Beyond Cycles of Extraction: Rethinking Development, Decline, and Revitalization in Late Industrial Fushun

Abstract

Fushun, once a cornerstone of China’s coal industry, is now frequently framed as a city of resource exhaustion and decline. Particularly, its West Open-Pit Mine, which was the largest throughout Asia, has long shaped the city’s socio-economic and geographic landscape. However, rather than viewing Fushun through the conventional boom-and-bust narrative, my thesis argues that its transformation should be understood as ongoing process of spatial reconfiguration and redevelopment. The depletion of coal reserves and the dwindling coal industry have not led to a straightforward decline but have instead opened avenues for new forms of industrialization, real estate speculation, and ecological infrastructure projects that continue to shape both the city and its inhabitants. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, my thesis challenges the teleological framework that ties Fushun’s fate to the life cycle of its extractive industries. By examining the rise of its coal industry, demographic shifts, corporate restructuring, and urban redevelopment led by state-owned enterprises (SOEs), I illustrate how different social groups, including technocratic elites, young people, and former workers, navigate the uncertainties of economic transformation. While some benefit from new industrial and financial investments, many others face increasing precarity shaped by intergenerational accumulation of socio-economic instability. My thesis thus reveals the uneven distribution of prosperity and hardship at a critical moment when Fushun emerges as a late industrial frontier, where new forms of governance and citizenship are being negotiated.Ultimately, my thesis questions whether decline is an inevitable consequence of resource exhaustion or a constructed narrative that shapes governance, labor structure, and urban renewal. In doing so, I reframe Fushun not as a city in decline but as a contested site where the boundaries between development and stagnation remain fluid, and where extractive economies persist in evolving and unexpected forms.