After this period a series of major policy changes took place, which led to a series of tragedies that caused China to lag behind internationally and the people's standard of living to fall. In fact, the most significant damage to China was caused by ignorant, narrow-minded political movements, which eroded the self-respect that China had only just rediscovered after the Opium War. This is also one of the reasons why today's Chinese have this unhealthy obsession with things foreign.
XINRAN: Do you think that this situation was the result of limited knowledge, or political expediency, or was it due to economic conditions?
YOU: The damage done to the people and to China's non-state-run enterprises between 1958 and the end of the Cultural Revolution is impossible to calculate. I believe that this historical mistake was primarily due to limited knowledge on the part of the leaders. After a long period of making revolution, class struggle was all they knew, they knew nothing about production, and in the end political mistakes were made. I can't say much about anti-rightism, rightist tendencies and the rightist movement, I didn't have much to do with those, but my guess is that it was a political struggle, a struggle for power. The main reason was the major leaders lacked the knowledge necessary to manage a country – at that time hardly anybody in the government had any real understanding of economics. Deng Xiaoping and others like him had studied abroad in France, but they did not hold the dominant positions, and in my personal opinion Zhou Enlai never held a dominant position either. There are all kinds of reasons why China suffered an identity crisis after the Three Great Mountains were gone, but what it boils down to is a lack of sufficient knowledge on the part of the leaders. Nobody dared to say it in the past, but there was a tacit understanding; actually we have not yet opened up sufficiently to discuss this issue now either.
Chinese people still have their Chinese strength of will: if mistakes have been made, then they rectify them. China's luck hasn't been that bad really; once Deng Xiaoping was released, he took facts as his starting point, and reversed all the wrongful verdicts on the people who had contributed so much to the revolution.
XINRAN: From the vantage point of a high-level national manager, do you still have the same concerns about development now? Are the management and policymaking levels of government limited by their lack of international knowledge?
YOU: In my view there are limitations – I'm not saying with everybody, but they are making an effort to put things to rights. In my estimation, it won't require too much work to put matters straight. For example, Deng Xiaoping implemented the Reform and Opening [the opening up of China to the West], which made a great contribution to China's economic development, but in terms of the nation as a whole, imbalances have emerged, and many places still have a lot of problems. Take the heavy industrial areas of the north-east, and the big expansion of the economy in the western region, these are all long-term matters, not something you can sort out in a day. The new generation of leaders has great resolve; they have enlarged the Great North-Western Region, incorporating the big, wealthy cities of Chongqing and Chengdu into the western regions. Urumqi used to be a tiny city with just two streets, now it's the biggest city in the north-west, and after Urumqi they're going to start opening up Yinchuan [the capital city of Ningxia, one of the very poor, arid areas where the Yous prospected for oil]. In other words, by following the policy guidelines laid down by Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin has achieved a certain level of development, and we now have a chance to re-establish the national pride we lost in the political movements and the Cultural Revolution.
But objectively speaking, the ability of Jiang Zemin and the leaders and cadres who came before him to plan the economy was severely limited, they lacked knowledge of global society. I have more confidence in the system of the current leaders, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao. Why? Because they are tackling the issues that the people really feel they need. First there is the "Harmonious Society",*3 a concept that has already been extended to foreign relations; how much time we Chinese have wasted with our internal squabbles and external conflicts, how many wasted lives. The second thing is their idea that "people are the key": in our thousands of years of history it was always power that was the key, this is why we have never had true, meaningful respect for the common people. But it's the third thing that has won the most hearts: solving the problems of China's peasants.
In the past the Party and government used to make a song and dance about how peasants were the key, but in fact it was still the peasants who suffered most! Now it's much better, they have solved a good many of the peasants' problems in small places like Hezheng. There has been a widespread change to high-yield fields here, whereas in the past they would have sown low-yield wheat, beans and the like; oilseed rape used to sell for a few jiao, and now it's three and a half yuan a kilo. This has improved the standard of living for the peasants who grow the crops. Many city people believe that peasants are nothing to do with them, but that's not so! In the cities it's peasant migrant workers who build houses and do all the low-status work. If you don't take the peasants, the vast majority of the population, into consideration when attempting to solve China's problems, then it's never going to work. You won't catch me going with the cadres to view those "advanced experimental areas", listen to "model reports" or any of that stuff. I just want to visit the grass-roots levels, to hear what those peasants who can never leave their land have to say. China is a big agricultural nation; without the peasants as a stable foundation, the landscape of the nation which we have developed with such suffering will not be stable or harmonious. If the peasants don't have a decent life, our national self-confidence is vain and empty. It is the responsibility of a nation to bring harmony, wealth and equality to its people.
XINRAN: I have three final questions. First, young people nowadays consider that of the last two generations, one generation was foolish and ignorant and the other was foolishly loyal. What do you think? Are they right?
