documents, local annals, and a variety of published materials to narrate Baiyin’s history: its industrial birth in the 1950s, rise as a national mining powerhouse, resource exhaustion and decline in the 1980s and 1990s, and recent attempts at economic diversification and environmental remediation. Through this story, I pay careful attention to global and local forces that shaped the interdependent and intertwined relationship between a city and its hinterland in the span of a single human lifetime—a little over half a century. I demonstrate that industrial resource extraction in and around Baiyin dissolved the physical and conceptual barrier between Baiyin and a hinterland outside it and contributed to the same larger collapse of the urban/hinterland divide across the planet. In this sense, Baiyin’s ongoing attempt to transition to a “sustainable”, postresource city merely obscures its environmental footprint, hiding it in long-distance supply chains and as a node in transcontinental economic configurations. Ultimately, I use the “small detail” of Baiyin to illuminate “the big picture” of the Anthropocene—to borrow the words of global labor historian Marcel van der Linden—while also recovering the “microreality” of places like Baiyin amid the “macroprocess” of the Anthropocene. ¹²

Baiyin and China’s “Resource-Based Cities”

Baiyin is located about seventy kilometers northeast of Lanzhou, the capital of the arid and mountainous province of Gansu in western China (see Figure 2). More precisely, it is situated on the upper reaches of the Yellow River, in the moonscape between the southern edges of the Tengger Desert and the northern edges of the Longxi loess plateau. The earth beneath Baiyin held some of the PRC’s largest and most valuable deposits of nonferrous metals like zinc, aluminum, cobalt, lead, gold, silver, cadmium, selenium, and—most significant of all—copper.

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Figure 2.

Baiyin, Gansu, PRC (Google maps).

With the help of Soviet technicians and capital as well as workers from elsewhere in China, the city was constructed in the 1950s as one of the 156 industrial construction projects of the PRC’s First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). From its establishment through to the late 1980s, Baiyin’s main enterprise, the Baiyin Non-ferrous Metals Company (BNMC), was the PRC’s largest producer of copper. It accounted for up to one third of national production. Its nonferrous metals were used in the electronics industry, machinery industries, transportation, aerospace, light industries, chemical industries, and military industries. One local saying claimed every third bullet shot by the People’s Liberation Army came from Baiyin. It shipped ingots, bars, wires, foils, pipes, plates, castings, and alloys to every province, municipality, and autonomous region in China. ¹³ Today, however, China’s “Copper City” no longer has much copper. In the late 1980s, local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cadres (Party functionaries) and engineers in Baiyin began to see signs that Baiyin’s mines were becoming exhausted. As one 1989 report soberly put it, “today, Baiyin as a large-scale copper-mining city is already in its final stage,” warning furthermore that, “new resources will not be able to replace it.” ¹⁴ Baiyin’s 1990s and 2000s saw increases in unemployment, poverty, pollution-related health problems, ecological degradation, inequality, and crime. The city struggled at the same time that China’s post-Mao market reforms under Deng Xiaoping’s regime led to enormous economic growth in coastal China—the so-called “China miracle” embodied by cities like Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.

Baiyin’s history up to this point recalls the stereotypical example of the declensionist, boom to bust narrative that defines the historical experience of communities whose economies are based on local resource extraction. But Baiyin also demonstrates subsequent human efforts to manage and transition what comes after the bust. In the mid-2000s, the PRC government began identifying and classifying hundreds of “resource-based cities” (ziyuanxing chengshi 资源型城市) throughout China. These official classifications referred to cities in which the extraction and/or processing of natural resources were the leading industry—mining, forestry, petroleum, and so on. Chinese researchers identified more than 250 resource-based cities in China, home to tens of millions of people. Almost half of all investment in the First Five-Year Plan went to fifty-three cities that would later classified as “resource-based.” In short, resource-based cities made huge material contributions to China’s twentieth-century industrialization and played “a unique role in helping set up an independent and complete industrial system in China and boosting economic development.” ¹⁵

After decades of industrial-scale resource extraction, the PRC government observed that many cities like Baiyin were plagued by a shared set of problems: serious ecological damage, uncoordinated socioeconomic development, unemployment, widespread pollution and health problems, and resource depletion. One group of Chinese scholars defined them as sites where “single, mineral resources are increasingly depleted, economic development is lagging, ecological destruction and environmental pollution are severe, people’s lives and employment are increasingly difficult, and urban space is dispersed under a low-level industrial structure.” ¹⁶ The PRC government subsequently made a new classification: “resource-exhausted cities” (ziyuankujie chengshi 资源枯竭城市). Baiyin was among the first to fit this classification.

