Maoming

A lychee tree in Maoming has been producing fruit for 1,933 years. Sixty years ago, Sinopec built China's largest refinery complex next door. Both are still operating. That coexistence is the city's defining anomaly and its economic signature.

Most resource cities in China chose a lane. Daqing became an oil town. Karamay became an oil town. When petrochemical infrastructure arrives, agricultural land gets paved, workers shift to higher-wage extraction jobs, and traditional cultivation dies within a generation. Maoming refused the trade-off. It processes 13.5 million tonnes of crude oil annually — the first Chinese refinery to exceed ten million tonnes, back in 1998 — while simultaneously producing one-fifth of China's total lychee output from 1.42 million mu of orchards, including 19,000 ancient trees.

The geographic explanation is necessary but insufficient. Maoming sits on oil shale deposits that attracted petrochemical investment in the 1950s, while its subtropical Guangdong climate provides ideal lychee conditions. But geography creates opportunity, not inevitability. The mechanism that kept both industries alive is resource partitioning — the same principle that allows competing species to share a habitat by exploiting different niches. The refinery occupies one ecological zone: heavy industrial land, deep-water port access, pipeline corridors. The lychee orchards occupy another: hillside terrain unsuitable for heavy industry, village-scale cultivation plots, and a labour force with 2,300 years of accumulated horticultural knowledge.

The economic compartmentalisation runs deep. Baiqiao Village, one of Maoming's lychee hubs, generates over ¥100 million in agricultural processing output and employs 3,000 people at ¥50,000 per capita income — competitive with the region's industrial wages. The lychee economy is not a heritage afterthought. It is a parallel system with its own supply chains, export networks reaching Russia, Australia, Japan, and Thailand, and its own value-added innovation including lychee brandy production.

The question facing Maoming is whether this dual metabolism can survive the next phase transition. China's petrochemical sector faces national overcapacity. The government has restricted new refining capacity, and Sinopec Maoming is pivoting toward green chemicals and hydrogen. The Binhai New Area development zone is betting on clean energy and coastal tourism. If the petrochemical economy contracts, Maoming may be the only Chinese refinery city that has a functioning alternative economy ready to absorb the shock — because it never abandoned the lychee trees in the first place.

The 1,933-year-old tree is not just a botanical curiosity. It is a proof of concept: that a city can run heavy industry without destroying the slower, older economy that preceded it.