At the time China discovered oil in the late fifties, the country had no resource giants like Standard Oil or ExxonMobil the government could rely on to get the resource out of the ground. Instead, Mao looked to a man known as the one-armed general, and tens of thousands of his fellow military men, to drain the gushers in the country’s north-east. Yu Qiuli, born in 1914 and a member of the Party by the time he was a teenager, had risen through the PLA ranks as a political officer during the anti-Japanese war and the subsequent internal conflict against the Nationalists. He had lost his left
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