The steel mill boomed, she says.

"My husband and son worked at the Xingye Industrial factory across the street," Liu Donglu says proudly.

That was 10 years ago.

Back then, Liu says, at least one person out of each of 400 families in the village of Shuihou worked across the street in Kaiping district, Tangshan, Hebei Province.

The Shuihou plant shut down in April.

In response to demands from Beijing for reduced air pollution, the Hebei government in October launched "Operation Sunday" where teams of provincial officials attached explosives to private steel plant boilers and blew them up all over Tangshan.

After that, the old steel workers left the Tangshan area in search of new jobs.

On top of lost factories and lost jobs is lost money: some villagers lent their savings to steel mill owners.

As China and Beijing finally faces up to air pollution so hazardous it makes headlines across the world, it is the humbler regions surrounding the capital city that are paying the price by cutting their own heavy industry.

The Ministry of Environmental Protection in September ordered Hebei Province to slash 60 million tons, or one-third, of its steel production by 2017: Tangshan must cut 40 million tons, Handan 12 million tons and Shijiazhuang 2.8 million tons.

Air pollution prompted the decision. Seven of China's 10 most-polluted cities are in Hebei, dotted around Beijing, according to ministry data released in December.