Knowledge Production in Mao-Era China by Rui Kunze

Author:Rui Kunze [Kunze, Rui]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781498584616
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2021-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Producing Knowledge on the Shopfloor

Technological Innovation in Socialist Industrialization

In the Mao era, the production of steel and iron had been viewed as the leading indicator of China’s level of modernization and the basis of realizing its agricultural mechanization. Therefore, the metallurgy industry had been subject to the state’s direct interventions. Since the 1950s it had experienced and hence testified to the most violent vacillation of state policies concerning knowledge production. In this field, the notion of “science” was perceived primarily in terms of “technology,” which measures the validity of knowledge by means of its application on the shopfloor. The constant search for new ways of (the Party) organizing such knowledge production in the Mao era attempted a synthesis of expert knowledge and knowledge created by the industrial worker. Embedded in the negotiations between the two were the political agenda of achieving national independence and self-reliance through industrial modernization and the social ideal of leveling classes by cultivating a new working class.1

As discussed in the preceding chapters, the early PRC enthusiastically pursued the socialist modernity exemplified by the self-portrait of the Soviet Union. This chapter traces China’s adoption of and then movement away from the Soviet model in search of its own, pragmatic path to industrialization. It did so by constantly reorganizing knowledge production on the shopfloor to deal with resource constraints and to forge the consciousness and identity of the industrial worker as an educated, progressive social class. The first section analyzes China’s adoption of industrial production and management of High Stalinism in the early 1950s, which highlights social agendas and the Party’s role in knowledge and economic productions.2 The model worker Wang Chonglun 王崇伦 (1927–2002) from the heavy industry sector, in particular, embodies the ideal of the emancipated worker developing into the creative knowledge producer on the shopfloor under the leadership of the Party. His technological innovations were disseminated so as to routinize his individual “miraculous” achievements into collective productivity. In the fanatic pursuit of accelerated modernization during the Great Leap Forward years, the second section shows that non-contingent experiment supported by numbers was deployed as an empirical scientific approach in public communication, which justified the replacement or making of the steel with indigenous products such as nodular cast iron, so-called “native iron” (tutie 土铁, or indigenously made pig iron), and “white steel” (ceramic products used in place of steel under certain circumstances). The last section conducts a case study of the Anshan Iron and Steel Works (hereafter its abbreviation the AnSteel), which had been the flagship of China’s socialist industrialization. Delineating its changing role in defining approaches to and authority of knowledge in the field of metallurgy, this case study demonstrates the interactions between the AnSteel and the state’s policymaking, which vacillated violently in the leadership’s struggles to deal with polito-socio-economic issues in the turbulent years of the 1950s to the 1970s.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.