The Soviet Union’s Today is Our Tomorrow: The USSR and China’s Developmental Vision, 1952–57
Introduction
This paper studies the “156 Projects”: a major Sino-Soviet collaboration program that constituted the bulk of the investment projects in China’s First Five Year Plan (1953-57). The 25 collieries, 25 power plants, 24 machine works, and other major industrial projects in China were celebrated as the symbol of the “great friendship” between the two socialist allies. These projects created new industrial bases and renovated old ones all over China, financed by Soviet loans, making use of Soviet-made designs and machines, and assisted by Soviet experts. Using archival documents, published primary sources, and memoirs in Chinese and Russian, I revisit Sino-Soviet economic cooperation around the period of the PRC’s First Five-Year Plan. The paper first discusses the Soviet influence on the PRC’s economic bureaucracy. The second part explores how Soviet and Chinese policymakers worked together to draft the PRC’s First Five-Year Plan. I then elucidate the challenges faced by the Chinese and Soviet cadres, scientists, engineers, and workers in implementing the 156 Projects. The last part of the paper examines the decline and legacies of Sino-Soviet economic partnership.
About the Speaker
Koji Hirata is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Monash University in Australia and Zijiang Visiting Scholar at East China Normal University. A graduate of Stanford History Department (Ph.D. 2018), he worked as a Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on modern China, Japan, and Russia/Soviet Union with broader implications for the global history of capitalism and socialism. His book Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), received the 2025 Reid Prize from the Asian Studies Association of Australia. He is currently working on a new book project about Mao-era China’s foreign economic relations.