Economic planning in socialist China required the local planners to gather comprehensive information within their jurisdiction on one hand and implement centrally issued plan on the other. The dual challenge of knowing the real economy and following ever shifting policy targets is particularly daunting in pre-mechanized sectors. Taking the 1950s Beijing transportation as a case study, this article describes the municipal transportation authority’s effort to control and tally the dispersed, privately-owned, muscle-powered transportations in and out of the city, with the purposes of establishing a state monopoly, fixing transportation costs, and making the transportation sector plannable. Through triangulating planning policies, statistical documents, and institutional archives, the paper shows that despite the indispensable role that muscle-powered transportation played in the economy, the statistical regime upholding the planning failed to incorporate it. This failure could only be partially explained by the accounting difficulty caused by the dispersed nature of muscle-powered technologies. Also important was the conflation of the plan and the reality.
Yujie Li is a historian of twentieth century China with a focus on labor, technology, and political economy in the socialist era. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Florida. Yujie received her PhD from the University of Chicago. Her book manuscript Foolish Man Moves the Mountains: Labor and Technology in Maoist China examines how the Chinese Communist Party struggled to support a modernizing and revolutionary agenda with peasants’ muscle power and predominantly rural, pre-modern technologies. Yujie’s work has been published in Technology and Culture, Twentieth Century China and Artefact. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and American Council of Learned Societies, among others.
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