Nestled in the mountains of Liaoning Province, Benxi rarely makes international headlines—yet this unassuming city holds the DNA of modern China’s industrial rise. While the world obsesses over AI and green energy, Benxi’s abandoned blast furnaces whisper forgotten lessons about globalization’s casualties.
When Japanese forces occupied Northeast China in the 1930s, they didn’t just want territory—they craved Benxi’s iron ore. The Anshan-Benxi metallurgical base became the engine of Imperial Japan’s war machine, with forced laborers mining what locals called "blood coal." Post-1949, Soviet experts helped transform these scars into China’s first state-owned steel complex. The Benxi Iron & Steel Company (Bengang) became a Marxist poster child: workers’ housing, schools, and hospitals sprouted around belching smokestacks.
Walk through Bengang’s decommissioned Plant No.1 today, and you’ll find something unexpected—art installations made from scrap metal. Like Detroit or Germany’s Ruhr Valley, Benxi is rebranding its industrial decay as "heritage tourism." The local government’s 2023 "Steel Culture Park" proposal mirrors global attempts to monetize post-industrial nostalgia. But beneath the curated decay lies tension: older residents remember when factory whistles dictated daily life, while their grandchildren livestream from abandoned warehouses.
Benxi’s skies were once among China’s most polluted—in the 1990s, satellite images often failed to locate the city beneath the smog. Today, cleaner technologies and shuttered mills have restored visibility, but at a cost: unemployment. This mirrors dilemmas from Pennsylvania to Poland. When Greta Thunberg demands faster decarbonization, Benxi’s laid-off steelworkers ask, "What replaces our paychecks?" The city’s struggle to balance environmental and economic sustainability offers a microcosm of COP28 debates.
Few realize Benxi’s mines produce more than coal and iron. Recent surveys found deposits of scandium and yttrium—critical for semiconductors and missiles. As U.S.-China trade wars escalate, such resources become strategic pawns. Local officials now walk a tightrope: promote mining for economic revival or downplay reserves to avoid geopolitical targeting. It’s a dilemma familiar to resource-rich Global South nations, now playing out in a Chinese third-tier city.
Just 200km from the Yalu River, Benxi absorbed waves of Korean refugees during the 1990s famine. Today, clandestine trade persists despite sanctions—coal trucks with covered license plates, mysterious "fishing companies" near the border. When CNN reports on Pyongyang’s missile tests, few connect them to Benxi’s backstreet currency exchanges where yuan and won change hands. The city’s unofficial role in sustaining the Kim regime reveals how global sanctions leak at the local level.
Deng Xiaoping’s reforms hit Benxi hard—by 2000, over 100,000 Bengang workers took early retirement. But their children became China’s silent economic transformers. Migrant labor statistics show disproportionate numbers of Benxi natives in Shenzhen’s early electronics factories. Some argue Foxconn’s iPhone assembly lines were built on skills transplanted from Liaoning’s state-owned plants. The same hands that once forged steel now assemble circuit boards—a workforce transition rarely discussed in analyses of China’s "economic miracle."
Visit Benxi’s "Live Streaming Base," a government-sponsored incubator where ex-factory workers train as influencers. A 55-year-old former crane operator, Auntie Zhang, has 2.3 million followers for her cooking videos featuring industrial-themed dishes—"blast furnace hotpot" served in repurposed steel pipes. This bizarre cultural adaptation reflects China’s digital economy swallowing its industrial past, creating hybrid livelihoods unimaginable a decade ago.
Benxi’s underground coal fires—some burning since the 1930s—created a morbid attraction. Travel vloggers film eerie landscapes where smoke seeps through cracks in abandoned schools. Local officials initially encouraged this "disaster tourism" for revenue, until outcry from families of deceased miners. The debate echoes controversies at Chernobyl or Fukushima: when does documentation become exploitation?
Notice the Uzbek restaurant near Benxi Railway Station? It’s no accident. As Bengang exports dismantled steel plants to Kazakhstan and Nigeria, migrant workers follow. The city has become an unlikely hub for Central Asian traders—a miniature reversal of China’s usual BRI labor flows. In a globalized twist, Benxi now imports plov (Uzbek pilaf) while exporting blast furnace technology to Tashkent.
Benxi’s story keeps rewriting itself. Last month, provincial officials announced plans to repurpose old mines as gravity battery storage sites—turning pits that powered imperialism into clean energy reservoirs. Meanwhile, archaeologists scramble to document workers’ graffiti inside soon-to-be-demolished factories: Mao-era slogans beside 1990s complaints about unpaid wages.
This city of contradictions forces uncomfortable questions: Can the world decarbonize without creating more Benxis? How do we honor industrial communities while transitioning beyond them? As climate accords and chip wars dominate headlines, places like Benxi remind us that every global trend lands somewhere local—with real people navigating the rubble of outdated systems.