One might still find holiday tablecloths, handkerchiefs, bed linens, and lace collars folded away in a parent’s or grandparent’s cupboard: decorative objects that furnished middle-class households across North America, Europe, and later Latin America. Few people know, or remember, that many of them were made by rural women in socialist China, working at home or in collective workshops that were sometimes temporarily set up in dilapidated ancestral halls or temples, paid meagerly by state-owned companies.
In theory, this arrangement should not have existed under socialism. The putting-out system had long stood as a classic emblem of capitalist degradation. When Marx sought a vivid example of exploitation outside the factory, he devoted pages of Capital, volume 1, to modern domestic industry, above all English lacemaking and cottage lace schools where women and children worked beyond the reach of the Factory Acts.Footnote 1 With a total workforce of one hundred forty thousand, they far outnumbered the ten thousand workers employed in factories. Modern domestic industry organized through outwork and putting-out has often been treated as a transitional form within industrial capitalism: by Marx, by Lenin in his survey of Russian kustar, and by later scholars of protoindustrialization in Europe.Footnote 2 Yet unlike forms of speculation and profiteering activities examined by Adam Frost,Footnote 3 the same socialist regime in the Maoist era did not abolish the putting-out system. It preserved it, transformed it under state operation, and made it grow. In the Chaoshan region of coastal Guangdong, the industry had drawn in roughly half a million women before 1949; by 1981, more than a million rural women worked in it. Rural women were thus central to socialist export production.Footnote 4
Mao’s Clever Hands: Export Lacemaking and Socialist Flexibility in the Cold War, 1949–1980s asks why a communist party preserved a form of production and exploitation that its very ideological backbone condemned, and what had to be done to that form in order to make it earn foreign exchange for socialist industrialization while producing successfully for the global market.Footnote 5 The question has gone largely unasked because the sector has been read as marginal. The Chinese handicraft industry occupied an inferior position in the Maoist economy: less planned than heavy industry, and dispersed across households and workshops rather than concentrated in factories. As Philip Scranton observes in Enterprise, Organization, and Technology in China, that inferiority has also cost the sector scholarly attention, as though distance from the central plan meant distance from socialism.Footnote 6 The dissertation takes up chousha (抽纱, drawnwork) or the export lacemaking industry, one of the largest of these export trades. Chousha products incorporated various needlework techniques like embroidery, lacemaking, drawnwork, crochet, and cross-stitch. The dissertation argues that the rise of the handicraft export sector is crucial to understanding both the socialist developmental path and the East Asian myth of economic development in the second half of the twentieth century.Footnote 7 Compared with the steel mill under a tightly administered planning regime, this sector’s very entanglement with global supply and commodity chains makes it a revealing test of what Maoist socialism actually was. From a sector built on dispersed rural household labor and capitalist export demand, we can see more clearly the limits of a planned economy and the improvisations and local negotiations that made the system function.
Chaoshan offers a valuable vantage point for a second reason. A less-studied treaty port and a largely forgotten Special Economic Zone, Shantou and its surrounding counties (hereafter Chaoshan) had been the dominant center of handmade lace production since the 1920s. Needlework was the region’s de facto pillar industry, supplying tablecloths, handkerchiefs, bedding, trimmings, and pajamas to consumers on five continents. Nationally, chousha, as a category of goods, ranked fifth among Chinese exports before the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945), and it was still the sixth most important export in 1980. For decades, its output and earnings exceeded those of silk and porcelain. Along with other light industrial and handicraft goods, it directly fueled socialist industrialization by earning foreign exchange, especially during the 1960s and 1970s, after the decade of Soviet assistance ended and China had to earn hard currency wherever it could. Between the Republican peak and the end of the Mao era, export lace revenue from the region rose from over US$10 million in 1937 to over US$58 million in 1978, a roughly sixfold increase.
