Mao’s China · CHAPTER 4 ·
China’s First Five-Year Plan
Chapter 4 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “The Soviet Model”
From 1953 China copied the Soviet model of central planning. The First Five-Year Plan of 1953–57 put heavy industry first around 156 Soviet-aided projects, raising steel output from 1.35 million tonnes in 1952 to 5.35 million in 1957, while the state took control of the harvest and then of the land.
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The map above is the world of China, December 1956 — The collectives complete.
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BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The Communist Party, which ruled alone at every level of government, set out from 1953 to industrialise China by copying the Soviet Union, and the method required the state to take control of the harvest and then of the land itself. The First Five-Year Plan of 1953–57 was a programme of central planning, in which officials in Beijing, much like the managers of one giant company, decided what every factory would make and where investment would go. Heavy industry came first: steel, coal, machines and power, built around 156 major projects designed and equipped with Soviet help. The results were striking enough to impress foreign observers, since steel output rose from 1.35 million tonnes in 1952 to 5.35 million in 1957 and industrial output grew by about 18 percent a year. On the map the grey-tan arrows show Soviet aid arriving by rail through Manchuria and Mongolia, and the red arrow shows new plants placed deep inland. China’s industrial future now rested on Soviet designs, Soviet credit and Soviet goodwill.
The cost fell on the countryside, which had to feed the growing cities and pay for imported machines with exported food. In November 1953 the state made itself the only legal buyer and seller of grain, at prices it set, much like a single company that is the only customer allowed to buy a farmer’s crop. Collectivisation followed, the pooling of household land, animals and tools into co-operatives worked in common and paid in “work points”, a points system that worked much like a wage paid in shares of the harvest. Planners expected this to take fifteen years, but in July 1955 Mao demanded a “high tide”, and by the end of 1956 about 96 percent of peasant households had joined co-operatives. The provinces that were hatched in 1955 turn solid red on this map. In four years the Party had gained control of China’s grain, its factories and its farmland, and it had built the machinery that its later campaigns of mass mobilisation would use.
The full story
The Soviet Union was the only model China’s leaders trusted, and after the Korean War it was the only one available. Its model was central planning, in which ministries set every factory’s output much as a head office sets targets for each branch of a company, and China copied it in the First Five-Year Plan of 1953–57. An American-led embargo, a ban on trade with China, had closed off Western technology, while Moscow offered designs, machines and about 10,000 specialists over the decade. The north-east received the showpieces because it had the Japanese-built industrial base and lay nearest the Soviet railway, which the arrows follow to Harbin and Anshan. Anshan’s steelworks was rebuilt, and in Changchun the First Automobile Works produced China’s first truck in 1956. The Plan also placed new plants inland, at Wuhan, Baotou, Lanzhou and Xi’an, away from the vulnerable coast. Because the model fitted the alliance, China adopted it with little debate.
Politically, the Plan years turned the revolutionary army into a bureaucratic state run by the Communist Party, which ruled alone and placed its members in charge of every office, much like a company whose owner appoints every manager. The six great regions run by generals were abolished in 1954, and the leader of the north-east, Gao Gang, was purged after he tried to displace Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai; he killed himself that year. In September 1954 the first National People’s Congress, a parliament that met rarely and approved what the Party had decided, adopted a constitution that listed freedoms of speech and religion while placing the country under the Party’s leadership. In the cities, workers were organised into work units, employers that also supplied housing, health care, pensions and political supervision, much like a company town, so a job became a lifetime dependence called the “iron rice bowl”. Private firms became “joint state-private” companies in January 1956 with almost no resistance. The new institutions brought urban workers security and gave the Party control of nearly every adult’s livelihood.
