Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the nation’s rapid economic development has been fueled by an unprecedented consumption of raw materials and energy. This panel explores how this enormous flow of resources has shaped both China’s domestic policy and foreign relations. By analyzing resources through the lens of critical industries, this panel examines how the Chinese state has marshalled hydrocarbon resources and managed innovations in the energy sector.

China is a coal-rich country with relatively little oil. In 1949, the Chinese Communist Party inherited a war-ravaged coal industry, which grew rapidly in response to the Party’s energy-intensive industrialization plans. Yet China could never extract and transport sufficient coal to meet its industrial needs. The expansion of domestic oil extraction from the 1960s opened new possibilities for industry and innovation, ultimately supplementing coal. Renewable energies similarly carved niches in China’s coal-based economy, offering new modes of both production and consumption. From the 1990s, oil imports have played an important role in China’s booming economy and thus shaped its relations with oil-producing countries in the Middle East and Latin America.

In the past two decades, work by Elspeth Thompson, Timothy Wright and Victor Seow has illuminated the relationship between resource management and state power in China. This historiography has detailed how Chinese regimes harnessed carbon-intensive science and industry to promote visions of social well-being, modernity, and progress thereby legitimating state power. Simultaneously, this industrial drive inspired technocratic regimes of extraction and reinforced social inequalities. Paralleling this work, studies on oil by Hou Li and Kazushi Minami have charted how early extraction inspired hopes of self-sufficient modernization, while oil sales in the 1970s provided foreign currency and bolstered China’s trade relationships with world markets.

This foundational historiography allows informed inquiries about the historical rationales of PRC resource production and utilization. This panel pursues those inquiries in industry, national transit, rural villages, and overseas. Ben Kletzer uses the history of locomotive technologies to understand how resource constraints influenced technological innovation, and laid the foundations of China’s carbon-intensive industrialization. Xiao Sun traces the evolution of China’s synthetic fiber industry from coal-based to petroleum-based production, highlighting how the emergence of an integrated petrochemical-textile supply chain fueled the country’s rise as a global manufacturing power. Amanda DeMarco examines experimental “solar villages” near Beijing, where ordinary people, local officials, scientific researchers, and CCP leaders formulated visions for renewable energy in the 1980s. Javier Guirado-Alonso explores how the expansion of the Chinese solar industry in the Middle East since the 2010s has reconfigured a relationship based on oil trade into larger transnational corridors and energy circuits. Together, these papers present a new history of fossil fuels and renewable energies in Chinese history.