Chinese researchers and policymakers have spilled a tremendous amount of ink toward classifying these cities, analyzing the problems caused by resource-exhaustion, and proffering policy solutions. One attempted solution was to bring in international financial and developmental organizations. As early as 2005, the PRC central government and the local Baiyin government together solicited the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to help plan and transition Baiyin’s economy for a future without the minerals upon which it was originally built. International consultant groups hired by the ADB drew on the transitional experiences of resource-based cities elsewhere in the world and suggested prioritizing constructing new high-tech industrial parks and detoxifying Baiyin’s water, air, and earth. In 2013, China’s State Council instituted a nationwide seven-year plan aimed at promoting the “sustainable development” of resource-based cities as a key pillar of China’s future national economy. ¹⁷ The success or failure of Baiyin’s transition to a sustainable postresource city will stand as a model for what postresource urbanization more broadly should—or should not—look like.

Surveys and Explosives

The global postwar Great Acceleration was fueled by a dramatic rise in the utilization of Earth’s resources. This was a process intimately tied to the work of geological surveying and resource exploitation that occurred around the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Before resources can be exploited, they must be found, quantified, and fixed legibly on maps. To this point, in Baiyin as elsewhere, geological surveying was a necessary first step. The human community of Baiyin would not have existed without the geologists that first identified the local nonferrous metal deposits and determined the feasibility of acquiring them.

Correspondingly, most official accounts of Baiyin’s history begin with the contributions of geological surveying Team 641. Team 641 was dispatched to Baiyin in May of 1951, not even two years after the PRC was founded in October 1949. Team 641 surveyed the area around Baiyin for several months, riding bicycles and camels, scrabbling around for food and water in the harsh environment, and living in caves. ¹⁸ Their surveying—and the walls of some caves they stayed in—revealed enormous porphyry, or “volcanogenic,” copper deposits that originally formed in the centers of ancient submarine volcanoes. ¹⁹ They were among the largest in the nation. In the next few years, first by the hundreds, then by the thousands, engineers, technicians, miners, doctors, laborers, and cadres moved to the area to build China’s shimmering “Copper City” in the desert.

What is sometimes missing from this story, however, is why Team 641 was dispatched to this specific area in the first place. The leader of Team 641 was a man named Song Shuhe (宋叔和), a geologist who had graduated from the Department of Geography and Meteorology at Qinghua (Tsinghua) University in 1938. As historian Grace Yen Shen has shown, the Chinese “geological culture” in the Republican period (1912-1949) in which Song Shuhe was educated was “meaningfully Chinese and global.” ²⁰ China had become an object of intense interest among foreign scientists. After Chinese treaty ports were opened by western gunboats throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, foreign explorers and scientists increasingly “acquired the right of penetration” to China’s interior. ²¹ Expeditions of foreign geologists and explorers produced some of the first major scientific studies about China’s geography and geology through until the late 1920s. One of the most important was a 1903-1904 American expedition led by the Carnegie Institute that became a “model for later studies.” ²² Chinese intellectuals themselves became interested in applying geological science to understanding their nation’s land in the early twentieth century. The renowned Geological Survey of China was founded in 1916. The Survey was considered by many Western scientists at the time as “the best scientific organization in Republican China.” It occupied a “legitimate position in the international learned world” and made “a genuine contribution to knowledge of the natural history of earth.” ²³

Chinese interest in their nation’s geology was motivated by the educational experiences of young Chinese scientists in places like Japan, Scotland, Belgium, and England. There they also became acutely aware of imperialist interest in China’s natural resources and geology’s role in providing access to them. Many Chinese intellectuals also saw—not incorrectly—foreign geological explorations as intimately linked with foreign imperialism. ²⁴ Educating more Chinese geologists and developing geological knowledge about their homeland became a way of conveying the Chinese people’s “ownership” of their nation’s resources. For the first generation of Chinese geologists then, being “good stewards” of China’s territory meant they had to first “know what it was made of, whence it came, and how it was connected to the rest of the world.” ²⁵

