Steel metropolis : industrial Manchuria and the making of Chinese socialism, 1916-1964
Keywords: History.

Drawing upon archival and oral history sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, this dissertation examines the transformation of twentieth-century China's largest steel enterprise and its urban environment: the Anshan Steel and Iron Works (Angang) located in the city of Anshan in Manchuria (Northeast China). During the early years of the People's Republic of China (PRC, 1949-), Angang produced fully half of China's steel, and was also the fourth largest steel enterprise in all of Asia. A symbol of the new socialist state as envisioned by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Angang was also one of the PRC's largest state-owned enterprises that formed the primary pillar of the socialist planned economy. While Soviet technological aid to Angang in the 1950s is well documented, far less known is Angang's genesis, which lay squarely in Japanese colonialism in Manchuria before 1945. This study traces the evolution of Angang and its urban environment in Anshan under the successive regimes of imperial Japan (1916-1945), the Soviet Union (1945- 1946), the Chinese Nationalist Party (1946-1948), and the CCP (1948-present). I challenge the widely held idea that the PRC's planned economy was inspired purely by Stalinist and Maoist visions. Instead, I contend that Chinese socialism also built upon the physical assets, human resources, and institutions left over from the Japanese and Nationalist war economies. Moreover, as under these previous regimes, lower-level officials and local residents often undermined the PRC's top-down efforts to transform the economy by re-interpreting the organizational and ideological rules set by the state for their own interests. Through a transnational microhistory of Angang and Anshan, my work offers a new framework for analyzing late-industrializing regimes of the twentieth century. I propose the concept of "hyper-industrialism" to describe the global nexus of ideology on development that crossed the divide between socialism and capitalism. By hyper- industrialism, I refer to a strong faith in the state's ability to industrialize the economy through bureaucratic planning and dominant focus on heavy industry for increasing the nation's military strength. By analyzing how the tenets of hyper-industrialism were implemented on the ground, I also explain how people experienced state-led industrialization in their daily work and everyday life. The dissertation begins by exploring the pre-CCP origins of the socialist planned economy in Manchuria as epitomized by the rise of Angang under Japanese, Soviet, and Nationalist rule (Chapters 1-2). The core discussion focuses on the first phase of CCP rule between 1948 and 1957, especially the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957). Specifically, chapters 3-6 examine the Japanese, Nationalist, and Soviet influences in the PRC's socialist industrialization; the early PRC's state-enterprise system; the planning and formation of the industrial city; and relationship between the CCP Party-State and Chinese citizens. The last chapter discusses the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961) and its impact on Chinese socialism.