The World of Socialist Coal: Technology, Economy, and Environment in China in the context of the cooperation with the Eastern Bloc (1945-1991)

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What role did the cooperation with the Eastern Bloc and technology exchange play in the People's Republic of China’s (1949-) coal industry in the second half of the twentieth century? This three year project based on the archival sources from Russian, German, Chinese, Polish, and Czech archives, will be hosted by the department of Sinology at Freie Universitaet Berlin. The project will focus on the coal industry during tumultuous China's politics of the man-made famine of the Great Leap Forward (1928-61), the disastrous Mao’s industrialization project, and the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) within the longer trajectory of the history of China’s coal industry and the cooperation with the territories of the former Eastern Bloc. The project will chart the varied paths, contexts and experiences of how the coal industry technical exchanges and trade in the Eastern bloc and the USSR and local contexts in China shaped each other. The project will explore how international technology transfer shaped the social and natural environment locally and how labour processes, social, and environmental setting on the local level shaped national coal industry and international coal trade. What role did coal play in China's domestic and external politics? Why did China stick to coal? Was it the same disastrous environmental policy in China as in East Germany? Ultimately, the aim is to write the history of China’s coal at the time of the foundation of the PRC industrial might by looking at how international and local shaped each other.