Many of China’s ‘resource’ towns are dying

YUMEN, China: Dying towns may seem rare in a booming China, but the expanses of rubble and abandoned homes that ring this formerly wealthy oil center identify Yumen as one of them. And although Yumen is home to just a few thousand people in a country of more than 1.3 billion, Beijing’s stability-obsessed government is worrying about their future.

Officials worry because Yumen’s poor, disgruntled inhabitants are the thin end of a wedge of discontent that could engulf hundreds of thousands of people within a decade unless the central government can resolve one of the more obscure but troubling legacies of past socialist policies.



The potential troublemakers live in dozens of “resource towns” that were built across China by Mao-era economic planners to exploit energy or mineral deposits regardless of how remote or inhospitable the location. Now, some seams of oil, coal and ore are starting to run out, increasing unemployment and migration while leaving behind shells of towns that are impoverished tinderboxes of unrest.

Yumen is in a high-altitude corner of the poor northwestern province of Gansu. A single oil field is its gushing but fragile economic base.

Phillips Andrews-Speed, a professor of energy policy at Dundee University, in Scotland, has studied the way China’s desperate hunt for energy has marginalized some of the people who produce it.

“It’s a general problem – Yumen is just an example,” he said “You have groups of thousands or tens of thousands of people left in the middle of nowhere who will be poor and with nothing to do.”

He added, “It is a growing problem for the government.”

Built near what was then an important oil field, Yumen was populated by those with coveted state jobs. But oil production peaked in 1959 and by the start of this century had become so insignificant compared with other discoveries that PetroChina moved its headquarters out of town.

Reuters