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.

This chapter uncovers efforts made by village and rural cadres in the immediate post-Mao era to reverse wrongful convictions adjudicated during the Socialist Education Movement (SEM). Drawing on previously unexamined materials, including the personal dossiers of rural cadres in eastern Hebei, it traces the decision-making and policy processes behind how ordinary individuals reexamined cases involving two types of alleged wrongdoings perpetuated by cadres: corruption and extramarital relationships. The chapter highlights the two processes that constituted the reexamination: (1) the implementation of limited transitional justice as the rebuilding of political-legal institutions through the formal mechanisms of the state; and (2) the informal, social processes of interpersonal reconciliation outside the purview of the state. Both dynamics contributed to helping locals come to terms with the complicated legacies of the SEM.

Part II establishes the alternative law and political economy framework by unpacking the dynamics between politics and law in the process of China’s market reforms. It starts with describing the relationship between law and politics in constructing one of the primary mechanisms of macro control in China – China’s socio-economic development blueprint, the “Five-Year Plan.”

It then moves to a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the evolving roles of law during China’s market reforms, outlining a three-stage shift in the allocation of market governance authorities within the Party-state system through legal evidence.

Throughout this part of the book, the author examines the legal configurations of political-power dynamics through a systematic investigation of the vast body of market-related primary and secondary sources of law and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) documents that have been promulgated in China since the early reforms until the present day. This Part reflects how two functions of law – economic and political – have developed side by side, each supporting the other.

The Epilogue addresses the legacies of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau. The war period provided a peculiar blueprint for later developments in terms of bilateral Sino–Portuguese relations and of local practices in the enclave, including towards new waves of refugees. The Epilogue also covers recent written and visual representations of wartime neutrality and collaboration in Macau.

This chapter demostrates that the ambiguities of wartime neutrality in Macau continued to haunt China’s relations with Portugal in the post-war years. Five interconnected issues relating to Portuguese neutrality evidence China’s post-war quest for justice and recognition: the re-establishment of regular diplomatic contacts, the handling of Japanese property, the extradition of suspects of war crimes and collaboration, the abolition of extraterritoriality and critiques of neutrality in calls to return Macau to Chinese rule. These issues raised questions about the meaning of justice and the legitimacy of who got to wield it. In its relations with a small and relatively weak European colonial power, China sought to affirm its new post-war international status. However, this process was constrained by resistance to the Nationalists’ anti-imperialist goals in South China and by the changing fortunes of Nationalist power as the Chinese Civil War unfolded.

This chapter addresses Macau’s place in China’s war with Japan from the early 1930s to 1941. Macau featured in Chinese resistance efforts from the start, but its relevance became more pronounced after 1937, especially after Guangdong province was engulfed in the conflict. The chapter argues that, due to its neutrality, Macau became an important meeting place for competing Chinese actors. Both those engaged in Chinese resistance – Nationalists, communists and others – and collaborators with Japan (before and after the consolidation of Wang Jingwei’s Reorganised National Government) used the enclave to circulate materials and propaganda, to mobilise others for their cause and to reach out to opponents.