A brief history of the Oil Gang
daqing // mao calls yu qiuli // oil gang against red guards // oil gang against readjustment group // bohai 2 // gossip about song zhenming offending zhu de's widow
Depoliticized politics (introduction A)
The tracking of depoliticization in China often starts in the 1980s with the rise of a technocratic elite under Deng Xiaoping. The political firebrands of the revolutionary era were cast aside in favor of policy papers from think tanks. There was an end to the calls for class struggle, and the productive forces of science and technology were permanently shielded from ideological interference. The logic of financialization and marketization took over.
But Wang Hui moves the process back even further. He suggests looking at the middle of the Cultural Revolution.1 When the grassroots rebellions of 1966 and 1967 were swept aside, the “corrosion of depoliticization” crept in. This is how he describes this first wave of depoliticization:
Its most important manifestations were bureaucratization and internal power struggles within the party-state, which in turn led to the suppression of discursive freedom. In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao and others sought a range of tactics to combat these tendencies, yet the end result was always that these struggles became implicated in the very processes—of “depoliticizing” faction fights and bureaucratization—that they were designed to combat, leading to renewed political repression and the rigidification of the party-state.
So, the key to all of this is factional battles.
In the Cultural Revolution, these have the appearance of ideological debates but beneath the abstract politics is warfare to control the machinery of the Party and state.
In a way, this is an idea against the standard historiography. There is a left-right showdown: the Gang of Four led by Jiang Qing pursuing a revolutionary Maoist line versus a coalition of liberal pragmatists under the ailing Zhou Enlai. This is how both sides would have described it, even if it was in more charged contemporary language (rebels against capitalist roaders, ultra-leftists against right deviationists).
When Jiang Qing lost the fight, we got the truth. We can be honest about our enemies, after all. The ultra-leftist line and political errors becomes less important than her ghoulish pursuit of power. Since he won, Deng Xiaoping’s quest for power had to remain an underemphasized part of the story…—and anyways, what does it matter? The alternative was the Jiang Qing program of ballet and increasingly esoteric campaigns of mass literary criticism.
But this can be complicated by adding in another faction to the narrative.
The narratives of left-right clash or technocratic pragmatism winning out over revolutionary zeal are less clear in Deng Xiaoping's maneuvering against the Oil Gang2 after the smashing of the Gang of Four.3
The battle between the Oil Gang and Deng is also a way to understand how factional battles might look at present, or how they probably looked in the late 1980s and 1990s, since this takes place in a time of technocratic management instead of revolutionary politics.
Factional politics (introduction B, confession)
In fact, I have to admit that this introduction to the Oil Gang is only meant to be exactly what it says it is. It’s a very basic history of the group. I have more to say, but I need a basic set of facts laid out, which I can refer to later. I want to be able to toss off a reference to Yu Qiuli or the Bohai incident and point here.
A definition before we begin of the Oil Gang (introduction C, spoiling the story)
Faction within Chinese politics, coming out of the petrochemical ministries in the 1950s and 1960s, involved in state planning after the Great Leap Forward and the promotion of the Daqing model of industrial development, then coming to greater prominence in the mid to late 1970s, supported by Zhou Enlai and then Hua Guofeng, when they laid the groundwork for his Second Great Leap. They advocated for rapid growth of heavy industry through infusions of foreign technology, import substitution in foreign economic policy, and selling oil and resources to finance all of this. Their power under Hua Guofeng was a challenge to former ally Deng Xiaoping, who saw to it that they were restricted to the oil industry.
But a brief history of the Oil Gang must start with a briefer history of petroleum production
We can start around a few decades into the twentieth century. The Nationalists are in power. They need oil because they are at war and because they need to industrialize.
They import their oil. It comes from Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony, later Mobil), the Asiatic Petroleum Company (Royal Dutch Shell, later Shell), and Texaco. Once the war with Japan began in earnest, it became difficult to maintain the flow.
That was when they turned to domestic reserves. There was not much. Some of the best reserves sat outside of Nationalist control: the Japanese were running shale gas operations in the Northeast and drilling for oil in Taiwan, and the oilfields in Xinjiang, developed by the Soviet Union, were under the control of the warlord Sheng Shicai. The oilfields in Gansu at Yumen became the best source.4 They kept the country going, along with limited imports. If the Americans had not intervened to end the war, it would not have kept them going much longer.5
The Japanese surrendered. The Nationalists fled the country four years later. And the Communist Party was left to solve the problem.
