This chapter explores Angang and Northeast China during the economic reforms following Mao’s death in 1976. As the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) developmental strategy shifted its focus to export-oriented light industry, regions with a greater presence of heavy industry such as Northeast China fared worse than light industry regions such as East China. Despite a series of state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms including privatization, the PRC further integrated larger SOEs such as Angang into the party-state bureaucracy. The final echo of the Maoist era emerged in the form of SOE workers protesting for job security and social welfare benefits by appropriating the socialist discourse of the state. As China moved away from socialist industrialization, the legacies of this period in Northeast China transformed the region into a rust belt filled with ageing, unprofitable SOEs in heavy industry.

This chapter delves into the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover and reconstruction of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in Manchuria between 1948 and 1952. It was here, during the Civil War, that the CCP first experimented with Soviet-style centralized economic planning. In the early People’s Republic of China, Manchuria emerged as the largest center of socialist industrialization, owing to the heavy industry facilities built by the Japanese and the SOE system developed by the Nationalists. The CCP drew on the expertise of the remaining Japanese and Nationalist engineers, managers, and skilled workers to reconstruct Angang and other major SOEs in Manchuria. The party co-opted these knowledge workers by carefully incorporating former Nationalist Chinese as members of the new regime and segregating the Japanese from the local Chinese community. The CCP’s reliance on Japanese and Nationalist experts came to an end as Cold War tensions intensified during the Korean War.

This chapter explores Sino–Soviet cooperation in the early to mid-1950s. The People’s Republic of China’s First Five-Year Plan sought to develop heavy industry by importing advanced technology from the Soviet Union. One-third of the Sino–Soviet collaboration projects were based in Manchuria, utilizing the physical infrastructure inherited from the pre–Chinese Communist Party era. Soviet experts in China and Chinese students and trainees in the Soviet Union played key roles in transferring Soviet technology. By learning from Soviet knowledge and skills and adapting them to suit Chinese conditions, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang gradually reduced their technological dependence on the Soviet Union while supporting other SOEs across China.

This chapter examines the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) efforts to politically mobilize Angang employees. Angang educated workers and engineers in the official Maoist ideology through study programs and propaganda campaigns. Under the danwei system, employees relied on Angang for social welfare benefits. To improve their positions within the CCP–created system, workers and engineers negotiated with state-owned enterprise (SOE) authorities, leveraging the discourse and institutional rules established by the party-state. These negotiations were exemplified by the Hundred Flowers Campaign of 1957. SOE workers and engineers participated in the CCP project of socialist industrialization by pursuing their interests within the ideological rules of the game set by the party-state.

This chapter delves into Mao’s endeavors to reconfigure socialist industrialization from the late 1950s through the mid-1970s. Amid waning Sino–Soviet relations, Mao criticized Soviet-style centralized planning and advocated decentralization during the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961). This policy shift granted local officials increased horizontal control over major state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such as Angang. Following the Great Leap Forward’s collapse, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) constructed new industrial SOEs within inland “Third Front” regions as a bulwark against potential American and Soviet attacks, thereby reducing resource allocation for Angang and Manchuria. Commencing in 1966, the Cultural Revolution further decentralized power from nationally-owned SOEs such as Angang to local CCP cadres and military forces. Despite these attempts to deviate from the Soviet model, these efforts still preserved essential aspects of socialist industrialization. Nevertheless, the Sino–US rapprochement of 1972 presented China with the prospect of integration into the US-led capitalist global economy.

This chapter examines bureaucratic politics surrounding Angang in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC). Major state-owned enterprises (SOEs) such as Angang were subject to both vertical control from the PRC government in Beijing and horizontal control from local Chinese Communist Party organizations. The tension between these two lines of control manifested in debates over the “one-chief system” – a Soviet-style top-down management structure. This tension was also evident in Angang’s construction, production, and sales. Despite the ostensibly centralized system, the PRC planned economy operated at the grassroots level as a field of constant negotiation among various government offices and SOEs, each interpreting the state policies in their own way.

