The Daqing oilfield (hereafter Daqing) has constituted the backbone of China's petroleum industry. Since its discovery 50 years ago, it has produced more than 2 billion tonnes of crude oil, accounting for over 40 per cent of the country's aggregate onshore production. Its development and management procedures have been replicated across many of China's major oilfields. Additionally, its cadres have assumed leadership positions in oilfields across the country, and some have even been promoted to central leadership positions to help make and implement the country's overall petroleum policy. Thus, much of China's petroleum industry is thought to have begun in Daqing.
With Oil in China, Lim Tai Wei offers a comprehensive and detailed case study of this giant oilfield between 1959 and 1985, drawing on Chinese, English and Japanese sources. He recounts how its discovery and development transformed China from a net oil importer to self-sufficiency and later a major exporter to Japan. To transcend the oil sector, he documents this transformation in chronological order and relates it to the changing configurations of China's broader domestic and international political environment.
The author skilfully employs the concept of self-reliance and its ideological metamorphosis to account for Daqing's evolution. He argues convincingly that China's deprived access to international oil markets, resulting from the Western embargo, and its inability to access foreign sources of oil after the Sino-Soviet split, led to a post-war anti-imperialist bent and intensified Chinese impulses toward self-reliance. Ultimately, this resulted in an inclination towards resource nationalism, which characterized the approach to the development of Daqing.
Thus, the author notes that the initial success of Daqing's discovery and development was incorporated into Communist ideology and supported by Mao Zedong. To promote the value system embodied in the Daqing spirit, Mao launched the “industries learn from Daqing” campaign. Nevertheless, Daqing came under attack during the Cultural Revolution because its continued success had started to challenge Mao's ideology of pursuing classless, egalitarian and non-elitist modernity. Its revival became possible only after the “petroleum faction” and its supporters reframed the notion of self-reliance as using outside help to enhance self-reliance. It is this reconfiguration, according to the author, that enabled Daqing's oil trade with Japan. Building on this analysis, the book links the material and ideological facets of Daqing and makes the central point that the ideological approval of the project was intrinsic to its continued success and progress. By connecting these two dimensions, the author substantially enhances our understanding of China's petroleum industry between 1959 and 1985.
Despite these strengths, the book suffers from some flaws. To begin with, it contains numerous factual errors and typos. For example, it says China's crude oil output reached 100 million tonnes in 1973 (p. 2) while the 100-million-tonne-threshold was accomplished in 1978. Similarly, it reports that China increased oil exports to Japan from 29 to 45 tonnes between 1972 and 1974 (p. 127), which makes little sense. Other errors, such as mischaracterizing 1972 as the year of the recognition of China by the US detract from the rigour of the scholarship. Furthermore, data repetition and inconsistency in different sections of the book undermine the quality of the analysis. Finally, the scope of the book does little justice to its title. While the title seems to suggest that the book will explain how China managed to transition its oil sector from self-sufficiency to internationalization during an era of oil dependence, the narrative merely discusses Daqing prior to the 1990s, much of which is known history. The author does not discuss the oil field's evolution since the 1990s, which is not well understood and provides an area where more value can be added.
The author's second book, Oil and Gas in China, is designed to construct the history of China's oil and gas sector after the country became a net oil importer in 1993. The book aspires to an ambitious target of reviewing China's regional hydrocarbon relations, but it does not define the geographical boundary and seems to include all of the country's neighbouring countries. Despite this commendable attempt, the book is weak in both content and structure.
To start, many chapters of the book are fraught with flaws. For example, the second chapter argues that Russia replaced Japan as China's most important energy partner in the 21st century. But neither the volume of China's oil imports from Russia nor the degree of Chinese hydrocarbon investment in Russia corroborates this statement. Further, the discussion of the problems bedevilling the Sino-Russian energy relationship is incomplete because it leaves out the other three most important and pertinent challenges to the relationship: the rise of resource nationalism in the era of Vladimir Putin with rising oil prices; the perceptions in Russia about a rising China; and the falling foul of the Angarsk–Daqing pipeline's proponent, Yukos Oil Company, with the Kremlin. Similarly, the third chapter on China's hydrocarbon relationship with Southeast Asia suffers from the same simplification. It does not offer sufficient explanation of the region's importance for China in terms of hydrocarbon trade and investment, nor does it address how growing consumption in the region affects the China–Southeast Asian energy relationship. Likewise, chapter five aims to discuss China's energy interactions with Indian and Japan, but it fails to mention Sino-Indo competition for energy in Central Asia, Africa and Latin America, and neglects to discuss the competition between China and Japan in this chapter, though it does make mention of it in chapter six, which is dedicated to the discussion of China's energy crisis.
Furthermore, the book's chapters pull it apart, leading to its lack of central focus and coherence. While the first five chapters, despite their weaknesses, are largely focused on China's energy relationship with neighbouring countries, the last three chapters take the book in a different direction. For example, chapter six offers little explanation for what constitutes China's energy crisis in 2004 and fails to link it to other chapters. Thus, the point and utility of this chapter remains dubious. Similarly, chapter seven mirrors the inconsistency and weakness of the previous chapters while chapter eight misses the opportunity to distil findings from the author's research and provide an overarching message. Consequently, instead of providing a coherent and robust analysis, the book provides a set of loosely connected, discursive and incomplete chapters.
Finally, this book includes many figures that this reviewer would dispute. For example, it states China imported 61.1 per cent of oil from the Middle East in 2005 (p. 24) but China only imported 47.2 per cent. It says that 60 per cent of China's oil imports travel across the Strait of Malacca (p. 46), but the real number is over 80 per cent. Similarly, it asserts 2004 was the starting point for China's embarkation for a global quest for energy resources (p. 97), but the effort actually started in the early 1990s.
Despite all the weaknesses, the book represents a major effort using multiple language sources to reconstruct the history of China's energy relationship with neighbouring countries in the 21st century. Rapid developments in China and its neighbouring countries have certainly made this attempt difficult. The book would significantly contribute to previous literature on the subject and receive serious readership if it demonstrated analytical rigour and added coherence.