They had more breathing room than the Nationalists. With the Soviets on their side, they had access to oilfields in Xinjiang. There was no war to fight. The Ministry of Petroleum was given a People's Liberation Army division with eight thousand soldiers and told to dig. They took all the advisors and equipment that the Soviet Union could provide.
Nationwide surveys began. No significant reserves were tapped.
We arrive at Daqing, where everything changes
On September 26, 1959, oil began gushing out of a test well a hundred miles west of Harbin.6
This was wild territory. This was where Chinese colonists only established a foothold in the nineteenth century. This was forest and black soil.
The Soviet advisors were already gone.
This was the Great Leap Forward. Every effort was put toward developing Daqing. Equipment was rushed to the site. Railways started to be laid down. The Ministry of Petroleum had tens of thousands of workers drawn from the military. Thousands of technicians and oil workers from Xinjiang and Gansu scrambled to help. Students piled onto trains to drag pipe and build temporary quarters. They battled the mosquitoes, the mud, a freezing winter, and malnutrition. This was in the middle of a nationwide famine.7
By the end of 1963, Daqing had shipped out more than four million metric tons of crude oil. A refinery was built nearby. Construction began on a pipeline headed south.
This was a turning point in modern Chinese history. There was enough oil under Daqing to make petroleum self-sufficiency a reasonable dream. There was no need to go begging to the Soviets.
Exploration did not stop with Daqing. There were discoveries in Shengli in Shandong and Dagang in Tianjin. But Daqing had the largest reserves and had received the most concentrated development.
Daqing grew into a city and an industrial hub, drawing in a huge supply of industrial expertise and manpower.
It became a model for mass mobilization in industrialization, for self-sufficient development under the Communist Party, and for urban development.
A core group of petroleum industry bureaucrats formed in Daqing and around the project.
This core group was Yu Qiuli, Kang Shi'en, and Tang Ke. This is who I am going to be talking about, mostly. This is the Oil Gang, as far as I’m concerned.8
The Chairman calls on Yu Qiuli
Chinese politics at the end of the Great Leap Forward were in a strange period.
Mass mobilization in agriculture and industrialization were not a complete success. The Chairman seemed to step back.
In 1962, the pragmatists under Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, who had been sidelined during the Leap, were put in charge of steering the ship, with Zhou Enlai taking a larger role. They were not completely opposed to collectivization but saw that it could not be attempted universally and with limited mechanization. They rolled out a policy that looked something like the household responsibility system that would be introduced in the late 1970s. In industry, they did not hold to the Maoist idea of rapid development under the state, but adapted the idea of trusts—or tuōlāsī, or трест—from the Soviet New Economic Policy: industrial conglomerates would take direction from the state but maintain a degree of independence.
None of these ideas took root officially. Less than a year into the pragmatists appearing to take over, the Chairman mobilized his loyalists to carry out the Four Cleanups Movement. There was mass mobilization to cleanse the country of revisionism. This meant denunciation of bureaucrats, managers, and Party members for political crimes. The call went out: “Never forget class struggle.”
This campaign was not anywhere near as disruptive as the Leap was or the Cultural Revolution would be, but it served as a test of loyalty for the elite. Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi’s unenthusiastic response in 1963 and 1964 doomed them.
When the Chairman went in search of new ideas, he remembered Daqing.
He remembered the Petroleum Minister.
Yu Qiuli had the ideal class background and revolutionary record. He joined the Party in his early teens after fighting in a peasant uprising in Jiangxi. He was on the Long March. After he lost an arm in the fight against the Nationalists, he was sent to the Counter-Japanese Military and Political University in Yan’an. That was where he started his rise, re-entering the military as a political commissar. After 1949, he kept going up, winding up heading the Financial Department of the People's Liberation Army General Logistics Department.9 Recommended by Peng Dehuai, he took the Petroleum Minister job in 1958.
The Chairman liked that he had an alternative industrialization model to the pragmatists. Perhaps he liked that he didn't seem interested in maneuvering into leadership, either.
Yu Qiuli gave him a seat on the State Planning Commission in 1964. He was put in charge of the Third Five-Year Plan, working alongside Gu Mu, another former military political commissar, who had worked for the State Construction Commission since 1954.
The Chairman made sure that they focused on the Third Front, too. This was his scheme to relocate industrial capacity to the natural fortresses of the mountains of the Southwest, protecting them from any military strike. War was on the Chairman’s mind. Conflict with the Soviet Union was a possibility; the Gulf of Tonkin Incident signaled that the United States was going to enter Indochina. But so, even if the Soviets might manage to steam their way down into the Central Plains, or if the Americans came up along the coast, industrial capacity wouldn’t be compromised.