To examine how this export handicraft industry expanded and was transformed under the socialist regime, the dissertation follows both the expanding trade routes outward and the agents along the production chain inward, through the lens of what I call socialist flexibility. Footnote 8 Socialist flexibility names the improvisational capacity that a planned economy required in order to overcome shortages and meet volatile foreign demand: it was authorized by the plan, indispensable to it, and never specified by it.Footnote 9 What the export sector supplies is a case where the improvisation was not tolerated at the margins but legitimized and institutionalized at the center, because foreign exchange for industrialization was at stake. The concept therefore covers both organizational arrangements and actors who sustained them: rural-urban divisions of labor,Footnote 10 a transformed putting-out system, capitalist merchants and workers recruited into the socialist enterprise, designers, local collectives, and the women themselves. Among many mechanisms of socialist flexibility, a key one was technical codification. Artisanal and tacit knowledge was codified into manuals, diagrams, and price schedules, separating abstract technical knowledge from embodied practice. The dissertation thus reveals a process of social deskilling.Footnote 11 The knowledge moved upward into the speech and writing of urban managers and workers who often could not perform the craft but could classify and describe it, while rural lacemakers received less recognition for the expertise on which the entire system depended.
Flexibility was not always benign, and neither was socialist flexibility. The costs of flexibility were paid unevenly by the industry over time. Mass rural lacemakers paid first, as the technical unit prices that had once rewarded demanding techniques were flattened and converged into near parity with those for less demanding ones in the early years of the Cultural Revolution. As a consequence, the incentive to acquire and transmit skill disappeared with it. In the early 1980s, state-owned companies began to suffer because they found themselves no longer able to compete with emerging domestic rivals or to secure enough skilled women to fulfill orders. Above all, socialist flexibility impacted the reputation of Chinese products and craftsmanship. In order to enter foreign markets through layers of intermediaries and reexport channels shaped by Cold War confrontation, lace products made in China were often exported without any visible indication of their country of origin. In order to respond to the changing global markets, Chinese lacemakers produced products of various kinds and qualities, including those associated with cheapness and poor quality.
Read across a longer arc, the study recasts the making of South China as a world factory at the end of the century. The experience of working in a socialist putting-out system taught rural collectives to coordinate handicraft sidelines alongside agricultural production. They negotiated for operational autonomy and worked to meet foreign specifications and deadlines. Much of the organizational and production experience that later underwrote township and village enterprises (TVEs) accumulated here, and the process formed part of the preparation of a rural population for industrial labor before any of them left the handicraft sector or boarded a bus for Shenzhen and Dongguan, The broader transformation described here will be explored further in the book manuscript.
The dissertation summary moves through three sites, each with its own evidence, scale, and limits: markets, companies, and villages. The first is the market, reconstructed from records in and outside the Chinese mainland, along with meticulous notes of a lace designer (1962–1966) who served as a mediator between global demand and local production. The second is the urban company, which is approached through one existing company archive in Chaozhou and several private collections of previous workers, including technical manuals and workflow documents. The company archive is abundant, and its difficulty lies in access rather than survival. In fact, gaining entry to the company archive took me more than three years of building trust, before and through the pandemic. The third and last site is the village, where the company and official records reach their limit. For that, the dissertation turns to oral history, fieldwork, and my own experience of learning and making.
Markets
Even as the industry persisted under socialism, the basic nature of the business did not change substantially. The high volume of lace goods did not arise from industrial mass production, but from the aggregation of innumerable small and differentiated orders tailored to highly customized needs. If anything, the business under socialism became even more varied. The US embargo cut off direct trade with what had been the primary buyer of Chaoshan lace, forcing socialist managers to “excavate all the potential” from global trade by reaching out to as many markets as possible. The same language of excavation was applied to both human and nonhuman resources; it captured a wider Maoist imperative to mobilize whatever could still be made productive.
The expansion of the production and employment of a large number of rural women was therefore inseparable from the external demand for lace and embroidery goods. One reason that this demand has been difficult to trace along global commodity chains in the early Cold War is that the very structure of the trade was shaped by attempts to circumvent the embargo through layers of intermediaries. After the US imposed the embargo, most of Chaoshan’s export lace trade shifted from direct exchange with dominant markets such as the United States and Britain (from the 1930s to 1950) to indirect trade routed through Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaya for the rest of the 1950s. Through a web of hybrid and heterogeneous global actors, China expanded its global market successfully. By 1965, export values had slightly surpassed their Republican-era peak. By 1974, they had doubled, and by 1981, they reached over US$103 million.
