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

In the wake of the Soviet Union''s collapse and the suppression of the Beijing democracy movement, scholars are asking how communist hardliners in China have managed to retain power. In this timely and strikingly original study, Deborah Kaple examines the first three years of communist power and argues that the orthodox analysis of communism as a monolithic structure fails to account for the resilience and adaptability of the Chinese system into the nineties. Instead, she offers a fresh examination of the roots of Chinese communism - based on an unprecedented reading of primary sources in both Russian and Chinese - that stresses the peculiarities of the Chinese communist experience, which, to a significant extent is a result of their legacy of `High Stalinism''.

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.