Just Transition in China: How Did Chinese SOEs Avoid the Massive Unemployment While Reducing Coal Capacity (2015-2020)?

Abstract

The transition from fossil fuel to a low carbon economy is the main way to mitigate climate change. However, this will also inevitably impact the workers in the fossil fuel industry and their communities. This study focused on China’s recent round of phasing out coal capacity and investigated how China’s coal SOEs reallocated workers after reducing coal capacity by case studies of two SOEs in Anhui and Shanxi. In addition, it also evaluated the reallocation and mobilized the perspective of workers in these two SOEs by in-depth interviews with both leaders and workers. It finds that these two SOEs mainly reallocated layoffs by reemployment within SOEs and early retirement. It is just in the sense of high reemployment rates but questionable to call it a transition because most of the worker is still working coal mining and coal-related industries.