Dream of a Red Factory The Legacy of High Stalinism in China [Hardcover]

Drawing on previously unknown primary sources in both Chinese and Russian, Deborah A. Kaple has written a powerful and absorbing account of the model of factory management and organization that the Chinese communists formulated in the 1949-1953 period. She reveals that their new management techniques were adapted from Soviet propaganda during the harsh period of Stalin's post-war reconstruction. The idealized Stalinist management system consisted mainly of strict Communist Party control of all aspects of workers' lives, which is the root of such strong Party control over Chinese society today.Dream of a Red Factoryis a rare and revealing look at the consolidation rule in China; told through the prism of the development of new socialist factories and enterprises. Kaple completely counters the old myth of the Soviet monolith in China, and carefully reconstructs how the Chinese communists came to rely on an idealized, propagandistic version of the Soviet model instead.

Dream of a Red Factoryis unique for its focus both on the works that the CCP translated and used (some that were little understood and about which no one in China had any experience) and upon Soviet post-WWII recovery plans that so influenced China. This book is instructive in understanding how and why Mao did what he did to China and even why China had the problems it did in engineering economic growth. --Asian Affairs

A clear, comprehensive portrait of the early days of Chinese factory management...One of the best analyses of early Chinese emulation of the Soviet model...The text shines with a clear description of the first four years of Chinese red factories. --China Review International

This concise book sheds startling new light on the origins of post-1949 labour relations in China...[Kaple's] findings force us to revise thoroughly our understanding of the relationship between Soviet and Chinese models of factory organization.lƒp