Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State by Hou Li

Abstract

Reviewed by: Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State by Hou Li Denise Y. Ho Hou Li. Building for Oil: Daqing and the Formation of the Chinese Socialist State. Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2018. 272 pp. $39.95 (cloth). Set in China's Northeast, Hou Li's Building for Oil traces the history of the Daqing (大庆) Oilfield in Heilongjiang Province. The book follows Daqing from its origins as an oil campaign in 1960, to its elevation as a national model in 1963-1964, to its contributions to China's reform and opening up. Daqing Oilfield, Hou argues, "substantially changed the development path of modern China," producing over 50% of China's crude oil and providing its largest single source of revenue (26-27). Daqing demonstrates how China's industrial drive persisted at the height of the Mao-era political campaigns, eventually paving the way for the agricultural revolution in the 1980s. Though we know of the Daqing model from the People's Daily in 1964—"In industry, learn from Daqing; in agriculture, learn from Dazhai"—Hou Li reveals the Daqing model with an urban planner's sensitivity to design and resources and an historian's eye for detail and analysis. The Daqing model, she suggests, adapted urban construction for a rural context, it balanced industry and agriculture, and it relied both on individual self-sacrifice and a flexible labor force that blurred the boundaries between workers and peasants. Building for Oil is a history in three keys. On one level it is a history of the institutions and professions that were devoted to the work of construction and resource extraction. Sections of each chapter outline bureaucratic organization from the center to the locality. At this same level the book details the lives and careers of engineers, geologists, architects, and planners; Hou points out that most such professionals chose to stay behind on the mainland after 1949, a story of legacy and continuity that places Daqing within the twentieth century. On another level Building for Oil contributes to the literature on China's search for modernity; it is an economic history of industrialization, of Five Year Plans, and of China's eventual independence in oil production. Finally, the book is a personal history centered on the life of Zha Binhua (查滨华 1941–), a young woman who arrived at Daqing Oilfield in 1962 as a fresh graduate in urban planning from Shanghai's Tongji University. Hou Li interweaves these three levels across six chapters and an epilogue. Chapter 1 locates the history of oil from the late nineteenth-century Self-strengthening movement up to the beginning of the People's Republic of China (PRC). In chapter 2, Hou Li introduces Zha Binhua, combining her journey to the oilfields with the national-level drive to mobilize human, material, and financial resources to the same end, extending the metaphor of the "battlefield" to the campaign for oil. Chapter 3 examines construction as an industry in the wider context of the planned economy, framing the building of an oil base city as a delicate negotiation between production and consumption, national and local, and industry and agriculture. If chapter 3 is about the economics of construction, chapter 4 is about the politics of construction, describing how Daqing became a national model—especially for Third Front cities—and how Zha Binhua found herself in a political role, representing the "Daqing spirit" at the 1966 Fourth Annual Conference of the Architectural Society of China in Yan'an. Chapter 5 is a social history of how life was experienced in Daqing, organized around types: Iron Men, Iron Girls, dependents, and intellectuals. It also details how the Cultural Revolution disrupted oil production, a [End Page E-23] problem quickly rectified when Daqing became one of the first places where the military restored order. In chapter 6 and the epilogue, Zha Binhua and her husband are liberated from the May Seventh cadre school and are transferred to Langfang in Hebei Province, later continuing their careers as an architect and a planner in the Nanjing City Planning Bureau. The final two decades of their working lives coincide with Daqing...