Following Japan’s full invasion of China in 1937 and after graduating from Qinghua University in 1938, Song, like other Chinese scientists and their institutions at the time, fled to interior regions of China beyond the reach of the Japanese Imperial Army. This inland migration of China’s intellectual elite meant that they were “effectively disconnected from the external world.” However, for geologists like Song Shuhe and others, their isolation also served to reorient the geography of the knowledge they produced about China’s mineral wealth and geological history. ²⁶ From 1942 to 1945, Song Shuhe worked alongside other geologists exploring and surveying the lesser-known geology of western regions like Xinjiang and Gansu. After Japan surrendered in 1945, through to the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Song Shuhe stayed out west, continuing to map its rich geology for a China that needed to rebuild after decades of war. ²⁷

In the fall of 1946, Song Shuhe and several colleagues went to Gaolan, Gansu— close to where today’s Baiyin is located. According to Song, his surveys were prompted by earlier Chinese geologists who visited the region in 1934, 1940, and 1944, with the earliest geological work in Gaolan conducted by the famous Hungarian geoscientist Lajos Lóczy (Ludwig von Lóczy) in 1878. ²⁸ Lóczy’s study marks the first scientific geological survey of the area, but the area had been mined before. Records dating from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) through to the reign of the Tongzhi emperor of the Qing dynasty (1861-1875) have shown that locals were mining local silver and gold deposits until they suddenly stopped and the deposits were essentially forgotten until the twentieth century. ²⁹ All these preliminary surveys suggested to Song, in any case, that a “detailed study . . . is still wanting.” ³⁰ Song subsequently published his surveys from 1947 to 1949, highlighting that the ore in the area had “considerable economic value.” ³¹

When Song led Surveying Team 641 back to Baiyin’s mineral deposits in 1951, his team’s excitement was tempered by the region’s remoteness and challenging climate and terrain. When the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) entered the Baiyin area in 1949, only several thousand people were eking out an existence in the surrounding counties. CCP cadres recorded old sayings that locals used to describe the inhospitable nature of their land. Locals talked about the “three howls”: the wind during the day, the wolf at night, and the belly after drinking bad water, and the “three fews”: people, water, and trees. ³² Another common saying went, “the mountains are as bald as a monk’s head, the gutters have no water, and if we plant ten crops then we’ll never harvest nine of them.” In a good year, Baiyin might get eleven or twelve inches of rain. In a bad one, four or five (Phoenix, Arizona, averages seven to eight inches per year). ³³ “Before liberation [1949],” a Baiyin-based cadre later wrote in 1959, “people here were not only slaves to the exploiting class, they were also slaves to nature.” ³⁴ In short, an entire city would have to be built in an uninviting climate with little preexisting infrastructure to maintain the extractive capital and provide the human labor and expertise needed to extract and process nonferrous metals.

In February 1950, the PRC and the Soviet Union signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance, creating one of the most important alliances to emerge out of the postwar order. As part of the treaty, the Soviet Union agreed to provide the PRC with technical and material assistance in support of its national industrialization efforts. Throughout the 1950s, thousands of Soviet advisors, technicians, and equipment were sent to help develop various heavy industrial enterprises throughout China—what some scholars refer to as “the largest technology transfer in human history.” ³⁵

The PRC state itself also actively drew from Soviet economic models and experience building socialism. One of the most prominent of these models was the five-year plan, which had been the dominant form of economic planning in the Soviet Union since Stalin first introduced it in 1928. The PRC launched its first five-year plan in 1953. The core of the plan was the 156 industrial construction projects that were to be built with Soviet technical assistance and capital. ³⁶

