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 explores the reasons why workers would stay in or run from a factory, as well as the traps and perceived appeal of temporary employment and day labor jobs. It discusses the role of employment service agencies and their networks of job intermediaries in sustaining factories’ power and control over workers and in making workers more vulnerable and more susceptible to informal and temporary employment.

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.

This chapter explores Sanhe gods’ hybridized masculinity across rural–urban and class boundaries. It also discusses their online and offline sexual discourses, desires, and involvement in paid sex.

This chapter discusses the larger implications of Sanhe gods’ experiences. It analyzes the various forms of their resistance, from non-compliance to direct confrontation, and the state’s mechanisms of control, from gentrification to coercion. It ends with a discussion on Sanhe gods’ precarious future, as flexible employment becomes more widespread and the prospects for settling down in cities reduce even when the great gods have intentions to stay. It presents migrant workers’ experiences not only of factory hopping but also, and increasingly, of city hopping, as both livelihood strategies and coping strategies formed in response to state policies and repression.

The conclusion encapsulates the book’s main arguments, discussing the role of Manchuria in modern China, the intricate interplay between technology transfers and national security, and the complex manifestation of power within Mao-era China’s socialist political economy. In doing so, it contextualizes Mao-era China within the broader global narrative of socialism and capitalism.