Koji Hirata

Drawing upon sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian, my dissertation will examine the history of Anshan, a steel-industry city in northeast China, between 1909 and 1966. It raises three questions: 1) how state authorities interacted with the managers and the physical infrastructure of the industrial enterprises; 2) in what transnational and local settings Chinese and foreign scientists and engineers worked; 3) how a new urban space was made and remade by state-led industrialization. By this case study, I will argue that to fully understand the origins of the PRC economic system, one must investigate what the Japanese colonizers did in the Northeast and how the Nationalists and the Communists reintegrated the region into China’s national economy after Japan’s surrender.