In fact, Chinese lace did not merely continue to enter existing Western markets like the United States through intermediaries and entrepôts; it also established new markets around the world. The top four incremental markets for Chaoshan lace in the early 1960s were Italy, Brazil, Panama, and West Germany. At the time, the economic growth and booming consumer culture of Latin American middle-class households generated demand not only for modern appliances but also for fine home decoration.Footnote 12 Information about cultural preference, technical and aesthetic tastes, fashion, sociopolitical situations, and foreign trade policies was collected with care and distributed to managers and designers in Shantou on a monthly or sometimes biweekly basis. Some channels were expected, such as existing lace firms in Hong Kong and Macau, Chinese-sponsored trading agents like Teck Soon Hong under China Resources, and Western trade journals. The Guangzhou trade fairs also provided a rare interpersonal setting in which foreign merchants shared market intelligence, even if not all were willing to do so. Chinese overseas networks, including secret societies in Southeast Asia and migrant laborers in Latin America and Africa, reveal both formal and informal efforts that contributed to a hybridity and multiplicity of Chinese export lace trade.
The expansion of the global market through intermediaries, however, came with a long-term cost, one whose consequences still echo in Western lace and home decoration markets today. Mao’s Clever Hands begins with the long symbolic and socioeconomic history of lace in the West, especially among European migrant families in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. It then juxtaposes the craftsmanship of Chinese lacemakers with the weak material literacy of rising new consumers, who, as early as the 1920s, often could not identify a clear needlework provenance. Prominent Chinese sites of lacemaking such as Chefoo (Yantai), Swatow (Shantou), and Siccawei (Xujiahui in present-day Shanghai) became increasingly invisible in English-language trade journals (which will be more carefully analyzed in the book) during the early Cold War. Even though Chinese lace products continued to furnish many Western middle-class families, “Made in China” was downplayed or deliberately concealed by intermediaries to avoid high tariffs, to rebrand goods for markets suffering from insufficient domestic handicraft labor and expanding tourist demand (as in Italy), or to exploit colonial trade preferences (as in Hong Kong). In this sense, the viability of socialist export lace and embroidery partly depended on the systematic unmarking of its products. Socialist flexibility thus includes flexibility about identity and country of origin, and that flexibility imposed a long-term reputational cost.
Because Chinese lace was reexported under shifting labels and nomenclatures, it is difficult to track its routes and final destinations from official trade statistics alone. My analysis becomes possible largely because of one extraordinary source: the working notes written by the chief lace designer, Chen Tiequan, between May 1962 and February 1966. I discovered them unexpectedly while working through Chen’s personal papers, a collection that had been largely overlooked by both scholars and former employees, partly because contemporary business and intangible cultural heritage discourse tend to value visual and material evidence more than textual evidence. Designers, as mediators between changing global demand and dispersed local production, reveal how socialist flexible production was deeply intertwined with and made useful to global capitalism during the Cold War. Expanding and diversified market demand, often expressed in small-volume orders, required multiscale management capacity and production flexibility in order to be coordinated and materialized across the region.
Companies
Like many urban industries in the 1950s, the Chaoshan export drawnwork industry in the 1950s was reshaped by socialist campaigns such as the Three-Antis and Five-Antis Movements, and by the broader socialist transformation of capitalist and private commerce. It also passed through several administrative reorganizations and repeated efforts to establish stable state-owned enterprises across the region. From 1958 onward, the communist government appointed leaders with no previous background in the lace trade to supervise the leading Shantou Drawnwork Company. But it also recruited many former lace business merchants and their employees, especially after the outflow of people to Hong Kong and abroad in the early 1950s. Even though most management positions were held by communist or “red” managers, the very department responsible for the capitalist markets remained in the hands of capitalist or “white” experts. By recruiting private merchants and their workers, the state-run company acquired earlier designs and absorbed trade knowledge, practical know-how, and commercial connections.Footnote 13 Although the urban workforce constituted less than 2 percent of the entire export lacemaking industry in the early 1950s and that percentage declined further as the number of rural lacemakers grew, it was the knowledge and networks of this small group of workers that proved essential to restoring production and trade.
