Winds of change

• Source: Global Times
• [22:45 August 04 2010]
• 
• Ma Chao visits his demolished home in the almost abandoned old town of Yumen.
• By Li Xiaoshu in Gansu

• Dressed in a scarlet work suit and carrying his laptop in a messenger bag, Ma Chao dozed off in a blue company bus emblazoned with the logo of PetroChina, one of the country's largest oil and gas producers.

  Outside the window, a vast desert dotted with camel thorns stretched across the horizon below the pale haze of a dawn sky.

  It was early morning and Ma had joined thousands of other workers on the long and drowsy ride to work at China's first oil field in Yumen, a county-level city of Gansu Province.

  The oilfield employees travel one and a half hours to the "resource town," some 90 kilometers away from the company's residential community in the neighboring city of Jiuquan. Commuting between work and home in two distant areas for almost a decade, few of them can find any beauty in the arid setting of endless Gobi desert with distant snow-topped peaks.

  Ma is 30 years old. He was born into a family of oilfield workers, and is oblivious to the dull vistas on the Monday morning ride to his coveted State job as a storekeeper at the Downhole Operation Company of Yumen Oilfield. He bunks at the oil field on weekdays and takes the bus home on Friday, his work routine for the past two years.

  "If my wife wasn't pregnant, I would quit as soon as possible," he told the Global Times, lowering his voice and looking around carefully to make sure nobody was listening. He earns 1,900 yuan ($279) a month, a relatively sound and stable income considering that the region's annual per capita income last year was about 13,705 yuan.

  "The oil field is dying, but most people take things as they are. Some people just get numb and lazy. Life is inanimate here, and I can see how I could turn old like this," Ma said, pointing out at the skeleton of an abandoned office building with broken windows and sealed gates.

  The bus drove along a main avenue with no cars in sight. The city seemed as deserted and silent as the desolate graveyard glimpsed outside the bus window. Huge oil pipes traversed empty compounds and major roads.

  The bus braked to a sudden halt. Ma was jolted forward and bumped his head on the seatback in front of him. Many other sleeping passengers were jarred awake. Some mumbled with discontent but fell asleep again.

  "Many prefer to keep their eyes shut," he shrugged.

  At the oilfield stop, Ma jumped off the bus swiftly and joined the stampede of workers hurrying to clock in. He would be fined 200 yuan if he showed up late.

• 

• Wind power engineers with the Yumen Branch Office of CNOOC New Energy Investment Company check turbines at the Changma Wind Farm, located in the wilderness 20 kilometers from downtown, Yumen. Photos: Li Xiaoshu

•  

  Pioneer outpost

   

  Yumen sits at the foot of the Qilian Mountains and its rich water supply sustains the city as a rare oasis in the expanding desert. The city has a fabled history and boasts gorgeous cultural artifacts from the days when Yumen was a major stop on the northern route of the ancient Silk Road.

   

  In 1939, geologists drilled the first oil well in Yumen's Laojunmiao. Eighteen years later, in December, 1957, as part of a campaign to prioritize domestic heavy industry in the 2nd Five-Year Plan (1958-62), the Chinese government called for nationwide efforts to build the city into the country's first oil production center.

   

  In the 1960s, Ma Chao's father, Ma Zhiying, a farmer in Linxia Hui Autonomous Prefecture, Gansu Province, left his hometown for Yumen to "serve the country."

   

  Wearing a straw hat and a pair of handmade shoes, the 62-year-old retiree recalls that the work was tough and dull, but he believes he made the right choice to improve the family's living standard.

   

  "My clothes were always filthy with crude oil stains and smelled bad. It was so icy cold in winter that your clothing froze," said Ma, who worked as cook, production worker and platform rigger.

   

  "In the early years, there was a limited amount of meat in the oil field. With no entertainment after work, we just slept to kill time. Women were scarce. It was more like a military camp."

   

  The elder Ma and his colleagues never complained, even when the workload seemed unbearable. It still seems incredible to him that he and five other workers were able to pull a 30-ton drill pipe free from a well, using only their back muscles and bare hands .

   

  Honest and simple, the first generation of oilfield workers were inspired by the "Iron Man" spirit of Wang Jinxi, who set a drilling record and was honored as "the national model worker" in 1959.

   

  Today, a statue of Wang, an icon of the Maoist working class, still stands in downtown Yumen, where a grove of white poplars provides dappled shade on an empty street.

   

  Ma Zhiying said he wouldn't have imagined this scene back when he was able to move his family of six into a 40-square-meter apartment in 1991, and into a bigger home in 1995. His two daughters found work in the oil field, another big event for the family. They expect that their lives would be free and easy from then on.

• Oil field on the wane

  However, the oil field's low capacity in the early 1990s was a warning sign of a looming crisis for company officials and employees. By 1998, overexploitation had reduced production to 380,000 tons, only 27 percent of the oil produced in 1959, according to the Yumen Petroleum Administration.

  Higher leaders attempted to overhaul the oil industry and saw the steep decline of the Yumen Oilfield as a sign that the State-owned sector could be shrinking into irrelevance.

  Consequently, oilfield authorities dangled buyout offers to senior workers in an attempt to downsize the workforce and eliminate labor redundancies. A number of oil workers with poor education and no basic professional skills panicked over the thought of being laid off without compensation.

  Ma Ping, Mao Chao's elder sister, was attracted by a severance package of 50,000 yuan. Her husband was dispatched to a sub-oilfield in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. After weighing the pros and cons, Ma Ping decided to sign the buyout contract in 1999.

  "My father was extremely proud to be an oilfield worker but it was just a random job for me," Ma said. "The money would create more opportunities for me."

