Visitors to the new steel town of East Horse Village, in the northeastern city of Tangshan, will encounter something that has been virtually alien to China's thriving industrial centers in the last five years: despair.rnThe largest mill in town, a three-year-old producer with 2,600 workers, has been shut down for more than a month, just weeks after doubling its capacity. Most of the neighboring small mills employing several hundred Workers each have also been shuttered for more than a month, including at least three that were built inrnthe last year on what had been the relentless optimism of the Chinese economic boom. In the surrounding Fengrun district of Tangshan, a city of 3 million that is the foremost of China's steel hubs, dozens of mills have shut down. Many of them are stuck with inventories of iron ore purchased at peak prices.
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