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
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?
5 Acrobat: from Counter-revolutionary's Daughter to National Medal Winner
Yishijua, top , practising, 1950s.
On tour in South America, 1990s.
YISHUJIA, aged sixty, a renowned acrobat,
Hu is a professional magician, and also a performer on the Western saxophone and a Chinese folk wind instrument called the
I talked to Hu about some of the feelings and losses Chinese experience on coming to the West, hoping I could learn something about the values of the new generation of young Chinese who were making a living overseas. But he left me only with an unforgettable feeling of responsibility: guilt at having been unable to keep his father alive, anxiety at being unable to fulfil his responsibilities to his widowed mother, shame that China's fine, true elegant culture had gained no recognition in the West. In truth, in the decade and more since I moved to Britain, I have rarely met a young Chinese person with such a sense of responsibility.
I had been searching for some time for an opportunity to decrypt this 'authentic Chinese' friend, but it was very hard. To me, there was a fortress of personality, made up of his age, his era and his gender: it was difficult for a woman of his mother's generation to enter his 'kingdom of causes and effects'. Then one day he told me that his mother was coming to Britain to see him, she did not understand English or have any idea how to get around London on her own, and he wondered if it would be possible for me to introduce a few Chinese friends to her.
Hu's mother, Yishujia, was a Chinese National Level One acrobatic performer and one of the few winners of the women's 8 March Red-Banner Pacesetter [4] medal. It was hard to believe from her limber, agile walk that she was a woman of over sixty, the youthful energy and interest that came from her years of training as a young woman were immediately noticeable. The first time we met, her smile and calm manner made me imagine a comfortable, tranquil life, which was a very rare form of good luck in the last century in China. I completely failed to detect what lay behind those smiles and jokes.
I invited mother and son to spend Christmas with us in London. At dinner, after the roast goose, we brought out a cheese plate. I was worried that Yishujia would not be able to cope with the taste, which Chinese people often find close to unbearable, but I watched her cut off a small piece of cheese, put it on her plate with a smile,