Koji Hirata on Steel, Industrialization, and Chinese Socialism

This month's episode looks at the history of Chinese industrialization by focusing on Anshan Iron and Steel Works or Angang, located in Manchuria. Long portrayed as the quintessential model of Mao-era socialist industrialization, Angang, as Koji Hirata shows, was, in many ways, built on the material and ideological foundations laid by imperial Japan and nationalist China. Moving forward in time, Hirata analyzes Angang's role in the making of socialist China, including revealing the relativley understudied political tensions that existed within China's largest state-owned enterprise (SOE) between factory directors, who answered to Beijing, and local party officials in Anshan; the political education of workers; and much more. The episode concludes by taking a long look at Anshan's shifting fortunes—and Manchuria, more broadly—amid a series of reforms during the late 20 th century, and its transformation into a Chinese Rustbelt.

You can listen to Koji Hirata on Steel, Industrialization, and Chinese Socialism online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

Koji Hirata on Steel, Industrialization, and Chinese Socialism is an episode from Who Makes Cents?: A History of Capitalism Podcast by Jessica Levy.

This episode is 33:01 long.

This episode was published on May 2, 2025.

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