Exhausting Stalinism: The Chinese Military-Industrial Complex's Transition from High-Volume Throughput to Lean Production

Yuting Chen, University of Chicago

This paper argues that there is an overlooked dimension to China’s transition to the market economy—the internal reforms of state-owned enterprises. This paper asks, "what does it mean to initiate and sustain a post-Fordist reform, and under what conditions do such projects of techno-political change fail or succeed? I show how Chinese shipbuilders deviated from the Stalinist vision of high-volume throughput in the production of guided-missile frigates in the 1970s, thereby gaining a new explanation for China’s capacity to escape the Fordist collapse in the 1980s. Chinese shipbuilders have honed a variant of learning through the induction of disequilibria in the manufacturing of guided-missile frigates. By inventing a gradualist approach to integrate and upgrade batch-specific shipboard systems (i.e., modular design), Chinese shipbuilders inadvertently developed a home-grown mode of just-in-time production at the institutional core of the command economy. Analytically, the paper takes a hybrid approach of two steps. The first step is to reconstruct basic criteria for a successful post-Fordist reform. It asks what the techno-political project of a post-Fordist reform entails, what would be required for its success, and in what way Chinese shipbuilders succeeded in meeting these requirements. To this end, I engage in a conceptual analysis of the technical history of a particular manufacturing system (frigates) in a specific context (supply chain management). The second step, then, seeks to reconstruct the reasons why shipbuilders made decisions that led to the discovery of the discrepancy between the Fordist hierarchy and lived reality. This enables me to identify a collective disenchantment with the Fordist hierarchy—a crucial condition of initiating and sustaining internal reforms. Here, I switch to a more classically sociological analysis and reconstruct the epistemic, organizational, and ideological conditions of internal reform on the basis of expert interviews and previously inaccessiable archival materials.

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 Presented in Session 85. Macrohistorical Dynamics