For about a century, the coast of Taishan (台山, Táishān) in Guangdong’s Wuyi (五邑, Wǔyì) counties was a shore people left. Emigrants sailed from its river ports to the Nanyang and North America, and the region earned the name it still carries: a qiaoxiang (侨乡, qiáoxiāng), an emigrant homeland. That shore now produces and ships. The tidal flats at Haiyan (海宴, Hǎiyàn) that worked salt from 1958 and cane from 1982 sit on the strip carrying the energy and port blocks of Guanghai Bay (广海湾, Guǎnghǎi Wān). The salt fields closed in 2004 and 2005; the coal station next door was in production by December 2003.
The rest of the inventory has changed as completely. A nuclear station stands at Yaogu Bay (腰古湾, Yāogǔ Wān), on the Hakka-speaking shore at Chixi (赤溪, Chìxī); the deep-water port was engineered, not found; the sea itself is now administered as a managed unit. Jiangmen’s claim to Guangdong’s hundred-million-tonne (亿吨大港, yì dūn dà gǎng) class is real, but dated 2021, counted across a break in its own series, and published without a per-port-area breakdown. The nuclear site’s total capacity exists in two official versions, both on Taishan’s own government website, both printed below. And the provincial planning vocabulary for this newest coast has no category for the diaspora that emptied it.
One Shore, Three Industries, and the Year the Salt Ran Out
Shabian (沙边, Shābiān) and Shalan (沙栏, Shālán), two salt fields on the Haiyan shore, were both built in 1958; Shabian was the county’s first state-owned salt field. They held 174.46 hectares of effective production area, produced 194,260 tonnes of raw salt between 1958 and 2002, and employed roughly 1,500 workers. A 2004 national adjustment of the salt industry required small fields to shut, Shalan first, Shabian the next year. Production ends in 2002; the closure falls in 2004 and 2005 — two different dates.
By 1982 the Haiyan Overseas-Chinese Farm (海宴华侨农场, Hǎiyàn Huáqiáo Nóngchǎng) had more than 400 hectares under cane; a ¥9 million state loan built a mill crushing 500 tonnes a day, later 700, producing white sugar and edible alcohol. Taishan’s county-run mills failed around 2000; the farm’s survived because it was less a mill than a system — a vertically integrated method the sources call the “seven transformations.” The last real sugar producer here was a farm, worked by resettled Southeast Asian refugee Chinese (归难侨, guīnánqiáo); that history is the farm’s own story. Its ending is documented in a 2021 filing: actual output 4,800 tonnes a year against an 8,500-tonne design, stoppage in January 2020, and a tenfold expansion proposed but never built. What became of the site afterwards is not established.
Coal arrived while the salt was leaving. The Taishan power station at Tonggu Bay (铜鼓湾, Tónggǔ Wān) in Chixi has five 600-megawatt units in its first phase; the first began construction in October 2001 and entered production in December 2003, 25.5 months and a domestic record for its class.
A Thirty-Year Decision Chain, Not an Event
The energy coast was not discovered; it was decided, over decades. Site surveying began in 1989, three years before Taishan became a city — from the county gazetteers, not independently re-verified. On 10 December 1992 the province approved the Guanghai Bay pilot zone; in January 1993 the coal station won project approval (立项, lìxiàng); the nuclear joint-venture contract was signed in November 2007. The coal approval sits one month after the pilot zone’s, and coal came a decade before nuclear. Any account presenting the nuclear station as this coast’s decisive arrival compresses a thirty-year chain into an event.
The Plant, in Numbers, With the Record’s Own Contradictions
The machines are EPRs: two units of 1,750 megawatts each. That is the phase-one answer, not the current one: units 3 and 4 will be Hualong One (华龙一号, Huálóng Yīhào) reactors of 1,200 megawatts each, approved on 27 April 2025 at a projected ¥43.1 billion under a separate company.
Taishan’s own record gives the site’s total capacity two ways. The city archive and the county’s “Impressions of Taishan” page — the same government website, identical wording — describe four EPR units with land reserved for two more. The development-zone committee, the environment ministry’s South China nuclear safety station and the state assets commission describe six reactor units planned at once. The same official website says both.
