"Engineering the Socialist World: Sino-Soviet Relations and the PRC's First Five-Year Plan, 1953-1957"

This paper studies the “156 Projects”: a major Soviet development aid program that constituted the bulk of the investment projects in China’s First Five Year Plan (1953-57). The 25 collieries, 25 power plants, 24 machine works, and other major industrial projects in China were celebrated as the symbol of the “great friendship” between the two socialist allies. These projects created new industrial bases and renovated old ones all over China, financed by Soviet loans, making use of Soviet-made designs and machines, and assisted by Soviet experts. Furthermore, the 156 Projects were also the largest foreign development aid program in the socialist camp, and thus seemed to epitomize the making of the new socialist world economy in the aftermath of the Korean War. Using archival documents, published primary sources, and memoirs in Chinese and Russian, I revisit Sino-Soviet economic cooperation around the period of the PRC’s First Five-Year Plan. The paper first discusses the Soviet influence on the PRC’s economic bureaucracy. The second part explores how Soviet and Chinese policymakers worked together to draft the PRC’s First Five-Year Plan. I then elucidate the challenges faced by the Chinese and Soviet cadres, scientists, engineers, and workers in implementing the 156 Projects. The last part of the paper examines the decline and legacies of Sino-Soviet economic partnership.