50 { China’s Quest
by Mao, they quickly came on board with Mao’s program of swift eradica-
tion of capitalism in China.^39
Stalin’s willingness to provide large-scale assistance to China’s socialist in-
dustrialization was another major factor convincing Mao that a swift destruc-
tion of capitalism and the construction of socialism were possible in China.
Stalin during his early 1950 Moscow talks with Mao and Zhou had pledged
to assist forty-seven major industrial projects. This was the first tranche of
Soviet assistance, which would grow considerably over coming years. Still, as
long as Stalin was alive Mao had to move carefully to avoid antagonizing him.
Stalin’s death in March 1953 removed that obstacle, and in December Mao is-
sued his “General Line for Socialist Transition.” The same year, Mao launched
a nationwide campaign to study the Short Course to “unify thinking” in the
party about how to “build socialism.”
The CCP viewed the Soviet model of comprehensive economic planning
as the very core of socialism and transposed a nearly exact replica of that sys-
tem in China. In spring 1951, the PRC began drafting its First Five Year Plan
to guide the growing socialist sector. In August 1952, a large and high-level
PRC delegation led by Premier Zhou Enlai, Vice Premier Chen Yun, and
Li Fuchun, by then deputy director of the Central Financial and Economic
Committee, traveled to Moscow.^40 The delegation included leaders from var-
ious industrial sectors: ferrous metals, energy, machine building, etc. The del-
egation stayed in the Soviet Union until May 1953, approximately ten months.
The purpose of the delegation was to study Soviet experience with Five Year
Plans. Delegation members studied components of the Soviet Fifth Five Year
Plan (then underway) and related that to the First Five Year Plan underway in
China. As one participant of the delegation later recalled, “By studying and
discussing the draft of the Soviet Union’s fifth five-year plan, we could sys-
tematically understand the formulation of the policy and content of the plan,
and it helped us in enriching and improving our own five-year plan.”^41
Delegation members also received lectures by members of the Soviet
economic planning commission, Gosplan. The range of lecture topics was
broad: the structure and process of planning a national economy, planning
budgetary resources and expenditures, pricing, labor allocation, manage-
ment and cadre planning, and the planning of specific industrial sectors.
The Chinese delegation members took detailed notes from the lectures
which were later compiled by China’s new State Planning Commission into
a handbook explaining exactly how socialist economic planning worked. It
was used for study by cadres involved in planning. Members of the PRC del-
egation also visited major industrial centers and factories to get a firsthand
sense of what actual modern industrial production looked like and study the
“management experience” of those factories.
Once back in China, delegation members went to work replicating the
Soviet planning system. In November 1952, a Gosplan-like State Planning