Toiling for oil: Daqing, real utopias and the production of livelihood in communist China

This dialogical interrogation of Hou Li’s important history of Daqing examines the contradictions of structure and agency in the building of communist China’s first oil city. Three provocations are raised. Two relate to ecology: the first on the ecological dimension of extractivism, which requires careful consideration in light of the current status of CO 2 emissions per capita, with China accounting for about half the emissions of fossil fuel exporters like Australia; the second on how extractivism and decarbonization can be considered in light of recent claims that the US military was the world’s largest consumer of hydrocarbons in 2019. The third relates to the ambiguity of the term “capital” in economic discourse, which invariably finds its way into cognate scholarly disciplines, such as historical inquiry and urban planning.