Chapter 63 "The First Five-Year Plan": The Construction Model of a Planned Economy

If the Shanghai experiment in 1949 allowed the Communists to gain experience in circulation and capital control, then the "First Five-Year Plan" that began in 1953 was a perfect example of the planned economy model in industrial construction. Performance. Not long after the founding of the People's Republic of China, North Korea and the United States went to war, and the Western world imposed a long-term economic blockade on mainland China. The "First Five-Year Plan" was carried out with the selfless help of the Soviet Union.According to Bo Yibo's recollection: All the forms of the "First Five-Year Plan" were made with the help of Soviet experts, "To be honest, at the beginning of the preparation of the 'First Five-Year Plan', we were concerned about what should be done first and then what should be done in industrial construction. How to achieve mutual cooperation among various departments is still unclear.”The Soviet Union provided China with a large amount of materials and design drawings, and almost gave China all their best technologies. In five years, 8,500 Soviet experts came to China. "Cambridge History of the People's Republic of China" commented: " The importance of Soviet technical assistance and capital goods cannot be overestimated. Its achievements in transferring design capabilities have been described as unprecedented in the history of technology transfer.” From the perspective of globalization, in the early 1950s, it was already public The opposing worlds of the East and the West have successively launched two large-scale international aid programs. One is the "Marshall Plan" implemented by the United States for the reconstruction of Europe from 1948 to 1952, and the other is the Soviet Union's aid to China's industrial development in 1953. Construction, they both achieve the goal of revitalizing the economy as expected, but they have different paths and results.

The core content of the "First Five-Year Plan" is to invest in the construction of 156 major projects with the help of the Soviets, known as the "156 Project" in history.Among them, the focus is on the priority development of heavy industry, which accounts for 85% of the total investment.Under the overall plan, some large factories in the fields of metallurgy, energy, and machinery have been built.Taking iron and steel as an example, within five years, the iron-making capacity increased by 2.8 million tons and the steel-making capacity increased by 2.53 million tons. In addition to the production capacity of the original steel mills, my country's pig iron output soared from 252,000 tons in 1949 to 4.67 million tons. A full improvement of nearly 20 times. During the "First Five-Year Plan" period, China built a large-scale automobile production base, manufactured the first self-developed Jiefang automobile, successfully trial-produced the first jet aircraft, built the first factory for manufacturing machine tools, and built a new building on the Yangtze River. The first bridge, the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, opened the air route from Beijing to Lhasa, built two new large-scale steelmaking plants in Wuhan and Baotou, completed the construction of the large-scale rolling mill project of Anshan Iron and Steel Company, and completed construction in Luoyang and Harbin A tractor factory and a bearing factory were established, and a large oil refining base was built in Lanzhou.China's heavy industry structure and regional layout changed abruptly.

In addition to importing technology from the Soviet Union, China has also comprehensively introduced the Stalinist, highly centralized and unified planned economic model.In order to manage the national economy in a unified manner, the State Planning Commission was established, followed by the establishment of the State Construction Commission, the State Economic Commission, the State Technology Commission, and the State General Administration of Material Supply. plan management system. This is an investment allocation and management system that is "all inclusive" by the state: the state mobilizes every cell of the economy with an extremely large and ubiquitous "visible hand" to determine what factories need to be built and what products to produce , How much production capacity to cultivate, as well as the output of products and the scale of investment are all directly arranged by the state through planning.Under this system, all the projects and investments used by new and old enterprises for the construction of fixed assets are planned by the state; the required funds are uniformly allocated by the state finance and allocated free of charge; materials for construction and production are provided by the state through commercial The construction team is uniformly allocated by the material department; the construction team engaged in construction is arranged by the state; the new labor force engaged in production is trained and distributed by the state; the products produced are purchased and sold by the state; the profit of the enterprise is all turned over to the state treasury; If there is a loss, it will also be subsidized by the state finance.Under this ambitious and rigorous planning system, the state not only makes macro decisions on investment scale, investment structure, and investment layout at the macro level, but also undertakes project decision-making and management tasks at the micro level.

From the data point of view, during the "First Five-Year Plan" period, China completed a total capital construction investment of 58.847 billion yuan, and the five-year increase in fixed assets was equivalent to four times that of 1949 when it was received. The average industrial and agricultural output value increased by 10.9%, and the average GDP growth rate 9.2% - a figure very close to the 9.4% average from 1978 to 2008.In Asia, China and Japan are the countries with the fastest growing industrial economies, and the economic aggregates of the two countries are similar.Wu Jinglian believes: "Economic growth mainly relies on investment, especially investment in heavy and chemical industries, which has become the basic feature of our economic development in the decades from the first five-year plan (1953-1957) to the beginning of reform and opening up."