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

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.