This chapter explores Angang and Northeast China during the economic reforms following Mao’s death in 1976. As the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) developmental strategy shifted its focus to export-oriented light industry, regions with a greater presence of heavy industry such as Northeast China fared worse than light industry regions such as East China. Despite a series of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms including privatization, the PRC further integrated larger SOEs such as Angang into the party-state bureaucracy. The final echo of the Maoist era emerged in the form of SOE workers protesting for job security and social welfare benefits by appropriating the socialist discourse of the state. As China moved away from socialist industrialization, the legacies of this period in Northeast China transformed the region into a rust belt filled with ageing, unprofitable SOEs in heavy industry.

This chapter explores the Japanese colonial origins of Angang between 1915 and 1945. The outbreak of World War I reconfigured the geopolitical balance in East Asia, enabling Japan to develop ironmaking in Anshan. World War I also led to the rise of the Soviet Union, prompting interest in economic planning among many outside Russia, including Japanese researchers in Manchuria. These new developments in the interwar years crystallized in state-directed industrialization in Northeast China under Japanese occupation from 1931 to 1945. Through Soviet-inspired economic policies, the Japanese-sponsored puppet regime of Manchukuo developed Shōwa Steelworks in Anshan to support Japan’s war and imperial expansion. Reflecting the quintessentially colonial nature of Manchukuo, Chinese workers faced various forms of violence and discrimination on a day-to-day basis, increasing the forced labor mobilization of Chinese prisoners of war. Through planning and violence, the Japanese occupation regime turned Manchuria into the largest heavy industrial region on Chinese soil.

This chapter delves into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover and reconstruction of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Manchuria between 1948 and 1952. It was here, during the Civil War, that the CCP first experimented with Soviet-style centralized economic planning. In the early People’s Republic of China, Manchuria emerged as the largest center of socialist industrialization, owing to the heavy industry facilities built by the Japanese and the SOE system developed by the Nationalists. The CCP drew on the expertise of the remaining Japanese and Nationalist engineers, managers, and skilled workers to reconstruct Angang and other major SOEs in Manchuria. The party co-opted these knowledge workers by carefully incorporating former Nationalist Chinese as members of the new regime and segregating the Japanese from the local Chinese community. The CCP’s reliance on Japanese and Nationalist experts came to an end as Cold War tensions intensified during the Korean War.

This chapter explores Sino–Soviet cooperation in the early to mid-1950s. The People’s Republic of China’s First Five-Year Plan sought to develop heavy industry by importing advanced technology from the Soviet Union. One-third of the Sino–Soviet collaboration projects were based in Manchuria, utilizing the physical infrastructure inherited from the pre–Chinese Communist Party era. Soviet experts in China and Chinese students and trainees in the Soviet Union played key roles in transferring Soviet technology. By learning from Soviet knowledge and skills and adapting them to suit Chinese conditions, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang gradually reduced their technological dependence on the Soviet Union while supporting other SOEs across China.

This chapter examines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to politically mobilize Angang employees. Angang educated workers and engineers in the official Maoist ideology through study programs and propaganda campaigns. Under the danwei system, employees relied on Angang for social welfare benefits. To improve their positions within the CCP–created system, workers and engineers negotiated with state-owned enterprise (SOE) authorities, leveraging the discourse and institutional rules established by the party-state. These negotiations were exemplified by the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. SOE workers and engineers participated in the CCP project of socialist industrialization by pursuing their interests within the ideological rules of the game set by the party-state.

This chapter delves into Mao’s endeavors to reconfigure socialist industrialization from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s. Amid waning Sino–Soviet relations, Mao criticized Soviet-style centralized planning and advocated decentralization during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). This policy shift granted local officials increased horizontal control over major state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such as Angang. Following the Great Leap Forward’s collapse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constructed new industrial SOEs within inland “Third Front” regions as a bulwark against potential American and Soviet attacks, thereby reducing resource allocation for Angang and Manchuria. Commencing in 1966, the Cultural Revolution further decentralized power from nationally-owned SOEs such as Angang to local CCP cadres and military forces. Despite these attempts to deviate from the Soviet model, these efforts still preserved essential aspects of socialist industrialization. Nevertheless, the Sino–US rapprochement of 1972 presented China with the prospect of integration into the US-led capitalist global economy.

This chapter focuses on the years 1945–1948 to examine the Soviet occupation of Manchuria and Nationalist China’s efforts to reconstruct the region’s industry. During the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937–1945), China’s Nationalist Government developed heavy industry state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the inland region. Following Japan’s defeat, Manchuria was first occupied by Soviet military forces, who removed a considerable amount of industrial equipment from Angang and other Japanese enterprises to send it to the Soviet Union. Despite all the damage done during the Soviet occupation, Manchuria still had better industrial facilities than other parts of China. After the Soviet retreat in the spring of 1946, the Nationalist government consolidated and reorganized formerly Japanese enterprises into large-scale Chinese SOEs such as Angang. The Nationalists reconstructed these SOEs by employing Japanese engineers still staying there, while building on their experience running SOEs in the inland region and sending for Chinese managers and engineers from the inland. The Japanese and Nationalists thus unintentionally provided the foundations for the Chinese Communist Party’s socialist industrialization after 1948.

The Introduction outlines the book’s scope and familiarizes the reader with the history of Angang and industrial Manchuria. In the process, it positions Mao-era China within multiple bodies of scholarship: The global history of late industrialization; the transnational history of Manchuria; the intersection of geopolitics and technological transfers; and the study of state-owned enterprises in China.

This chapter examines bureaucratic politics surrounding Angang in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC). Major state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang were subject to both vertical control from the PRC government in Beijing and horizontal control from local Chinese Communist Party organizations. The tension between these two lines of control manifested in debates over the “one-chief system” – a Soviet-style top-down management structure. This tension was also evident in Angang’s construction, production, and sales. Despite the ostensibly centralized system, the PRC planned economy operated at the grassroots level as a field of constant negotiation among various government offices and SOEs, each interpreting the state policies in their own way.