Four official dates circulate for the first unit’s start of construction: 1 September 2009 (main works), 26 October 2009 (the raft foundation pour), 18 November 2009 (the nuclear safety administration’s map) and 21 December 2009 — not a construction date at all, but the Great Hall of the People ceremony founding the joint-venture company, with the Chinese vice-premier and French prime minister present. A civil-works date should be the October 2009 pour. The milestones are not in dispute: cold functional testing on 30 December 2015, the first completed by an EPR anywhere; fuel-loading permit 10 April 2018; first grid connection 29 June 2018; commercial operation 13 December 2018; unit 2 on 7 September 2019. On “world’s first,” be exact: Olkiluoto 3 and Flamanville 3 both began construction before Taishan, making these the third and fourth EPRs to begin construction and the first and second to reach commercial operation.
There is also a record after the books stop. In 2021 the environment ministry confirmed fuel-rod damage in unit 1, describing the proportion as extremely small and far below the design standard, and the operator shut the unit for inspection on 30 July 2021, a year of 8.129 billion kilowatt-hours. Resumption was approved in July 2022, with reconnection on 15 August, a year of 4.445 billion. The plant generated 24.35 billion kilowatt-hours in 2024, about 22.77 billion delivered to the grid — up 52.29 per cent and a record since commercial operation began. Two sets of figures stay apart rather than averaged: design expectation of about 26 billion kilowatt-hours a year against 22.77 billion delivered in 2024, and a cumulative figure in two 2024 vintages — over 100 billion on the operator’s third-quarter statement, 106.9 billion in a local review.
The Hakka Shore the Plant Stands On
Chixi’s own town government sets out the history plainly: a Chixi sub-prefecture (赤溪厅, Chìxī tīng) was created in 1867; in 1912 it became Chixi county (赤溪县, Chìxī xiàn); and on 30 April 1953 it was abolished and merged into Taishan as the county’s nineteenth district. That is 86 years of separate administration.
The 1867 split had a boundary, and it includes the plant’s own address. A magistrate’s 1890 text named the places cut out of Xinning (新宁, Xīnníng) — Taishan’s old name — and the list includes Yaogu. The same list appears in the Guangzhou prefectural gazetteer; sources are named rather than paraphrased, since no page-level citation can be given from the book literature. Identifying the 1867 Yaogu with today’s village is consistent but inferred from place-name continuity, and the nuclear safety authority’s map puts Yaogu village about 1.2 kilometres from the plant.
The ancestor line here is Hakka, moving into Xinning from the Huiyang, Chaozhou and Jiayingzhou prefectures under the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns. Chixi is Taishan’s only purely Hakka town, the language is Hakka (客家话, Kèjiāhuà) rather than Taishanese, and its lineage network is not the Siyi route to the Nanyang and North America — history carried by the site’s account of Hakka communities in Wuyi and its migration-era baseline.
A first-party engineering account records that Chixi’s sparse population and deep shoreline were favourable conditions for siting the plant, while the gazetteers record continued net out-migration from Taishan through 1979 to 2000. Read together, the emptiness and the siting are one fact: the policy literature expects a working local economy to stop exporting its people; the record shows the export continuing two decades after the industrial build began. Both stand, unresolved.
The current scale is reported rather than census-grade: roughly 35,000 registered residents against roughly 65,000 overseas Chinese and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan compatriots — a diaspora about twice the population at home. A 2020 census figure of 17,072 usually resident circulates from a data aggregator, while government pages give 33,100 (2005) and 36,000 (2024). Nothing in the record supports a claim that the plant reversed the outflow.
Who Got Kept, and On Whose Income Line
The oldest income line ran the other way: remittances (侨汇, qiáohuì) were earned abroad and spent at home, and with men abroad women ran the salt pans and the oyster beds. The new line runs generate-here and ship-away — the plant’s design output, roughly 26 billion kilowatt-hours a year, goes to the Pearl River Delta load centre, with tax retained at town level. Electricity leaves for the cities; the tax stays in the town. The household form remittances produced belongs to the jinshanpo wives.