In the countryside, collectivisation, the merging of family farms into units owned and worked in common, decided who would own China’s harvest. Since 1953 the state had been the only legal buyer of grain, but planners found 110 million separate households hard to tax and harder to plan, so co-operatives, farms owned and worked by their members much like a farmers’ co-operative today, looked like the solution. Mao’s speech of 31 July 1955 mocked cautious colleagues as “a woman with bound feet” and set off a rush in which officials competed to report the highest share of households enrolled. Reluctant peasants slaughtered animals before they could be pooled, and some later tried to leave, but by the end of 1956 almost all had joined. Unlike Stalin’s collectivisation of 1929–33, which caused famine in the Soviet Union, China’s caused none, partly because land reform had already destroyed the rich peasants who might have resisted. The speed of the success persuaded Mao that will and organisation could overcome any economic limit, a lesson that led straight to his crash industrial drive of 1958, the Great Leap Forward.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
Why copy Stalin’s model?
China’s leaders adopted the Soviet model for reasons of belief, necessity and inexperience at once. Marxist theory held that socialism required modern heavy industry and a working class, and the Soviet Union’s rise from the ruins of 1917 to victory over Germany looked like proof that central planning worked. The Korean War added necessity, because the embargo left Moscow as the only source of advanced machinery, and the Party, which had spent decades in the countryside, had few people who knew how to run a modern economy. Barry Naughton’s analysis of the plan years shows the model’s logic: hold down farm prices, extract a surplus from agriculture through the grain monopoly, and pour it into steel and machinery. It worked for industry and left agriculture growing at about 4 percent a year, barely ahead of a population growing by over 2 percent. Historians such as Meisner argue that this imbalance, and the bureaucracy the model created, are what made Mao look for a faster and more Chinese road after 1956.
How Mao sped up collectivisation
Collectivisation in China moved in stages: mutual-aid teams in which families shared labour, then elementary co-operatives where land was pooled but owners received a dividend, and finally advanced co-operatives of a hundred or more households where the land belonged to the collective and income came only from work points. The Party’s rural chief, Deng Zihui, slowed the process in early 1955 and dissolved about 20,000 weak co-operatives. Mao’s speech of July 1955 reversed him, and the anthology Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, with Mao’s enthusiastic notes on model villages such as Wang Guofan’s, told officials what was expected. Political scientist Thomas Bernstein, comparing the Chinese and Soviet campaigns, argued that China’s worked with less violence because the Party already had cadres in every village and land reform had already removed the rural elite. Peasant resistance took quieter forms: slaughtered livestock, poor work, and the withdrawals of 1956–57. The ease of the victory taught Mao a dangerous lesson about what mobilisation could achieve.
The machinery of the party-state
The years 1953–57 built the institutions through which the Party controlled ordinary lives for the rest of Mao’s rule, and three of them matter most. The household registration system, or hukou, began in the cities in 1951, was extended in 1955, and was set out in national regulations in January 1958; it recorded every person as urban or rural and made moving to a city almost impossible without permission. The work unit, or danwei, gave urban employees housing, food rations, medical care and permission to marry or travel, which Andrew Walder later called a system of “organised dependence”. The personnel files, or dang’an, followed each person for life and held their class label and political record. Together they meant that the state did not need to arrest people to control them, because withdrawing a ration book or a residence permit was enough. These quiet tools of rule explain how the regime kept its grip for decades, in the long years between the campaigns as well as during them.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
The war closed every other door. The Korean War left China under an American trade embargo and dependent on Soviet weapons, loans and advice. With Western technology out of reach, the Soviet Union was the only source of the blueprints, machine tools and engineers that industrialisation required, and Moscow agreed to help build 156 major projects. The alliance therefore decided the shape of China’s economy as well as its foreign policy, because a factory built to a Soviet design also needed Soviet parts, training and planning methods.
A Marxist faith in heavy industry. The Party believed that a socialist country needed steel, coal, electricity and machines before anything else, both to create a working class and to defend itself. The Soviet example seemed to prove that a backward country could industrialise in a generation through central planning, so heavy industry received the great majority of industrial investment, and consumer goods and agriculture were left to wait. The choice meant that ordinary living standards would rise slowly, which the leaders accepted as the price of national strength.
