"We must face the future," reads the calligra-phy draping a distillery in Yanshan, about an hour's drive north of Beijing. Yanshan, with a population of about 100,000, is a drab dustbowl; but it is also a petri dish of China's corporate reforms. Everything and everybody here has something to do with refining oil or turning it into various kinds of chemicals. The city itself consists mostly of rather odorous refineries and endless tangles of pipelines, vents and ducts connecting them. Around these nestle grey housing blocks, schools and hospitals for the workers and their families. All of this used to be managed, if that is the word, by central planners in a Beijing ministry.
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