Jottings from the Granite Studio

On this date in 1972, the People’s Daily published an editorial urging the Chinese people to “Learn from Daqing,” a phrase first made famous by Mao Zedong in 1964. Repetitive? Sure, but by 1972 China’s industry was in complete shambles. Six years of Cultural Revolution had plunged the country into near total chaos, and what was left of the party leadership (not exactly the best and the brightest, let’s just say) called the only play they knew: A political campaign with moral exhortations, kicked off with an editorial, some posters, and a few thousand red banners for your home or office.

Starting in the early 1960s, Daqing, and its agricultural counterpart Dazhai, had been held up as models for other industrial and agricultural enterprises to follow. Why Daqing? Well, the Party claimed it was the spirit of hard work, self-reliance, plus selfless devotion to party, country, and Mao Zedong thought which was responsible for Daqing’s incredible productivity. That said, it probably didn’t hurt that they struck oil there in 1959. Seriously, Haiti would be a “model of industrial productivity” if they found a giant oil field under Cité Soleil.

Not that the oil wasn’t a big deal. In the 1950s, many in the West thought that the PRC was doomed to fail because it lacked access to sufficient petroleum stocks to sustain industrial development. Everybody (Read: “Especially the Japanese”) had known Manchuria was rich in natural resources, but after a decade of such brilliant industrial strategies as ‘buy all of our factories from Russia,’ ‘build one million backyard steel mills,’ and then resorting to the tried and true fall back plan of ’starve all the farmers so that the cities can eat’…well, nobody really believed the PRC could come up with the simple, yet elegant, solution of ’sink a well and see what we hit.’ That’s right: It’s The Jed Clampett Book of How to Build a Modern Industrial Economy.

Hey, it worked. It was actually (the original) ‘Iron Man,’ Wang Jinxi, who is credited with finding oil there in 1959. Since then, the Daqing oil fields have produced nearly 10 billion barrels of oil and a lot of poster material.

Throughout the 1970s, “In Industry, Learn from Daqing” posters called on Chinese workers to strive selflessly to increase industrial productivity and build the country, a campaign that lasted until Deng Xiaoping came into power and implemented more effective policies like “paying people.” Black cat, white cat, whatever works.

In 1980, Dazhai and Daqing were stripped of their paragon status, but ‘Learn from Daqing’ campaigns would occasionally be taken out of mothballs for special events: Bat Mitzvahs, birthdays, the aftermath of the 1989 student demonstrations, retirement parties, celebrity roasts…that sort of thing.

So, this being Friday, let’s all learn from Daqing (or at least the band Loverboy) and everybody work hard for the weekend.

Finally, by way of clumsy segue but in the spirit of industrial solidarity and proletariat struggle, don’t forget to check out the launch of Helen Couchman’s new book Workers, being held tonight at The Bookworm in Beijing, beginning at 7:30.
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Image top right from Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Poster Pages.