Kang Shi'en was put in charge of the Petroleum Ministry.
Compared to Yu Qiuli, Kang Shi'en's revolutionary credentials and family background were less than ideal. His grandfather was a livestock dealer and his father was a teacher and low-level bureaucrat. He joined the Communist Party at Qinghua, where he was studying geology. He had been in the oil business since 1949 and had run Daqing for Yu Qiuli since 1959.
Kang Shi’en and Yu Qiuli had a short window of opportunity to get anything done. Within two years of rising to their new positions, elite politics ground to a halt.
The Oil Gang against the Red Guards
Yu Qiuli had been brought in to challenge the pragmatists and the old guard under Zhou Enlai at the State Council. But that did not last long. Two years after taking his job, he found himself in the middle of a fight between the State Council and the Central Cultural Revolution Group under Jiang Qing.
He wasn’t an ally, but he had to keep on the good side of Jiang Qing. He knew that if he was taken down, Daqing would fall, too, since he was so closely associated with its success.
That meant staying on the good side of the Red Guards, too.
It turned out that the Red Guards enjoyed hanging out at an exhibition to the Daqing project. Maybe that was what got them thinking about Yu Qiuli. In December of 1966, Red Guards from Beijing Normal University sent a note to Yu, demanding a meeting. Mao Huahe recounts in his book how he met with Yu and Kang Shi’en and decided to stage a trip to the exhibition. They went the next morning:
At 10:00 that morning, when we arrived at the museum, a dozen Red Guards were waiting. Without going through the exhibition, they quickly surrounded Yu Qiuli. ... They listed three specific crimes: (1) Why was Liu Shaoqi’s photo in the exhibition? … (2) Why was Vice Chairman Lin Biao’s photo not in the exhibition? … (3) Why did the gift shop sell Liu Shaoqi’s pernicious book …? … Yu Qiuli remained silent. One Red Guard pressed sternly, “Have you seen the exhibition?” Yu timidly replied: “I have not.” I was flabbergasted. I knew for a fact that Yu Qiuli had come more than once.
The meeting was hastily ended; it had lasted less than 20 minutes. Three days later, pamphlets appeared in the streets of Beijing, claiming that Chen Boda, the team leader of the CCP Central Committee Cultural Revolution Team, met with the Red Guard representatives of Beijing Normal University and publicly announced that Yu Qiuli had told lies.
Yu Qiuli’s military history, class background, and support from Zhou Enlai and the Chairman kept him from being purged. But he suffered intense public criticism, including denunciation by Jiang Qing herself at a 1969 rally.10
Kang Shi’en was even less fortunate. Like Yu, he was criticized by Jiang Qing and Lin Biao and their loyalists, and harassed by Red Guards, but he also faced a revolt from within the Ministry, from workers and technicians at Daqing, and from petroleum sector employees around the country.11
In the end, the infighting at the Petroleum Ministry was resolved by the Military Control Commission taking over.12 Although they were expected to restore order, they did it by turning against Kang Shi'en. They replaced his loyalists with People’s Liberation Army officers loyal to Jiang Qing and Lin Biao. In the end, Kang Shi’en was relieved of his duties.
The potency of Daqing as a model faded.
Work slowed. Ongoing projects weren’t cancelled. Oil kept coming out of the ground.
No new development could be pursued. Surveys had found significant oil reserves in Jianghan in Hubei around 1965. The Ministry submitted plans to the State Council for it to be the target of another mass mobilization campaign, similar to that for Daqing. But it had to be set aside.
Oil Gang and oil shock
By 1969, things were getting back to normal.
The radicals were finding it hard to mobilize, which had been a key weapon in the struggle; Red Guards were being sent down to the countryside, and the Workers' Propaganda Teams and the military were being used to shut down any organization that risked disrupting social order. Answering the calls of Zhou Enlai and Lin Biao, who had turned on Jiang Qing, the Chairman withdrew his support for excesses.
Zhou Enlai and his loyalists were regaining power.
Kang Shi'en was personally summoned back to work by Zhou, and the the two of them met with Yu Qiuli and came up with a plan to get the Jianghan project underway.
It could not be mass mobilization in the old style, they decided. That would be too chaotic. It would invite meddling by the rebels. It had to be separate, too, from the Military Control Commission that held the Ministry of Petroleum. If the PLA was involved, it had to be beyond the influence of Lin Biao.
