Excellent Situation in Taching Oilfield

[This article is reprinted from Peking Review, Vol. 11, #44, Nov. 1, 1968, pp. 29-30.]

SINCE the start of the great proletarian cultural revolution, the masses of workers and revolutionary people of the nationally known Taching Oilfield have resolutely implemented Chairman Mao’s great policy of “grasping revolution and promoting production,” and achieved tremendous results in both revolution and production.

Holding high the great red banner of Mao Tse-tung’s thought in the great cultural revolution, Taching’s proletarian revolutionaries, with the workers as the main force, and its revolutionary masses have experienced a sharp struggle between the two classes, between the two roads and between the two lines. They have destroyed the bourgeois reactionary line, brought to light the agents of China’s Khrushchov in Taching, repudiated these persons’ towering crimes in opposing the Party, socialism and Mao Tse-tung’s thought, and smashed their conspiratorial attempt to restore capitalism in Taching. The Revolutioniry Committee of Taching Oilfield was established on May 31 this year.

Since their establishment, the revolutionary committees at the various levels in Taching have led the revolutionary masses in the creative study and application of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, in energetically running Mao Tse-tung’s thought study classes, carrying out Chairman Mao’s latest series of instructions in an all-round way, and promoting a deep-going development of struggle-criticism-transformation. Up to now, the whole oilfield has run more than 6,000 Mao Tse-tung’s thought study classes of various types.

Following Chairman Mao’s teaching that “one of our current important tasks on the ideological front is to unfold criticism of revisionism,” and under the leadership of their revolutionary committee, the masses of workers and revolutionary people of Taching are using Mao Tse-tung’s thought as their weapon to unfold revolutionary mass criticism and repudiation on the basis of shifts and groups. Work-sites, workshops, well sites, classrooms, farm fields and households have all become battlefields for unfolding this mass criticism. They scathingly denounce the counter-revolutionary revisionist trash peddled by China’s Khrushchov and his Taching agents on the industrial front such as the theory of the “dying out of class struggle,” “giving first consideration to production,” “material incentives” and “relying on experts to manage the factories.” At the same time, they have purified their class ranks and one by one exposed the renegades, enemy agents, and diehard capitalist roaders and unreformed landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists who had hidden themselves in the revolutionary ranks. This has tremendously strengthened the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Following Chairman Mao’s latest instruction that the working class must exercise leadership in everything, and under the unified organization and leadership of their revolutionary committee, the masses of Taching workers have heroically stepped on to the political stage of struggle-criticism-transformation of the superstructure.

The great proletarian cultural revolution has greatly promoted
the growth of production and this year the Taching Oilfield has
surpassed its previous peak in daily output of crude oil. Tank
cars with huge amounts of Taching crude oil ready for shipment.

The great campaign of struggle-criticism-transformation is surging forward vigorously. The Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution drawn up under the personal guidance of Chairman Mao points out: “The great proletarian cultural revolution is a powerful motive force for the development of the social productive forces in our country.” Since the beginning of this year, state plans for the whole oilfield in crude oil production, processing and delivery have been fulfilled and over-fulfilled every month. Daily output of crude oil has surpassed its previous peak. The oilfield’s construction tasks for the Third Five-Year Plan were fulfilled two years ahead of schedule.

During the great upsurge in struggle-criticism-transformation, through revolutionary mass criticism and repudiation, Taching’s workers have broken away completely from the foreign dogmas and old stereotypes which had hampered growth of the productive forces. Their revolutionary initiative and creativeness has burst forth like a volcano, sending Taching’s production steadily upwards. The revolutionary workers and staff of the No. 1205 drilling team, which broke the world record in annual drilling footage, have gone in vigorously for technical innovations and achieved outstanding results in high-speed drilling this year.

The plant making shots for gun-perforators and the general machinery works together formed a three-in-one combination of workers, as the main body, revolutionary cadres and revolutionary technical personnel which successfully experimented with a new perforating technology. Adoption of this new technology, which is up to the world level, not only reduces the workers’ labour intensity and enormously raises efficiency, but saves hundreds of tons of high-grade alloy steel for the state each year. Pushing aside the reactionary bourgeois technical “authorities,” workers of an oil extraction team did away with all fetishes and superstitions and experimented boldly. They succeeded in transforming wells not gushing automatically into gushers. This provides valuable experience for speeding the development of the oilfield. Iron-clad facts, prove that this teaching of Chairman Mao’s — “The lowly are most intelligent! The elite are most ignorant” — is a great truth.

Learning from the Tachai people’s revolutionary spirit of self-reliance and hard struggle, the masses of poor and lower-middle peasants and revolutionary members of families of workers and staff in Taching this year overcame a drought of a gravity rarely known in local history. They reaped a bumper harvest on their farms and achieved excellent results in their rural sidelines. This success follows on the extremely rich harvest of last year.

Across the Land

Excellent Situation in Taching Oilfield