Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China | The American Historical Review | Oxford Academic

Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China | The American Historical Review | Oxford Academic

Made in Manchuria: The Transnational Origins of Socialist Industrialization in Maoist China

Koji Hirata

The American Historical Review, rhab351, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhab351

Published: 27 October 2021

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Abstract

With its high concentration of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in heavy industry, Manchuria (Northeast China) functioned as a symbol of the “socialist industrialization” in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–). 

Many Manchurian SOEs nevertheless originated as Japanese colonial enterprises founded before 1945. 

Drawing on archives and interviews in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, I trace industrial Manchuria’s transformation before and after the Communist Revolution with a particular focus on Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). 

I argue that the industrial legacies of imperial Japan and Nationalist China in Manchuria facilitated China’s transition to a Soviet-style socialist planned economy under Mao Zedong’s leadership (1949–76). 

The early PRC developed a new system of socialist industrialization by simultaneously learning from Soviet economic planning and deploying physical assets, human resources, and economic institutions left by the Japanese and the Nationalists. 

My findings expand on recent scholarship on the pre-Communist origins of the early PRC by elucidating the significance of the Japanese influence. 

More broadly, I also argue that China’s socialist industrialization was decisively influenced by the global spread of state-directed developmental visions during the interwar period, thereby demonstrating the fundamental interconnectedness between capitalism and socialism in the twentieth century.

Vladimir Tikhonov

2 h  · 

State-managed capitalism is a trademark of the 20th century. What differed were the degrees of nationalization, its forms, and the political framework under which the nationalization took place. 

But purely technically, the mechanisms of "capitalist" and "socialist" state management of economy could often overlap. And lots of cross-fertilization took place across the political/ideological borders, with Taylorism in the USSR and five-year plans in France or the Netherlands (not to mention India or South Korea)....