From colonial company town to industrial city

the South Manchuria railway company in Fushun, China

Limin Teh

pp. 69-90

in: Marcelo J. Borges, Susana B. Torres (eds), Company towns, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

In his 1970 essay on company towns, the geographer J. Douglas Porteous distinguishes between two types of company towns: extractive and model. Extractive company towns, Porteous explains, are "essentially temporary pioneering device[s]" for exploiting natural resources such as coal and timber, while model company towns are built to reflect employers' philanthropic desires or Utopian visions.¹ Whatever the impetus for their creation, Porteous's typology implies that the existence of company towns is intrinsically linked to the company or natural resource, and hence decline in the company or the availability of natural resources usually results in their demise. From the ghost towns dotting the Gold Rush Trail in California to the abandoned ruins of Henry Ford's company town in the Amazon, countless examples of company towns affirm this trend.² However, some company towns escape this pattern of decline. Fushun, presently an industrial city in China's Liaoning Province, is one such case.