The scale of Baiyin’s deposits and the value of nonferrous metals for all kinds of industrial processes meant that it was an obvious and important candidate for one of those joint projects. Consequently, the Soviet Union sent mining technicians to Baiyin in June 1953. Inspired by the “noble spirit of internationalism,” these experts trained Chinese mining engineers and technicians, operated equipment, and even designed the mines. ³⁷ The Baiyin Non-ferrous Metals Company (BNMC) was founded soon after in September 1954. In 1956, Baiyin’s Soviet experts advised that the mining of Baiyin ought to begin by blowing up seven mountaintops and hilltops to create large open-pit mines. To do this, they put nearly twenty-thousand tons of explosives in the “bellies” of seven mountains. They sourced explosives from all over China and, since there were not yet trains to Baiyin, used legions of trucks to move the explosives into thousands of meters of cutouts and tunnels. Engineers then blew it all up on December 31, 1956 (Figure 3). The Baiyin Committee of Cultural and Historical Data claimed this was the largest explosion that had ever happened in China until that point: the explosions together blew up nearly ten million cubic meters of earth and lowered the mountaintops by an average of fifty meters. The explosion and resulting seismic activity were so powerful that some Western countries reportedly at first speculated that China had tested its first nuclear weapon (that would come in 1964). ³⁸

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Figure 3.

Two of the enormous 1956 explosions that opened Baiyin’s open pit mines. ³⁹

From a logistical and technical standpoint, the opening of Baiyin’s mines and the Sino-Soviet cooperation behind them were a rousing success. Soviet experts had trained China’s “first batch of blast engineers and technicians” and created the first large-scale nonferrous metal industrial base in the PRC. ⁴⁰ With the help of Soviet technicians, the BNMC smelters produced the first copper with modern industrial production methods in the PRC. ⁴¹ The open-pit mines would be used until the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In short, Baiyin owes much of its existence to global and transnational processes—despite its geographic interiority within China. One of these was the large-scale warfare that followed the Japanese Empire’s invasion of China. It pushed Chinese geologists westward, directing their scientific energies to a region whose mineral wealth was not as well known, but was at least free from Japanese control. The war also necessitated finding a certain kind of resource: minerals that could be used to fuel factories that could produce material to fight the Japanese military. When the CCP defeated the Nationalist Party and established the PRC in 1949, Song Shuhe—like many other geologists—decided to stay in mainland China and not follow the defeated Nationalist Party to Taiwan.

The emerging postwar order also shaped the relationship between the human community of Baiyin and its local hinterland. The Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s allowed the PRC state to draw on Soviet technical assistance and industrial machinery to fulfill the CCP’s promise to modernize and rebuild the country after decades of warfare. Soviet mining advisers suggested creating open-pit mines through massive explosions. These explosions completely leveled entire mountaintops, forever changing the local landscape. The resulting open-pit mines defined local economic and environmental activity for decades, through to today. They also brought about a new era of urbanization and built infrastructure to the area, as thousands of laborers and technicians were needed to work the mines.

Urbanizing Baiyin

While mining experts were blowing up Baiyin’s mountaintops, Soviet and Chinese urban planning experts and architects were designing the city of Baiyin itself. In a unique moment in the history of international urban planning, the Soviet Union sent around forty professional urban planners to the PRC between 1949 and 1959. Scientifically informed urban planning theory was an essential component of the Soviet Union’s experience building socialism. ⁴² According to Chinese architectural scholar Tang Xianglong, “All European and American architectural and planning theories were criticized, and Soviet urban planning theory was fully introduced and became the only choice at that time. The experience of building socialist cities in the Soviet Union became the object of reference for China.” ⁴³

Soviet and Chinese planners linked the development of heavy industrial projects like Baiyin with the development of urban areas. ⁴⁴ One form in which this relationship played out was through the “monotown” (моногород, in Russian, or monogorod). As the name suggests, monotowns were single-industry towns that developed around a particular resource and extractive activity—Soviet versions of “resource-based cities.” Monotowns were state-owned and built in accordance with national economic plans. In the United States and other capitalist countries, certain types of company towns reflect a similar dynamic between a particular resource or industrial activity and the urban community built to support it. The industrial universality of this kind of urban-extractive configuration suggests more of an Anthropocentric pattern than a distinctively ideological one.

