8. China’s Unique Plan for Rapid Industrialization
After a long slog against the Nationalist government, as well as Japanese foreign occupiers, Mao Zedong’s communists finally seized control of China in 1949. They then set out to restore the country’s status and prestige after a stretch of weakness termed “The Century of Humiliations”. To accomplish that required a massive and swift industrialization program, in order to transform a backward agrarian society into a global powerhouse. One theoretical route was the example of other countries that had industrialized gradually. Such countries had started with the accumulation of capital, then spent that on industrial machinery.
China had neither the money nor time to emulate that example, however. Its population had already begun to rapidly outstrip the available resources, and it was too poor to accumulate enough capital anytime soon for massive industrialization. So Mao opted for an industrialization plan that relied on the mobilization of China’s vast population. The idea was to use labor-intensive means of industrialization that emphasized manpower, of which China had plenty, instead of machinery, of which China had little. As seen below, things did not go smoothly.
