Preface. A brief discussion of the project''s origins and its distinctive resource base in recently digitized and as yet little-used archives, closing with acknowledgements. Introduction. This sets the scene for post-1945 China, emphasizing World War II and Civil War destruction (though highly variable regionally), and key challenges facing the nation in 1949. These include dealing with a fragmentary and incomplete infrastructure, repeated cycles of natural disasters, and the legacy of several centuries of foreign interference and manipulation. China prioritized self-management and self-sufficiency to exclude Western incursions, but this hampered addressing the first two challenges. Then follows is a thumbnail sketch of PRC history from 1949 to 1971, with comparisons to Central European efforts at "building socialism." The remainder locates this study within business history generally and in relation specifically to Chinese business history, which has largely ignored the Maoist decades.
It also presents the study''s central argument - that persistent experimentation with novel organizational and technological approaches to problem solving drew on long-standing Chinese enterprise pragmatism and traditions of emulating exemplary practices, while creating durable, flexible capabilities foundational for the PRC''s emergence as a major economic power. Part I: Business Practice and Technology from Liberation through the Great Stumble, 1949-1961 Chapter 1. Agriculture: Organization and Tools for Self-reliance After summarizing socialist land reform and the transition to basic, then advanced cooperatives, the chapter focuses on a key organizational innovation, the supply and marketing co-ops, which served as local intermediaries for goods and information everywhere in rural China. Replacing predatory loan and purchasing practices from Old China, SMCs were charged with demonstrating socialism through fairness; in a sense they were daily evidence that revolutionary change had commenced. Yet SMCs and the communes that followed were imperfect devices. Weakly-trained cadres were consistently overwhelmed by visitors, supervisors, meetings, and the demands of calculating household shares of collective revenues. Situated accounts of missteps and failures and efforts at correction and re-centering will document ongoing experimental practices on the ground, not least the discoveries that mechanization involved better farm tools more than tractors, and that attending to maintenance and repair tasks was fundamental. The chapter closes with the decade''s greatest error, the Great Leap Forward''s rush to rural development through which "rocks for brains" officials triggered China''s last famine.
[No subheads.] Chapter 2. Infrastructure as Labor Intensive Development At Liberation, China''s transportation, water management, and power infrastructures were both fragmentary and fragmented, yet the new state was capital poor facing massive repairs and unmet needs. The socialist solution was a two-track construction program, with major railways and dams/reservoirs/power stations directed and funded from Beijing, while thousands of middling to small projects were tasked to counties and towns through provincial authorities. Initially People''s Liberation Army troops worked on repairing and extending railroad (5000 miles of track and 2700 bridges in the early 50s), but in time 20 million peasants spent off-season months moving billions of cubic meters of local earth and stone to keep back floods and assure adequate roadways for getting crops to railheads. Focusing on ground-level actors, the chapter revisits "big project" work processes, county-level experiments and the shortcomings that both exhibited when urgency trumped attention to detail in construction. With the Great Leap''s collapse, "small and local" schemes to provide electricity, building materials, and chemical fertilizer gained traction, initially clumsy efforts that proved valuable as first steps toward rural industrialization and as capital-saving investments. [No subheads.
] Chapter 3. Commerce and Socialist Construction Soviet revolutionaries regarded private merchants and traders as "unproductive" and eliminated them. This wasn''t feasible in the new PRC, even if it were a correct application of Stalinist "theory." China had no state capacities or personnel to replace 2+ million commercial actors, so instead undertook to harness their wholesale and retail skills through first encouraging, then pressuring them to join private-public partnerships and sales cooperatives. Even then, the state had few facilities to supervise these operations or school their owner-managers in the rudiments of socialism. Yet such merchants proved critical to managing markets and contracts bringing rural foods and handicrafts to cities and delivering industrial goods to farming districts. Enthusiasts for the Great Leap forbade the operation of rural market fairs, some of whose histories stretched back centuries, but once the Leap stumbled, the fairs roared back into prominence, with state commercial and economic publications recounting best practices and pitfalls to be avoided. Wholesalers developed market relations outside official channels and "unlicensed" traders multiplied to the extent that fears of "spontaneous capitalism" mounted among Maoist cadre, revealing fracture points about commercial activity that would crack wide open in the next decade''s Cultural Revolution.
