Dushanzi Petrochemical Company

Synthetic rubber

Dushanzi Petrochemical Company is a subsidiary of the China National Petroleum Company (PetroChina or CNPC), operating in Karamay. By 2017 Dushanzi was producing more than half of China’s production of SSBR. Since then, it has increased production capacity 160%. In September 2022 it announced plans for another expansion, of 25,000 tons/year production. Dushanzi Petrochemical was “the only enterprise producing environmentally friendly rubber in China” as of 2021. This “green” technology plays a key role in “helping environmentally friendly tires go international.” Among the new products Dushanzi Petrochemical developed in 2020, two were specific SSBRs for winter tires and racing tires, to realize universal tire production." Adjacent Dushanzi Petrochemical operations is a separate 50,000 ton/year synthetic rubber facility at Xinjiang Lande Fine Petrochemical (新疆蓝德精细石油化工股份有限公司), which also ranks among China’s major synthetic rubber manufacturers.

Car tires are made of steel wires, textiles, silicone, carbon black and an array of synthetic and natural rubbers. Among synthetic rubbers, which are petroleum byproducts, the tire industry consumes roughly 70% of global production of the solution-polymerized styrene butadiene rubber (SSBR) market, and a comparable percentage of the butadiene rubber (BR) market more broadly. Tire manufacturing dominates the synthetic rubber industry.

Additional supply chain risks arise as Dushanzi Petrochemical is continually launching new products. In 2020 it developed new product lines for blow-molding. Blow molding is a technology and product used in the manufacture of car paneling, railings, bumper support, fenders, mud guards, door locking systems, consoles, garnish pillars, braking, seating, storage systems, entertainment/audio/video components, console lids, shifter knobs, steering wheels, fan shrouds, cooling systems, resonators, fuel tank systems, electrical covers, and decorative parts.

Dushanzi Petrochemical has carried out villager-level “pairing” with cadres, supported construction of residential schools for Indigenous children, financed the (typically coercive) conversion of pastoralist lifestyles to agricultural labor, facilitated labor transfers of people from poverty-stricken villages, purchased goods produced in ‘poverty alleviation factories’ in Ili. State media photos of one such project shows it encircled by concertina wire. Petroleum processed at Dushanzi Petrochemical is sourced from the Tarim Oilfield, which like “all oil companies in Xinjiang” has been “actively… recruiting ethnic minority brothers to work.”

Dushanzi Petrochemical has established a poverty alleviation industrial park in a small village in the southern XUAR, which is designed for the “transfer of the poor labor force.” Cadres that work for Dushanzi Petrochemical are dispatched to the village to “guide surplus laborers to transfer employment.” The Dushanzi Petrochemical work team sends workers into its parent company’s oilfields and to enterprises in other parts of China. Furthermore, as the major national-level industry operating in Karamay, Dushanzi Petrochemical would be a likely destination for some of the “230 people” who “were newly resettled for the transfer of surplus labor force in southern Xinjiang” into Karamay by the government in 2019.