John Garnaut reports on the men who have run Western China.

THE three key officials who have led China's hardline security policies in Tibet and Xinjiang in recent years all started out together around the oilfields of the Yellow River delta in Shandong.

One is the Tibet Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, who described the Dalai Lama as "a wolf in monk's clothes, a devil with a human face". The second is Wang Lequan, who has led the uncompromising "strike hard" policies against ethnic separatism in Xinjiang since the mid-1990s.

The third is Zhou Yongkang, China's formidable security boss, who sits on the elite nine-member Politburo Standing Committee and controls China's police, intelligence and justice systems.

Many analysts, largely outside China, believe the hardline security policies implemented by Zhou, Wang and Zhang contributed to the seething discontent among Tibetans and Uighurs which exploded into deadly riots in Tibet in 2008 and Xinjiang in July last year.

But little is known about the process of policy formulation that has led to the political screws being tightened.

If past episodes are any guide, it was likely the product of fierce internal struggles between factions, interest groups and ideology. Professor Melvyn Goldstein, a leading Tibet scholar at Case Western Reserve University, has detailed how Tibet became the battleground for one of the Communist Party's most ferocious internal struggles when Deng Xiaoping's Southwest Army and the Northwest Army marched onto the Tibetan plateau from opposite directions in 1950 and could not agree on how to divide it up.

Tibetan sources detail how the radical reform efforts of the party secretary, Hu Yaobang, from 1981 were constantly undermined by local political-economic interests.

A prominent Tibetan scholar told the Herald that such divisions and patterns of sabotage were still at play when Hu's successor as the head of the Communist Youth League, the current President, Hu Jintao, was appointed as the Party Secretary of Tibet in 1989.

"Hu Jintao was on the 'soft' side," said the scholar, speaking of how police came to indiscriminately shoot protesting monks at the time, but it seems impossible for outsiders to judge. Ties of political patronage are complicated and opaque, but important.

One commonly held view, which is probably a myth, is that President Hu is a personal patron of those who have run and profited from the hardline policies in Tibet and Xinjiang in recent years. According to well-connected Beijing sources, Tibet's Zhang and Xinjiang's Wang had only peripheral involvement with the Communist Youth League when it was under Hu Jintao's control.

In 1988, as power in China was shifting from the hands of reformists to conservatives and the Ministry of Petroleum was changing its name to PetroChina, the ministry appointed Zhou as the party boss of Dongying city and simultaneously head of the Shengli oilfields, on the Yellow River delta. Zhou's deputy in Dongying was Zhang Qingli.

Eighty kilometres down the road is the home town of Wang Lequan, Shouguang. Wang by then had been promoted on to the party committee of Shandong province.

Zhou was a close family friend of the oil ministry official Zeng Qinghong, who was the key powerbroker for the Shanghai party boss, Jiang Zemin.

Then came the political purges surrounding the Tiananmen protests of 1989, which saw Jiang unexpectedly elevated to party boss of China, and the careers of the three Shandong officials took off. In 1990 Zhou was appointed as the commander of PetroChina's Xinjiang's Tarim Basin Oil Exploration Regiment.

It turned out to be a good career move, as those oil and gas discoveries are the biggest industry in Xinjiang and a key reason why PetroChina is the world's second largest oil company by market capitalisation.

In 1992 Wang Lequan followed Zhou's path to Xinjiang, as deputy party boss and then party boss from 1994. Zhang Qingli was appointed to be Wang's deputy in 2002, the same year Zhou Yongkang was promoted to the Politburo. And in 2005 Zhang took the skills he learnt with Wang in Xinjiang to Tibet, where he was promoted to party chief.

This Shandong oil clique – Zhou, Wang and Zhang – has ruled western China with an iron fist for much of this decade. Whatever Hu Jintao's connection to massacres of protesting monks in 1989, he has been a relatively weak leader who is only now thought to be gaining ground against his factional adversary, Jiang.

A key victory came in April, when Wang Lequan was moved out of Xinjiang. There are hints that policies in western China are at last changing. The new Xinjiang party boss, Zhang Chunxian, is widely seen as sophisticated, relatively open-minded and, according to some close political watchers, an ally of Hu Jintao.

With the new regime has come a low-key but new acknowledgment that some old policies were not working.