Oil cities,industrial policy and sustainable development: a new historical approach

Abstract

The notion of “oil cities” is typically considered antithetical to industrialization, growth and development. This paper frames a symposium on Hou Li’s (2021) latest book, Building for Oil, which questions this imbroglio. The book’s central argument is that the oil city of Daqing drove industrialization in China from the 1960s to the 1970s. The industrialization and the self-sufficiency that Daqing symbolized in Chinese socialist economic planning became the template for that particular period of history. While that model was subsequently modified, its developmentalist ideology, its industrial policy and its urban experience – collectively called “the Daqing model” – cannot be overlooked in the analysis of oil cities. In this sense, the book is not simply about Daqing but also about a consequential city that provides lessons – distilled by the six authors in this book symposium.

I. L’histoire Événementielle

Oil cities are widely considered antithetical to industrialization, growth and development. Descriptors of these cities range from “premature deindustrialization” to “urbanization without industrialization”.⁽¹⁾ These are extensions of the “resource curse” theory – the idea that resource abundance or dependence slows down or rolls back economic growth. As a detailed recent review⁽²⁾ of resource curse studies shows, such claims are typically based on neoclassical and new institutional economics growth theories, which are static, spatially weak and largely ahistorical.

But more radical schools of thought that are critical of oil, cities, and oil cities are similarly ahistorical and aspatial. Consider how global sustainable development is understood. According to the World Commission on Environment and Development, “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”⁽³⁾

This conceptualization prioritizes the present and emphasizes the future, but says nothing about the past. So, historical wrongs, why they mould unsustainability, and how they could be resolved, are overlooked or, if considered, typically caricatured. Discussions about, and writings on, ecological imperialism and reparations become relatively rare or they are purged of their historical content. Spatially, too, sustainable development analysts tend to focus on “sustainable cities”.⁽⁴⁾ This emphasis recognizes neither “ecological imperialism”⁽⁵⁾ nor “just sustainabilities”.⁽⁶⁾ So, the dynamic of externalizing ecological problems is not systematically analysed from the current and dominant standpoints in sustainability research. This peripheralization of ecological problems makes cities in the global North appear “sustainable” when, in fact, their sustainability is obtained by shifting polluting and unsustainable processes and practices to their former colonies and to some poorer nations, cities and regions.

L’histoire événementielle, Fernand Braudel’s name for event-based, short-term history,⁽⁷⁾ afflicts the study of sustainability. This ahistoricism is further characterized by a focus on individual responsibility. In sustainability rhetoric, L’histoire événementielle can be seen in the rise and dominance of behavioural nudges and the use of prices to change behaviour.⁽⁸⁾ All these approaches are fundamentally flawed. Research in social economics⁽⁹⁾ shows that the purchasing habits of people tend to be influenced more by social relations and peer pressure than by prices per se or by individually targeted behavioural fixes. More fundamentally still, economic systems escape scrutiny, while L’histoire événementielle focuses on “big events”.

The critique that capitalism is the problem is, of course, historical. But, as a “cyclical history”, it is limiting. Fernand Braudel put the case powerfully. Whatever lies outside the “cycle” or the “intercycle” is expunged from history.⁽¹⁰⁾ This is particularly serious because the world did not begin with capitalism. Imperialism has a much longer history. Even worse, this approach to history has so much in common with L’histoire événementielle. Take COVID-19. As discussed elsewhere,⁽¹¹⁾ anti-capitalist analysts claimed that this signalled the beginning of the end for capitalism. This focus on “great events”, to use Braudel’s descriptor, is a fundamental weakness of the current dominant approach, the Conventional Wisdom.⁽¹²⁾

Conventional Wisdom has evolved. According to a recent review of the literature,⁽¹³⁾ orthodox analysts have taken many new steps to grasp the nuances of human behaviour, environmental change and development. These advances range from mitigation to adaptation, prices to behaviours, markets to non-markets, local to global. Whether these strides are sufficient is a different question. For the Western Left Consensus, the dominant alternative to Conventional Wisdom, orthodoxy is not fit for purpose. The Western Left Consensus⁽¹⁴⁾ is the answer. It is not always Marxist, but Marxism is quite central to its methodology, leading Fernand Braudel to single it out for analysis: “Might I add that present-day Marxism seems to be the very portrait of the dangers in any social science that is too enamoured of the pure model, of the model for the sake of the model.”⁽¹⁵⁾

