EASt seminar "Local Practices of job Transition for China’s Coal Mining Workforce"
Le 11/09/2026
by Coraline Goron, Duke Kunshan University
Calls for a “just transition” that balances climate goals with social justice have become central to global energy transition discussions. China, as the world’s largest coal producer faces the loss of 1.3 million coal-related jobs by 2030 and 2.35 million by 2050. This lecture combines findings from policy analysis and fieldwork investigating labor transition practices by state-owned and private mines in multiple localities in China during the 2016–2020 Coal Overcapacity Reduction Campaign (CORC), which closed 7,748 mines and resettled 1.21 million primarily state-sector workers and is used as a prefigurative event of a future phase-down of coal production in the country. The findings highlight that China’s stability-focused, campaign-style approach to industrial restructuring, implemented through SOEs, may be effective in preventing mass unrest, but struggles to support sustainable, inclusive labor transitions. They underscore the need to combine just transition with area studies to better inform global discussions about just transitions.
Acknowledgement: the lecture draws primarily on two studies co-authored with Weijun Rong and Yufei Yao, respectively.
Dr. Coraline Goron obtained a double Ph.D. degree in Political Science from the University of Warwick and the Université Libre de Bruxelles under the aegis of the Erasmus Mundus GEM program. Before joining DKU, Coraline was a postdoctoral research fellow funded by the Wiener-Anspach Foundation at the University of Oxford China Centre.
Her research centers on environmental politics with a specific focus on China, both domestically and as an increasingly influential actor in global environmental governance. Her Ph.D. thesis received the Marthe Engelborghs-Bertels Prize for Sinology in May 2018. It traced the transformation of China’s power stem and environmental protection and analyzed their combined outcomes on the implementation of decarbonization policies. It draws on a vast corpus of Chinese-language documentation, as well as interviews with Chinese industry experts and policy stakeholders.
See also: https://msh.ulb.ac.be/en/member/coraline-goron
Friday 11th September 2026, from 3pm until 4:30pm
Room UD.6.114
Building U - Gate D - Level 6
ULB - Campus Solbosch
This seminar is hybrid. You can join us online (see QR code on the poster).
Contact : east@ulb.be
