From the State Factory to the New Silk Road

In a 2013 speech on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, President Xi Jinping suggested that China’s socialist revolution created the theoretical, material, and institutional foundations for the economic reforms. This presentation considers that claim through state factories and urban development in Chengdu. It asks: which specific legacies of Mao-era governance enabled contemporary state-driven economic expansion? And how can the function of such legacies be observed from the perspective of urban history?

It traces the transformation of Mao-era industrial zones in Chengdu into market-oriented developments tied to the Belt and Road Initiative. It examines how the Chinese Communist Party has coordinated industrial, urban, and economic policy across multiple scales, from national strategy to factory restructuring. In so doing, I argue that reform-era developments adapt methods of governance cemented under socialism. By analyzing workers’ responses to industrial and urban reform, I also show how compliance with reform policies emerged from Mao-era institutional and political cultures. Bridging PRC (People’s Republic of China) history and the history of the economic reforms, the presentation reinterprets SOE (state-owned enterprise) reform as a series of state adaptations rooted in the socialist industrial regime.

This event is free and open to the public. Please RSVP here. 

About the speaker:

Sarah Chang is an assistant professor of history at Miami University (Ohio). She holds a Ph.D. in history from UC Santa Cruz and a B.A. from Stanford University. Her research focuses on labor, gender, and the rural-urban divide in the context of Chinese state-owned enterprises. Her current book project examines how the rise and fall of two state-owned steel mills in Chengdu marked China’s changing urban regimes from socialism to the economic reforms. Chang has published works in Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, The Journal of Urban Affairs, and The PRC History Review.