Manhole covers double as currency in steel-hungry Chinese cities

CHINA: You have to keep your eyes open walking through the streets of Beijing these days. In the Jiuxianqiao district, a certain Mr Zhang was awarded compensation this year when he fell down a drain where the manhole cover had been nicked, writes Clifford Coonan in Beijing

In November last year, Liu Kuilin was not so lucky - he fell down an uncovered drain and drowned. The savage irony? The luckless Mr Liu was an employee of Chaoyang District Hygiene Office.

Thousands of manhole covers in the big cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou have been disappearing as thieves steal them and sell them to take advantage of rising scrap prices.

They reckon a manhole cover weighing around 30 kilograms will fetch 20 yuan, around €2, at Shanghai and Beijing scrap metal dealers.

Last year 24,000 manhole covers were stolen in Beijing, forcing the government to set up a "manhole cover hotline". If a citizen sees an uncovered manhole, the authorities promise to replace it within 24 hours - an increasingly expensive proposition as steel prices rise crazily in China.

The rising price of steel has the Chinese government worried and premier Wen Jiabao told a recent meeting of China's cabinet, called the State Council, that "direct" and "forceful" measures were needed to counter the recent rise in prices.

Much of the steel is coming from the country's burgeoning steel towns.

In one of these towns, Tangshan, trucks laden with bright mild steel girders trundle through the dusty streets, the poor air quality bearing testament to the steel mills churning out the produce. Not dark, not satanic, but busy enough to let you know beyond any doubt you are in one of the monster steel towns feeding China's economic boom.

Sweating steelworkers have hammered molten metal into long beams to form the girders in one of the 300 steel plants in this city just a few hours northwest of Beijing.

Tangshan is most famous abroad as the site of one of the worst natural disasters ever, when 300,000 people died in the 1976 earthquake.

Now a burgeoning array of new shopping centres in the heart of the town, around a memorial to the terrible earthquake, bear witness to Tangshan's steel-driven prosperity.

The streets just outside the city centre have a frontier-town feel to them, lined with makeshift scrap machinery markets, tool shops, PVC shops - anything related to building materials and steel.

"That last truckload that we just sent on its way, the one you just passed, was bringing the best quality steel from Tangshan for one of the buildings being built for the Olympics," said Wang Jian, an 18-year-old who works in one local steel market.

"From here, steel goes to Beijing, and all over China," he says proudly.

One steelworker was friendly, but had no time to chat.

"We haven't even had lunch yet. We have no break and we haven't had a chance to stop for lunch until now," he said, jogging to the canteen. Food is a serious business in China - he must really be busy.

China consumes more than a quarter of the world's steel and one third of the world's iron ore. It is the world's biggest consumer, producer and importer of steel. Output has nearly tripled since 1998 and now exceeds that of the USA and Japan together.

Rising steel prices come in tandem with, and are inextricably linked to, an unprecedented economic boom. Fears of a hard landing for the world's fastest growing major economy persist and from time to time the government will rein in spending on major projects to try and cool the economy down.

This can even affect high-profile projects like Olympic buildings. Architects Herzog & de Meuron, whose firm is building the Beijing 2008 Olympic Stadium, originally conceived their building as a bird's nest structure of interwoven steel, complete with sliding roof.

Staging the Olympics is a source of great national pride in China, but the rising cost of raw materials meant that even this cherished project would have to play its part in the austerity measures.

Beijing's dry climate means a roof is hardly a priority. So now the stadium will be roofless.

The mighty Capital Steel plant in Beijing has been earmarked for a move to Tangshan, but the shift is being delayed by the fact that thousands of employees do not want to leave the capital to live in a remote town in the province of Hebei, as it means a big loss of status. But it will be pushed through.

The industrialisation process in China is far from over. There are still hundreds of millions of farmers who haven't bought into the consumption boom yet, but they will soon enough.

So there is no sign of a slowdown in the Chinese economy, which should mean this boom continues for some time to come.

Which means that pedestrians and drivers will have to keep their eyes open for a while yet to keep from falling down any open manholes.