Industrialization as Imagination and Reality in Mao-Era China: Writing Labor History from Below

Industrialization is a defining characteristic of economic and social life in Mao-era China. Existing scholarship often focuses on labor and production work performed by workers, engineers, cadres, and peasants. This paper shifts focus to one important but often overlooked aspect of China’s industrial history: literary production. Since the early 1950s, a large variety of literary writings, such as novels, documentaries, survey reports, and newspaper and magazine articles, have been produced to recount the process of China’s industrialization. The writing movement involves a wide range of intellectual groups, including university students and teachers, writers, reporters, and propaganda officials. Drawing on previously untapped sources such as unpublished factory manuscripts, work team surveys, and local government sources, I examine how various intellectual and labor groups participated in the creation of literary works in Mao-era China. In particular, I look at the “Masses Write History” movement from the late 1950s to the early 1960s and explore the political, social, and cultural significance of the writings the grassroots intellectuals and workers produced. Viewing industrialization mainly as a cultural and social process, this paper uses literary production as a means to shed light on the relations between individual labor experience and collective memories of work, the boundaries between literature and facts, and the politics of writing history in the socialist world.