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- [Poster 2 captions:]
7. “[The Daqing workers] regard the north wind as an electric cooling fan and view the blizzard as fried noodles. In battles raging from north and south, from the heavens and the oceans, we vow to achieve the number one oil field!” [quoted from a poem by “Iron-man” Wang Jinxi]. The workers of Daqing feared neither hardship nor death [in their determination] to bring glory to Chairman Mao and win credit for socialism. The drilling team braved temperatures of thirty and forty degrees below zero, as they persevered with sinking wells in the wide open spaces, and the Steel 1202 Drilling Team’s record of wells struck for the year 1961 exceeded that of the Soviet revisionists so-called “Achievers” drilling team They said proudly: “Unafraid of frozen ground or snowdrifts nine feet tall, oilfield workers don’t care if it’s winter [literally – have no winter].”
8. The launching of the development of the Daqing oilfields came at the start of the period of temporary difficulty [in the years 1959-62], and in order to overcome natural disasters and confront the onslaught of the evil wind of the “three selfs and the one guarantee” [personal responsibility for profit and loss, free markets, private plots, and contracting production quotas to families] stirred up by Liu Shaoqi and company, to sustain and develop the oil battle, family members of the workers in production villages responded to the call of the party committee, fostered the spirit of Nanniwan [a village which grew food to support the army in the revolutionary base areas in the civil war], five family members including Xue Guifang shouldered five shovels, and were the first to go to the grassland to open up new land and cultivate the ground, starting an agricultural sideline enterprise, so that the family members of Daqing could participate in collective productive labour, and became recognized as models in taking the road of revolution.
9. [slogan on wall:] Struggle hard, build the nation thriftily; In their production and construction work, the workers of Daqing set high standards and stern demands; in their lives they were austere and plain living; they did not set themselves apart from the rest of the nation. While the battle was on, a patching and mending shop was established at the oil-field, initially equipped with a couple of large vats and housed in an old cowshed, and dedicated to laundering the workers’ padded clothing [taking out the padding and washing the clothes] and repairing and patching. For more than a decade, the workers and family dependents in the shop have persevered in fixing the old and making use of the discarded, running the shop thriftily, and they frequently go to the worksites and well-heads, to serve the needs of front-line workers in the battle.
10. In the arduous years of setting up the enterprise, the workers of Daqing fostered the spirit of Yan’an, found materials where they were, and went in for rammed earth construction, building basic earth dwellings to solve the need for housing of workers and family members. At that time, the rammer’s chants were heard everywhere, and everyone pitched in, whether they were workers or family members, building up piles of earth and ramming them, creating rows of rammed earth houses, constructing worker-peasant settlements in many locations, so that the Daqing oilfields became a new-style natural resources region with “industry and agriculture working together, city and countryside working together, beneficial for production, and convenient for livelihood,” creating conditions for the reduction of the three great divides [between town and country, industry and agriculture, and mental and physical labour].
11. While leading the battle for oil, the Party committee of the Daqing oilfields observed Chairman Mao’s many directives on seeking truth from facts, combining theory with reality and other matters, and stressed the building of ideology and work-style among the workforce, and in nurturing the “three honests and four stricts” [honesty in thoughts, words, and deeds, strictness in standard of work, organization, attitude, and discipline] and “four the sames” [work the same night and day, in bad weather and good weather, whether a leader is there or not, and whether work is checked or not], paying greatest attention to a sincere revolutionary lifestyle. The workers had a high sense of proprietary responsibility, were conscientious, meticulous in doing the work of the revolution well, no matter if it was day or night, if it was windy or raining, they were all like sentries on guard at their posts, diligently carrying out all instructions and procedures.
12. The workers of Daqing took class struggle as the key, and relied on the “two essays” to launch their enterprise, they worked hard to build it up, and in three short years they established a burgeoning petroleum base on a patch of grassland. Every day high-speed pipelines filled with Daqing crude would carry it to all parts of the nation, transmitting the good news of [national petroleum] self-reliance. On December 1, 1963, the People’s Daily solemnly announced to the world: Our nation’s oil production is essentially sufficient four our needs, we have reversed our dependence on foreign oil! When the Daqing oil workers and the people of the whole country heard this great news, all were happy and proud, bursting with joy.
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