It was decided that the Jianghan drilling be under the command of the Wuhan Military Region. Han Dongshan of the PLA was nominally in charge of the operation, with Kang Shi’en giving the orders, advised by Yu Qiuli in Beijing.
Workers from oilfields around the country were assembled under the command of PLA officers. Armed troops guarded the technicians and workers from the rebels.13 The goal was to get oil out of the ground without any struggle sessions denouncing the management as capitalist roaders.
It was after Jianghan that Kang and Yu began rebuilding their influence.
In 1970, Zhou Enlai pushed further. He enjoyed the fullest support of the Chairman, who wanted him to build up his power base to counter a challenge from Lin Biao. He began rehabilitating purged bureaucrats and ordered major reorganizations of the bureaucracy.
These had the effect of placing the Oil Gang at the center of state planning.
Yu Qiuli stayed on at the State Planning Commission, which had expanded to include the State Economic Commission, the Office of Industry and Transportation, the Bureau of Material Supplies, the Ministry of Geology, the Ministry of Labor, the State Statistical Bureau, and the Central Relocation Office.
Kang Shi’en took up a post as the head of the Ministry of Fuels and Chemistry Industry, which included the Ministry of Petroleum, the Ministry of the Chemical Industry, and the Ministry of Coal.
For his second-in-command, he chose Tang Ke. A veteran of the petroleum industry, Tang had been head of the Geological Exploration Bureau when oil was discovered in Daqing, and had become a close ally of Kang Shi’en.
Gu Mu, who had worked with Yu Qiuli at the State Planning Commission, returned to his post at the State Construction Commission, where he would oversee an integration of the Ministry of Building Construction and the Ministry of Construction Materials.14
The four men at the top of the petroleum industry became close advisors to Zhou Enlai and eventually Deng Xiaoping, who had been rehabilitated after Lin Biao’s death.
The biggest problem they faced was in revitalizing the industrial economy. The Oil Gang supported an infusion of foreign technology to do it, which would make possible an import substitution program.
In 1972, Yu Qiuli collaborated with Li Xiannian and Hua Guofeng on a report advising the importation of chemical fiber and fertilizer plants. This expanded into a larger buy:
Later in 1972, Zhou approved the import of fourteen additional chemical fiber and fertilizer turnkey plants worth $3.3 billion. In addition, contracts were signed to import iron works from Japan's Hitachi Engineering, a small steel mill from Japan's Sumitomo Metal, and a steel-rolling plant from Wester Germany's Demag AG, as well as quite a few power plants from Japan (valued at $43 million), the USSR (valued at $24.5 million), France (valued at $10 million), the United Kingdom (valued at $8.4 million), Sweden (valued at $4 million), Italy (valued at $1.7 million), and Switzerland. These contracts marked a revival for the first time since the early 1960s of the import substitution development program.15
This expanded even further, directed by reports from Yu Qiuli to the State Council, running up a bill of around four billion.
It was paid for in large part with oil exports.
Three things came together at the same time to make this possible.
First: there was a surplus of crude oil. Production went from six million metric tons a year in 1963 to fifty-five million metric tons in 1973.16 The slowdown in industry and supply chain chaos caused by Cultural Revolution mobilization reduced the domestic energy appetite. And production had increased so rapidly that there was no way to keep up with the construction of refining facilities.
Second: détente. After Nixon’s visit in 1972, China found it much easier to import foreign technology and sell their resources.
Third: the 1973 oil shock. The United States had let their domestic oil production fall, which put the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in the position to use oil as leverage. When the Americans didn’t blink and backed Israel in the Yom Kippur War, OPEC cut production and put an embargo on oil exports to the United States and allies. Global oil prices spiked.
Shortly after Richard Nixon left Beijing, Japan normalized relations with China, too. It happened that they were suddenly in the market for oil. They ordered a million metric tons of Daqing crude.
The Oil Gang made sure that they were recycling some of this back into their own industry. Apart from turnkey chemical and manufacturing facilities, equipment for offshore drilling in the Bohai was also purchased.
The scheme of foreign technology and import substitution was expanded to a larger program still, called the Four-Three Plan, which would see big purchases of manufacturing equipment from the United States.