In his book Monotown, architect Clayton Strange documented how a standardized model based on Soviet monotowns built in the 1920s and 1930s was exported to India and China variously during the twentieth century. Monotowns were necessarily located wherever the resource to be extracted was placed by planetary geological processes. They, therefore, required moving large amounts of people, as well as the housing, services, and infrastructure needed to support them, to often distant, remote regions. Through projecting state power to remote hinterland regions, Soviet monotowns worked as “an instrument for flattening national space.” ⁴⁵ The PRC’s Mao period (1949-1976) also saw deliberate attempts to build more urban and industrial centers in interior regions of China. ⁴⁶ This was partly for military and strategic reasons, but also because there was knowldge of rich, untapped mineral wealth there. ⁴⁷ Baiyin was thus a specific project to get at a specific nonferrous mineral deposit, but it was also representative of the CCP’s broader development strategies. ⁴⁸

Many skilled migrants who went to Baiyin were from larger, more developed urban centers further east like Shanghai. By 1957, there were sixty thousand people—many from outside Gansu—working in Baiyin and so urban infrastructure had to be built quickly. ⁴⁹ Between 1957 and 1959, the BNMC “constructed hundreds of thousands of square meters” of housing to support the growing population of technicians and workers. ⁵⁰ Conditions in incipient industrial centers in interior China in this period were rough and unfamiliar. Many Shanghainese workers sent to Gansu in this period soon went back to Shanghai and refused to return. In one instance in 1960, officials from Gansu even went to Shanghai to persuade workers to return by explaining that their labor was necessary for building the “industrial base of the motherland.” ⁵¹

According to the Baiyin City Construction Committee, Baiyin’s 1956 city plan was based on the idea that the city and its infrastructure should “reflect the value of serving industry.” ⁵² Of the twenty-eight square kilometers of the municipal area, twenty were dedicated to nonferrous metal industry, and eight to residential areas. Planners described their mandate to privilege industrial activities accordingly in a 1955 document:

The copper smelting industry . . . is the only driving force for the growth of this city and the material basis for our urban construction and urban development. The basic principle of urban planning is to serve industrial production first, so that industrial production has the most favorable conditions for development and the most powerful conditions for business activities. ⁵³

In support of industry, new automobile roads and railroads needed to be built from the factories, linking them to the regional capital of Lanzhou to the west and the autonomous region of Ningxia to the east. The need to move materials from the mines to the industrialized urban center meant that, from the beginning, Baiyin’s local impact was far larger than just the initial twenty-eight square kilometers of the urban area itself. The railroad would branch from the city to enter various factories and the open pit mines outside of them. This created a web of railroads crisscrossing the surrounding landscape, moving minerals from the open pit mines to be processed in Baiyin, and then to larger regional hubs like Lanzhou where they would then be spread across the nation for all manner of industrial use. ⁵⁴ Moreover, various “ancillary” industries were needed to support the nonferrous metal mining and refining enterprises, like “construction, manufacturing, textiles, and coal mining”—their growth over time further expanded Baiyin’s material footprint and its influence on the regional ecosystem. ⁵⁵ This flow of materials and the infrastructure supporting it mirrored on local scale the national transportation infrastructure, which tied resource-based industrial cities in the west to the urban centers in coastal regions. ⁵⁶

Later city plans in the 1960s and 1970s “did little to alter the trajectory of growth for Baiyin” as they simply built on “existing patterns” established in the 1950s. ⁵⁷ Baiyin’s industrial capacity, however, continued to grow throughout the 1960s. The BNMC finally smelted its first batch of copper in 1960. By 1965, the BNMC was mining nearly four million tons of copper and smelting almost forty-thousand tons. From 1963 to 1975, the average industrial output of Baiyin increased significantly. ⁵⁸ Moreover, as Strange documents, Baiyin’s mines and factories required huge amounts of energy, which was provided through coal thermal plants and hydroelectric facilities along the Yellow River. ⁵⁹ As a result, the urban community of 110,000 people who lived in Baiyin by 1970 left a substantial impact on a wide surrounding area.

