Abstract

"From Capitalist Workshops to Socialist Factories in 1950s Shanghai's Bicycle Industry"

Yujie Li, University of Florida (reenalee@gmail.com)

The large, state-owned factories in socialist China produced standardized products under the direction of the central plan. They represented the Communist Party’s vision of social prosperity through mass production—a vision that has been described by scholars as “high modernism” at some times, and as “global Fordism” at other. Yet much of China’s factories were equipped not with Fordist specialized machinery, but the versatile machine tools. In the 1950s, the Party consolidated an industrial sector previously populated by small workshops operating in OEM networks and built new centralized, state-owned factories—a process known as the Socialist Transformation of industries. This paper explores the technological dimension of the Socialist Transformation. Through a case study of Shanghai’s bicycle industry, this paper uncovers the critical role played by the social group that I call the “technician-entrepreneur.” Many of them were business owners with valuable technical know-how but labeled as middle and petty capitalists by the communist state. Through archival research on both the pre-consolidation bicycle trade association and the post-transformation state-owned factory, this paper examines the transformation of the relations between the state and this group. Their role changed from suppliers to designers and enforcers of standardization, and ultimately employees in the socialist factory. Their integration into the new sociotechnological system eliminated the entrepreneur as an identity even as it valorized the role of “technician.” Thus, the party-state successfully assimilated both private assets and industrial expertise into the new socialist production regime.