This is when the Gang of Four threw everything they had at a final campaign. They could see which way the wind was blowing. The end was coming soon, one way or another. In case there was a succession struggle, they wanted to be in the position to seize power. The Chairman was in poor health and Zhou Enlai was dying of cancer. Deng Xiaoping and other Zhou allies were vulnerable. The stated targets of this final push were Lin Biao, already dead for several years, and Confucius, already dead for two millennia; the implied target was Deng Xiaoping; and the real targets were Zhou Enlai and his allies, including Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and the petroleum clique. The rallies started up again. Industrial output was smashed.17 But perhaps everyone was weary of the endless campaigns, and perhaps Zhou Enlai and his allies were strong enough to prevail over the Gang of Four, and perhaps enough people could predict how the succession struggle would play out.
In the end, Zhou Enlai got his way. He revived the Four Modernizations that had been shelved since 1963. The Four-Three Plan went ahead. His lieutenants drafted a scheme to shift from large-scale self-sufficient industrial policy to import substitution. The Ten-Year National Economic Development Plan Outline for 1976 to 1985 called for opening up to the capitalist world.
The petroleum clique supported the plan. They believed foreign technology would allow them to open up more reserves.
Yu Qiuli was raised to the position of Vice Premier.
Zhou Enlai died. The Chairman died. The Gang of Four were arrested. Hua Guofeng took over.
The Oil Gang takes over, then Deng Xiaoping takes over
Chairman Hua was not an Oil Gang man, but he was on board with their plans.
Yu Qiuli became a close advisor to the new Chairman and headed up the State Planning Commission. Kang Shi'en moved to positions on the State Council and the State Economic Commission. Tang Ke moved up to take Kang Shi’en’s old positions. There were also significant promotions for allies of those three men, including Song Zhenming, who moved up to the Petroleum Ministry from a job as Party Secretary in Daqing, Sun Jinwen, formerly a Deputy Minister under Tang Ke. Gu Mu became a Vice-Premier and headed the State Import and Export Administration, as well as holding a position on the new Financial and Economic Commission.
Daqing was revived again in propaganda in 1977, becoming a national model for industrial communities. Chairman Hua endorsed Kang Shi’en’s proposal to build dozens of Daqings.
Chairman Hua had worked in the past with Yu Qiuli on planning and his own Ten-Year Plan for Developing the National Economy was a continuation of this. The goal was rapid industrialization with foreign technology, serving an extensive import substitution program, buoyed with sales of crude.
As usual, the timelines on these things are tight. The cycles were brief: the pragmatists got a year before the Four Cleanups, Yu Qiuli got two years before the Gang of Four started meddling in state planning, and the Oil Gang got two before a coalition started forming against them.
On the economic planning side, there was consensus building in the liberal think tanks under Deng Xiaoping, as well as among surviving pragmatists, that they were not sustainable.
In 1975, approximately 14 percent of total national capital construction investment was devoted to the 4-3 Plan. By 1976, this percentage had grown to 21 percent… The large-scale import substitution strategy thus placed a heavy burden on the entire economy. … The central government planned to withhold RMB 2 billion from the localities and incur a $10 billion foreign exchange deficit.
More ominously, the import substitution projects already in operation were not profitable. Approximately two-thirds of … import substitution projects were losing money… These industrial losses in part were attributed to slow construction schedules caused by the 1974-76 political campaign, the scarcity of building materials, and the delay of domestically supplied equipment. In addition, in certain cases the state lacked the appropriate technology, imported defective material, or duplicated existing capacity.18
On top of this, oil exports could no longer make up for the shortfall. Agriculture, increasingly intensive and mechanized in the late 1970s, was taking more fuel,19 as was industry. By 1979, the State Planning Commission noted widespread shortages of fuel.20 There was nothing left to export.
Deng Xiaoping knew that he had to sideline Hua Guofeng and the Oil Gang.
Deng moved against Chairman Hua first. After 1978, he was no longer a factor.
That meant that he could modify the economic plan to with readjustments to avoid "proportional imbalances."21 The import substitution scheme was not completely abandoned, but its scope was reduced.
The problem was the relative power of Yu Qiuli. Chairman Hua had put him in charge of the State Planning Commission's Small Group on Importation of New Technology, which was leading strategy on the Four-Three Plan and the Chairman’s own plan for import substitution and technology transfer, and Deng had previously given him a position on the Small Leadership Group on Imports and Exports, so he still had a large say in foreign economic policy. He would not tolerate extensive modification of the plans he had formulated. Deng ordered the two groups dissolved and replaced with the Foreign Investment Control Commission and the State Import-Export Administrative Commission, with no role for Yu Qiuli.