The employment ledger is smaller than the language around it: by the end of 2018, more than 550 cumulative local hires, 443 with Chixi household registration, against a construction peak of roughly 10,000 mostly non-local workers who came and left, leaving no remittance-like long-term revenue structure behind. The licensed posts — instrumentation and control, chemical analysis, radiation protection — were new local technical work, with more female participation than construction. The operator’s own account six years later: by the end of 2023, the company says more than 1,500 people registered in Jiangmen were working at the station, about half from surrounding villages, in cleaning, conference reception, cooking and maintenance. A larger number on a wider base, in mostly outsourced roles, is a different claim from the licensed cadre above, so this article will not write that “the plant employs 1,500 locals.”
That leaves the third externally managed income line, the one a coastal household now sits on: ranch maintenance, port-adjacent employment, port work — managed from outside the household, as remittances once were. The half-fishing, half-farming (半渔半农, bàn yú bàn nóng) towns this applies to are Guanghai, Chixi, Wencun and Haiyan. The real argument was never about output; it was whether the coast could be kept and worked by the people living on it, or whether going abroad remained the better answer.
The Sea as a Managed Unit
The newest layer on this coast is not a farm but an administrative unit. The county’s definition: a marine ranch (海洋牧场, hǎiyáng mùchǎng) is a fishery run in a defined sea area through scaled facilities and systematic management, applying artificial reefs (人工鱼礁, réngōng yújiāo) and stock enhancement (增殖放流, zēngzhí fàngliú) to plan and manage marine life. The county’s summary is to subtract near shore and use the far water, with a municipal state-owned marine group submitting the sea-use applications itself. Guangdong has built artificial reefs since the 1970s and 1980s, the term reaching back to the biologist Zeng Chengkui’s 1960s marine-agriculture concept; this sea has been renamed three times inside that lineage — fishing ground, qiaoxiang departure point, then something the vocabulary treats as farmland.
Policy now runs from near-shore reefs toward deep-and-far-sea aquaculture, so dating a local programme inside that shift matters. In 2023 Taishan set up a task force to create a national-level marine-ranching demonstration zone (示范区, shìfànqū), targeting demonstration-county status by 2035 — a target, not a status: Guangdong’s national inventory, thirteen zones and 1,097 square kilometres in the batches checked, contains no Taishan or Jiangmen entry.
What can be checked is better material. On 6 June 2021, at the Yutang harbour on Guanghai Bay, a provincial restocking event released more than 40 million prawn fry and 10 million yellowfin seabream fry; sixty gravity cages are anchored off Shangchuan’s Wuzhu islet, with sixty more and a semi-submersible platform planned; and in 2023 Taishan won a 600-hectare sea-use award in Jiangmen’s first competitive auction of its kind. A 2024 environmental filing covers 49,067 hectares in eight towns’ sea areas — a filing, printed as one, because an area is not a result.
Reefs, seed and monitoring are capital-intensive and slow to return, so state and provincial finance carries the programme, with a local state-owned company standing in for the missing anchor enterprise. Recreation is most ranches’ main cash flow, so the money comes from visitors, not the fish. No monitoring document for any Taishan ranch’s results was located: unknown, not proven. Two cautions from the literature: the science base is northern, and Pearl River runoff shapes this water.
Why There Is a Port Here at All, and What the Tonnage Claim Can Honestly Say
Jiangmen Port (江门港, Jiāngmén Gǎng) is seven port areas (港区, gǎngqū) under one name: three on the coast — Guanghai Bay, Xinhui and Enping — and four inland, on the river. One name covers sea ports and river ports, which is why its numbers move depending on who counts what.
The geography is why it had to be engineered rather than found: the delta’s ports follow its eight river outlets (八大口门, bā dà kǒumén), two of which — Yamen (崖门, Yámén) and Jitimen — bracket this coast; sediment arrives mainly from the west and deep water from the east, so the western shore is largely a silting estuary port. The Yamen channel’s traffic depends on catching the tide (乘潮通航, chéngcháo tōngháng), and dredging against siltation (回淤, huíyū) is routine.