Even the World-System theory advanced by Immanuel Wallerstein as an explanation of capitalism is insufficient. If an historical approach must consider “historical temporalities”,⁽¹⁶⁾ then the historical approach must consider all timescales. Delimiting the “world-system” to Western capitalism epitomizes l’histoire événementielle, limiting our understanding of the world. China, for example, and Asia in general, provided the spark for Western civilization, what J M Hobson has called The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation.⁽¹⁷⁾ Yet, l’histoire événementielle is blinkered to such insights, a chronic problem in the modern study of (urban) China, both in academia and the media, with few respectable exceptions.⁽¹⁸⁾

Andre Gunder Frank and Barry Gills’ question – whether “The World System [is] Five Hundred Years Or Five Thousand?”⁽¹⁹⁾ – remains relevant today. “For me”, wrote Braudel, “history is the sum of all possible histories – a set of multiple skills and points of view, those of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Whether one is writing about 1558 or the year of Our Lord 1958, if one wants to understand the world, one has to determine the hierarchy of forces, currents, and individual movements, and then put them together to form an overall constellation.”⁽²⁰⁾ This total history, a holistic approach to history, is precisely what is needed, but also what is currently rare, in sustainability research.

There have been some attempts to correct this ahistorical framework. The best example is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s book, Reconsidering Reparations.⁽²¹⁾ Its analysis includes history, but its solution of reparations is futuristic, what Táíwò calls a “constructive” view. Little or nothing is said about “environment and urbanization” in this constructive approach. Of course, there is “urban history”, as a subfield of study, and even a journal named as such, but most urban history holds back from total history, including comparative history.⁽²²⁾ It is SHIE – short-term history, individual-based and event-centred. Fernand Braudel recognized this shortcoming, too:

“Similarly, I doubt that a study of a city, no matter which one, can be the object of a sociological enquiry . . . without inserting it in the historical long-term. Any city – a society with conflicts, with its crises, its ruptures, its breakdowns, its inevitable scheming – has to be placed within the context of the countryside that surrounds it, and also within those archipelagos of neighboring cities.”⁽²³⁾

II. Radical Alternatives: Digging the History of Daqing

The Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science (HELSUS) Global South Encounters (hereafter, “Global South Encounters”) tries to develop radical alternatives to both the Conventional Wisdom and the Western Left Consensus. In this context, “global South” symbolizes distinct approaches that engage but ultimately transcend all forms of orthodoxy. “Global South”, in this respect, is neither a “binary” geographical concept (global North/global South), a euphemism for “developing/third-world/poor countries”, nor an avatar of “grassroots” alternatives. The global South is part of the wider struggle “towards a just ecological political economy”⁽²⁴⁾ to which projects like the HELSUS Global South Blog are devoted. Books discussed in the Global South Encounters, therefore, show these features.

Accordingly, Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State,⁽²⁵⁾ the focus of this book symposium, contributes to these radical alternatives. The book aims to show “how communist ideology, political conflicts, urban planning discipline, and popular attitudes were all articulated in the creation of the model city of Daqing, as lived and experienced on a daily basis and as a political entity – a space of control and coercion but also of dissidence and contestation. The book is also the story of food and energy, two key elements that determined life and death in the People’s Republic.”⁽²⁶⁾

This is a fiendishly difficult mission, but Hou Li, the book’s author, comes well prepared to the task. She holds a Bachelor of Urban Planning, a Master of Engineering in Urban Planning, a Master of Design Studies and a Doctor of Design. Formerly a professor, distinguished researcher, award-winning teacher in urban planning at Tongji University in China, a practising planner in China, and currently a lecturer in urban planning and design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, her authority on the subject about which she writes is indisputable.