Yet practical questions emerged when private business owners and their workers were merged into a state-run system. Whose production knowledge and work routines should guide daily operations? What kind of standardization was possible, and for whose purposes? The transformation from private houses to state-owned enterprises therefore unfolded as a decade-long process of both horizontal and vertical craft integration spanning the Great Leap Forward and years leading into the Cultural Revolution.Footnote 14 State-run drawnwork companies began to survey and record relevant production knowledge from design, to material preparation, to making, to finishing, according to their own institutional responsibilities and at uneven rhythms. Such integration happened not merely in the export lacemaking industry in Chaoshan but also in other craft industries across the country.Footnote 15
The technical guides preserve meticulous descriptions of all kinds of needlework techniques, along with illustrations of making procedures and material samples. I also found a large body of company documents in a flea market that surveyed different processes and ingredients used to remove stains in the finishing sector, after pieces had been collected from multiple hands across different villages. The final, or one version of the final, selection of finishing methods was determined both by practical effectiveness and by the availability of materials, including state-regulated chemical supplies. A retrospective comparison of production statistics from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution suggests that the vertical integration through technical codification was successful in one important sense: output remained stable even when capitalist merchants were purged and sent down for socialist reeducation in the early Cultural Revolution. Yet the success of codification came at a social cost. The codification of tacit knowledge did not simply standardize craft production and tighten quality control; it also separated making from knowing. The state-run employees who could narrate and document skills gained greater authority along the production chain, while rural lacemakers were socially deskilled. Socialist lace designers, as mediators between global markets and local production, were often the most sympathetic to lacemakers’ skills and well-being. Even so, their recognition was limited and rarely became genuine solidarity across the hierarchy of value and status that structured the industry.
Following the production chain as a whole also shows that codification of tacit knowledge was incomplete. While much of the workflow and craft knowledge was standardized, certain forms of specialized trade knowledge remained embodied in particular workers rather than fully institutionalized. Cost calculation and cost control, which remained central to the business, were handled by specialized price-makers who were familiar with both external markets and the internal labor market. These price-makers used formulas, index numbers, and tools to calculate costs from design patterns. Their technical calculations of material and labor costs helped guarantee the profitability. Contrary to the common impression that socialist China exported products without serious attention to costs, Mao’s Clever Hands shows that recruited capitalist merchants and their coworkers continued to seek profit and to maintain profitability, usually around 15 to 20 percent, in lace exports.
The effects of losing such embodied expertise became visible during the early Cultural Revolution. After the purge of price-makers, production across the region continued, but the unit prices attached to different needlework techniques between May 1966 and December 1971 converged into a relatively flat and stable pattern. In other words, the early Cultural Revolution produced technical parity through the absence of specialized personnel. That parity demoralized skilled lacemakers. Previously valued and demanding techniques were significantly devalued, dropping to levels close to those of less demanding techniques such as cutwork and crochet, and they never fully recovered their earlier relative value even after price-makers returned to their posts. The result was not merely a change in accounting. It was a restructuring of incentives that undermined skill formation itself.
Alongside technical codification and its limits, the organizational structure of the export drawnwork industry also changed tremendously. After the Great Leap Forward and the Great Famine, the state-run companies and trade bureaus began discussing how to transform the putting-out system in 1961. They decided to replace individual middlemen with state-operated workstations and to dispatch agents directly across the region, in part to eliminate profit-seeking motives of local intermediaries and their reluctance to undertake challenging yet unrewarding tasks. Even so, the state-run companies and workstations still depended heavily upon rural collectives in order to reach individual makers. That dependence takes us to the third site, villages.
Villages
The production of discrete, customized pieces in both small and large orders, and under tight deadlines, relied on an efficient organizational structure and a stable supply of flexible, cheap labor. Two factors made villages and rural populations central to export lace production. First, even before state-operated workstations were established after 1961 to replace the first-tier middlemen (一盘商人) who often traveled from cities to suburbs and nearby villages, rural collectives had already been crucial to reaching dispersed female laborers. Second, the putting-out system, which had once rested on person-to-person networks, was transformed into a bulky institution-to-institution system, because Chinese villages and rural populations were gradually incorporated into the three-tier collectivized structures of communes, brigades, and production teams after the mid-1950s.
