Forty-eight years ago, on July 28, a magnitude-7.8 earthquake shattered the pre-dawn silence of Tangshan, Hebei, and all but razed this heavy-industry city of a million people to the ground. In the quake's aftermath, the people of Tangshan, with the earthquake-relief spirit of "selflessness, sharing weal and woe, indomitable will, and courage to forge ahead," created the miracle of rising again from the ruins.

Over the past 48 years, that earthquake-relief spirit has been woven into the blood of the people of Tangshan and forged into the genes of this heroic city. At this new starting point, Tangshan is firmly grasping high-quality development as its primary task, focusing on accelerating the building of a modern industrial system, deepening reform and opening-up, transforming its development model, adjusting its economic structure, and steadily ensuring and improving people's livelihoods, so as to write the Tangshan chapter of the Hebei story of Chinese modernization and strive to build Tangshan into a window city for economic cooperation in Northeast Asia, a new-type industrialization base in the Bohai Rim region, and an important pillar of the capital economic circle.

　　New Rise

Tangshan Port ranked second in the world in cargo throughput last year

In the height of summer, Tangshan Port is a scene of bustling activity, with trucks shuttling back and forth and cargo ships loading and unloading in orderly fashion. On July 23, the vessel "Jipeng," laden with 214 TEUs of cargo from Hebei, Inner Mongolia, Liaoning and other places, set out from the Jingtang Port Area of Tangshan Port and arrived at the Port of Busan in South Korea after a four-day voyage. This is a microcosm of Tangshan Port's development. Since construction of the Jingtang Port Area began in 1989, Tangshan Port has grown from nothing to strength, and now has 47 domestic and foreign trade container routes reaching more than 200 ports in nearly 80 countries and regions.

"In 2023, Tangshan Port's cargo throughput reached 842 million tons, firmly holding second place among ports worldwide. In the first half of 2024, Tangshan Port's cargo throughput was 430 million tons, up 3.54 percent year on year," said Luo Tongzhen, member of the Party Leadership Group and deputy director of the Tangshan Municipal Bureau of Ocean Ports and Port and Shipping Administration. As a natural "diamond-grade" port on the Bohai Rim, Tangshan Port has completed the "one port, three areas" layout, comprising the Jingtang Port Area, the Caofeidian Port Area and the Fengnan Port Area. It has become one of the first batch of national ports and the first port along the Bohai coast capable of berthing 400,000-ton bulk carriers. It is also China's largest import terminal for foreign-trade iron ore, its largest export port for steel and coal energy, an important import base and reserve center for oil and gas energy, and an important feeder container port in the Bohai Rim region.

At the remote-control center of the smart terminal in the Jingtang Port Area of Tangshan Port, a remote quay-crane operator can simply move a joystick to remotely control the rail-mounted gantry cranes at the terminal, completing container lifting, horizontal transfer and placement, after which unmanned container trucks automatically carry the cargo to designated areas. "The company began automating the terminal in 2017, and Terminal 25 achieved full automation last September," said He Quan, director of the remote-control center of the equipment operations department at Jintang International Container Terminal Co., Ltd.

In recent years, Tangshan Port has advanced green and smart port development, was selected into the first batch of national smart port demonstration projects, and built China's first parallel-layout fully automated container terminal using intelligent unmanned container trucks for horizontal transport; five terminals have been rated 4-star green ports. Good news has recently come again from Tangshan Port: the 250,000-ton navigation channel in the Jingtang Port Area has officially entered trial operation. This channel is not only the first 250,000-ton channel in Hebei Province, but also China's first 250,000-ton channel built on a silty-sand coast, and it has been designed to allow future upgrading to a 300,000-ton channel.

　New Momentum

Robot "legion" becomes a new city calling card

"At the Tangshan Baichuan Robot Shared Manufacturing Factory, even a single order can be accepted; you can even come with just an idea, and we have a professional team to follow up on design, R&D, production and other stages, helping accelerate the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements," Wang Mengzhao, general manager of Tangshan Baichuan Innovation Technology Service Co., Ltd., told reporters. Tangshan Baichuan Group is currently China's largest manufacturer of rail transit inspection and testing robots, with more than 160 innovations filling gaps in related domestic fields.

