For more than three decades after it was founded in 1958, the Baoding No. 1 Paper Mill seemed a model of Chinese socialism.
If none of the workers got rich, at least they were provided decent housing. Medical care was nearly free and the growing force of retirees from the city-owned mill received livable pensions.
Faithful workers, a number of whom gained coveted membership in the Communist Party, spent their careers at the mill and their graduating children often entered it too.
"This was a family affair," is how one worker described it.
Today, the factory is dismantled. Its workers, onetime "masters of the nation," are mostly destitute and feel betrayed.
They say the mill exemplifies some of the darker sides of China's economic transition: the dismemberment of old state enterprises under shady circumstances and the virtual abandonment of lifelong employees.
Many better-educated Chinese look forward eagerly to the opportunities provided by the growing private sector and by China's imminent entry into the WTO.
But millions of middle-aged and older workers in state enterprises -- whose own schooling was often cut short by Maoist turmoil -- have been left feeling cast-off and afraid. They include many in Baoding, an aging industrial city of a million or so about 130km southeast of Beijing where failed state industries and unemployment have proliferated.
In a chilling reflection of a community in despair, three elderly male retirees have committed suicide in the last three years, despondent because they became such a burden on jobless children with families of their own to support, workers said.
The case of this mill is by no means an isolated one, and the government's promises of training and even minimal income support have not been kept.
"I never imagined it would get this hard," said Chen Yinglan, 72, who wears the haunted look of someone whose world has fallen apart. Her husband worked for 40 years in state industries, proudly joining the Communist Party and rising to foreman at the Baoding paper mill. He died in 1994, when the plant's fate still seemed uncertain, but she has rarely received the pension she is due.
Last year, she said, she got a grand total of US$6 a month to live on, and this year she has not received a penny.
Like most of the former mill employees and their spouses, she lives in the increasingly decrepit company apartment blocks. She spends her days rummaging through garbage for sellable materials.
Zhang Shufen, 48, who lives in the same compound, is not as hard up because she has kept her job at an outside store. Still, she fought back tears as she described how her husband -- who had been a foreman at the paper mill and a 20-year member of the Communist Party -- was arrested last month for disturbing public order.
"I think he just got so outraged when he saw that they had beat up workers and nobody cared," she said by way of explaining the role of her husband, Zhang Xiaoying, in the angry demonstrations on Nov. 12 and Nov. 13 that led to his arrest. She has not been able to visit him in jail and is waiting to hear his fate.
The paper mill was still doing a good business but was closed in 1992 to halt pollution of a nearby lake. The national government provided US$3.3 million for upgrading but that money disappeared, former managers say, and the mill's 1,036 employees, including 400 retirees, were left with nothing.
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