In this 2019 book, Philip Scranton answers a criticism that he himself had raised six years prior: that the established business history field is “too Western” and lacking effective presentation of Asian or Latin American perspectives (Philip Scranton and Patrick Friedenson, Reimagining Business History [2013]). His effort to stand by his words is successful. Scranton candidly states that he has “no capacity” in the Chinese language, but he compensates with meticulous scholarship on two enormous collections of English primary sources with Chinese origins (p. 384). First was the body of 130,000 documents translated by the Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS), a government agency successively operated under the U.S. Commerce Department and the CIA. Scranton drew information from the JPRS's translations of forty-four Chinese journals and sixteen daily newspapers. He also capitalized on the CIA's recent opening of the Electronic Reading Room (over 900,000 files) and systematically probed the agency's declassified circulars on Mao's China including broadcasts to U-2 spy missions and evaluations of road building and machinery production.
Scranton is intrigued by the phenomenon of “socialist businesses”: enterprises within socialist states that, although uninvolved in price battling, bankruptcy, or stock trading, still did many things that capitalist companies do, like making and selling goods, providing services, paying workers, keeping accounts, and buying machinery. He observes that socialist businesses in Maoist China were more willing to try novel approaches and accept failures than their peers in Communist central Europe, and this willingness “sparked far more creativity in matching resources to needs” in China than in Poland, Hungary, or Czechoslovakia (p. 5). Consequently, the two-way transfiguration between market-driven businesses and planned-economy enterprises had the most dramatic and lasting impact on China, where the largest human-caused famine took place in the twentieth century but an “economically dynamic one-party state” persists in the twenty-first century (p. 9). Seeing the Deng Xiaoping-era experimentation as a continuation of previous decades, Scranton reassesses the achievements of Maoist China's enterprises.
Scranton arranges nine main chapters in a four-four-one sequence to cover four different enterprise domains (agriculture, infrastructure, commerce, and industry) across three periods (1950–1961, 1962–1966, and 1967–1971). In the “foundation” agricultural sector, Scranton studies the communes and state farms, the piecemeal system these enterprises used for labor accounts, and their balancing act in producing grain, vegetables, and subsidiaries (charcoal, fibers, and herbs). In tracing state capital allocation, Scranton distinguishes the capital-intensive electric power facilities from labor-intensive projects like railroad/road construction and water management. This book pairs strongly with Elizabeth Köll's Railroads and the Transformation of China (2019) and David Pietz's The Yellow River (2015) to examine infrastructural enterprises’ supportive role in rural production and freight transportation. Scranton finds the commerce sector teeming with transactions outside the vertical channels of provincial wholesale depots or state enterprises—even at the peak of the Great Leap Forward campaign, communes and factories were barter-trading eggs, hogs, chisels, rice bowls, rubber hoses, and brown wrapping paper among themselves. Fourthly, Scranton's analysis of industry comprises not only the visible goods and machines but also the less quantifiable workers’ training and farm-related repair services. While economists often use Beijing's four consecutive “Five-Year Plans” as benchmarks for periodization and macrolevel assessments, Scranton sees the twenty-two years after 1949 as one continuous socialist experiment that featured many small failures and a few big disasters that did not necessarily impact all sectors at once; for instance, railroad construction in Southwest China was scarcely delayed during the Cultural Revolution. The socialist business model that solidified in China by the early 1970s set the stage for a new wave of enterprise reforms in the subsequent Deng Xiaoping era.
A unique strength of Scranton's work is his attention to technological details. Beneath economic analysis, we unexpectedly learn mechanical details on engines, generators, turbines, petrochemicals, metal-casting, roadbed graveling, etc. It is uncannily like walking in the Midtown Scholar Bookstore in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where 200,000 new and used books are packed into two small buildings—one constantly stumbles across gems. For instance, I learned why the John Deere tractor, despite its renowned quality, did not sell in China in the 1980s and 1990s—even though Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping and Xi Jinping both famously posed for photos driving a Deere tractor. Scranton explains that the Chinese had already designed two hundred varieties of walking tractors in the 1960s for paddies and terrace tilling, and the best of them, the Model 7 hand-guided tractor, not only cost just $1,400 but could be repaired in tractor stations across the country. I started channeling Scranton's case studies to my Modern China class this spring. My students enjoyed learning about the “socialist slag bricks”—sintering (fusing) industrial wastes like fly ash and slag to create building blocks so that topsoil clay needed not be stripped from farms to make bricks. They also applauded the birth of a “designed-and-made-in-China” twelve-thousand-ton hydraulic forging press in 1962, when Chinese engineers lacked the advanced facilities to cast, ovens to heat, and cranes to lift its huge columns and beams; the success spoke to the ingenuity of Chinese socialist business.
My two main criticisms of Scranton's book are its limited consideration of the “fear factor” behind socialist enterprises and its lack of spatial analysis. Apprehension—of being reported as “unrevolutionary/unproductive”—could drive people into hard work as effectively as inspiration during the Mao years. Furthermore, although the book mentions over one hundred enterprises named after cities or towns, there is little spatial discussion as to where these factories and farms are concentrated within China's twelve macroeconomic and frontier regions. The lone map in the book only shows general provincial boundaries and capitals.
These flaws aside, this eleventh book of Scranton's exemplifies a veteran scholar's efforts to lead by example. Mining the newly available online archival collections, Scranton speaks with joy that “the wall obstructing scholarly access has crumbled,” and he answers his own critique of Western-dominated business history field by demonstrating the considerable scope of insights that business historians could provide despite language barriers (p. 384). His studies on Mao-era Chinese trials and errors humanize the “communists” who seemed feverishly self-dependent and unbusinesslike. Finally, his research strikes a chord in Generation Z-ers who grew up witnessing challenges to America's world leadership and are naturally interested in China and the non-Western trajectory it embodies. Taking Scranton's lead, we readers probably have little excuse to not step out of our comfortable territories and flex our brains.