Deng also began an attack on the Daqing model. This was something that might have rankled him since the early 1960s, when his industrialization model was tossed in favor of Daqing. In a tour of the Northeast in September of 1978, he stopped off at the oil city for a tour. In a speech there, he seemed to bring up some of the complaints of workers from the Cultural Revolution, expressing dismay at the tough conditions they had been forced to labor under. This touched off a campaign to criticize the petroleum industry's slogan of "production before livelihood."22
Deng’s best shot at wiping out the Oil Gang came in late 1979.
Deng Xiaoping’s dirty tricks
In the early morning on November 25th, 1979, a drilling platform capsized in the Bohai, killing seventy-two of the seventy-four workers and resulting in a total loss of the rig.
The Offshore Oil Exploration Bureau reported the incident to Petroleum Minister Song Zhenming later that day. The next morning, Kang Shi’en and Song sent a formal report to Vice Premier Li Xiannian.
Details were not released to the public until the summer of 1980, when the case went in front of a judge.
Reports on the accident and the resulting investigation focused on widespread mismanagement and neglect of regulations:
On November 12 last year, the said bureau decided that the platform should move to a new drilling point. ... [T]he head of the oil rig radioed the bureau headquarters three times and made three requests, one of which was that three tugboats be sent to tow the platform to ensure safety and speed. The headquarters, however, decided to send only one 8,000-h.p. tugboat and ignored the other request.
On the early morning of November 24, the day of departure, there were warnings of a gale in the area... But the headquarters did not give orders that the towing operation be postponed. ... In the wee hours of November 25, gale-force winds rose and pounded the platform, breaking a ventilating duct. Water poured in and the oil rig soon submerged.
Preliminary investigation showed that the towing operation was not carried out according to the instructions laid down by the shipyard ... and the operational rules of the bureau.23
The blame was squarely placed on the men at the top of the Offshore Oil Exploration Bureau and the Petroleum Ministry.
Song Zhenming was fired.24
Kang Shi'en was censured.25
Yu Qiuli lost his position at the head of the State Planning Commission.26
Discipline
None of the three men was destroyed by the campaign against the Oil Gang.
Song Zhenming was given a minor job within the Petroleum Ministry.
Kang Shi'en was sent back down to replace him as Minister of Petroleum. After a few years, the Ministry was given to Tang Ke, and Kang Shi’en began floating back up again.
Yu Qiuli stuck around, even making it onto the Central Advisory Commission.
Not all of their projects were immediately rejected. They could still be called on to advise and direct, if not guide independently the petroleum industry. Their experience was indispensable, and they had built up important relationships with foreign oil firms. Some associated with the Oil Gang, like Gu Mu, went about their business as usual.
But discipline was established. The Oil Gang was no longer able to dictate or interfere with economic policy.
Politics and the oil business shifted away from them, anyways. These were not young men. Maybe they were relieved to be able to enter retirement without worrying about factional fights.
He suggests going back further to the struggles after the Great Leap Forward, actually. Here, he says, the political struggles start being subsumed into factional warfare and fighting between elements of the bureaucracy. He quotes from Alessandro Russo’s "How to Translate 'Cultural Revolution,'" which talks about the crisis of the 1960s providing an opening for debate and “multiple forms of organization” (I’m quoting Wang Hui summarizing Russo), but also the re-entry of the state.
They could be called the First Oil Gang to differentiate them from a related but separate group that emerged in Chinese politics in the 2000s and fell in Xi Jinping’s move against PetroChina corruption. Or: the Petroleum Clique, the Petro Party, the Petroleum Group (this is what Lawrence G. Reardon uses), the Daqing oilers, “the hydrocarbon men” (this is tossed off by Hou Li), shíyóubāng…
The story of Deng Xiaoping agains the Oil Gang works even better than Deng Xiaoping taking out Hua Guofeng, who officially succeeded the Chairman. It’s wrong to write Hua off as a bumbler that lucked into his job or an avatar for more powerful forces, but it seems clear that was willing to vacate the position without a fight.
For the history of this period of time, I am drawing on The Ebb and Flow of Chinese Petroleum: A Story Told by a Witness, Mao Huahe, translated by Mao Yiran and Thomas Seay.
Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State, Hou Li: “By 1949 only the Yumen Oil Field was sustaining industrial production in China. It had survived China’s crisis during the war years, but it hardly met the country’s needs for a massive transformation.”
