Huaibei

Huaibei is Huainan's smaller, harder-luck sibling—another Anhui Province coal city, but one where the coal ran out faster and the alternatives arrived slower. The city was carved from Suzhou Prefecture in 1960 specifically to manage coal extraction from the Huaibei coalfield. That single-purpose founding created a company town at municipal scale: the mines defined the city's geography, employment, infrastructure, and identity.

The coalfield's reserves proved smaller and lower quality than Huainan's deposits to the south. As mines exhausted and Beijing mandated closures for environmental and safety reasons, Huaibei lost its economic engine without having built a replacement. The city's population of roughly 900,000 faces the demographics typical of resource-depleted towns: young workers migrate to Hefei, Nanjing, and Shanghai while retirees and mining-injury pensioners remain. Coal mining legacy costs—pension obligations, environmental remediation, subsidence repair—consume municipal budgets.

The city's attempted pivot follows China's standard resource-city playbook: develop replacement industries (food processing, building materials, logistics), invest in renewable energy (some mining subsidence areas repurposed for solar), and improve transport links to larger cities. A high-speed rail connection to the Yangtze Delta economic zone provides the infrastructure for economic integration, but integration often means serving as a labor source for wealthier cities rather than developing autonomous industry.

Huaibei illustrates the terminal phase of resource extraction urbanism: a city purpose-built for a single commodity that now must justify its existence after that commodity's economic death. The question is not whether Huaibei can diversify—it is whether a 900,000-person city created in 1960 for coal has any comparative advantage in a post-coal economy.