Abstract

"The Last Golden Age of China’s Cotton Textile Industry: State-owned Cotton Mills in the 1980s"

Juanjuan Peng, Georgia Southern University (jpeng@georgiasouthern.edu)

This paper traces the development of Chinese cotton textile industry from 1978 to 1989, hoping to understand the causes of its rapid growth during this period and the quick decline afterwards. A particular emphasis will be placed on the large-scale state-owned mills, which were the leaders of the industry. As the first historical research of China’s post-reform economic development, this paper aims at the following two goals. First, it uses this specific industry to assess some popular theories in understanding China’s recent economic growth. More specifically, the paper will reveal how, exactly, the cotton textile industry gradually grew out of the plan during the first decade of China’s economic reform, and identify some policy and ideological confusions at this stage. At the same time, the paper makes effort to put the 1980s back to the history of Chinese modern cotton textile industry—a story that started with the early mills in the late 19th century. It therefore joins the a new genre of scholarship that aims to cross the 1949 and 1978 divides, combine the historical and economic studies, and form a new understanding of China’s modern economic development during the long twentieth century.