Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China - Hardcover

Kaple's argument is ... convincing, and she sheds some new light on, for example, the disruptive effects of the campaign method on production in both China and the Soviet Union. Among the many merits of this book are its awareness of alternative Chinese ideas on industrial organization which owed nothing to the Soviet example, and its contribution towards defining the nature of CCP rule since 1949. (Jackie Sheehan, University of Keele, EHR No. 96)

Drawing on previously unknown primary sources in both Chinese and Russian, Deborah A. Kaple has written a powerful and absorbing account of the model of factory management and organization that the Chinese communists formulated in the 1949-1953 period. She reveals that their "new" management techniques were adapted from Soviet propaganda during the harsh period of Stalin's post-war reconstruction. The idealized Stalinist management system consisted mainly of strict Communist Party control of all aspects of workers' lives, which is the root of such strong Party control over Chinese society today. Dream of a Red Factory is a rare and revealing look at the consolidation rule in China; told through the prism of the development of new "socialist" factories and enterprises. Kaple completely counters the old myth of the "Soviet monolith" in China, and carefully reconstructs how the Chinese communists came to rely on an idealized, propagandistic version of the Soviet model instead.