What “made” costs, on the ground: the Guanghai first-phase wharf — three berths built in 1988, with a maximum 1,000-tonne berth — is now effectively out of service, its channel clogged by reclamation, aquaculture and silt. A 2000 study still recorded this coast only as a candidate deep-water site and Jiangmen Port as a regionally important bulk port; it predates the 2007 national port layout plan, so it proves only what was knowable then. The 2006 review of the Guanghai Bay and Chuandao scheme is the documented turn.
The tonnage, then, said exactly. In 2021 the composite port the province counts as Jiangmen Port carried 105 million tonnes and 1.733 million standard containers, making Jiangmen the sixth Guangdong city to pass the hundred-million-tonne line. The count had been five at the end of 2020, so Jiangmen is the change.
Two limits belong here. “Sixth” is a moving ordinal — in 2019 the sixth had been Zhongshan — so it must carry its year. And the series is discontinuous in a way nothing located for this article explains: 62.1 million tonnes in 2012, 93.7 million in 2018, then 68.3 million in 2019, a fall of 27.08 per cent, before the 2021 crossing. The figure is not broken down by port area, so no per-port-area number appears, and it should not be blended with 2024’s 93.75 million tonnes of waterborne freight, a different metric. Crossing a hundred million tonnes is a status line in the coastal hierarchy; a bulk port and a container hub do not rank on the same scale.
Port-Based Industry, and the Water’s Older Use
Heavy industry goes to deep water, not the reverse: port-based industry (临港工业, língǎng gōngyè) exists because the berth exists. Energy enters first, because it can — fuel and cooling water in by sea, power out by wire — and it brings its own dedicated wharf (专用码头, zhuānyòng mǎtóu). A 2022 adjustment plan for the power-station wharf area inside the Guanghai Bay port area proposes general berths of 50,000 to 100,000 tonnes and 5,000 tonnes plus an LNG-receiving berth; the same document concludes that normal operation has little impact on the dolphin reserve, while an accidental pollution incident would affect water quality, aquatic life and the reserve.
The county’s own best port resource was handed over to secure that fuel line. The People’s Daily reported in December 2003 that the plant’s wharf could berth 100,000-tonne vessels and was the finest deep-water port on Taishan’s coast, and that the county gave it to the power station free of charge to guarantee coal deliveries.
The same water carried something else first. Jiangmen opened as a treaty port in 1902, and the channel that now brings coal, equipment and feedstock is the channel that carried emigrants out. Haikoubu (海口埠, Hǎikǒubù), inside Guanghai Bay, was called the first port from which Cantonese speakers went abroad and is where the remittance-letter trade clustered — history belonging to Guanghai’s own account, to the region’s hidden departure ports and to the museum built on it. The sequence is the addition: people first, goods second, industrial feedstock third.
Why Here, and Who Counted as an Input
On 10 December 1992 the province approved the Guangdong Taishan Guanghai Bay Overseas-Chinese Investment Development Pilot Zone (华侨投资开发试验区, huáqiáo tóuzī kāifā shìyànqū), the first in Guangdong, in the same year Taishan became a city. The provincial gazette gives its shape: it relied on Guanghai Bay and seven surrounding towns, covered 375 square kilometres, held a population near 200,000, and was anchored on the Taishan power station, the Guanghai port and the coastal highway’s Taishan section.
Then the sentence that gives this article its argument: the zone’s stated purpose was to attract the more than 1.1 million Taishan-born overseas Chinese home to invest and develop an export-oriented economy. The migration network is not a legacy to be acknowledged; it is a development condition. The county gazetteer shows how literally: the country-distribution table compiled for overseas-Chinese affairs work reappears as the investment prospectus list. That lineage has an institutional present in Jiangmen’s overseas-Chinese platform.
One scale correction belongs here, because four area figures circulate and are not interchangeable. The 1992 pilot zone was 375 square kilometres. The industrial park that replaced it, renamed in 2006, had an approved area of 621.32 hectares — about 6.2 square kilometres — and 1,432.89 hectares after the 2018 national development-zone catalogue revision, about 14.3 square kilometres across five blocks. A 215-square-kilometre planning scope also appears on a current county page, single-sourced and a different measure again. The factor-of-sixty comparison between 375 and 6.21 is true only for 1992 against 2006, not as the park’s present scale.