[No subheads] Chapter 4. Industry From Trial-and-Error to Technology Reform In 1950, what remained of China''s steel, machinery and metalworking industries had all been constructed by foreigners. The USSR stepped in during the 1950s to sponsor and equip over a hundred new plants, but operating and maintaining them proved a nightmare until sufficient numbers of experienced workers emerged. "Horror stories" will be recounted: of machinery destroyed for want of lubrication, of raw materials and spare parts decomposing in storehouses or of workers'' shop floor short cuts gone dreadfully wrong. "Light" industry (textiles, ceramics) employed antique machinery left over from UK and Japanese mills. With state capital prioritizing "heavy industry," its managers and workers had to improvise repairs and workarounds that would keep factories going and meet plan quotas. Millions of handicraft workers, urban and rural, faced difficulties in getting raw materials, a problem solved by joining experimental cadre-led co-ops which contracted for marketing and payments while seeking hard-currency-generating fine goods. Both heavy and light industries often met quantity targets by ignoring quality, a deficiency highlighted in the late 50s/early60s Technological Revolution campaign, a drive to reduce waste, upgrade machinery and tools (without state subsidy), and unleash workers'' creativity in cutting bottlenecks, costs, and material inputs.
Tales of ingenuity compete with accounts of regrettable pratfalls for attention here, but the larger story concerns cultivating bottom-up innovation through encouraging and rewarding worker initiative. [No subheads.] Part II: Recovery, Reversal, Resilience : Business Practice and Technology, 1961-1971 Chapter 5. Agriculture as the Foundation Post-leap rural recovery entailed reforms pushing responsibility down the organizational structure to production teams and brigades (huge communes had proved unwieldy), prioritizing agriculture requirements over industrial needs, building rural production facilities and free-standing electric stations, and supporting market-responsive activity by farmers and craftsmen. Yet rural cadres and managers were persistently undertrained and overburdened, and often failed to constrain households eagerness to grow, make, and trade - some even abandoning rural life for illegal entry to town and city commercial circles. Controversies arose over everything from prohibiting eating frogs (they consumed kilos of insects) to surging market fairs (handling an estimated 25% of rural production). Self-reliant counties helped co-ops build small plants to make tools, cement, and fertilizer with local, not central resources. Thereby decentralization opened spaces for steps toward greater rural prosperity, but undermined revolutionary values.
[Subheads: The Four Modernizations and the Four Magic Wands: Building Rural Socialism; Updating Agriculture Through Refocusing Industry; Intensification and Diversification in Agriculture] Chapter 6. Infrastructure: Reappraisal and Reorientation Shifting capital spending toward agriculture dramatically reduced the flow of infrastructure projects in the early 1960s, a slide intensified by the withdrawal of Soviet experts and the cutoff of construction equipment and spare parts from the USSR. Railway building essentially ceased and water management efforts slowed. Still, the time had come for more systematic organization and management of all infrastructure systems, through drafting a comprehensive manual for freight and passenger train operations or with intensification of worker training through campaigns contrasting local work routines with best practices elsewhere in the PRC. By 1964, major dam and reservoir projects re-started, with "thousands of computations" replacing the mass urgency of their 1950s predecessors. Comparably widespread efforts undertook to repair and renovate hastily-built or pre-Liberation power stations, railways, and irrigation systems, with Chairman Mao''s Thought empowering veteran workers and cadres to convene discussion sessions that determined priorities and tabled plausible innovations. Formalized in the Design Reform Movement, "red" pressures mounted on construction "experts" to get out of their offices, go to sites to design "on the spot," and learn h.