Entanglements

Planners early on decided that the city’s industrial and residential water needed to be taken from the Yellow River, twenty-seven kilometers away. Its water was used in factories that processed metals from the open pit mines, as irrigation water for farms used to feed Baiyin’s population, as a municipal water source, as a source of energy, and as a way to transport refined metals. In return for all that the river provided Baiyin, it was treated as a sink for industrial and residential wastewater. Planners in the mid-1950s mandated that harmful industrial sewage should not be discharged into the Yellow River. ⁶⁰ This was not followed and all untreated industrial wastewater, which by 1975 had nearly tripled in volume, was discharged into two natural flood ditches that flowed to the Yellow River. ⁶¹ In this sense, the Yellow River both enabled and was the object of Baiyin’s ever-extending sphere of influence. This kind of physical entanglement encapsulates a sad irony of humanity’s relationship to resources that more broadly defines the Anthropocene: we depend on them for sustenance and development and in so doing render them complicit in their own exploitation and degradation.

In 1974, researchers from various scientific institutes in Gansu were sent to Baiyin to investigate water and soil pollution for the first time. They identified the flood ditches as highways for toxins, which spread trace amounts of heavy metals in Baiyin’s farmland, drinking water, and communities downstream on the Yellow River. Together, the nine investigation teams collected 769 samples. The results were troubling. The surface soil of Baiyin’s wastewater irrigation areas contained huge amounts of cadmium, a toxic heavy metal byproduct of metal refining, at levels thirty-one to 171 times higher than normal. In the tested crops, the average cadmium content ranged from fifteen to fifty-two times higher than normal. ⁶²

The investigators determined that the source of this pollution was waste discharged by the enterprises along the Dongdagou stream. The Dongdagou stream began as a drainage channel from the BNMC’s “Number One” open pit mine north of the city (see Figure 4). The thirty-eight-kilometer-long stream ran north-south through the eastern part of Baiyin before ultimately flowing into the Yellow River. Residential communities in eastern Baiyin also dumped their wastewater in the stream. ⁶³ Because Baiyin is in such an arid, desert climate, farmers around Baiyin had little choice but to use wastewater from both the Dongdagou stream and the Yellow River to irrigate their farmland. For decades, the people of Baiyin unknowingly ate food poisoned with heavy metals. ⁶⁴ The 1974 report concluded that “the pollution to soil and crops is very serious,” suggesting that more research was needed on the risks to human health. It urged those “responsible” in Baiyin—the BNMC and local authorities—to “take a serious attitude” to the problem of pollution and develop a plan to eradicate it as soon as possible. ⁶⁵

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Figure 4.

Baiyin’s “Number One” open-pit copper mine. ⁶⁶

Despite these warnings, enterprises continued dumping wastewater into the Dongdagou for decades, eventually making it “the largest source of heavy metal pollution in the upper reaches of the Yellow River.” ⁶⁷ A 1990 study by China’s Northwest Smelting Research group found that the Dongdagou’s pollution was still “extremely serious” and that arsenic, cadmium, and lead levels in its waters were much too high for agricultural use. A 2006 study of Baiyin’s soils and vegetables conducted by Lanzhou-based research centers drew the same conclusions as researchers thirty years prior: “the vegetables grown in Baiyin non-ferrous metals mining and smelting waste affected area have a hazardous effect on human health.” ⁶⁸ Since the mid-2010s, officials have spent hundreds of millions of yuan and planted tens of thousands of trees to try to remedy the heavy metal contamination. And yet, as recently as May 2022, a team of researchers from Gansu’s Laboratory for Environmental Pollution Prediction and Control at Lanzhou University concluded that plants in abandoned farmland around Baiyin still far exceeded an acceptable amount of heavy metals and continued to pose a danger to livestock that grazed there. However, the ability for local plants to absorb heavy metals did pose phytoremediation as a potential innovative solution. ⁶⁹ In short, Baiyin’s entangled physical relationship with the Yellow River meant that while the city itself thrived on extraction and export, its longer-term sustainability was imperiled by those same processes.

Exhaustion and Transformation

By the late 1980s, Baiyin’s two largest open-pit mines were exhausted, signifying Baiyin’s senescence as a resource-based city. ⁷⁰ Throughout the 1990s, unemployment, crime, out-migration, health and environmental problems, and poverty followed. Here, Baiyin reveals a distinguishing feature of resource-based cities: very little separates the exhaustion of the local resource and the unraveling of social and economic fabric.