  When her father learned of the buy-out, he got furious with his daughter. They quarreled again and again. Ma Ping left home for one month until her father finally gave in.

  Calculations done by oilfield workers show that by 1999, at least 7,000 workers, almost half of the oil field's total payroll, were "dismissed," mostly with buyouts, but sometimes given the choice of quit or get fired.

  Li Liang, director of the company's publicity department, denied the workers' figures and refused to provide with details on what he called, an "historical issue."

  A few bought-off workers petitioned and protested their dismissals over the past decade, but few of them succeeded, according to the Mas.

  "Many gradually lost the spirit to fight. Some just raised hell and wasted all the money on gambling, alcohol and orgies," said Ma Ping, whose husband died of cirrhosis in 2000.

  By that time, she had been a housewife for four years and almost collapsed under the emotional pressure of her life.

  "It might not have been the end of the world, but suddenly I didn't know where to go," she said.

• Boom to bust

  As early as 2000, rumors spread that within a few years formal oilfield employees would be assigned to new apartments in Jiuquan, a prefecture-level city some 90 kilometers east of Yumen.

  Ma Zhiying tried to confirm word of his daughter's resettlement, but was informed that the Yumen government intended to move all of its offices to a more convenient location some 80 kilometers west of the old oil town.

  A Yumen official who requested anonymity disclosed that a power struggle and irreconcilable differences between the local government and the petroleum giant directly lead to the division.

  "The slowdown in oil production ultimately jeopardized the fragile economy," he said.

  More and more local businesses went bankrupt. A report by the Yumen Statistics Bureau showed that only eight industrial companies remained operating in 2000 while 82 others were closed down.

  The city's population has fallen to 20,000 from 130, 000 in the early 1990s, leaving the formerly wealthy "resource town" an empty shell with rising unemployment and an exodus of people migrating to other cities.

  Yumen is now on China's list of 44 cities whose natural resources have been exhausted with inadequate solutions for the problems of the residents left behind.

  Wang Quanfu, 52, a hearing-impaired vendor who polishes shoes at Yumen's busiest market, earns less than 200 yuan a month. Laid off from a local factory in 2001 without compensation or social insurance,the decade-long relocation has driven his second wife to work in a clothing factory in Jiuquan. Wang said the only goal of their marriage is "to survive."

  He had been sitting in the burning heat for three hours with only two customers.

• Chasing the wind

  Born in Yumen, Ma Chao has a haunting memory of the strong winds that whip across his hometown too often to be counted. Last May, winds hit the city like a sandblaster more than 10 times.

  "We have a local joke. There are only two winds every year. Each one lasts six months. More weirdly, people wear shirts outside sweaters to battle cold winds that chill you to the bone," Ma laughed.

  Phase Two of China's "western development strategy" hopes to revive the depleted oil town by harnessing the power of those desert winds. Massive wind turbines, towering 70 meters high with whirring blades 35 meters long, rise abruptly on the dry and barren land of the town's newest suburb.

  The Gansu provincial government and Jiuquan city government plan to build the world's largest wind power project, undertaken jointly by Yumen city, Guazhou county and Subei county of Jiuquan.

  With a staggering investment of 120 billion yuan, the windmills are planned to generate a capacity of 20 gigawatts of electricity by 2020, complementing the hydroelectric capacity of the Three Gorges Dam.

  Locally, the wind project is called the "Three Gorges of the Land," China's fourth mega-project following the Yangtze River dam, the west-to-east natural gas transmission line and the Qinghai-Tibet Railway pushed forward by the "western development strategy."

  The Yumen government is determined to revive the city by transforming reliable winds into a constant profit flow. Mayor Zhan Shunzhou believes that wind power "will help the city to develop."

  "We'll lose our direction without taking advantage of wind power," said Zhan in a July meeting to push forward the city's transition.

  In 2009, wind farms in Yumen generated a total volume of 4.4 billion kilowatts on the power grid, and power companies paid taxes of 16.23 million yuan to the State and 2.81 million yuan locally.

• Future risks

  Despite worries that the industry is over-heated, wind power energy companies are surging ahead at an astonishing speed in a bid to satisfy Yumen's appetite for renewable energy targets.

  Chen Jinwei, business manager of the Yumen Branch Office of the New Energy Investment company under China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the nation's largest offshore oil and gas producer, said the firm "has the ability to withstand uncertainties" as it has invested some 2 billion yuan on a 150,000-kilowatt wind farm with 134 wind turbines in Yumen.

  "Losses were inevitable since the grid has not been adequately prepared to receive a large amount of wind energy. It might be a gamble for smaller enterprises, but we have enough time."

  Faster development of the power grid will be a bonus for wind farm operators. A 750-kilovolt transmission line is to be completed and in use by the end of 2010, according to the Yumen government.

  However, not all problems will be solved by committing to the additional grid and "new problems may arise," warned German wind power expert Manfred Schmude during his visit to Yumen in June.

  Meanwhile, Ma Chao and his wife have a secret plan - leave Yumen next year to support their brother-in-law, who runs a trading company in Yiwu, Zhejiang Province, a world-famous commodity market and birthplace of China's private economy.

  "The east is more exciting, active and energetic than the west. Definitely, it's not the difference between heaven and hell. I'm just kind of obsessed with the open atmosphere," Ma said, eyes shining with renewed hope.

  "I guess my parents won't understand and will even feel heartbroken. I will have to comfort them with the baby," he sighed.

  Accidentally, Ma lost his mobile phone during the bus ride, but he took it as a metaphor for a new life.

  "If the old doesn't go, the new won't come," he shrugged.

   

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/macolex/archive/2011/11/09/2243679.html