'Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism'

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'Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism' - Dr. Koji Hirata (Senior Research Fellow, Monash University)

Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang), located in China's largest heavy industry region, Manchuria (Northeast China), was the largest steel-making enterprise of the Mao era (1949-1976). Drawing on archives in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English, Making Mao's Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), offers the first comprehensive history of Angang before, during, and after the Mao era. Among other themes, it traces the pre-Communist roots of China's socialist industrialisation, showing how the Chinese Communist Party developed a new system of industrialisation in Manchuria by combining Soviet-style economic planning with industrial legacies inherited from the Japanese and Nationalists. By highlighting the symbiotic relationship between socialism and capitalism, the book situates China's socialist industrialisation within the global history of late industrialisation.

Please join us for the this talk on Thursday 1st of May, 5pm in the Hawkins Room, Fellows Quad, Merton College. 

No registration required. 

We look forward to seeing you there!