China Witness

Standing in front of their house in Hezheng, 2006.

MR YOU, aged seventy-eight, and his wife, aged seventy-six, pioneers of oil exploration in China, interviewed in Beijing and Hezheng, Gansu province, in north-west China. Mr You, a Hero of Labour, was part of the very first group of Chinese oil explorers. In the Cultural Revolution he was 'struggled against' because of his contacts with the Soviet Union, but is now a respected authority and influences many aspects of China's oil exploration. Mrs You went from trainee teacher to become the first head of a female oil-prospecting brigade. Their three children were raised mainly by grandparents.

When I was at university I read a book called The Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet, a military strategist who was born in Italy in 1869, and who in 1909 started to challenge the traditional military idea of domination by sea, predicting that the skies would become the century's next battleground. In 1921 he published The Command of the Air, on which much modern air tactical theory is based, and followed it with The Face of Future Warfare. In due course, the great global slaughters of the 1930s and the Second World War proved the correctness of Douhet's theories. However, his contemporaries seem not to have been aware of oil in the way that we are today: since the year 2000, oil has been both a cause of war and a weapon in the struggle for world domination. Less than a hundred years after the first oil was poured into the first barrel, it has leaked into the skies, seas and earth of humanity, into our clothes, food, homes and transport; it has become a part of the structure of our lives that it is impossible to ignore.

In the years when I was growing up in China, people took pride in their future, but for most people this future involved 'limitless high production' of wheat (like the exaggerated reports they were accustomed to hearing), and the Soviet Union's 'potatoes cooked with beef ' (the Chinese idea of a tasty Russian meal). When the great Daqing oilfields were mentioned, they conjured up an image of a profession that 'forged men of steel', but the importance of oil in our daily lives, even in political discussions about China's future, was barely touched on. The first major discovery of oil was made in September 1953 in a town called Landa, located in north-east China. Did the Chinese care about oil? When they founded the New China, did the policymakers who had come from the muddy fields and ditches of the countryside, who had defeated the planes and guns of the American army and founded the People's Republic of China with 'millet and rifles', understand that in the future Chinese people would need to drive cars and take aeroplanes?

I had tried many times to investigate this issue in the years before 1997, and each time I came away disappointed. I had been warned that this was 'a national secret'. Nonetheless, I hoped that somebody would help me understand the story of Chinese oil, and give an account of how its significance emerged. Finally, through my own circle of friends, I unearthed a married couple: he was a major figure in China's national oil prospecting, and she had been the first leader of a women's oil-prospecting team. Both husband and wife had been buried in history, retirement and 'being a national secret' for a very long time.

On 11 August 2006, my reporting team set out in a twelve-seater Icarus minibus, which we had hired for 150 yuan, and travelled two and a half hours from Lanzhou to Hezheng county, where the two old people had a summer residence.

Hezheng county is located in the south of Gansu province. It has a total area of 960 square kilometres, exactly 1/10,000 of China's territory. Hezheng county is situated in the region where the Tibetan Plateau meets the Yellow Earth Plateau of the north-west: to the south of the county is a ridge of high, stony mountains, whereas the north is a region of gullies and ravines in the yellow earth. It is one of poverty-stricken Gansu's rare scenic areas, where the mountains come together, row upon row, each peak rising higher than the last, to form scenery as beautiful as any picture. The area's population is roughly 200,000, of which minority nationalities make up 57 per cent.

The police officers who had helped us along our route were surprised that we had made Hezheng county part of our itinerary, because Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, of which Hezheng county is a part, has seen one of the biggest intensifications of racial conflict in the country in recent years, especially between the Han and Hui (Chinese Muslim) groups. After nine o'clock residents do not enter the territory of other ethnic groups; if they do they might never be seen again. But as far as we newly arrived outsiders were concerned, apart from Buddhist temples and Muslim mosques by the side of the highway, each village vying with its neighbours for strangeness and beauty, and a feeling that the streets were unusually quiet and deserted, we didn't get so much as a whiff of cordite.