YOU: What angle should I look at this from? Have these people studied any advanced cultural knowledge? How much do they know about history, and what is necessary to set up a nation? I think that those young people are wrong.
XINRAN: Second, if you could choose, would you have your time over again?
YOU: Let's leave that one, you're talking about something impossible.
XINRAN: Third question then. Can you tell me about one or two things you remember best from your childhood?
YOU: This is an easy question for me; to this day I've never forgotten the things from my childhood. I'll give you two examples. When I was in primary school, our school only had fourteen uniforms, so anyone who wanted to be in the Boys' Army had to be a good student, one of the top ten in the class, they had to love study, and they had to love labour. I really wanted a uniform; it was made of khaki cloth, similar to foreign clothes, the kind the American soldiers wore. But to wear that uniform I had to pay a deposit of three yuan. I thought hard about it, and finally I begged my family for the three yuan, with tears in my eyes. It was a fine feeling, putting on that army outfit! Every day when school was out, the Boys' Army left first, leading the way, with the ordinary students following on behind, it really gave you a feeling of achievement. When I got home I used to quickly take it off, fold it up very neatly and put it away. This is one of the deepest impressions of my childhood.
The second was during the Anti-Japanese War, when we held a collection for the soldiers at the front line, and every family made an effort for those soldiers. But later on I saw the head of our police bureau giving a speech, ranting and waving his arms around, and he was wearing some of the things we had donated. I thought: Aiya, we've been had, they never sent our gifts to the front line, they took them for themselves! At that moment I decided: If I'm a big official some day, I will never, ever be corrupt. These are the two deepest impressions from my childhood.
XINRAN: Teacher You, do you have any unfulfilled wishes?
YOU: Ah, unfulfilled wishes . . . personally, yes. I'm more ash
amed and guilty about my children than anything else. I never gave them a chance to get a proper education. This is my greatest regret.
XINRAN: Now there's hope for your grandchildren.
YOU: Yes! There's hope for the grandchildren! We devote our time to them now, but that's my biggest regret!
*
At that moment we heard a voice in the courtyard calling out for supper.
And so we concluded that day's interview. I prayed for this elderly couple, hoping that these confidences could bring them a measure of peace and comfort. They truly had given their all to China – their own youth, their children's chances in life; how many mothers and fathers in the world would sacrifice their own children's happiness on the altar of a political party or a nation?
The following morning, before we took our leave, I had two more long discussions with Teacher You, in the course of a morning walk and a picnic at noon. This mainly involved me listening to his analysis of the current state of China's petroleum.
*
XINRAN: Teacher You, within the limits of what is permitted, can you tell me in a simple way about China's earliest oil resources?
YOU: Before 1949, China had very little oil; there were only three oilfields in three places. One was the Yanchang oil deposit in northern Shaanxi, an old oil deposit, started in the last years of the Qing dynasty. Another was the Yumen oilfield in Gansu, and the third was the Dushanzi oil deposit in Xinjiang, which we had only just started to develop with Soviet help, we hadn't started extracting. The total value of all three was less than 150,000 tonnes a year.
Before the Liberation we relied mainly on the American company Mobil; as a nation we were dependent on them. After Liberation we only imported Soviet oil for political reasons. The Soviets helped China develop a petroleum industry; they were the ones to suggest recruiting China's physics students as geological prospectors for oil, and the Chinese government did as they suggested, so production levels were somewhat higher in the first ten years after Liberation; with the discovery of the big Kelamayi oilfield, production rose from 150,000 tonnes to 500,000 tonnes.
At that time, when the Petroleum Ministry held its yearly Oil Prospecting Conference in Beijing, there would barely be a hundred key workers present. Many geologists were posted to Daqing in the north-east; at that time oil work was really tough, it's impossible to describe how hard that time was. The centre told us to stick it out for four more years, and bring Daqing to heel! It was tough, but we just kept on working.
After opening up Daqing, we discovered the Shengli oilfield in Shandong, and the North China oilfield. This was when Chinese geological prospecting really took off and China's petroleum started to develop; come the sixties, China was no longer dependent on oil imports, and we didn't start importing again until after the eighties, when we found ourselves developing too quickly. In the seventies our production increased again, to nearly 700,000,000 tonnes. We could easily supply our own needs, and we started to export petroleum to North Korea and Japan.
XINRAN: I saw a news report recently on the possibility that a Russo-Japanese oil pipeline will pass through Chinese territory. Am I right in thinking this is closely connected with the future of our oil supply?
YOU: The best option for China would have been transportation by pipeline, that is, using a pipeline to transport the oil resources of neighbouring countries, thereby lessening China's dependence on oil from the Central Asian region and transportation via the Malacca Straits. The Archangelsk–Daqing Line that would have linked China and Russia collapsed in mysterious circumstances at the last moment, and this cast a heavy shadow over prospects of a pipeline in China's oil strategy.
