56 { China’s Quest
machinery building complexes, or oil production in Xinjiang. Twenty-four
worked on the construction of the first bridge over the Yangtze River in
Wuhan, in Hubei province in central China. (The bridge opened in 1957.)
One hundred and sixty Soviet specialists worked in the design bureau of the
Metallurgical Ministry in Beijing. Soviet specialists helped Chinese master
large and complex production processes, such as blast furnaces, hot blooming
steel mills, jet airplanes, and seamless pipe. Moscow set up training programs
in Soviet enterprises for Chinese personnel. By 1960, 38,000 Chinese person-
nel had received training in the Soviet Union, ranging from skilled workers
and technicians to people receiving advanced degrees in natural sciences and
engineering at Soviet universities.
A number of China’s post-Mao top leaders were trained in the Soviet Union
during this period. Li Peng, raised by Zhou Enlai after Li’s father died in
the revolutionary struggle, studied hydroelectric engineering at the Moscow
Power Engineering Institute for about six years, returning to China in 1955
to work in the electrical power sector, starting in the Northeast. Jiang Zemin
studied industrial management for a year at the Stalin Auto Works in the
Soviet Union, returning to China circa 1955 to become a manager at China’s
first (and Soviet-assisted) automobile factory in Changchun, Jilin province.
Hundreds of thousands of Chinese were trained in specialized programs set
up in China by Soviet advisors. This deep Soviet influence would continue to
be felt even in the post-Mao era. One wing of the broad reform coalition led
by Deng starting in 1978 saw “planning” as the crux of “socialism” and was
reluctant to reinterpret “socialism” to be compatible with markets.^51
Soviet transfer of industrial machinery and equipment and know-how in
the 1950s was an immense assist to China’s industrialization effort. After the
collapse of Sino-Soviet relations circa 1960, China would enter an eighteen-
year-long period of relative economic isolation in which reverse engineering,
copying, and dissemination across the economy of copies of Soviet equip-
ment was the key driver of China’s productivity increase and technological
advance. Not until the 1980s would global inputs of advanced technology
again begin to flow into China on a scale comparable to the 1950s.
Soviet models of industrial management came along with Soviet M&E.
Soviet industrial organization of the 1950s was rigidly hierarchical. Enterprises
were headed by a single manager with a technocratic background and wield-
ing extensive powers over the enterprise’s operation. Under the manager was a
chain of command also made up of technically skilled people. The role of the
party committee was limited to general oversight of the technocratic manage-
ment, and most definitely did not include activities that disrupted production.
Sharp wage differentials were also used to reward and motivate people.
By 1958, Mao, who was beginning to envision himself and not new
CPSU leader Nikita Khrushchev as the genuine successor to Stalin in the
Marxist-Leninist pantheon, would begin to find fault with the Soviet system