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The Chinese Machine-Building Industry: A Reappraisal

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Robert Michael Field
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Extract

The machine-building industry covers a very wide field: rolling stock for railroads, blast furnaces for new iron and steel complexes, trucks and tractors for agriculture, bicycles, radios, clocks and thermos bottles for personal use, not to mention thousands of other commodities. An interest in any of these things or in more aggregate measures such as the volume of construction or the growth of industry, presupposes an interest in the machine-building industry. As it was put in the first Five-Year Plan, “The machine-building industry is the key to the technological transformation of [the] national economy.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 54 , June 1973 , pp. 308 - 320
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1973

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References

* I am extremely grateful to Mr John Philip Emerson and Mr Murray Feshbach of the U.S. Department of Commerce for listening patiently and for giving me the benefit of their expert knowledge of the Chinese and Soviet economic systems.

1. First Five-Year Plan for Development of the National Economy of the People's Republic of China in 1953–1957 (Peking, 1956), p. 75Google Scholar.

2. State Statistical Bureau, Wo-kuo kang-t'ieh tien-li mei-t'an chi-hsieh fang-chih tsao-chih kung-yeh ti chin-hsi (Chinese Iron and Steel, Electric Power, Coal, Machinery, Textile, and Paper Industries — Past and Present) (Peking, 1958), p. 140Google Scholar. Cheng, Chu-Yuan, The Machine-Building Industry in Communist China (Chicago, 1971), p. 81Google Scholar; Chao, Kang, The Rate and Pattern of Industrial Growth in Communist China (Ann Arbor, 1965), p. 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Field, Robert Michael, “The growth of industrial production and productivity in communist China: 1952–1957” (Doctoral Thesis, Harvard University, 1966), p. 60Google Scholar.

3. For a discussion of the defects in the official data for the gross value of industrial production, see Field, Robert Michael, “Labour productivity in industry”, Eckstein, , Galenson, and Liu, , eds., Economic Trends in Communist China (Chicago, 1968), pp. 638–44Google Scholar.

4. Cheng, , Machine-Building, p. 82Google Scholar.

5. The complete list can be found in the State Statistical Bureau's Kung-yeh ch'an-p'in mu-lu (Index of Industrial Commodities) (Peking, 1953), pp. 41–85Google Scholar.

6. The formula for the adjustment of a sample index is:

where I represents the index for an entire category, I' represents the index computed from the sample output data, and α and β represent the average annual rates of growth during the years 1952-6 of the index for the entire category and of the sample index, respectively. For a more complete description of this formula, see Kaplan, Norman M., and Moorsteen, Richard H., Indexes of Soviet Industrial Output (Santa Monica, 1960), pp. 61–8Google Scholar.

7. Power machinery consists of gasoline, diesel, gas and steam engines. See Cheng, , Machine-Building, p. 251Google Scholar, who cites Chi-hua ching-chi, No. 12, 1958, p. 22Google Scholar. The first three types are internal combustion engines.

8. The prices and physical output data used in the construction of all three indexes are presented in tables 10 and 11, respectively.

9. Chao, , I-wen, , Hsin chung-kuo ti kung-yeh (The Industry of New China) (Peking, 1957), p. 43Google Scholar.

10. Kung-yeh t'ung-chi-hsueh chiang-i (Lectures on the Study of Industrial Statistics) (State Statistical Bureau, Peking, 1958), pp. 32–5Google Scholar.