Word: henan
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...While Dongxiaokou's scrap yards have epitomized China's industrial boom over the past two decades, the global economic slowdown has left the scrappers struggling as prices for raw materials plummet. A group of men from Henan sit at a table playing a card game called "Fight the Landlord." They're the owners of a huge mound of plastic bottles they could process, but if they sold them now, they would lose money - scrap prices have fallen to levels not seen in years. "You want to know why our prices are dropping?" says Zhang Zhongming, 43, who moved...
...Zhang Wei, 42, came here in 1990 from Henan, where his family of six was struggling to live by farming one-third of an acre. "In the past, nobody would do this work," he says. "It's for the outsiders, poor people from the countryside where they can't earn enough to eat meat even." Now the specter of deprivation is emerging again. Plastic bottles, which sold for $1,175 to $1,300 a ton as recently as the summer, are now trading in the $300-to-$450-a-ton range. Zhang claims that as a result of the downturn...
...Nearby, a man repairs a machine that shreds plastic bottles into nickel-size shards. Like most residents of the village, he migrated here from the countryside in the early '90s. "We came to work, because it's better than Henan," he says. Now he isn't so sure, but he knows that things won't be any better if he returns. The machine, now fixed, roars to life. "What to do?" he wonders with a shrug as he begins feeding old bottles into the machine. Back to work, that's his answer. The scrappers of Dongxiaokou can only hope...
...Consider Qiu Haiyan, 22, from Henan, a province in central China with an average per capita income of $1,100 per year. She first found her way here working on a barge that carries bricks up the river that flows past our house. Qiu has the build of an Olympic weight lifter, with thick, powerful legs, and she and other work-gang members would offload the bricks on a wide wooden plank attached to a rope that they would sling across their shoulders. The subcontractor who built our development estimates he used about 70,000 bricks at Emerald Riverside...
...year-old son, Chunjie, who had spent the past six months working in a shoe factory, stood outside Wednesday, holding tickets bought earlier in the day. "Before it was impossible," Huilin says. It will be another day before their train begins the 16-hour journey home to Henan. They'll eat their New Year's Eve dinner in the station, he says, then try to find a bed for the night...