The Industrial Activities of the National Resources Commission and Their Legacies in Communist China

Focusing on three industrial plans proposed and practiced during the 1930s and 1940s, this paper analyzes the industrial activities of the National Resources Commission (NRC). Though the NRC had been in charge of China's industrial development strategy for more than two decades and actually managed a large number of China's modern industrial enterprises, its history was rarely discussed in English scholarship. Intending to fill this void, the author describes the origins, process and results of the NRC industrial activities and summarizes their characteristics, such as a central-controlled management structure, a hierarchy of management structure, and the ignorance of profit concern. The NRC's industrial planning and its practice of running state-owned enterprises provided a model for the PRC economic planners in the early 1950's. The experiences and lessons the NRC received, the state-owned enterprises and their operation system that it formed, and the managers and engineers the NRC recruited in two decades left a profound legacy to Communist China's state-owned enterprise system. When the PRC leaders were designing their economic plan, they were influenced, consciously or unconsciously, by the NRC's practices since most NRC employees served in the major enterprises of the People's Republic of China in the early 1950s.