want to now open the earth with my fist,” he declared, “to let the black oil gush out and dump our backwardness in petroleum into the Pacific.”
Wang’s team drilled at a furious rate. Wang himself would not be stayed. After one injury, it is said, he crept out of the hospital and went back to the drilling site, where he directed operations from his crutches. In his most famous exploit, in order to prevent a blowout that would have destroyed the drilling rig , he ordered bags of cement to be poured into a pit. Since there was no mixer, Wang jumped in and mixed the cement with his legs, forestalling the blowout and further injuring himself. Following the success of Daqing, Premier Zhou En Lai welcomed Iron Man Wang and his fellow Daqing workers to Beijing as national heroes. Mao himself declared that Chinese industry should “learn from the Daqing oil field.”
Many other fields followed, the pace pushed by a famous oil minister and later vice premier, Kang Shien. China succeeded in becoming self-sufficient in petroleum, which, the People’s Daily announced, had “blown the theory of oil scarcity in China sky high.” Another publication declared that, “The so-called theory that China is poor in oil only serves the U.S. imperialist policy of aggression and plunder.” The United States was not the only antagonist. The victory in the oil campaign was also hailed as a fusillade against “the Soviet revisionist renegade clique.”6
RED GUARDS
In the mid-1960s, Mao recognized that he was being pushed aside because of the dismal failure of his disastrous economic policy, the Great Leap Forward, which had caused an estimated 30 million people to die from starvation. In 1966 he counterattacked and declared war on the Communist Party itself, charging that it had been captured by renegades with “bourgeois mentality.” To carry out his “Cultural Revolution,” Mao mobilized youthful zealots, the Red Guards, who waged a vicious battle against all the institutions of society, whether enterprises, government bureaus, universities, or the party itself. Prominent figures were humiliated, paraded around with donkey heads, beaten up, sent to do manual labor, or killed. Universities closed, and young people were dispatched to factories or the countryside to toil with the masses. The nation was in turmoil.7
But because of the oil industry’s importance to national security, Premier Zhou En Lai took it under his personal protection, using the army to insulate the industry and ensure that it kept working. This led to notable incongruities. “During the day, I organized production as usual,” recalled Zhou Qingzu, the chief economist at CNPC. “At night, I would sit in front of the students and workers and say I was wrong and apologize and write out my errors and apologies. I would listen very attentively to their criticism and write notes. During the day, I was a boss. At night, I was a nobody.”8
Eventually the Cultural Revolution went too far even for Mao, in terms of the chaos it had created, and he used the army to throttle back the Red Guards.
“EXPORT AS MUCH OIL AS WE CAN”
Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s special assistant for national security, fell ill during a dinner in his honor in Pakistan in July 1971. Pakistan’s president, the dinner’s host, strenuously suggested that Kissinger, in order to escape the heat and thus speed his recovery, should recuperate in an estate up in the much cooler hills. This was very definitely a diplomatic illness. The supposed trip to the hills was a ruse, to provide cover for Kissinger’s real purpose. Meanwhile, Kissinger himself—now code-named “Principal Traveller”—was given a hat and sunglasses to disguise himself at the airport prior to taking off for his actual destination, although the disguise might have seemed a little excessive since it was 4 a.m. in the morning.9
Only a week later did the sensational news break. From Pakistan, Kissinger had flown secretly over the Himalayas to Beijing, creating an opening in the Bamboo Curtain that had surrounded China since the communist victory in 1949. Half a year later, President Richard Nixon went through that opening. In the course of his historic visit to Beijing , Nixon supped with Mao, clinked glasses with Zhou En Lai, and dramatically reset the table of international relations.
For both sides it was a matter of realpolitik. The United States, looking for a way out of the stalemated Vietnam War, wanted to create a balance against the Soviet Union. For China, this was a means to strengthen its strategic position against the Soviet Union and