Daqing
China's flagship oil field dropped from 43% to 16% of national production in three decades — the city loses 37,000 residents annually as EROI declines toward economic non-viability.
Daqing lost 119,000 residents between 2020 and 2024 — roughly 37,000 in 2024 alone. The oil field that created the city is 65 years old and experiencing biological senescence: its systems winding down not from external damage but internal depletion. The share of China's national production dropped from 43% in 1995 to 16%. The energy return on energy invested (EROI) has declined from 7.3 to an estimated 4.7 — meaning it costs progressively more energy to extract each barrel. At an EROI below 5, the margin between productive extraction and economically unviable effort narrows with every pump cycle.
During the 1960s and 1970s, the Daqing oil field supplied an average of 75% of China's annual crude output. The Maoist government turned the city into a propaganda model: 'Learn from Daqing in Industry' was a national slogan launched in 1964. The city that resulted is a monument to central planning — wide Soviet-style boulevards, identical housing blocks, and a population that peaked near 2.9 million in 2010 before the arithmetic of depletion reversed the flow.
Daqing's production share fell from 43% to 16% in three decades. Each year, 37,000 more residents leave. Declining production drives job losses, job losses close services, service closures accelerate departure — a positive feedback loop that compounds annually.
Beijing's response has been to demand more, not less. The 'Seven-Year Action Plans to Enhance Oil and Gas Exploration' launched in 2019 pressured Daqing to maintain output through enhanced oil recovery — polymer flooding, chemical injection, and other techniques that extract remaining reserves at higher cost. The field managed to produce over two billion barrels in the 2014–2023 decade. But production maintenance is not growth, and the workforce required for enhanced recovery is shrinking faster than the reservoir.
Meanwhile, China's overall oil production grows — driven by offshore fields in the Bohai Sea and new developments in Xinjiang and the Ordos Basin. The national organism is healthy. The specific organ is failing. When a whale dies and sinks to the ocean floor, its carcass supports an entire deep-sea ecosystem for decades — bone worms, bacterial mats, scavenger species — all sustained by the slow decomposition of a body built over a lifetime. Daqing is entering its whale-fall phase: the city digests its own infrastructure through autophagy, cannibalising resources from declining neighbourhoods to sustain the productive core, feeding a provincial economy from the slow decomposition of an asset built over sixty years of extraction.