OIL FOR THE LAMPS OF CHINA?

Well, Mr. Rockefeller, the local market had been satisfied — capital wanted to expand beyond it … and, to tell the truth: the idea was rather born by one of your father’s employees; his name was William Herbert Libby ...

„From 1882 onwards, my father let distribute the safe Standard-Oil-Kerosene-Lamp all over East Asia, as a gift, or very cheap — some eight million in one go … and a couple of millions more afterwards. Good Luck, that was the name as advertised ...”

Mei Foo!

„Excuse me?”

I see the light … Good Luck — that is in the language of my grand... grand... grand... grandfather: MEI FOO! He was still a little boy then, perhaps just the age of the little American boy …
And, both of their fathers had Good Luck — the first one in his Chinese hut as light from the Rockefeller-kerosene, the other one in his American bank as dollars in the Rockefeller-account …

„In my father’s memoirs it was a great adventure.” ...
In many countries, we had to teach the people to burn oil by making lamps for them; we packed the oil to be carried by camels or on the backs of runners in the most remote portions of the world; we adapted the trade to the needs of strange folks.”

In my peoples’ memories, it has been a simple trick ... At the beginning of the Eighteenth Century, our trade was blooming like nowhere else in the world, and my „strange folk” made already use of oil-lamps when there was in the whole of America not a single blasting white fellow, who would have dreamt of Standard Oil …

OIL FOR THE LAMPS OF CHINA?

Yet, Libby’s strategy was a great success. The lamps were indeed moved deep into the heart of our country, in caravans of carts or on sampans. Before long, Standard Oil had broken both the monopoly on peanut oil exercised by mandarin merchants, and swept aside the prejudice village priests had against kerosene. Even when empty, the tin cans and wood frames the kerosene was packed in made useful household additions for poor Chinese villagers.

We Chinese are traders by nature, however, the idea to give away something for free so that you would earn from the permanent need to refill it to make it work, this idea hasn’t even struck my Mr. Moon as something sustainable.
..„Oil for the lamps of China” soon became a byword among American executives and internationalists. It was even the title of a highly popular novel, 1932 written by Alice Tisdale Hobart, an American woman who had married an oilman stationed in China.
Her story, later even turned into a movie, followed the rise of Stephen Chase, a young oil executive captivated by a vision of an industrialized China. In the novel, it is Chase who comes up with the idea for the Mei Foo lamps, by recalling his childhood night light.
„A tiny chimney, tiny bowl that would hold a coppers’ worth of oil! A lamp that peasants and coolies could afford to buy! Stephen smiled to himself, seeing their childish delight, remembering the pleasure they took in examining his watch, his flashlight ... His dream expanded. In time the Company could put a lamp in every inn, every hut in Manchuria, in China! Four hundred million people, millions of lamps.”

Mr. Rockefeller, your father did not only bring light to the world, he laid one of the very cornerstones of American optimism. The idea, tracing back to Puritans, that there need be no conflict between doing well and doing good. The Chinese would have light, China would rise, and the stockholders would get rich!

And, why didn’t we come up with such a clever idea ourselves?
²² In those times, our traders belonged to the lowest class — after scholars, teachers, civil servants, peasants and artisans. It was said, traders would make profit by simply exchanging the fruits of labour produced by other pople, and an old Chinese saying goes: banks are founded by big robbers.
We Chinese, we were always great in inventing things, but shy in getting profit out of it … compass, gunpowder, paper, silk, porcelain, book-printing … By the way, during the Han-Dynasty — that was more than two hundred years before the Christian age — we already used two different systems to record the spoken word …

Hold on … would you, please, elaborate a bit more on that?

Of course, and with compliments to your controller, says Mr. Moon!
The first kind, he lets you know, was called xíngshu, you could translate it as running script. The other one was called caoshu, something like grass script — very difficult to learn. Mr. Moon thinks the first one is similar to Pitman’s shorthand system so much treasured by your controller …

But, how ...? — Oh ...? — Excuse us, we are told you should just continue ...

e²² Well, we showed a rather prophetic contempt for all such projects, which were supposed to save on labour, speeding up its pace feverishly, and throwing half of the population into unemployment. Instead, we were still quite content with the traditional way of trading, when European capital, in 1876, constructed the first railway-line in China!
This first line between Shanghai and Woosung was sixteen kilometres long. The people did not like it; their protest was based on the conviction that this iron horse would offend the spirit of the earth. Opposition became so serious that the government of the time bought everything, and all wagons, including the locomotive, were thrown into the sea …

— tazara — tazara — tazara ...

So,in a ll this, the Chinese themselves were only faceless consumers — actors in a corporate drama. That corporate drama would play out a little differently, but it would indeed undermine your father’s loftier ideals, Mr. Rockefeller, wouldn‘t it?
Even as Standard Oil expanded into China, it was losing its worldwide monopoly on crude oil. Discoveries of massive deposits at Baku and elsewhere soon made it clear that the world’s oil had not all been providentially placed in western Pennsylvania.
Before long, companies led by Sweden’s famous Nobel brothers, the Rothschilds, and the Anglo-Dutch combine of Shell Oil and Royal Dutch, were drawing on enormous new fields and refineries from the Black Sea to the Dutch East Indies, and challenging Standard Oil’s hegemony around the world.
By the 1890s, Russian crude oil production would even briefly surpass that of the U.S., and your father responded to the challenge with alacrity — and some less than savoury methods.
Trying to create alarm in Russia’s main superpower rival, Standard Oil hired British solicitors to spread rumours of a cabal under „Hebrew influence” who were trying to take Russian tankers through the Suez Canal controlled by „Jewish men who cry ‘Wolf! Wolf! Standard Oil Company!’ and keep moving in and getting control of markets,” and contrasted Standard Oil’s „fair-minded” practices with „the old, old, Jew method of treating one customer one way and another in another.”
However, much to your father’s chagrin, he would have to share the Asian market with Jewish and non-Jewish men alike and soon — thanks to Teddy Roosevelt, the American market as well ...

„Do you want to indicate the Rockefellers have ever been … anti-Semitic?“

Not at all! We let indicate!

CONTROL! Hello! ACTION!