The modern Chinese oil industry is less than sixty years old. For Mao’s communist government, the cutoff of oil supplies during the Korean War in the early 1950s and then the later rift with its “big brother,” the Soviet Union, made “self-reliance” in oil an absolute priority. That became a possibility in 1959, with the discovery in Manchuria of a giant oil field named Daqing—which means “Great Celebration.” By the 1980s, the domestic petroleum industry was meeting the nation’s needs and also producing a surplus of oil that was exported, principally to Japan.
