In their heyday, the steelworks and open-cut coal mines in this industrial hub became the locomotives for Mao Tse-tung's vision of a China with lifelong job security and guaranteed social welfare. Today the unemployed are lucky to shine one pair of shoes a day or sell a spring roll or two at the curbside. Across the city, drably dressed men stand in line hawking personal knicknacks, a few old tools, maybe just two cucumbers and a tomato. Residents have opened hundreds of hole-in-the-wall restaurants, some of them doubling as brothels.
A heroin peddler was executed last autumn, a first for Fushun. Many factory chimneys have stopped smoking, closed not as health hazards but because central authorities in Beijing are trying to trim China's bloated, loss-producing state enterprises.
He is the local representative for McDonnell Douglas Corp. Louis-based aerospace company. When China's premier, Li Peng, toured the area in late , the city virtually was under a security siege. It was two days before news of his visit was made public. Perhaps this was to prevent any gesture of protest in the crowded cluster of industrial megacities in northeastern China that groups Shenyang, Fushun, Benxi and Anshan. Officially, 18 percent of workers in the region are unemployed, and billboards went up last year pleading: "Please don't attack factory managers; they are doing their jobs.
The area shows the symptoms of a China grappling with a widening wealth gap that has turned the rich into millionaires and the poor into virtual beggars. Factories remain legally reponsible for medical care and the housing of laid-off employees, and those dismissed are supposed to have a lifelong pension.
But it doesn't always work that way. Stoppages have occurred. The Shenyang municipality had to increase its Complaints Office staff to 32 from 3 to cope with nearly 2, petitions last year, most of them from irate workers' delegations demanding wages.