In response to this problem, the local Baiyin government and China’s central government enlisted the global financial and developmentalist muscle of the Asian Development Bank in 2005. Established in 1966 and based in Manila, the ADB is a regional development bank composed of forty-nine Asia-Pacific countries and nineteen countries outside the region. Its core mission is “providing loans, technical assistance, grants, and equity investments to promote social and economic development” to its members across Asia. ⁷¹ The PRC government hoped that with the ADB’s help Baiyin could be a national symbol for how other resource-exhausted cities might transition into some more sustainable urban existence. ⁷² The ADB responded by sending international consultant and policy teams to Baiyin and providing over US$180 million in loans between 2006 and 2014.

After a series of fact-finding missions, H&J Inc, an international consultant group headquartered in Buffalo, NY, framed Baiyin’s dilemma thusly:

Internationally, there are two approaches in dealing with typical resource exhausted cities; one is to promote the economic transformation for continuous development and another is simply to abandon the city. . .For Baiyin City, it is not an option to completely abandon the city because of the tremendous cost involved in the resettlement of the existing city population and the significant social and economic impacts to the region. ⁷³

The economic future that H&J envisioned for Baiyin was largely based on international analogues of successful postresource cities, as well as Baiyin’s entrenched legacy as a nonferrous metals base and its large unemployed, but skilled, population. H&J saw lessons to be learned from the successful examples of places like Fuxin (a coal mining city in northeastern China), the Ruhr valley in Germany, Pittsburgh and Houston in the United States, and the coal and steel center of Roubaix in France. ⁷⁴ H&J suggested building a South Baiyin Industrial Zone (SBIZ) as well as attendant industrial and transportation infrastructure that would help knit Baiyin closer to global markets. The SBIZ was later renamed the “Baiyin High-tech Industrial Development Zone” and by 2015 was “fully occupied or committed” by private companies involved in “chemical engineering, nonferrous metals (rare earth), equipment manufacturing, biomedicine, building materials and ceramics.” ⁷⁵

A second ADB-funded project in Baiyin began in 2013, this time based on recommendations from the Hong Kong branch of AECOM, an engineering consultancy headquartered in Dallas, Texas. AECOM suggested that despite Baiyin’s 13.5 percent annual growth during Phase I (2008-2013), its “urban infrastructures are still inadequate to support its economic diversification through industrial transformation.” ⁷⁶ In particular, its water supply and wastewater treatment facilities were still poor, urban-rural income disparities were actually widening, and unemployed and laid-off former workers were struggling. Their plan suggested building yet another industrial park, similar to the first. They also focused on building large new water supply and treatment facilities, a seventy-four-kilometer wastewater collection pipeline, and transportation infrastructure. Cleaning up Baiyin’s water was seen as crucial in “improv[ing] the investment environment to attract more enterprises” to Baiyin. ⁷⁷ At around the same time, in 2012, the BNMC launched the twenty-billion-yuan Dongdagou River Heavy Metal Pollution Control Project, which was completed in 2019. The project involved soil decontamination measures as well as the “electrical monitoring and analysis of more than four hundred key pollutant discharge enterprises in the Baiyin section of the Yellow River.” This expansive system of chemical surveillance would allow officials to monitor whether specific enterprises were continuing to pollute the Dongdagou. ⁷⁸

Despite the various consequences of being a nonferrous metal base for decades, Baiyin’s municipal government did not want Baiyin’s postresource future to stray too far from its history. The municipal government and ADB advisers planned to stimulate local economic development primarily by attracting industrial transfers from “large and medium industrial enterprises from the eastern coastal region of the PRC” to be housed at the city’s new Liuchuan Industrial Park. This pattern of industrial transfer from coastal to inland China was part of the PRC government’s broader initiative to reduce regional disparities by promoting economic development in interior provinces. Planners envisioned leveraging Baiyin’s metal processing facilities and expertise to grow Gansu’s rare earth industrial base, processing them for use in electronics and batteries. They also advocated for making aluminum alloys from minerals mined in the nearby Qinghai-Tibet plateau, for producing components for wind turbines and other green energy technologies, for manufacturing parts to be used in automobile factories in Lanzhou, and for coal-chemical processing to create various industrial chemicals. In addition, the Baiyin government calculated that the Baiyin area had up to four billion tons of clay, which could be used to produce all manner of ceramic products and cement that were in high demand due to China’s ongoing urban construction elsewhere. ⁷⁹

