Machine-tool High Modernism: Socialist Transformation of Shanghai's Bicycle Industry

Yujie Li, University of Florida

The large, state-owned factories in socialist China produced standardized products under the direction of the central plan. They represented the Communist Party’s vision of social prosperity through mass production—a vision that has been described by scholars as “high modernism” at some times, and as “global Fordism” at other. Yet much of China’s factories were equipped not with Fordist specialized machinery, but the versatile machine tools. In the 1950s, the Party consolidated an industrial sector previously populated by small workshops operating in OEM networks and built new centralized, state-owned factories—a process known as the Socialist Transformation of industries. This paper explores the technological dimension of the Socialist Transformation. Through a case study of Shanghai’s bicycle industry, this paper uncovers the critical role played by the social group labeled “middle and petty capitalists,” many of whom were business owners with valuable technical know-how. Their integration into the new sociotechnological system eliminated the entrepreneur as an identity even as it valorized the role of “technician.” Thus the party-state successfully assimilated both private assets and industrial expertise into the new socialist production regime.

No extended abstract or paper available

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