In Chapter 5, the final case study examines the spate of Tibetans burning themselves alive in opposition to rule by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 2009. First delineating significant events in the relationship between the nation of Tibet and the PRC, prior to and through the Cultural Revolution, I describe the social, political, and cultural situation of Tibetans during their loss of their sovereign nation. Interrogating the most attested claims and desires of these self-immolators—called pawo or martyrs in Tibetan circles—I highlight the role Tibetan Buddhism plays in the conflict as target of the PRC, core of Tibetan identity, and solution to the crisis on the plateau. I connect that discussion to an analysis of the historical and religious bases for the practice of auto-cremation as a means of resistance and meritorious action. Drawing these arguments together, I conclude by describing the state of emergency within Tibet, most notable in lands which now exist within the internationally recognized borders of China. I conclude by showing how suffering is constructed as an affirmation of the truth of the Tibetan imaginary made plain in the burned bodies of pawo.

Nationalism rewrites the state. It rewrites authoritarian states as democracies. It rewrites democracies as authoritarian states. Whatever its cause and whatever its ends, it has been central to narratives of state transformation since the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, it is not a primeval force, is not ever-residing. It is derivative, and the historian who sorts out the roots and branches of an apparently nationalist phenomenon will discover that it disappears under scrutiny. It is, like centripetal force, an ideation that explicates but is not itself real.

Nationalism is able to rewrite the state because it is the accumulation of manifest internal opposition to an existing regime, based on the premise that the present form misrepresents the nature and interests of a defined population. In any nationalist movement, opposition is redefinition. For such opposition to thrive, it must draw upon established public terms of legitimacy, historical claims, and the credible definition of national solidarity in opposition to its governance.

Chapter 7 explores the ways statistics were used to govern public health in the early People’s Republic of China (PRC), showcasing another way the language of statistics was spoken. The PRC was disconnected from the WHO’s statistical network during this time, and instead became part of an international health network made up of socialist countries. The chapter details the rise and fall of socialist statistics within the PRC and the methodological continuity maintained by public health researchers, despite the government’s enforced implementation of socialist statistics in the 1950s. The PRC during the period under study illustrates how statistical thinking continued to develop even as experts’ authority was called into question due to a series of anti-intellectual campaigns.

This chapter explains how, in the wake of the reforms implemented since the early 1980s and the desire to provide a legal framework for State action, successive statutes have laid the foundations for a system of responsibility of public authorities in the People’s Republic of China. Despite the establishment of mechanisms to enforce State responsibility, the system still suffers from a number of shortcomings. Some are inherent in the reluctance of any State to be held responsible; others are more specific and outline the contours of a regime of responsibility specific to China at a time when the country wishes to assert a government model to compete with liberal democracy. In the background, a regime of political rather than legal responsibility has emerged, which both limits the obstacles to public action (in order to ensure efficiency) and emphasizes the government’s duty to ensure common prosperity. The report examines the Chinese bureaucratic culture, its history and the specificities of the current political system to explain the origin of this specifically Chinese conception of the responsibility of public authorities.

The conclusion considers the implications of the epistemic destruction of the twentieth century for general narratives and scholarly works on modern Chinese history. It then turns to the continued role of wenshi ziliao as a form of communal memory, the role of disaster commemoration in the political legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, and the continued political relevance of revolutionary memory in the post-Mao People’s Republic of China.

Each of these chapters contains a case study of a couple from the relevant country. Each includes a description of the everyday life of the couple with respect to the division of housework and childcare, a recounting of the history of their relationship and how it became equal, a discussion of how they balance paid work and family, and an analysis of the factors that facilitate their equality. Those factors include their conviction in gender equality, their rejection of essentialist beliefs, their familism, and their socialization in their families of origin. By showing how and why they undo gender, these couples provide lessons on how equality at home can be achieved.

This concluding chapter raises the deceptively simple question whether or not there is such a thing as a Chinese diaspora. The first half of the chapter shows the efforts by which the People’s Republic of China has sought to standardize or homogenize diasporic institutions and mobilize overseas Chinese and ethnic Chinese abroad to the Chinese nation. The second half of the chapter describes ways in which ethnic Chinese have either complicated understandings of the Chinese diaspora as a homogeneous entity or resisted the drive toward standardization in the service of the Chinese nation.