Rural collectivization made the putting-out system not only bureaucratic but also more extractive. This happened through two interlocking mechanisms. First, it became extremely difficult to distribute work directly to rural women due to the rural-urban divide. In theory, state-run companies could have done so through their own agents and workstations. In practice, however, the communist prioritization of agriculture over handicraft and sideline production created unequal competition for labor, especially in Chaoshan, a region known for its labor-intensive farming techniques.Footnote 16 State-run drawnwork companies therefore had to negotiate constantly with rural collectives and devise incentives for cadres to release labor time to lace production, even though that production earned foreign exchange for the state. One such incentive was a management fee ranging from 5.5 to 12 percent, depending on labor conditions. The fee was paid directly to the collectives but deducted from the total labor package. Rural collectives used it in various ways, including funding collective infrastructure and paying local cadres’ wages. Export lace production thus sustained not only the state but also local socialist institutions. Rural women, meanwhile, bore a triple burden in their everyday life: agriculture, export craft, and domestic work.
The second mechanism produced a divergence between the company records and lacemakers’ lived experience of payment. According to company records, The baseline remuneration for women’s labor was raised eight times by state-run companies between 1956 and 1981, with increases ranging from 80 percent in 1956 to 8.33 percent in 1979 relative to the previous level. Yet few lacemakers experienced these changes as real increases in income. In addition to the deduction of management fees, rural women’s lacemaking earnings were further reduced by the work point system, under which agricultural labor and sideline production alike were often converted into nonmonetary credit. Members earned credited work points in exchange for food and other collective welfare rather than receiving direct cash wages. Because lacemaking was one of the few opportunities for rural women to earn cash (and because there existed a gray market of exchange), rural collectives had strong reason not to allow state-run companies to distribute work directly to individual peasants. According to oral histories with more than forty lacemakers from nine villages across three counties, the actual cash women received from lacemaking usually ranged from only 15 to 30 percent of the full amount nominally assigned to their labor. The remainder was converted into work points. Younger workers suffered even more. Although women under the age of twenty made up the majority of the workforce (due to their nimble fingers, good eyesight, and lighter childcare burden), those under sixteen received discounted work points because they were not counted as fully able-bodied laborers. Under the rural work point system, the state paid very little cash to rural lacemakers while earning handsomely from export lace, one of the most profitable handicraft exports in the twentieth-century global market.
I could not have identified this gap between archives and lived experiences without oral history. Company and official archives contain very few records about ordinary lacemakers, apart from a few lacemaking models, and almost none about their skills and practical knowledge. Oral narratives not only reveal routes of skill transmission on the ground but also show how access to better work opportunities was guarded through local politics and social hierarchy. In the 1970s, in order to reduce transaction layers and save on transportation costs and time, state-run companies initiated what they called a “four-localization project.” The shift from regional specialization of techniques to localization aimed to create a more centralized and economical structure for flexible specialization. To achieve localized flexibility and reduce production costs, lacemakers were trained in a wider range of techniques so that women in a single village, or neighboring villages, could complete one entire piece of lacework without requiring repeated circulation across counties, as had often been the case during the Republican period and first two decades under the socialist regime.
The drive to enhance efficiency and productivity was visibly industrial in its language and assumptions. The company archive explicitly invoked the Daqing model, showing how deeply industrial ideology shaped even a socialist handicraft industry. Work routines were established in collective workshops, a grading system borrowed from industrial workplaces differentiated skill levels, punctuality was recorded, and work incentives included both social humiliation and material punishment for poor or slow work. Rural lacemakers did not work on a factory floor, but many nevertheless experienced the harsh discipline and poor working conditions of factory-like production in village settings, especially in the 1970s, when collective lace workshops proliferated after 1971.