Another aspect of Baiyin’s postresource transition is based on the idea that it could serve as a transportation node in the PRC government’s global search for natural resources. Baiyin’s remoteness from Chinese economic and political centers further east has, in the twenty-first century, become an asset. As a city between China’s coastal megalopolises and Central Asia, Baiyin fits neatly into the ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. The recent development of basic infrastructure like “roads, railways, air transport, and telecommunications” under the ADB’s guidance means that Baiyin now possesses “the basic means to integrate itself with the world market.” ⁸⁰ For its part, the BNMC has survived the exhaustion of local mines by going out into the world. It has contributed to a broader trend of companies built on exploiting China’s western resource frontier that now facilitate China’s global search for resources. The Jinchuan Group, for example, which originated in the nickel, platinum, and cobalt mining town of Jinchuan, Gansu, not far from Baiyin, held sixty to seventy percent of their assets in Africa as of 2014. ⁸¹ The BNMC currently has mining investments in more than ten countries throughout Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America. ⁸²

Conclusion

ADB consultants and Baiyin planners claim that their urban revitalization project will lead to a “sustainable model of urban development through industrial transformation for other resource-exhausted cities in the PRC.” ⁸³ The above plan to climb up the manufacturing chain may lead to a “sustainable” economic future for Baiyin. Processing aluminum ore from the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau or building batteries diminishes the local consequences of open-pit mining. But it also means Baiyin’s sustainability will be built on somewhere else’s unsustainability. The BNMC’s shift from a local resource extractor to a manager of China’s global extraction, and the city’s new role as a node in the Belt and Road Initiative are emblematic of this problem. By addressing local issues without fundamentally reimagining its role within global economic and ecological systems, Baiyin shifts its footprint instead of reducing it. As Elmqvist et al. have argued, the rise in “global connectivity and redundancy of supply systems” often masks complex and spatially tortuous urban-hinterland relationships. In addition, long-distance, global supply chains that define Anthropocentric resource consumption hide the consequences of local resource exploitation felt by people in places like Baiyin. ⁸⁴ Fully understanding these consequences requires a multiscale approach to discussions of global-urban processes which is more sensitive to the ways in which local actions can have far and wide-ranging repercussions.

In his book Earthopolis, Carl Nightingale not only examines some of these global-urban developments but engages the existential threat they pose to the human future on earth. He argues that humanity’s survival of the Anthropocene requires us to “start with the conditions faced by the most vulnerable of Earthopolitan citizens, people who mass along the hottest front lines of our Urban Planet’s fast-accelerating realm of consequence.” ⁸⁵ The Chinese government’s evolving policies toward “resource-based” and “resource-exhausted” cities in the twenty-first century seem to signify an organized, concerted effort to deal with cities like Baiyin that are on the Anthropocene’s “hot front line.” Whether such efforts to transition resource-exhausted cities create more broadly applicable solutions invokes again the problem of scale. Merely replacing Baiyin’s nonferrous metal inputs with supplies sourced elsewhere might address local impacts of mineral extraction but does not offer a broader solution. It only moves the Anthropocene’s front line. It replaces one extractive relationship between urban place and hinterland with another, which is rendered “more opaque” by distance and the intricacy of global supply chains. ⁸⁶

Parochial sustainability, in short, is not the answer. The solution cannot be merely making resource-based cities more sustainable while obscuring or outsourcing their environmental impact. Instead, we must strive for a more holistic and integrated approach that recognizes the global ecological implications of local actions and seeks to transform the very systems that perpetuate unsustainable patterns of resource consumption and environmental degradation.

Ultimately, the story of Baiyin serves as a poignant reminder of the challenges and complexities of navigating the Anthropocene at the urban scale. It underscores the need for—and difficulty of coordinating— solutions that both respond to local realities and engage with global ecological interdependencies. The lessons from Baiyin’s journey are not just relevant for other resource-exhausted cities in China, but for cities worldwide grappling with their own trajectories in the Anthropocene. The challenge lies in translating these insights into actions that do more than shift the burden of our impacts, but truly transform the way we inhabit and interact with our planet.