The Chinese Nationalist Government’s Access to and Limitations on Xinjiang’s Resources : A Case Study of the Dushanzi Oil Field, 1942–1946

Abstract

This article traces the Chinese Nationalist Government’s approach to the Dushanzi Oil Field (獨山子油礦) in Xinjiang between 1942 and 1946, aiming to reveal that political consolidation and substantive control over resources were, in practice, two separate matters. Sheng Shicai’s (盛世才) 1942 shift from a pro-Soviet to an anti-Soviet stance opened an unprecedented opportunity for Nationalist intervention in Xinjiang, yet at this point the Dushanzi oilfield remained under exclusive Soviet operation, run without any written contract. Following a field investigation led by Weng Wenhao (翁文灝), the National Resources Commission entered into four rounds of negotiations with Soviet representatives, but the two sides never converged on the questions of capital share, management rights, applicable law, and land valuation. Even before the talks formally broke down, Soviet troops had already occupied the Dushanzi site by force. After the breakdown, the Soviet side selectively withdrew its equipment and sold off the remaining assets, which the Nationalist Government purchased in February 1944 for 1.7 million US dollars, acquiring in the end only sealed wells and obsolete facilities. Soviet influence proved impossible to overcome even after the purchase was completed. The Soviet Union repeatedly undercut the outcomes of negotiation through informal military pressure, such as bombing along the border and support for rebel forces, against which the Nationalist Government had no effective means of response. The border bombings in turn precipitated Sheng Shicai’s removal and his replacement by Wu Zhongxin (吳忠信) as provincial chairman. With Wu, who had overseen China’s frontier policy as head of the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission for eight years, Xinjiang came under the rule of a centrally appointed figure for the first time; yet the Resources Commission’s takeover of the Dushanzi oilfield amounted to no more than a formal transfer. This outcome reflected not incompetence on the part of the Nationalist Government but the structural constraints of a China caught in the turmoil of the Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War: obliged to manage its relationship with the Soviet Union as a fellow member of the Allied camp while conducting the war against Japan, the Nationalist Government had little room to confront the Soviets over Xinjiang alone. Lacking a substantive understanding of the region, the Nationalist Government treated Xinjiang not as a matter in its own right but as a diplomatic card bundled together with the Northeast question in its dealings with the Soviet Union. Through this reconstruction, the article challenges the premise underlying existing scholarship, which has treated the conclusion of negotiations or the 1944 asset sale as the completion of sovereign recovery over Xinjiang, an equation of formal legal ownership with the restoration of substantive control. The Nationalist Government’s approach to the Dushanzi oilfield proceeded without a prior, thorough understanding of Xinjiang, relying instead on inheriting existing frameworks largely intact, namely Soviet equipment and technical expertise on one hand and Sheng Shicai’s existing political apparatus on the other, in pursuit of stability. The Nationalist Government did approach the Dushanzi oilfield, but it was precisely this manner of approach that led it, at every turn, to its limits.