The numerous reviews of the book in leading journals such as Planning Perspectives and China Review International show her success at accomplishing her task. Indeed, Building for Oil won the 2020 First Book Prize for the Most Innovative Book in Planning History. In reflecting on his groundbreaking book, Adam Smith in Beijing, the eminent Italian political economist Giovanni Arrighi recounts how, “Chapters that some readers enjoyed most, others enjoyed least . . . and . . . sections that some readers thought central to the argument of the book, others found superfluous.”⁽²⁷⁾ This seems to be the fate of Building for Oil, too. Some reviewers have called many of the book’s features original, but others contend that they are merely descriptive and disruptive.⁽²⁸⁾

What is indisputable is the book’s central argument: that the oil city of Daqing drove industrialization in China from the 1960s to the 1970s. The industrialization and the self-sufficiency that Daqing symbolized in Chinese socialist economic planning was the template for that particular period of history. While that model was modified in subsequent years, the study of China, its developmentalist ideology, its industrial policy, urban experience and sustainable development cannot be complete without probing the Daqing model. “Without Daqing”, according to Hou, “China’s industrialization and drive to modernity would have been seriously weakened.”⁽²⁹⁾ Clearly, then, “Daqing was more than just an oil town. It was a symbol and a showcase of the PRC’s modern industry and independence.”⁽³⁰⁾ In this sense, the book is not simply about Daqing’s history but also about the consequential lessons it provides.

III. The Remaining Papers

The remaining papers are written by Jing Zhang, from the School of Oriental and African Studies, UK; Stephan Hauser, from the University of Helsinki, Finland; Joe Collins, from Central Queensland University, Australia; Yan Zhang, from the University of Cambridge, UK and Yunnan University, China; and Hou Li, from Harvard University. Jing Zhang and Hauser are planners, the former a development planner researching industrial and urban policy, the latter an urban planner with a focus on law. Both Joe Collins and Yan Zhang are political economists, with the former specializing in the historical approach to political economy, while the latter centres her work more strongly on ecological economics.

This interdisciplinary approach to “environment and urbanization”, to history, merits comment. Fernand Braudel⁽³¹⁾ proposed the longue durée as a response to the need to do interdisciplinary work. The question he tried to address was not whether interdisciplinarity is valuable, but how to do interdisciplinary work. Area studies and mathematics were two of his proposals, but he tried to develop long-term history. In his words:

“I would hope that the social sciences would for the time being stop arguing so much about their reciprocal borders. . . . Let us rather try to find the common lines of our research, if such there be, which might orient a collective research program around themes that might permit us to reach an initial convergence. I personally think these common lines are mathematization, spatial specification, and longue durée.”⁽³²⁾

These authors – along with Professor Hou Li, an urban planning historian or an urban planner with an historical focus – combine most of these ways of doing interdisciplinarity within urban sustainability. All these authors praise the book, for reasons including its informative investigation on the role of the state (Jing Zhang), for analytical detail on how urban planning works in practice (Stephan Hauser), and for skilful treatment of structure and agency (Joe Collins). The book’s approach to history, a marriage between different histories, histories of workers, histories of industry and histories of urban and regional development – deserve commendation.

Yet, there are many other ways in which the debate could be further advanced. A crosscutting critique is the need to throw a bit more light on the current transition to a low-carbon economy and what tools are available for state use (Jing Zhang) – a critical issue given the underdeveloped analysis of urban industrialization, pollution and the urban health crisis in Daqing (Hauser). Collins points to the need for a more careful conceptualization of “capital”, too, in a world of ecological crises and heightened imperialism. For Yan Zhang, “the absence of pronounced connections between Daqing’s historical significance and contemporary China’s economic and energy infrastructure” is an important weakness of the book. Remedying it would require, “incorporating discussions on the evolution of China’s economic model, energy transition and the role of technocracy and leadership in shaping these dynamics”.⁽³³⁾

In addressing these questions, Hou Li welcomes and appreciates the critical comments. As she notes, she has no firm conclusions. The essence of the story is the journey itself. Any idea that holistic history work is for the fainthearted should be put to rest. Articles of faith have little room to roost. What lies ahead is even more arduous.