Grain was the bottleneck. Industrialisation meant more city workers to feed and more food to export in payment for Soviet machines. When private grain markets failed to deliver enough in 1953, the state imposed its monopoly on buying and selling grain, which let it set low prices and quotas. Collectives then made the monopoly easier to enforce, because the state could deal with a few hundred thousand co-operatives instead of over a hundred million households.
Mao’s impatience with gradualism. Mao grew frustrated with planners and rural officials who wanted to move slowly after 1953, when he replaced New Democracy with a “general line” for the transition to socialism. His July 1955 speech attacked caution as a political error, and officials, who had learned in the campaigns that overfulfilment was safe, competed to enrol villages. The pace of change was set by the leader’s will and by the incentives of the system he had built.
THE TURNING POINT
The “high tide”, July 1955. Mao’s speech of 31 July 1955 is the hinge of the Plan years because it took the pace of change away from the planners and gave it to the campaign. Before it, collectivisation was meant to take fifteen years; within eighteen months almost every household was enrolled. The speed showed that the Party could reorganise half a billion people by command, and Mao read the success as proof that political will could overcome economic limits. He used Wang Guofan’s “paupers’ co-operative” as his image of the nation: poor, determined and eager to leap ahead. That belief carried directly into the Great Leap Forward.
What it changed
The Leap forward from the Plan. The Plan succeeded in industry and left agriculture lagging, and Mao concluded that the Soviet model was too slow and too bureaucratic for China. His answer, from 1958, was to mobilise labour instead of capital and to combine farming and industry in giant communes. The co-operatives of 1956 became the building blocks of the communes two years later, and the officials who had raced to collectivise raced again.
The state could now take the harvest. The grain monopoly and the collectives gave the state the power to decide how much food each village kept. In normal years this fed the cities and paid for imports. In 1959–60, when officials took grain on the basis of inflated harvest reports, the same machinery stripped villages bare and turned a policy failure into famine. The tools built to feed industry became the tools that starved the producers.
Two classes of citizen. The work-unit system and the 1958 household registration rules divided China into city people, with rations, pensions and health care, and rural people, who had to feed themselves from collective fields and could not move to the cities. The divide between urban and rural China created in these years outlasted Mao by decades, and it decided who lived and who died when food ran short in 1960.
Soviet ties that became a burden. China’s factories, schools and planning offices were built on Soviet designs and staffed with Soviet advisers. When the alliance broke down in 1960 and the experts left, unfinished plants and missing blueprints showed how deep the dependence had been, and the split forced China to improvise its own path. Self-reliance, later praised as a virtue, began as a necessity, and the Lanzhou uranium plant finished by Chinese engineers in 1964 became its proudest example.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Was the First Five-Year Plan a success, and for whom?
By its own measures the Plan succeeded: steel output quadrupled, coal production doubled, and industrial output grew by around 18 percent a year, a pace few poor countries have matched. Urban workers gained steady jobs, housing and welfare through their work units, and China built industries it had never had. The costs were carried elsewhere. Peasants sold grain at prices set by the state, lost their land to co-operatives within a few years of receiving it, and were tied to their villages by household registration, so the countryside paid for the cities. Agricultural output grew only a little faster than population, which left no margin for error. Historians such as Naughton credit the Plan with real achievements while stressing these imbalances, and Meisner argues that it also created the bureaucratic elite Mao later turned against. A fair verdict is that the Plan was a success for the state and for city workers, and a sacrifice imposed on the peasant majority. It also shows how growth figures can conceal who pays for development.
An interesting fact
The alliance with Moscow reached into every classroom. In the early 1950s Russian replaced English as the main foreign language in Chinese schools and universities, and Soviet textbooks were translated by the thousand, from engineering manuals to novels. Beijing’s Friendship Hotel, a vast complex built in 1954 in a palace style with green-tiled roofs, was put up to house Soviet experts and their families near the new university district. When Khrushchev recalled the experts in 1960 its rooms emptied within weeks. It still operates as a hotel today, and its name is one of the few public reminders of the alliance.
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