The Ship of Theseus: Shipbuilders and the Cold War Origins of Modular Innovation in China

Yuting Chen, University of Chicago

Scholarship on state socialism(s) typically assumes a positive correlation between central planning and mass production. The more a socialist state sustains industrialization through central planning at the national level, the more it imposes mass production systems at the firm level. Yet, as I will show in this chapter, the relationship between socialist planning and production systems is much more complex than the handy formula of equalizing socialisms as incarnations of Fordism. I will make my case by adopting a historical method to trace the Chinese decision-making structures in the minesweeper programs between 1954 and 1987 and to surface the complex economic, technical, and political relations. Specifically, a home-grown batch production system enabled the late Maoist state (ca. 1961-1978) to produce more useful and resilient designs by canvassing more alternatives in less time than the Soviet-designed mass production system of the 1950s. However, these unorthodox structures of coordinating production were not the simple consequence of Chinese state agents’ ingenuity in technical and economic relations; they resulted from varying geopolitical dynamics, one of which was China’s forced defense industrialization (ca.1961-1978). I thereby theorize an overlooked political irony of the socialist world. There was one sense in which the late Maoist state was more Stalinist than its Comecon contemporaries, namely that there was even less of a turn towards a focus on consumer goods than in the USSR. A considerable share of Chinese industrial output was going to end users with serious political power, and some of whom (e.g., in the People’s Navy) could not afford to settle for products markedly inferior to what their capitalist counterparts had. This historical condition of continued Stalinism empowered and activated a set of alliances between end-users and producers to force deviations from another aspect of Stalinism, namely the strongly top-down, non-competitive nature of design and production.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 79. Historical Social Sciences and China (II): Socialism, Capitalism, and Transitions in Between