China Witness (20 page)

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 ashamed 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 years 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.

*

Just as we were completing the
China Witness
interviews, I saw a news piece on
CNN: on 27 August 2006, Chad, which is one of Africa's emerging oil nations, suddenly ordered two of the world's oil giants – America's
Chevron-Texaco Company and a Malaysian oil company – to quit the country. This report stated that the Chad government's true motive was to clear the way for the Chinese oil company
Sinopec; in all probability this was "reserving a seat" for Sinopec to enter Chad. Analysts were quoted, saying that if this was correct, it would constitute an enormous change in the political relations of the entire African continent. I hope that this is not setting up the battlefields of the Middle East all over again, and that this area will not become the next place of "urgent need" in the development of the arms industry.

When the time came for me to phone Mrs You to check my final draft, she told me that she was still thinking about my two difficult questions: What are the three most painful things and the three happiest things of your life? You are so successful, you created an era, but in modern people's eyes, in young people's eyes, was it worth it?

Yishijua,
top
, practising, 1950s.

On tour in South America, 1990s.