In January this year, Baichuan Group built a shared factory covering 117,000 square meters in the Tangshan High-tech Zone. As China's first shared factory for customized non-standard robot products, it has since its launch reached cooperation with more than 90 enterprises across the country. "Letting the 'elephant dance with the ants' is also a continuation of Tangshan's earthquake-relief spirit in the industrial field," Wang Mengzhao believes.

In recent years, Tangshan has consistently taken the cultivation and expansion of high-end equipment manufacturing as the entry point for accelerating the building of a modern industrial system, and has worked to make its three advantageous industries—intelligent rail transit, robotics, and automobiles and parts—bigger and stronger. Among them, more than 100 robot-related enterprises have been developed, 90 percent of them located in the High-tech Zone, and the market shares of welding robots, firefighting robots and intelligent rail-equipment inspection robots all rank first in the country.

Kaiyuan Group's welding robots once played a prominent role in the construction of Beijing's "Bird's Nest," the Shanghai World Expo pavilions and the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge; leading domestic collaborative robots—such as AUBO's intelligent latte-art coffee robot and traditional Chinese medicine therapy robot—are making life more wonderful... At present, Tangshan has built a robotics industry cluster supported by industrial robots and featuring special robots, integrating R&D, production and services. It has become one of the six major industrial chains of Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei coordinated development, and has earned titles including the "National Torch Tangshan Robotics Characteristic Industrial Base" and the country's first well-known brand demonstration zone named after robots.

　　New Happiness

Coal-mining subsidence area transformed into a national 5A-level scenic spot

Qinglong Ze, mirror-like and bright; the pink-and-green Hehua Pu; the 999-meter-long Love Promenade... Whenever night falls, Longquan Bay also stages a combined "water-screen film plus musical fountain" show created by a leading domestic lighting design team. Tangshan Nanhu·Kailuan Scenic Area, which was rated a national 5A-level tourist attraction in February this year, received nearly 600,000 visitors during the May Day holiday alone.

Yet who would have thought that this place was once an abandoned subsidence area formed by coal mining at the Kailuan Coal Mine, and after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake it became a ruin covered with garbage and overflowing sewage. "In 1996, Tangshan began to remediate Nanhu, using local materials and piling up rockeries from earthquake debris, and building pavilions, waterside houses, wharves and so on. After 13 years of ecological restoration, the former 30-square-kilometer coal-mining subsidence area was turned into a park. In April 2016, the World Horticultural Exposition was held here," a staff member of the scenic area said. It has become Tangshan's "urban green lung" and "natural oxygen bar," with a greening rate of 65 percent and a water area of 11.5 square kilometers, attracting more than 100 species of wild birds.

Zhong Bingrui, a 65-year-old "new resident" of Tangshan, witnessed the transformation of the Nanhu Scenic Area and also the development of Tangshan. Zhong recalled that after the Tangshan earthquake, the work unit of his parents came from Baotou, Inner Mongolia, to assist Tangshan and take part in rebuilding local steel plants; after graduating from high school, he moved to Tangshan with his parents and has lived there ever since.

"Over the past 48 years, Tangshan has not only improved its ecological environment, but also continued to improve various livelihood benefits. I am proud to be from Tangshan," Zhong said, listing them one by one. In recent years, the medical assistance system for serious and complicated diseases has established a remote consultation model linking county, city and Beijing-Tianjin medical institutions and other outside medical institutions, making it more convenient to see a doctor; community and rural canteens have been set up throughout the city, and Hebei's first "integrated childcare and kindergarten" model was pioneered...

In the blink of an eye, nearly half a century has passed since the Tangshan earthquake. The indomitable people of Tangshan have stood up from the ruins and rebuilt a new Tangshan. The momentous changes of 48 years have engraved the development miracle of a heroic city rising like a phoenix from the ashes, and have also embodied the great strength of a nation and a country's indomitable and unyielding spirit.