What sits inside the boundary now, dated: the Guanghai Bay economic development zone, core of the larger Greater Guanghai Bay economic zone (大广海湾经济区, Dà Guǎnghǎi Wān), plans four boards — coastal living east, port-based economy west, energy south, ecological leisure north — and the county reports 204 projects worth ¥73.453 billion in 2024. Every positioning claim in that paragraph is the plan’s.
On 6 September 1924 Sun Yat-sen, as grand marshal, appointed the returned emigrant Chen Yixi (陈宜禧, Chén Yíxī) to prepare the Tonggu commercial port (铜鼓商埠, Tónggǔ Shāngbù). Chen had built the Sun Ning Railway (新宁铁路, Xīnníng Tiělù), the country’s second commercial railway; it was demolished from October 1938, and Chen died at Doushan. Local reporting traces the idea back to a 1919 reference to Tonggu Island in Sun Yat-sen’s reconstruction plan; no text of that plan was found, so it is reported as the local narrative rather than a settled date, while the 1924 mandate carries its date and wording. The “late fulfilment” reading — 1992 zone, 2006 park, 2019 bay-area clause, 2024 Huangmaohai crossing — is the county’s narration, attributed to its narrators.
The Sea Pushes Back, and the Plan Has No Word for Us
The bay the plant draws its cooling water from is also a nature reserve. The Guangdong Jiangmen Chinese white dolphin (中华白海豚, Zhōnghuá báihǎitún) provincial nature reserve was delineated in 2003 across 107.477 square kilometres off Dajin Island, upgraded to provincial level on 25 January 2007 at 10,747.70 hectares. It holds about three hundred Chinese white dolphins — around five per cent of the global total, all six age classes present.
In May 2025 the county posted a public notice proposing to adjust the reserve’s boundary and functional zones, comment window 19 to 23 May. It is a proposal, not a decision. The stated reason: the thermal discharge (温排水, wēn páishuǐ) generated during operation of a national major project has raised water temperature in part of the reserve beyond the national seawater quality standard’s allowance — no more than 1°C above ambient in summer and 2°C in other seasons for a first-class marine nature reserve. The notice itself is no longer online; Caixin reported the notice on 23 and 30 May 2025, recording expert assessments that the effect on the dolphins is limited but protection intensity falls somewhat, the official response that areas moved out become an outer protection belt, and conservationists’ view that an outer belt protects less and the removed areas are frequently used habitat.
The county’s own list of the best places to see a Chinese white dolphin in Jiangmen begins with the harbour basin of the coal-fired power station: the animal and the industrial harbour share water, and the county says so itself.
What may not be said matters as much. Intake and outfall locations, cooling-water flow rates and the thermal plume’s extent are not public in any source located for this article; the only route to their geometry is the project’s impact assessment, which was not locatable. One usable figure is general, not Taishan: a draft national standard records that once-through seawater cooling (海水直流冷却, hǎishuǐ zhíliú lěngquè) takes 50 to 70 cubic metres per second per million-kilowatt unit — about twice an equivalent coal plant.
Sea use on this coast is a permissions regime in named parcels — ranch areas, the port’s designated zones, the reserve and its proposed adjustment, aquaculture grants to named farms — all under ecological red lines, sea-use fees and sea-use approval (用海, yònghǎi). No instrument located for this article describes an open frontier; every one is a permission.
Then the silence. Guangdong’s marine framework has been restated in successive plans: three zones, three cooperation circles and two bases (三区三圈两基地, sān qū sān quān liǎng jīdì) in the thirteenth five-year-plan era, then one core, two poles, three belts and four zones (一核两极三带四区, yī hé liǎng jí sān dài sì qū) in December 2021 — in which the named poles are Shantou and Zhanjiang, while Jiangmen and Taishan sit inside the Pearl River Delta core region, named nowhere in profile. The policy literature reviewed for this article reads that framework as carrying no overseas-Chinese category and no emigration variable at all — a reading drawn from the literature, not from a document the reader can open.