XINRAN: Do you believe that this "loss" was due to pressure from America and Japan, or was it a Russian manoeuvre? Or was it a problem with our negotiators?
YOU: You could say that it's all of these. Oil is a part of politics now, this is clear to see from international relations, and it's very dangerous.
XINRAN: When did China start having plans for prospecting in Africa? And when did we begin diplomatic relations with the Middle East? When did we start to concern ourselves with Middle Eastern oil reserves?
YOU: Over 50 per cent of our oil imports come from the Middle East; very early on that region became an area of high demand for both oil and weapons. Central Asia accounts for about 30 per cent, and then comes Africa, which produces approximately 20 per cent of China's total crude oil imports. We are now officially trying to get into a few "sidelined and occupied areas". Our main attack is on two fronts: one is Africa, in particular North Africa; the other is the South American region, that's places like Cuba.
In a few months' time China will hold a summit with the heads of forty-eight African nations in Beijing. This will be a forum for Chinese–African cooperation, in which plans will be made for the period between 2007 and 2009, to ensure the future of Chinese–African oil cooperation. The fiftieth anniversary of China's opening diplomatic relations with African countries is in 2006, and it is also the tenth anniversary of the China Petroleum Corporation officially entering Africa on a large scale to develop oil and gas. China's leaders hope to create as quickly as possible a situation in which the African economy will be inseparable from China's oil investment. Africa's oil reserves can safeguard China's energy reserves.
XINRAN: Why are all the brains in the oil world thinking up plans for Africa?
YOU: If you follow the Gulf of Guinea south on an atlas you will see a group of African countries all marked with the sign for oil – that includes Equatorial Guinea, Gabon and the Congo, all the way down to Angola in the south. A whole series of new oilfields with rich potential have been discovered in the Sahara Desert in North Africa, Sudan in East Africa and Chad in Central Africa.
In Africa's history, petroleum came after gold, ivory and slaves; it was seen as another of the "black" treasures of the African continent. Over a period of decades, just about all of the Western oil magnates have invested large sums in Africa. China Petroleum has had forty-four prospecting and development projects in twenty countries in ten years, with thirteen of those countries in North and West Africa.
Just before oil prices started to rise, Africa became another storehouse of oil for the whole world, a possible successor to the Middle East. But, after decades of prospecting, how much virgin territory is there left in Africa to open up? Between oil giants like ExxonMobil, Shell, Total and the others, what opportunities will China Petroleum still be able to find? This is actually a challenge to China's prospecting technology and transportation capability.
XINRAN: Are you worried about China's prospecting capability?
YOU: In many aspects of prospecting and development, China Petroleum has already reached the world standard (in areas such as passive rift valley basin natural gas theory, integrated prospecting technology, fine-scale imaging of oil reserves and so on. China's oil prospecting is still at the middle-mature stage, and our oil reserves are still in the high basic value, stable growth period), but the difficulty of prospecting is increasing all the time. Generally speaking, China's top oilfields are entering a period of decline, and achieving stable production is becoming increasingly difficult.
China's oil needs are skyrocketing, and this has been perceived as a key reason for the major inflation of international oil prices in recent years. China has already replaced Japan as the world's second biggest consumer of oil (second only to the United States); it is estimated that in less than ten years China's oil needs will have increased from 6,000,000 tonnes a day to 11,500,000 tonnes a day. Our oil reserves are seriously inadequate, and in fourteen years' time China's oil may very well be exhausted. This dramatic transformation from the oil exporter of former years to a major oil-importing nation has already become a "bottleneck" in our development. It is predicted that by 2020 at least 60 per cent of our oil will have to come from imports. To bring our prospecting ability up to a level where it can contend with the world's established high-tech oil nations in fourteen ye
ars will be no easy task.
XINRAN: If we can't make it in time on the harvesting front, do you worry about the transportation of oil imports?
YOU: Our country's fleet of oil tankers in the Far East is pitifully small; this does not sit well with constantly increasing oil imports. Over 90 per cent of our country's oil imports have to be transported by sea, and 90 per cent of this seaborne oil is transported in foreign tankers. This leads to another even more serious question: the human factor – it is people who are in charge of our nation's oil security. In order to safeguard our nation's energy reserves, China Ocean Shipping (Group) Company is currently building a world-class oil tanker fleet.
XINRAN: Apart from worries about prospecting, harvesting and sea transportation, do you consider that there are any more urgent tasks for Chinese oil?
YOU: I'm not worried about our oil diplomacy with other nations; we can stand aside and let them fight it out between them. But our internal structure and systems of organisation are cause for concern. In 1998, as part of our country's reforms of the petroleum industry, the original single company was split up into the three companies we have today, in the hope of stimulating competition. But today there is no sign of the results they predicted, a state of competition did not develop, quite the reverse, it created a monopoly, with the three companies carving up their fields of influence between them. The government should be on the alert to prevent this; the oil groups could manipulate the market, to coerce the government.