In this paper I examine British policy towards the Yuan Shikai government in China between 1912 and 1914 through a consideration of the role of Britain's 'men on the spot' in China (i.e. British diplomats and bankers resident there). In doing so, I synthesize two bodies of literature that rarely interact: British imperial history and work by China historians. Three main elements shaped British policy in China: first, British policy-makers were determined to support Yuan Shikai's consolidation of power in China; second, in the making of its China policy, the Foreign Office relied heavily on Britain's men on the spot; and, finally, these men were anxious about the vulnerability of the Yuan Shikai government and were therefore manipulated to a certain extent by Chinese politicians. I suggest that British policy-makers were reacting to, rather than controlling, Chinese politics and that in this period collaboration with British imperialism was a rational choice for the Yuan Shikai government.
This article examines the construction of industrial cities in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; 1949-) by focusing on Anshan—a major steel city in Manchuria (Northeast China) that had been constructed by the Japanese prior to 1945. I demonstrate that the PRC industrial cities embodied the nature and limits of the new socialist regime’s vision of industrialization. The early PRC overwhelmingly focused its resources on heavy industry, which translated into the financial and bureaucratic superiority of industrial enterprises to city governments. The early PRC industrial cities drew from not only the Soviet urban-planning model but also the legacies of pre-revolutionary regimes, even including imperial Japan. The construction of industrial cities was driven by negotiations among various actors including city officials, enterprise managers, and domestic migrants. Building on the multi-layered local, national, and transnational forces, the industrial city of Anshan was a microcosm of the early PRC.
With its high concentration of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in heavy industry, Manchuria (Northeast China) functioned as a symbol of the “socialist industrialization” in the early years of the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–). Many Manchurian SOEs nevertheless originated as Japanese colonial enterprises founded before 1945. Drawing on archives and interviews in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, I trace industrial Manchuria’s transformation before and after the Communist Revolution with a particular focus on Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). I argue that the industrial legacies of imperial Japan and Nationalist China in Manchuria facilitated China’s transition to a Soviet-style socialist planned economy under Mao Zedong’s leadership (1949–76). The early PRC developed a new system of socialist industrialization by simultaneously learning from Soviet economic planning and deploying physical assets, human resources, and economic institutions left by the Japanese and the Nationalists. My findings expand on recent scholarship on the pre-Communist origins of the early PRC by elucidating the significance of the Japanese influence. More broadly, I also argue that China’s socialist industrialization was decisively influenced by the global spread of state-directed developmental visions during the interwar period, thereby demonstrating the fundamental interconnectedness between capitalism and socialism in the twentieth century.
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