We spent the night in the Hezheng County Guest House. This government-run hotel, crammed between a crowd of new buildings which were still under construction, was used by local officials to hold meetings. The hotel was reminiscent of the guest houses attached to government ministries in Beijing in the 1950s and 60s, roadside hotels in the big cities in the 1970s and 80s, and 'two-star' hotels in the 90s: a three-storey building, with a dimly lit service desk on one side of the ground floor, and rows of aluminium keys marked with red paint hanging on the wall, which showed both the scale of the guest house, and its emptiness. On the other side of the lobby was a long dining hall, in which the huge round tables were as numerous as the keys; without a doubt this place had seen innumerable 'battles of eating and drinking'. The first and second floors were guest rooms: peeling wallpaper patterned with peonies, mildewed red carpets and rust-speckled iron Thermos flasks for hot water. In the light of all this, it is perhaps not surprising that the building was constantly rocked by deafening blasts of noise from the demolition works and building sites outside, so loud that we couldn't hear each other speak.

It is impossible to escape from building noise, one of China's defining characteristics. My bedroom was equipped with the most luxurious furniture available locally, but in a very mismatched style: a mahogany sofa, metal tables and chairs and a king-size bed with plastic stickers on the headboard, against which was propped a pair of pillows embroidered with the words 'Love Song' in English. The bathroom was very big, and boasted a 1.5-metre- high 'sauna' box as well as a crude shower head, but since any attempt actually to use any of the functions invariably led to 'flash floods', I was resigned simply to admire it as a piece of interior decoration.

In order to get a clearer idea of the role Hezheng county had played in the life of Mr and Mrs You, and to give them a chance to get to know us, we didn't start the interviews straight away, but went for a stroll with them around this small county town. This took less than an hour, after which we went with them and some of their relatives to the Hezheng Fossil Museum, a source of international pride to the locals.

Hezheng Fossil Museum is China's only museum of vertebrate fossils. It is one of China's very few national-level specialised museums, built after the Sichuan Dinosaur Fossil Museum, and the Banpo Neolithic village near Xi'an.

Starting in the 1950s, large quantities of rare fossils have been unearthed in Hezheng county, and today the museum collection comprises over six thousand fossil specimens. Hezheng Fossil Museum contains many different varieties rarely seen anywhere else in the world, preserved in good condition: their three-toed horse fossils and collection of fossil skulls are the best in the European-Asian land mass, superior even to the world-famous three- toed-horse-producing areas of Pikermi and Sarmos; and only the New York Natural History Museum and the Natural History Museum in Beijing have larger collections of shovel-tusked elephant fossils. Several of these creatures were named after this place, such as the Hezheng Goat, which has been found nowhere else in the world. The state invested 15,250,000 yuan to build the 3,850-metre-square museum, which is both a National Youth Education Base and a Popular Science Tourism Unit, as well as a scientific base for researchers from China and overseas. It took us almost two hours to view two of the six subject areas: the three-toed horse and the shovel-tusked elephant.

Among the local Han people, it is possible to tell the background of a family without entering the house or asking the owner's name, from the lintel of the doorway of every household. Those who had some local fame, such as an ancestor who had passed the xiucai examinations, would have a brightly painted, gilded lintel; if a family's ancestor had been a major official at provincial level, there would be two rows of even more luxurious lintels; three rows of lintels on the gate of a courtyard were for families whose ancestors had been high scholars or officials serving under the emperor himself. The last few generations of the You family had been important people in the locality, so the family courtyard was a small two-storey horseshoe-shaped building, inside the only three-lintel gate in the whole village, which stood out among the masses of humbler dwellings. We addressed Mr You by the respectful name younger people use for scholars of the older generation: Teacher You. Teacher You pointed to those three lintels and said proudly: 'That's several generations of true scholarship and talent; you can't buy that now, not at any price!'