Friday, December 9, 2011

China’s stone workshops silenced by European crisis


DANGCHENG: Mournful ancient Roman lovers, a boy Mozart and half a dozen angels lie in weeds behind the padlocked gates of an abandoned sculpture workshop in Dangcheng town, victims of economic waves rippling across the world to this corner of northern China.
Dangcheng applied the traditional stone-carving skills of this rocky part of Hebei province to boom as an exporter of ornate statues, busts, relief and fountains to Europe and North America. Now the town is struggling with the deep slump in once vibrant markets, especially Italy and other euro zone countries.
“The boss ran away, they say. He went broke a year or two ago. Don’t know where he went,” said Lu Jiguang, a brawny mason from a nearby workshop who stopped by the locked gate.
“There haven’t been that many bankruptcies here. Most people find a way to get by, but business is certainly hard going,” continued Lu, with the same stone dust-covered features and gnarled hands as nearly most other residents of the town.
“I’ve seen reports about the financial crisis in Europe on television,” he said. “It’s also had a bad effect here.”
Dangcheng, a town of 20,000 people 240 km (150 miles) southwest of Beijing, is a microcosm of the risks that slowing exports pose for China — risks that a commerce official laid out this week.
Reuters visited Dangcheng in 2009, when the downturn was beginning to bite. A return this week showed that the extended euro crisis and US doldrums have mauled business, forcing some workshops to shut and many more to scale back or move. And all surviving ones to court customers at home.
The stone workshops — many still crowded with statues of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, Cupid, Zeus and legions of deities, saints and heroes from antiquity — also reflect the challenges testing growth potential across China.
Asked about their deepest worries, sculpture workshop bosses here almost always named rising wages, the growing cost of stone and transport charges.
“I’m more worried about labour costs than about the euro,”said Lu Xuhui, a 34 year old owner of a sculpture company that has relied on orders from Italy, France and the United States.
“The European market is very, very tough. Prices we can charge are very low, but wages keep going up, and prices for stone are way up too, so our profits are tiny,” said Lu, as he sat in a stuffed leather sofa bought in better times.
“We’re trying to turn more to domestic buyers, but they’re feeling the rising costs as well.”
Lu Shaolei, a cousin of Lu Xuhui, watched as several masons in his workshop carved and polished dozens of statues of Jesus, which illustrated the economic changes coursing through China.
He started his business a decade ago, specialising in religious statues for churches in southern Europe and the United States. But this order for 40 Jesus figures was, he said, a sign of the times: they were for Chinese customers.
Growing domestic prosperity and some loosening of Communist Party controls on churches have offered an escape route from disappearing foreign orders, Lu said, above a din of electric grinding and chiseling.
“We haven’t had a foreign order since summer. Europe was our biggest buyer, but not now,” said Lu, who like nearly everyone in the Dangcheng sculpture trade is a local. “We used to focus on exports, but they’re no good now, so now we’re focusing on domestic buyers,” he added.
“I’ve paid attention to the European crisis. That means we’ll have even fewer exports, but domestic orders keep us going.”
Other workshop bosses along Dangcheng’s unpaved main street said sales to Europe and North America had picked up a little this year, after a grim slide two years ago. But many feared the latest euro crisis would again sap demand for carvings.
Quyang county, where Dangcheng lies, traces masonry skills back to the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD), and that tradition survived war and revolution until traders from Italy arrived in the 1990s, hunting for cut-price copies of antiquity.
Dangcheng’s carvers set themselves to mastering foreign tastes, cribbing from sculpture books to recreate Renaissance and classical figures. Their skills, increasingly rare and costly in Europe, and the ease of the Internet brought plenty of orders from Europe and North America.
By 2008, exports accounted for over 90 per cent of sculpture sales from Dangcheng, a county official told Reuters in 2009.
“Italy is dead for us now,” said Wu Huanzhen, a co-owner of the Shuangfei Sculpture Workshop in the town. “When business was good, we exported about 900,000 yuan a year,” she said, adding those most of those orders went to Italy.
“This year we might clear 300,000 yuan, if we get some more orders soon,” she said in a yard strewn with statues.

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