Yumen Oilfield: Cradle of the Chinese Petroleum Industry

Chapter 6 Yumen Oilfield: Cradle of the Chinese Petroleum Industry

1 United to Welcome Liberation

In 1949, as the gunfire of the War of Liberation drew near to one of the largest industrial operations in the northwest—Yumen Oilfield—the Nationalist government’s executive office in the northwest pressured Zou Ming, the oilfield’s director, requesting him to submit a plan for destroying the oilfield. Instead, he and other patriots such as Sun Yueqi and the oilfield employees united to protect the oilfield. Meanwhile, the First Field Army of the PLA under the command of Peng Dehuai, sped up its advance. With lightning speed, the mechanized armor regiment led by General Huang Xinting 黄新廷 of the Third Army arrived at the oilfield on the morning of September 25. Yumen Oilfield was spared from destruction. Three days later, on September 28, with the recommendation of General Wang Zhen 王震, General Peng Dehuai appointed Kang Shi’en, who was the Third Army’s 9th Division’s political commissar, as Yumen Oilfield’s chief military representative. Fifty years later when recounting this period, Kang Shi’en said that when Yumen was liberated, Zou Ming as its director did a good job protecting the oilfield. First, when the Kuomintang rule verged on collapse, plundering and sabotage occurred everywhere. Zou gathered gold bars and silver coins worth more than 100,000 yuan from Lanzhou, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and so on and stored them at the oilfield. He put away enough to support oilfield operations for months. This guaranteed the financial stability of Yumen Oilfield. Meanwhile, he transported more than 10,000 dan (= 500,000 kg) of grain from Wuhan and Dunhuang, enough supplies to last the oilfield employees and their families four or five months. Second, he increased pay for the members of the oilfield police, asking them to deal with harassment and sabotage from Kuomintang stragglers and disbanded soldiers. Third, he formed and led an oilfield protecting force made up of oilfield employees. Ten days or so after Yumen was liberated, Peng Dehuai traveled from Jiuquan to Yumen, in order to meet with Kang Shi’en and Zou Ming. Peng Dehuai praised Zou Ming for protecting the oilfield. Zou said modestly that the fact that Yumen was intact and undamaged was due to the PLA’s speedy advance.

More than fifty years later, Yumen Oilfield invited Zou Ming to visit. He was then in his eighties and retired comfortably in Beijing. His memories were clear when he talked about that period of history. He said in earnest: “For a long time, people have been saying that Yumen Oilfield restored production after Liberation. That’s not correct. How can you talk about restoration when Yumen Oilfield had never stopped production? It should be that Yumen Oilfield continued to increase production …” He was absolutely correct.

2 General Peng Dehuai Says Yumen Oilfield Should Become the “Cradle”

In October 1949, when the smoke from the War of Liberation still had not fully dissipated from the northwest battlefields, Peng Dehuai traveled from Jiuquan to visit the Yumen Oilfield. At a meeting attended by eight hundred people, he urged the workers to unite, learn, strive, increase production, and support the PLA’s march into Xinjiang. Peng Dehuai, from his high, strategic position, issued a call to turn Yumen Oilfield into the “cradle” of the nation’s oil industry! This was a prediction, an expectation, and also a historical task assigned to the Yumen oil workers. For fifty years, generation after generation of oil workers in Yumen have fought wholeheartedly to carry out this mission for the development of the country’s oil industry. But in early 1950, Yumen Oilfield hit hard times. The silver and grain that Zou Ming had stored up were depleted, and more than four thousand employees had not been paid for months. Kang Shi’en reported the emergency to the Northwest Military and Political Committee, i.e., the Headquarters of the PLA’s First Field Army. General Peng Dehuai immediately directed that his plane, then in Jiuquan, be flown out so that people from Yumen could take it to see him in Lanzhou, so as to save time. Jiao Liren 焦力人, the deputy military representative, Zou Ming, the manager of Yumen Oilfield, and Shi Jiuguang, the American-educated geologist, went. Once they made their report to Peng Dehuai, Peng immediately summoned General Zhang Nansheng 张南生, who was in charge of the Army Logistics. Peng asked, “How much money do you have on hand?” Zhang replied, “50,000 silver yuan.” Peng said: “Give it all to save Yumen!” Because there were basically no highways at the time, it would take three to four days to walk from Lanzhou to Yumen, which would include cross- ing the 3,000–3,500 m tall Wushao Mountain. Bandits were rampant along the way. General Peng sent a fully armored squad to escort the money and the visi- tors back to Yumen. They traveled in two Dodge trucks, which the Communist