Gazing over the remains of his home, Wang Bingbing surveys a decades-old jujube tree flowering through the rubble, and the yard where he and his wife once raised pigs, now a pile of crumbled brick.
In the valley below, a sprawling coalmine is the source of their dislocation: years of digging heightened the risk of landslides, forcing Wang and his family out. To prevent the family from returning, local authorities later demolished their home.
“We really didn’t want to leave,” Wang’s wife, Wang Weizhen, says ruefully.
Wang’s life is the story of coal’s past, when the industry was notoriously dangerous but booming. His children and grandchildren are facing coal’s future, an economic and environmental predicament that China’s policymakers have yet to solve.
As the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter transitions to cleaner energy, families like Wang’s are on the precipice of being left behind by China’s green…
