Anshan in present-day Liaoning Province, part of Northeast China or Manchuria, is home to Angang (Anshan Iron and Steel Works), for decades China’s largest steel producer. In Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism, Koji Hirata offers an ambitious and meticulously researched history of the enterprise and its company town, linking urban and industrial history to broader questions of how industrialization was initiated, transformed and sustained across successive regimes. Angang’s evolution is presented as a plus ça change story, in which organizational forms and inequalities persisted through empire, war and socialism.
The book follows a chronological structure. The Japanese Empire laid the foundations of Angang as a semi-colonial pig-iron producer, which was transformed into the state-controlled Shōwa Steelworks in 1933. Its workforce, drawn largely from rural migrants, was stratified by a rigid racial hierarchy that excluded most Chinese from welfare and job security. Total war from 1937 strengthened production through state subsidies, imported materials and forced labour from occupied China. Despite population influx after Anshan’s elevation to city status, labour shortages and material crises by 1940 undermined growth. Following Japan’s defeat, systematic machinery removal by the Soviets had complicated the Chinese Nationalist takeover in 1946. Reorganized under the National Resources Commission, the plant remained China’s most advanced, but the renewed civil war and repeated shifts of control impeded recovery.
Under the Chinese Communist Party, Angang became central to the socialist project of industrial modernization. Lacking skilled personnel, the new regime retained former Nationalist and Japanese technicians while welcoming Soviet experts. With Soviet aid and technology transfers, Angang spearheaded the First Five-Year Plan. This model factory town embodied the spatialized socialist welfare regime: hospitals, schools and recreation facilities within a self-contained garden city as residential space for the employees. The former Japanese managers’ residential district was repurposed for senior cadres, while ordinary residents endured acute housing shortages – a striking instance of ‘state-sponsored inequality’ (p. 200). Yet the socialist system also offered channels of social mobility tied to Party membership and workplace performance, revealing continuities and transformations of meritocracy and everyday socialization under Maoist state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Economic curbs soon surfaced, in a pattern that was identical to contemporaneous socialist republics and the dissolved Manchukuo. Quantity was prioritized over quality. Stakhanovites no longer toiled. Corruption, inefficiency and ‘wrangling’ (deliberate delays by work units) became endemic. Wrestling for control between Beijing ministers and the local Party committee produced further administrative instability. The drive to a one-chief system and centralization dominated the early 1950s, yet had lost its prime position after the downfall of its senior proponent Gao Gang, China’s industrial tsar who had once led Manchuria, and the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. Political education, directed mainly by city authorities, became a means of critiquing enterprise management.
During the final two decades of Mao’s rule, Angang became a test site for productive experimentation. The ‘Angang Constitution’, a report by the CCP Anshan Committee, impressed the Chairman by advocating mass mobilization and critiquing technocratic management. Hirata interprets this as less genuine empowerment than as a strategy for the municipal Party’s dominance over enterprise affairs. Deng Xiaoping’s 1975 resurgence reversed this tendency, restoring vertical control. In the reform era, Angang’s trajectory was one of relative stagnation. Talent transfers from Angang to coastal zones were ordered to elevate exports. Imported technologies expanded, yet required costly upgrades that ate into state investments. Profitable subsidiaries were spun off for stock-market listing to offset deficits. By the late 1990s, the company’s Maoist legacy had become a contested symbol – invoked by managers to inspire productivity, by workers in welfare protests and by coastal observers as the relic of a dysfunctional past.
Hirata challenges the conventional portrayal of socialist SOEs as monolithic and fundamentally distinct from their predecessors. This book thus contributes to global urban history by situating Anshan within transnational circulations of capital, labour and organizational models. Angang’s successive developers often reached prosaic consensus. The book also offers an incisive discussion of inequality. Angang’s industrial life, under colonial or socialist auspices, relied on spatial segregation and man-made inequality. Japanese planners had divided Anshan along racial lines, while Maoist authorities continued to privilege foreign experts with superior housing and transport. Contacts with Chinese workers were limited to mediated encounters. Besides its known privileged position in Maoist era, colonial Angang’s industrial take-off had the agricultural economy of Manchuria as its trade-off. Its reintegration into ‘Free China’ forced the closure of smaller steel producers. Anshan’s rust-belt status was another manifested sample of how the structure of growth in China had shifted, while some of the chief entrepreneurial successes owed their nascence to this precursor in stagnation. With Angang as the standpoint, global and interregional connectivities are not reduced to a clichéd celebration of laissez-faire or Orientalist nostalgia.
Hirata’s study is impressive in its analytical scope and his utilization of accessible materials. Occasionally, regional generalization is overextended from Anshan to Manchuria as a whole, but the book’s framing of Angang as a microcosm of heavy-industrial-led modernity remains persuasive. In a moment when the spectre of creative destruction was feared and anticipated, Making Mao’s Steelworks is a helpful account of a city where the sole manufacturing superpower of our age sprouted and rusted.