What is verifiable is the contrast. The county counted more than 1.1 million overseas Taishan people as an investment input in 1992, and by 2023 more than 1.8 million Chinese abroad and compatriots in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, across 107 countries and regions — while the province’s marine vocabulary, thirty years on, still has no slot for them. One record names the diaspora as the reason to build; the other cannot see that it exists.
Which Coast Are You From?
This coast has been renamed at least four times. Salt, from 1958. Sugar, from 1982. Power, from 2003, and nuclear from 2009. And now a managed sea, whose vocabulary has no word for the people the earlier coast exported.
Places we inherit are usually handed to us in one of two descriptions — as heritage, or as progress — and both spare us the parts that are about us. The heritage version stops at the sugar mill; the progress version stops at the reactor. Neither says that the sparse population which made this shoreline suitable for a power station was produced partly by the departures that put a Taishan surname in a mine in Bendigo.
The question to leave with is answerable at the scale this article has worked at: which coast are you from — the salt coast, the sugar coast, the power coast, or the managed sea — and on which income line does that shore now sit? Remittances, inshore catch, ranch maintenance, port work. The names have changed. The structure has not.
Sources
Government and archival records
- Guangdong Provincial People’s Government Gazette, 1992 No. 12 — “Guangdong’s first Overseas-Chinese Investment Development Pilot Zone established in Taishan” (粤府函〔1992〕541号) — the 10 December 1992 approval, 375 sq km, seven towns, and the 1.1 million Taishan-born overseas Chinese named as an investment condition.
- Taishan Natural Resources Bureau — Jiangmen named among the province’s six 100-million-tonne ports (2022-09-28).
- Jiangmen Municipal People’s Government — “Jiangmen: empowering the overseas-Chinese capital” (2024-02-18; 江门日报 / 粤交集宣) — “成为广东省第六个港口货物吞吐量亿吨大港”.
- Taishan Municipal People’s Government — “Guarding the blue home: Taishan’s experience of Chinese white dolphin protection” (2025-04-21) — the 107.477 sq km reserve and its 300-plus dolphins.
- Taishan Municipal People’s Government — “Taishan’s new nuclear units approved by the state” (2025-04-28) — units 3 and 4 approved 27 April 2025 on Hualong One technology.
- Chixi Town People’s Government — town overview — 赤溪厅 (1867), 赤溪县 (1912), the 1953 merger into Taishan, and the Hakka ancestor line.
- Jiangmen Ecological Environment Bureau, Taishan Branch — proposed approval, Haiyan Overseas-Chinese Farm sugar mill expansion (2021-08-20) — the mill’s January 2020 stoppage and the unbuilt tenfold expansion.
- Guangdong Local Records Office / Wenshi Guangdong — Cai Feng, “A history of Taishan’s salt industry” (2020-11-11) — 沙边 and 沙栏 salt fields, 174.46 ha, 194,260 tonnes of raw salt 1958–2002, closing 2004 and 2005.
Operator
- China General Nuclear Power Group — “At this nuclear plant, locals cover half the sky” (2024-04-26) — more than 1,500 Jiangmen-registered staff by end-2023, and the job categories it names.
News reporting
- Caixin — “Guangdong’s Taishan will adjust its white dolphin reserve for a major national project” (2025-05-23).
- Caixin — “Taishan’s official response on the dolphin reserve adjustment” (2025-05-30) — expert assessments, the official response and the conservationists’ objection.
Note on the tonnage figure. The 2021 figure of 105 million tonnes originates in the Ministry of Transport’s Pearl River Navigation Administration report “Director Wang Jianhua leads a water-transport development survey in Jiangmen” (2022-06-13); that ministry page has since been withdrawn and no longer resolves, so the crossing is cited here through the two live government pages above.
Continue Reading
- Guanghai: Taishan’s Historic Port Town and Its Maritime Diaspora
- Haiyan Overseas Chinese Farm: The Taishan Town That Built a Home for Returned Chinese
- The Dual Corridor Era: What Two Bridges Changed for Wuyi
- JUNO: The World’s Largest Neutrino Detector, 700 Metres Under Kaiping
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