Here, again, I am drawing on Building for Oil. It’s the best book I’ve found about the petroleum industry in China and the formation of the petroleum clique. It’s a wonderful book, actually, readable and not overly academic.
Through 1960 and for most of 1961, it became hard to procure enough food to send to Daqing. There was a famine going on. Mao Huahe’s book is a good source for this, since he was there (and present for most of the events he writes about, whether they took place in Daqing or Beijing). In 1960, he was diagnosed with edema, probably from a lack of protein. His rations were increased to fifty grams of meat per day. He writes: “Throughout the whole campaign, no one died of hunger. People endured the crises, and the campaign persisted against great odds.” By 1961, the situation had stabilized and gardens were being planted around the oilfields: “In the fall of 1961, 3.04 million jin (1 jin = 0.5 kg) of beans and 13 million jin of vegetables were harvested.”
As far as I’m concerned. There are more complicated webs to be drawn. Mine is a simplified Oil Gang. Apart from these three men, I think, there are many other petrochemical industry bureaucrats that could be included. I think Song Zhenming is one of them. He hasn’t appeared in the narrative by the time you’re reading this note. Neither has Gu Mu, who has nothing to do with oil but becomes a Yu Qiuli ally. For a more extensive description of possible Oil Gang inclusions, I recommend Policy Making in China: Leaders Structures, and Processes by Kenneth Lieberthal and Michel Oksenberg. I can’t find their list right now, but it includes a number of names that don’t pop up in other books, like Lin Hujia, a politician from Zhejiang that eventually went on to be Minister of Agriculture, who happened to work with Yu Qiuli on state planning in the 1970s.
This account of Yu Qiuli’s rise is from Building for Oil, but it is hard to quickly confirm certain facts, partly because, like everyone else, he switched job titles frequently in the early 1950s as military branches and civilian ministries and departments were rapidly created or integrated.
Given his impeccable background and revolutionary credentials, on what grounds could she criticize Yu Qiuli? She denounced him as a "henchman" of He Long. That requires some explanation. He Long was a military man that joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. After Liberation, He Long fell afoul of the Chairman after trying to save Peng Dehuai from a purge. When the Cultural Revolution began, He Long was denounced as a rightist. Shortly after the mass rally where Yu was denounced, He Long died from complications after being hospitalized for malnutrition suffered while under house arrest.
The criticisms from petroleum workers are worth further discussion. They were part of a larger debate about the role of management and a quest for post-Fordist, post-Taylorist indigenous management techniques. The Anshan Steel Constitution was one several examples of this put into practice, promoting a three-in-one combination of technicians, management, and worker on the same tasks. At Daqing and around the petroleum industry, things tended to be run a bit tighter. Some of the oilfields and production facilities were built under the Soviets and retained the same management style, and others were run along more military lines, mimicking the People’s Liberation Army. Much of the worker dissatisfaction was expressed in the revolutionary language of the times, but it often came down to the same things factory workers strike for now—more of a role in management decisions, fairer compensation, shorter hours, and more free time. Again, Mao Huahe’s book is a good source for personal anecdotes. One of his beefs was that they had ten-day work weeks, with only a single day off.
This system of military command over civilian affairs had been abolished in 1953. But it was revived in 1968 after the January Revolution of 1967, when Red Guard groups began seizing government offices. It was originally intended as a way to drive out radicals and protect the functioning of the government, but it also fell victim to factional infighting.
They also guarded Kang Shi’en. I like these anecdotes from Mao Huahe, as you can tell. He was there in Hubei, too. This is what he saw:
In 1969, among the oil workers who had come from different parts of the country, there were numerous political factions. A minority among them claimed to be rebels. … Whenever Kang Shi’en went to a work site, some of these people from the rebel factions would say, “Your arrival is so timely, for you are the biggest capitalist roader in the Ministry of Petroleum. In the past, we couldn’t criticize you even if we wanted, but today we’ll have an on-site criticism meeting.” When the upright Zhang Xianyang learned of this, he was furious: “These people are complete outlaws. Kang Shi’en was sent by the State Council to be in charge of the oil campaign. In the future, if such things happen again, I won’t be so civil.” Meanwhile, he told Kang, “Old Kang, to tell you the truth, when it comes to fighting a war we here are okay, but when it comes to finding oil, it’s all up to you oil experts. Just do your job and be bold about it. Commander Han and I will escort you and protect you along the way.”
The description of the reorganization of the reorganization as it affected Yu, Kang, and Gu is taken almost directly from Building for Oil, just organized in a way that works better in this entry.