Conversations with lacemakers, their families, and company employees in the region all converge on a wider social perception that underpinned the invisibility of this particular craft. Beyond the fact that handicraft appeared outdated in an industrial age, lacemaking itself was perceived as feminine, ordinary, and unremarkable. In 1981, lacemakers made up 37.6 percent of all able-bodied rural labor across twenty-three communes in Chao’an County, which equaled roughly three-quarters of able-bodied rural women. Those women were also sisters, wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law, and the labor they performed was as unremarkable within their households as housework itself. In interviews, sons, brothers, and husbands described watching (and in some cases helping) their mothers, sisters, and wives make lace, work that generated income for the family. But they never asked about it or honored the skill it required. Because lacemaking was treated as a routine source of rural household income and absorbed into the ordinary, the expertise it demanded ceased to register as expertise at all. During the reform era, younger generations who grew up under socialism quickly turned to better-paid industries, leaving the lace and embroidery sector with both a labor shortage and, more importantly, a shortage of skilled hands.
Conclusions and Prospects
Maoist China witnessed the rise of an export handicraft industry embedded simultaneously in external markets and in internal production sites threading urban companies and rural collectives. Mao’s Clever Hands is the first English-language monographic study to explain the mechanisms behind the expansion of a socialist export industry by connecting local and global actors, institutions, and networks through the concept of socialist flexibility. While handicraft production was less planned and less mechanized than heavy industry, state-run companies and local bureaucracies imagined the industry as “a gigantic factory” dispersed across villages. The routines of work, systems of grading, incentives, punishments, and quality controls all point to a striking effort to industrialize embodied handicraft production without concentrating it spatially in factories. The coordinating functions of the factory were thus performed without the actual factory’s spatial or mechanical apparatus.
At the technical level, the codification of workflows and techniques along the production chain, initially undertaken in the name of standardization, eventually separated women’s tacit knowledge into two distinct domains: actual making and accurate narration. Over the long term, the latter moved away from lacemakers and into the hands of male company workers who could classify, document, and supervise skill even when they could not perform it themselves. The outcome of socialist flexibility therefore extended beyond the disruption of a regional handicraft ecology. Domestically, it prepared rural populations for industrial production through quotidian labor discipline, constant emphasis on efficiency and productivity, and the commodification of craftsmaking itself. Mao’s Clever Hands examines the labor-industrious foundations of China’s economic rise from an extreme and revealing case: a sector among the least mechanized, yet one that became deeply integrated into global capitalism. It also offers a new perspective on China’s rural development and on the prehistory of TVEs in the reform era. Internationally, the dissertation contributes to business history by showing that socialist export success rested not on the elimination of decentralized labor but on its reorganization through state institutions, global intermediaries, and new techniques of managerial control. It demonstrates that Maoist China’s participation in the world economy was neither marginal nor contradictory to socialism, but constitutive of the way socialism functioned in practice. The concept of socialist flexibility invites historians to rethink several familiar oppositions: plan versus market, factory versus household, socialism versus capitalism, and modern industry versus handicraft. In Chaoshan’s lace trade, these were not stable binaries but mutually constitutive arrangements. A planned economy relied on flexibility externally and internally; dispersed rural households could be coordinated as an export machine; socialist firms depended on capitalist expertise and capitalist (and hybrid) markets; and a seemingly old-fashioned handicraft sector helped lay the organizational and social groundwork for China’s later rise as the world’s factory.
A final methodological note follows from this argument. Where many business historians confront a dearth of direct company archives, I was instead confronted with an overabundance of material, though the access itself took more than three years to secure. The richness of the company archive was both a fortune and a danger: it drew me so deeply into its internal logic that I risked losing sight of my larger questions and of the subaltern voices that had first motivated the project, like walking through a dense forest without a clear direction. It was only through the oral history with lacemakers, and through sustained analysis and mapping of statistical series, however imperfect socialist statistics may be, that the gaps between sources of different provenance became visible. My own hands-on experience learning embroidery and drawnwork with a local master did more than equip me to discuss technical procedures in my own terms. The changing light in the alleyway, the exhaustion of the eyes after hours of focusing on the minute spaces between warp and weft, and the stiffness of the body from holding an embroidery frame while seated on a small stool all made the everyday labor of lacemakers legible to me. That bodily knowledge does not replace archival analysis, but it sharpened my understanding of what the archives could not say: that the making of socialist export capitalism rested, in the end, on the disciplined, undervalued, and extraordinarily skilled and flexible labor of rural women.
Open access
