Pioneer petroleum engineer awarded July 1 Medal posthumously

Chen Junwu, one of China's foremost petroleum refining engineers, was posthumously awarded the July 1 Medal, the Communist Party of China's highest honor, in recognition of a career that produced a string of breakthroughs in petroleum refining and coal chemical engineering.

For Chen, the value of a life could be distilled into a simple moral equation, according to a Xinhua News Agency report on Monday: "A life shines bright when giving outweighs getting. It's merely plain when giving matches getting. It's dim and gray when giving falls short of getting."

These words served as the personal standard of a man who devoted 68 years of service to the Party and worked tirelessly for more than seven decades until his death in 2024.

The spark that ignited that career came 80 years ago in Fushun, Liaoning province.

As a 19-year-old chemistry student at Peking University, Chen visited a synthetic oil plant left behind by the Japanese.

At the time, China's oil industry lagged far behind the world. Standing there, he made a promise to devote his knowledge to the nation's rejuvenation.

The path ahead was often a lonely one. In a 1948 diary entry, Chen wrote: "The truth of science has tempted me too bitterly. I have thrown my splendid youth into a bottomless abyss, and my obsessive quest for knowledge has made me a lonely soul cut off from the crowd."

After graduating in 1949, he headed straight to Fushun, where he took up a job as a technician at a synthetic oil plant.

"It is best if my major can solve the country's immediate difficulties," he recalled years later. "As a fresh graduate, I desperately wanted my skills to be used where the nation needed them."

In the 1960s, the Daqing oilfield, Heilongjiang province, was producing crude oil in abundance, but the technology to refine it efficiently was lacking.

In 1961, at the age of 34, Chen led a team that mastered fluid catalytic cracking, a pivotal refining process, and designed the country's first such unit. The achievement brought China's refining capabilities close to world standards.

In the 1980s, as domestic oilfields faced declining output and deteriorating crude quality, Chen developed an indigenous residue catalytic cracking technology.

The breakthrough enabled China's refineries to shift, in his words, "from eating refined grain to eating coarse grain".

In 1990, Chen retired from his management post at China Petrochemical Corporation's Luoyang Petrochemical Engineering Corporation, Henan province. But he never truly left the energy sector behind.

Every morning, a man dressed in a white shirt and carrying a blue cloth bag could be seen heading to his office on the fourth floor of the company building, where stacks of papers and research materials filled the room.

His attention later turned to climate change. Beginning in 2010, when he was already in his 80s, Chen spent three years poring over vast amounts of research, publishing more than a dozen papers and writing a book titled Studies on China's Mid- and Long-term Carbon Emission Reduction Strategic Goals.

Chen Xiangsheng, who served as his assistant for more than 30 years, recalled: "Those were the three most demanding years of Chen's post-retirement life.

"Without a profound sense of responsibility to the country and a rigorous scientific attitude, no one in his 80s could have shouldered such a burden."

Despite his many accolades, Chen never believed they entitled him to slow down.

"I never let myself think that just because I've earned a lot of honors, I can afford to slack off. I stay on guard at all times and don't allow myself to even entertain that thought," he said.

Chen saw himself as just one step on the scientific ladder for future generations to climb. He hoped to connect the past with the future by nurturing young talent.

"We are in a wonderful era now, and the pace of progress has visibly quickened," he said.

"I hope more young comrades will step on my shoulders, grow faster, reach higher and march forward bravely on the path of scientific and technological innovation."

lihongyang@chinadaily.com.cn