This is from The Reluctant Dragon: Crisis Cycles in Chinese Foreign Economic Policy, Lawrence G. Reardon. This is one of the best books to understand the role of Oil Gang executives in decisionmaking in the 1970s.
These numbers come from "China's Petroleum Trade," Lee Hong-pyo, who is adapting them from Economic Development and Social Change in the People's Republic of China, Willy Kraus, and China's Economy in Global Perspective, Doak Barnett.
Lawrence G. Reardon has more on this. He says:
At the April 1974 Conference on Grasping the Revolution and Promoting Production, ten State Council ministers reported serious problems in the production, energy, and transportation sectors. During the first quarter, steel production was estimated to be short by 830,000 tons; raw coal production by 2.45 million; washed coal by 930,000; chemical fertilizer by 830,000; and railroad transport tonnage by 8 million. Such economic deterioration continued through the second quarter, and only moderated after August 1974.
This is from The Reluctant Dragon.
"The Problems of China's Oil Industry and its Prospects for the Future" (PDF), Michael G. Gallagher:
Unfortunately for the Chinese, energy consumption took a major jump in the mid-1970s due to a large increase in grain production. Chinese grain output shot up 15%, mostly due to a 26% boost in energy consumption by Chinese farmers. Most of this energy increase went to power new tractors and to provide raw materials for increased amounts of chemical fertilizer. Apparently this sudden spurt in agriculture, coupled with other factors ... helped to push China into an energy deficit situation.
Reardon says that in 1979 “the State Planning Commission estimated a 15 million ton shortage of fuel, a 1 million ton shortage of concrete, and 75,000 square meter shortage of lumber.”
Again, Reardon:
Expanding upon Chen Yun's 21 March speech, Li Xiannian specified five "proportional imbalances in his work conference speech: (1) between agriculture and industry, (2) between light and heavy industry, (3) between the fuel and power industry and other industries, (4) between accumulation and consumption, and (5) between employment and lack thereof.
I am being brief here. This slogan and the campaign against it are discussed at length in The Ebb and Flow of Chinese Petroleum. Deng Xiaoping’s September tour and the general campaign against Daqing as a model is covered in Building for Oil, as well.
This is from the August 4th issue of Beijing Review, taken from reporting in the People's Daily and Worker's Daily.
The Ebb and Flow of Chinese Petroleum has much more background on Song Zhenming in particular. As I said, Mao Huahe knew all of these people personally, so this is more reliable than gossip.
Hu Yaobang was particularly disturbed by how the funeral for the Bohai oil rig workers had been carried out, Mao reports. They were lavish celebrations, supposedly. Hu Yaobang was also upset about Song erecting stone steles to celebrate the visit of Hua Guofeng in 1977.
Song personally insulted Cai Chang, head of the All-China Women's federation, and Kang Keqing, the widow of Zhu De, at a banquet in Beijing. They went to Chen Yun to lodge a formal complaint. Chen Yun vowed to fire him. No date is given. Details of the offense are not given.
When Song was promoted to Minister of Petroleum in 1978, he transferred workers from Daqing to Beijing to dig a cellar for his hutong house. The excavation happened to sever a dedicated municipal government telephone line.
Song hung out with murderers. In November of 1978, his personal chauffeur borrowed a Ministry of Petroleum car and drove to Beijing Station. This was Li Bendong’s habit. He lured young women into his car and raped them. In this case, the victim was a young woman returning from an enforced stay in the countryside, on her way to Shanghai to get married. She fought back against Li. He beat her to death with a hammer and dumped the body in the woods. Li got the death penalty.
Again, Mao Huahe is a good source of gossip. Kang Shi’en’s official censure was supposedly handled by Bo Yibo, father of Bo Xilai. The two men had history:
…[I]n the summer of 1967, when Bo Yibo was escorted to the Ministry of Petroleum to be denounced at a mass meeting … Kang Shi’en publicly exposed what Bo Yibo had said about Daqing: that the oil campaign was like a big melee, and that Chairman Mao’s favoritism towards Daqing was like that of the Tang Emperor Xuanzong’s favoring Yang Yuhuan over his 3,000 other concubines. Bo Yibo meant basically that Chairman Mao favored the oil industry above the others—but Kang Shi’en accused him as “being against the red banner of Daqing” and “being against Chairman Mao.”
This was not explicitly related to the Bohai incident but down to his stubbornness on economic foreign policy readjustment and the general campaign against the Oil Gang.