Standing in front of now defunct smokestacks, the third-generation former steel worker in his 70s spoke with pride and a visible nostalgia about the heyday of production, when around-the-clock shifts on these now half-razed grounds produced the steel for the Manhattan skyline, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the vast American fleets of the Second World War. It was September 2024, and I had arranged for a tour of the former Bethlehem Steel grounds for a group of modern China historians. In a different language and with a few minor changes in details, the encounter could have taken place in any rustbelt city around the world, including Anshan in north-east China, home to Angang, the premier steelworks of Maoist China. The scene replayed in my head as I read Making Mao’s Steelworks, which brings to vivid life Angang and its history spanning the Japanese Empire (1915–1945), the Soviet occupation (1945–1946), Nationalist China (1946–1948), and as a model of socialist industry under the Chinese Communist Party (1948–present).
By using an impressive array of archival research, interviews and previously classified materials from Japan and Russia, Hirata places Chinese socialism and industrialization into conversation with global trends, juxtaposing the CCP’s grand vision against the reality on the ground, and argues that “China’s socialist industrialization was a fluid system, evolving through transnational interactions and local-level negotiations” (p. 5).
In three parts and over eight chapters, the story begins with an ascendant Japanese Empire, fresh from its victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), which allowed it to gain control of the extensive railway network in Manchuria. Upon this infrastructure Japan built China’s largest heavy industries, including Anshan Ironworks and Shōwa Steelworks. These enterprises served larger imperial industrial goals and enforced a strict hierarchy with largely segregated Japanese workers enjoying a privileged lifestyle and Chinese workers subjected to brutal labour practices. Upon Japanese surrender in 1945, Soviet troops initially occupied Manchuria and stripped industries of anything that could be moved. When the Nationalist government took over in 1946, they rebuilt as much as they could and continued state-directed industrialization at Angang and other enterprises in the Northeast with their own state-owned enterprise (SOE) system, which they had practised during the war and their forced retreat to the Southwest. The Chinese Communist Party subsequently built upon the earlier models of state-directed industrialization under the Japanese and the Nationalist government. Into the early 1950s, the CCP continued to rely on Japanese and former Nationalist engineers, managers and skilled workers. During the heyday of Sino-Soviet collaboration in the mid-1950s, Soviet experts transferred technology to aid the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) first Five-Year Plan and reinforced the importance of heavy industries such as Angang to the country’s planned economy. Through the decades of the twentieth century, Hirata demonstrates continuities through succeeding regimes and the interwoven nature of technology transfers and geopolitics (p. 17).
Hirata’s book is at the forefront of a new turn in China studies, driven by geopolitical contingencies and restrictions on access to archives in the PRC, toward research that both highlights transnational influences and illuminates Chinese dynamics from the outside in. The most remarkable section of this book comes near the end. In an appendix on primary sources, the author tells the harrowing story of his research for the book. He arrived at the Anshan City Archives in July 2013. On the first day, he was shown files from the 1950s and 1960s and allowed to freely photograph these documents with his iPad. On day two, the staff grew suspicious, deleted the images from his iPad, and brought in government officials who detained and interrogated him until 9 pm. To secure his release, officials forced him to surrender his iPad. Alarmed by these spiralling developments, Hirata asked the Japanese consulate-general in Shenyang to intervene on his behalf. Apparently undaunted by this experience, Hirata returned to Anshan a few years later. On a second visit in 2017, Hirata was again denied access to materials at the archives but found some materials in the Anshan City Library and pre-1931 documents at the Liaoning Provincial Archives. He also conducted interviews with retired workers.
Working around these official restrictions, Hirata employed “Sinological garbology” to supplement his sources from second-hand book dealers that had picked up discarded historical records, often from local government offices. He turned to document troves in Taiwan, the US National Archives, Hoover Institution at Stanford, and in Japan. The Russian State Archive of Economy turned out to be a goldmine. Documents from the innocuous sounding Ministry of Ferrous Metallurgy included records of classified conversations with Chinese leaders. What comes out of this assortment of sources is a history of late industrialization in China told from the outside in, reflecting the plethora outside influences on Chinese industrialization – from Japan, Nationalist China, Germany, the Soviet Union and the US. The resulting history is specific in place and time – and yet, with enough remove to underscore the amalgamation of external influences on distinctively Chinese developments. The book is rife with keen insights and analysis of socialist industrialization, building to the conclusion that, “The transnational history of Angang highlights the importance of recognizing the interconnectedness between socialism and capitalism” (p. 300). This includes not only the rise but also the decline of these industrial cities. The book concludes with a vignette from a popular 2023 TV series The Long Season, depicting ordinary workers navigating the decline of a financially beleaguered SOE in a fictional northeastern city, Hualin, based on Anshan. In the finale, the second-generation steelworker Wang Xiang exclaims, “look forward, don’t look back!” (p. 293). Hirata’s experience writing this book should spur Sinologists in 2025 to look outward and work creatively around the PRC’s increasingly stringent restrictions on archival access.
