The northeastern city of Anshan was bathed in the glow of furnaces that filled the night sky. In Changchun, a new factory hall was waiting to make what China had never before created its own trucks! Wuhan was being prepared for a bridge connecting the two sides of the mighty Yangtze river for the first time by rail. This was repeated around the country in the mid-1950s and so on. The country had been a recipient for a hundred years and was now teaching itself to manufacture machines. This was the First Five-Year Plan (1953-1957) and one of the most ambitious and significant building programs in modern Chinese history.
Starting from Almost Nothing: The challenge could hardly have been greater. At the end of the 1940s, the Chinese modern industry was feeble, fragmented and war-torn for decades. Much of what had been there was in a few coastal cities or in the northeast where factories had been established by the Japanese during the war and disassembled at the end of it. At best, the country was making just more than half a million tons of steel per year prior to 1949. It lacked the ability to manufacture complex machine tools, aircraft or cars. The bulk of manufactured products were light in nature, snack foods, and most of the population was rural. Early 1950's recovery. Inflation was tamped down, railways and bridges were patched up, and last week's story described the land reform that restored the productivity of the farms. By 1952, output was back to and in some industries exceeded pre-war levels. With that firm foundation, the leadership looked to the bigger question of how a poor, primarily agricultural nation could become a modern industrial nation. The solution, created in the early 1950s and officially accepted in 1955, was a plan. It was based on the Soviet model which established hard production, investment and construction targets for the entire economy, particularly for heavy industry.
The 156 Projects: The key to the plan was 156 big projects constructed under Soviet sponsorship. It was agreed that thousands of Soviet engineers and technicians would move to China and Chinese students and workers would move to Soviet factories. Blueprints, equipment and technical know-how flowed across the border, providing China with a shortcut that would otherwise have taken decades. The projects were the first of their kind. The Anshan Iron and Steel complex was reconstructed and expanded into the largest steel works in the country and was already a historic site in Liaoning. New iron and steel bases sprouted up in Wuhan and Baotou. The launching of the first Jiefang (Liberation) trucks from the First Automobile Works in Changchun was marked throughout the country in 1956. A tractor factory started to cater to the needs of the farmers in Luoyang. Harbin's power equipment, turbines, and precision instruments factory plants opened. Within the country, the first aircraft factories were established in Shenyang and the first jet aircraft was manufactured in 1956. The effort was not limited to the northeast either. A conscious effort to make the industries spread inland resulted in factories, mines and power stations in provinces where there had never been any industrial development. Cities such as Lanzhou, Xi'an, Chengdu and Taiyuan become major industrial hubs, and paved the way for a more equitable national economy.
Numbers that told the Story: By the standards of the day, the results were impressive. Official data indicate a rate of industrial growth of approximately 18 per cent per year over the five years, and an overall rate of growth of around 8-9 per cent per year. From around 1.35 million tons in 1952 to over 5 million tons in 1957, the production of steel had increased almost 4 times. Production of coal, electricity and cement skyrocketed. The nation started to manufacture machinery, generators, metal-cutting machine tools, and chemicals which it was dependent on importing before. Industry's contribution to the economy rose steadily and thousands of factories and workshops provided work for millions. Regular wages, housing, and an expanding range of benefits available via the work unit provided numerous families with a way out of rural poverty through work in a factory. Now a proficient worker was a paragon and a symbol of status in the new society. The plan was not all about steel and machinery. With the increasing use of grain by the growing industrial population, production increased and by 1957 was approximately 195 million tons. More cloth to consumers and more cotton production, more textile mills and expansion. Learning was expanded through literacy campaigns and through new schools; and technical colleges and universities were expanded to produce the engineers, doctors and scientists the new economy required. Using disease control and prevention initiatives and the growth of clinics, death rates declined and life expectancy began to increase.
Roads, Rails and Bridges: As a nation of China's size cannot be held together without transport, so the plan was to be carried out. Thousands of kilometers of new railways were laid many opening up remote areas for the first time. The Chengdu-Chongqing line was started prior to the plan and the Baoji-Chengdu line was connected across the formidable Qinling mountains, linking the northwest to the southwest. New lines extended to Gansu, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. At the end of the period, the national rail network increased by approximately one-third. Roads were built as well. In 1954, roads were opened that connected to Tibet in some of the harshest regions of the world, making the plateau closer to the rest of the country. In October 1957, the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge was opened to train and vehicle traffic, crossing a river which for many years had separated the north from the south of the country. It was a representation of engineering prowess and national pride and one of the most beloved photographs of the time.
A Nation of Builders: Behind the statistics were people. The young men and women that left the villages to work in the new towns of steel and oil fields. The young men and women who abandoned the villages for the new steel towns and oil fields. Many of the duties of engineers were assumed by engineers who had been trained in the few years preceding this, and who were expected to handle them that were foreign to them before. On the job training was used to develop new skills and a cadre of technicians, managers and scientists emerged. The years had a tone in them that is unforgettable: a tone of purpose and optimism, of a rising country. There were newspaper reports of record harvests and new factories. Smiles were displayed opposite smokestacks and tractors, on posters. For decades, the people of China had been fighting, humbled and oppressed, but after all those years, they were finally making a future for themselves. The plan also resulted in permanent institutional benefits. Despite the later weaknesses, China created a national economic planning system, statistical reporting and industrial management that enabled the government to marshal the nation's resources in unprecedented proportions. Research institutes and universities expanded and Chinese Academy of Sciences developed, becoming the focal point of a scientific organization that would help the country's technological development.
The Foundation for what came Next: Historians note that the plan had its limits. More emphasis was put on heavy industry with less attention given to consumer goods and light industry, and its planning model was very Soviet in nature, which later became stifling. But few would argue its primary success. After five years the bones of an industrial economy had been laid out; China was a country that had steel works, power stations, machine factories, railways, and a trained workforce. The legacy of those years can be seen in today's China. Numerous great industrial cities, steel cities, manufacturing hubs that are the mainstay of the modern economy began in the 1950s. Here the tradition of long-term planning was started, which is still followed in the country's five-year plans today. By 1957, when the plan reached its 5th year, China was a different land than the one that had come out of war eight years before. It had demonstrated to itself its ability to plan, construct and manufacture on a massive scale. That confidence would define the decades ahead and propel the nation to its next, bolder chapter.
Coming Next week
Week 4: "The Great Leap and the Great Hunger"