More comparative history, for instance, linking the Daqing case to oil cities in the Middle East, the Americas, Europe and Africa could have nuanced Hou’s historical approach. Likewise, the need for even more systematic economic analysis is crystal clear. Braudel’s call for a bit more “mathematization”⁽³⁴⁾ is, however, not to be confused with a turn to neoclassical urban economics. Mainstream urban economics is a Western project. Trying to show that agglomeration economies,⁽³⁵⁾ for example, can be found in the global South and, hence, urban economics is fit for purpose, misses the history of its limitations in the global South. Consider the attempt by the “Ibadan School”, a clone of mainstream economics implanted in Nigeria to handle federal finance after independence. These economists paid “great attention to detailed empirical data and figures”, showing “a virtual obsession with calculations . . . [and] an intense love of subjecting everything to arithmetic and technical computations”.⁽³⁶⁾ Neither they nor their advisers had any interest to change the philosophy of finance or the economic system. What they seemed to be anticipating was the invention of some derivatives that would restructure the country’s economy. That never happened.⁽³⁷⁾ The point of calling for a new urban economics that takes the global South more seriously,⁽³⁸⁾ or an urban studies that is more strongly sensitive to global South and the development process⁽³⁹⁾ is not to simply trim its edges with tokenistic global South makeovers.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Or, even worse, to defend business as usual by applying urban economics (as we know it, mainstream) to the global South.⁽⁴¹⁾ All these approaches to studying urban development suffer from crude methodological limitations.

Examining “the social sustainability of urban transformations in the global South” is the goal. So, all authors submitted draft papers critical of the book – a major publication by a global South scholar. She publicly discussed her book with the authors at the Global South Encounters in December 2023. The papers have been reviewed. Entries were reviewed internally, discussed externally at the event, and revised again for this symposium. Hou Li’s response went through a similarly rigorous process. All the papers in the symposium, from this introduction to Hou Li’s own article, were then subjected to the same standards of peer review by Environment and Urbanization.

IV. Overall Conclusion

In concluding this symposium, the apogee of the 2023 GSEs, it must be noted just how deeply moving and, for me, how deeply rejuvenating these encounters have been. We set out to study space, energy, time, war, security, self-sufficiency and autonomy. Ecological imperialism remained a common theme. So serious and existential are these socio-ecological problems that we approached our analyses with a sense of urgency and a determination to learn from multiple perspectives.

This book discussion has taught us more about China. Its historical institutions, ideas, practices and, crucially, cities of oil. Its challenge to conventional research on “environment and urbanization” provides a foundation, a continuity, and, thereby, a long-term framework to investigate China’s development trajectory. Indeed, Building for Oil is the quintessential opposite of l’histoire événementielle, the methodological cancer that has plagued the existing study of cities and regions for years. Hou’s book is an informed and informative account of China, a great nation, and how it built the foundations that would subsequently help to free millions of Chinese people from the clutches of poverty and privation in the opening and reform eras. This historiography has helped us to learn an intriguing lesson: a developmental state was formed before the country was reformed. We now know more about the Chinese state, later framed as the “Chinese developmental state” due to the distinctive characteristics of the developmental state in China and the exceptionally impressive record of developmentalism in that country. Its advance relates to some invention, some innovation, some learning, some technology, even technocracy, and some digitization (Yan Zhang’s paper). Using public land seems to be an important part of this story too, but this requires further research, including investigating the uses and abuses of industrial land in China.⁽⁴²⁾

How land rent is linked to technology and technocracy, and digitization to uneven urban and regional development could be studied a bit more. Being au courant is useful in itself, but that is not the goal. Linking that dynamic step to a study of the commons and to works such as Governing the Commons in China⁽⁴³⁾ and Rent,⁽⁴⁴⁾ and to other oil cities⁽⁴⁵⁾ could provide firm grounds to address the questions posed in the papers on the nature of the state (Jing Zhang’s paper), to sharpen key concepts about land, labour, capital and the state (Joe Collins’ paper), and to challenge simple representations of oil blessing or oil curse (Stephan Hauser’s paper).

All these future investigations are needed to address questions about uneven and unequal spatial forms. In particular, the question of how internal inequalities and socio-spatial stratification more broadly interweave with national sustainability challenges requires urgent attention, too. But the issues with China, as Walden Bello points out, are not only internal, but also international.⁽⁴⁶⁾ The concerns range from technological self-sufficiency⁽⁴⁷⁾ and the management of China’s relations with neighbours in Asia and Australia⁽⁴⁸⁾ to the question of whether China becomes a “new Bandung”, a pivot for global South transformative change,⁽⁴⁹⁾ or is co-opted into the global geometry of superpower politics against the global South.⁽⁵⁰⁾

Building for Oil is a timely intervention. The authors, in offering their thoughtful assessments, have made their own original contributions to sustainable development, oil cities and industrial policy. Together, this symposium has helped to advance The Historical Approach to Environment and Urbanization.