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Industrial Production in Communist China: 1957–1968

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Robert Michael Field
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Extract

For the years before 1958, because Communist China published data on the physical output of a large number of industrial commodities, it was possible to construct an index of industrial production that could be used with confidence. As early as 1959, however, there was a noticeable drying up of official reports as a source of data and objective commentary and, since the collapse of the Leap Forward in 1960, the regime has imposed an almost complete blackout on the disclosure of specific economic facts and figures. As a result, the number of commodities for which physical output can be estimated has been reduced sharply, and the estimates are subject to a wide range of error.

Type
Research Article
Information
The China Quarterly , Volume 42 , June 1970 , pp. 46 - 64
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1970

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References

1 See my article, “Chinese Communist Industrial Production,” in An Economic Profile of Mainland China (Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the United States Congress: Washington, 1967). I appreciate the comments made by Professors Dwight Perkins, H., Ta-chung Liu and Kang Chao at the hearings held by the Joint Economic Committee, in the pages of this journal or to me personally. They were extremely helpfuls in preparing the revised index presented here.Google Scholar

2 The physical output series are presented in Table II; those estimates that have been revised are noted.Google Scholar

3 The formula for this adjustment is:

where I represents the index of total industrial production; I′ represents the index computed from the sample output data; and α and β represent the average annual rates of growth during 1953–57 of the index of total industrial production and of the sample index, respectively. For a more complete description of this method of adjustment see Norman Kaplan, M. and Richard Moorsteen, H., Index of Soviet Industrial Output (Santa Monica, 1960), pp. 61–68.Google Scholar

4 U.S. Federal Power Commission, World Power Data(1966). The figure is the mean of year-end data for 1965 and 1966.Google Scholar

5 The figure is drawn from a Red Guard publication cited in Kung-Lee Wang, “China's Mineral Industries in 1967: Victims of the Cultural Revolution,” Asian Survey (Berkeley, California), No. 6 (1969), p. 427. He presents estimates of 325 million metric tons and 225 million metric tons for 1966 and 1967, respectively. These estimates are considerably higher than mine.Google Scholar

6 Colina MacDougall, “What About the Workers?”, Far Eastern Economic Review, 3 10 1968, p. 69Google Scholar; or “Communist China Economy at Mid-Year 1968: Eighteen Months of Disorder,”Current Scene (Hong Kong: U.S. Information Service), No. 12 (1968), p. 6.Google Scholar

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21 Radio Peking, 30 12 1968.Google Scholar

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23 Radio Peking, 30 12 1968.Google Scholar

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45 The ration data are drawn from the text and the population data from S, John. Aird, Estimates and Projections of the Population of Mainland China: 1953–1986, U.S. Bureau of the Census, Series P-91, No. 17 (Washington, 1968), projections I and D. I also made calculations based on projections IV and C, but the differences were not great.Google Scholar

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55 U.S. Foreign Agricultural Service, Hong Kong, No. HK9020 (25 02 1969).Google Scholar