Steel for China : Workers Dismantling Closed Mill Get Yearlong Lesson About America

His assignment to help industrialize his homeland has brought 37-year-old Quinping Yu here, face to face with an American icon of brute strength and manufacturing might that he is helping transplant back to China.

Yu is one of about 300 Chinese engineers and welders, technicians and logisticians who are spending a year dismantling the old, 22-story Kaiser Steel Plant No. 2, once the most macho and biggest of buildings this side of the Mississippi.

Piece by piece, the 66,000 tons of pipes and girders, electrical control boxes and cables are being lowered to the ground, coded in Chinese characters, logged, packaged and shipped to China--where they will be resurrected by a nation with an insatiable appetite for steel.

Most of the Chinese workers are dog-tired by day’s end and retreat to a motel in nearby San Bernardino. Their animated play over mah-jongg boards distracts them from the drone of two intersecting interstates that skirt their temporary home.

Yu is sequestered in his own room, huddled over a thick stack of paper, accounting for the thousands of pieces of factory that 8,000 workers will labor around the clock to reassemble back home. He worries, he said, that a bundle of pipes will somehow be misplaced, and a critical piece of this industrial-size puzzle will end up missing.

But the bigger picture--the opportunity to live in the United States for a year on a project to modernize China--is not lost on Yu.

“It is glorious,” he said, “to be appointed to join this mission.”

And so by day, these Chinese workers in steel-toed boots and hard hats sweat in choreographed labor, breaking at midday for steaming pots of white rice, pork and vegetable stew and a weak, sweet soup made of green-bean stock.

At night they retreat to a motel leased exclusively for them by their Chinese employer, surrounded by a green iron fence constructed expertly of scrap iron from the Kaiser site to ensure their privacy. They play poker and Ping-Pong, billiards and mah-jongg. They watch Chinese television piped into their rooms, swim, lift weights and write letters home.

On their one day off each week, they have visited Sea World, the beach and Disneyland. They sing the praises of Space Mountain. Twice they have walked through Chinatown.

They remark on the spontaneous friendliness of Americans--although two of them escaped being robbed in downtown San Bernardino only after unabashedly raising their arms up in the air to demonstrate that they had no money, prompting the frustrated assailant to flee because of the attention they were drawing.

They talk with awe of how “America is the kingdom of the car,” and of how freeway traffic moves “in such good order.” They compliment the “good quality of air,” compared to Beijing. They admire the public landscaping and the well-stocked store shelves. One worker wonders why so many Americans are fat.

And they reflect on the ironies of American life after excursions to Downtown Los Angeles.

“Before coming here, we saw the United States as the No. 1 country and thought the people must be very rich,” said Quanpo Yin, 42. “We never expected to see homeless people. We can’t understand it. Why does a rich country have so many homeless people living alongside the streets?”

Has this altered his impression of this country?

“More or less,” he said.

But Fan Wei said her feelings for the United States are changed for the better.

“I was told that American people are very selfish and don’t care about others, just themselves. But I’ve met a lot of people who are always telling us: ‘If you have problems, let us help you.’ ”

Not everyone welcomed the arrival of the Chinese in February.

They were met by picketing out-of-work laborers--many of whom had helped build the steel mill in the late 1970s, and wondered why they were not hired to take it down as well.

Use of Chinese labor was a condition of sale of the plant, officials noted, and work visas were provided because of the specialty of the work required: In order to rebuild the plant, Chinese workers would have to dismantle it and mark its pieces in their own language, so the same crew could supervise its reconstruction.

“The local labor unions misunderstood us,” said Mingshui Wu, president of overseas operations for China’s state-operated Shougang Corp., a diversified manufacturing enterprise with 270,000 employees and the largest steel manufacturer in Beijing.

Once the steel mill is removed, the property’s owner--California Steel--can build anew on the site and create jobs, Wu said. Besides, he and others say, the project is generating $30 million for the local economy through the use of American subcontractors and vendors, and because the Chinese work force has to be lodged and fed.

Los Angeles-area firms have been hired to operate the heavy machinery, oversee state and federal safety and environmental regulations, and transport the equipment to Long Beach; a New Jersey company specializing in international shipping is supervising the packaging of the factory pieces, and the owners of Chinese grocery stores in Monterey Park and the Econo Lodge in San Bernardino are relishing the business.

“I feel sympathy for these (union members), because they’ve lost jobs because of your economy,” Wu said. “But I feel disappointed that they misunderstand our goodwill. We are giving much (financial) feedback to your community.”

The old Kaiser mill is one of 14 bought in the United States in recent years by Shougang Corp.

The company covets steel plants that have been discarded as obsolete by American standards but are modern by Chinese measure. To buy, dismantle and ship them to China is far cheaper and quicker for that nation than to design and build ones with their own resources.

“The Chinese are willing to use technologies long past the time they are abandoned in the West,” said Nicholas Lardy, director of the University of Washington’s school of international studies and a China expert. “Because they are less restrained by environmental regulations, they can run previous-generation facilities long past the time they can be operated in Western countries. And they’ll keep these plants running a long time.”

The Kaiser plant--and a similar one that Shougang bought in Belgium--are the two largest the company has bought.

The Fontana mill, the largest in Kaiser’s operations, produced steel for only two years before it was decommissioned in 1982, handcuffed by tougher environmental laws and changing market conditions.

Shougang bought it for $15 million--a bare fraction of what it would cost today to construct a steel plant, even after adding the dismantling and relocation costs.

The project is expected to be complete by next spring, months ahead of initial projections. The first load from the Fontana facility is crossing the Pacific.

Some logistic problems are still unsolved, including how to transport from Fontana to the Long Beach Harbor four 500,000-pound pieces: the two, 20-foot-wide oxygen-fired furnaces and the two trunnions that cradle them inside eight-foot-thick steel arms.

Getting the equipment to China is only half the problem, said Richard Masco, whose Diversified Packaging and Development Corp. is overseeing the shipment to southern China. Masco has helped ship other steel plants to China--along with a nuclear power plant control room and a General Motors engine plant from Flint, Mich. “But this is a precedent-setting project in terms of volume and weight,” he said.

Wu is confident that, one way or another, the Fontana steel mill will be operating within 2 1/2 years, and he talks romantically of how that will be good for everyone.

“After we reassembled the Belgium plant, we had (the former owners) come to see it,” Wu said. “And they said it was a good sight. In Belgium, it was silent, but here, it was alive again.”

Construction safety officer Terry Cook reflected on how the American-made factory is being taken apart and its pieces marked in Chinese symbols for reassembly.

“It’s clear,” he said, “that we live in a global village.”