Situated at the intersection between the history of technology, economic history, and diplomatic history, this paper examines China’s three major waves of technology transfer during the Cold War period: from the Soviet in the 1950s, from Western European countries, the United States, and Japan in the early 1960s and 1970s, and from an even larger group of Western and Eastern countries in the late 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on heretofore unavailable ground-level factory archives and government documents, this paper looks at how Maoist China alternated between the Eastern and Western Blocs to import advanced industrial technology. In particular, it explores how technology transfer, as a result of geopolitical changes, affected industrial production on the ground level and how factory workers responded to technology from different foreign countries. Theoretically, this paper tends to see technology transfer as political and institutional processes in the local society. Foreign technology was received not only as technology itself; also, it came along with a series of political campaigns and institutional changes by the communist state intended to reinforce their control over factories and workers. For the vast number of local industrial factories, technology transfer turned out to be more about political campaigns and institutional changes than about technological change. Using the case of Cold War China, this paper highlights the role of technology as a contested force that interacted with geopolitics and Maoism to transform the institutions and practice of China’s industrial economy and society in the second half of the twentieth century.
