On 19 October 1950, the Chinese People's Volunteers crossed the Yalu River.
The fighting was in the northern part of the Korean peninsula. But on the north bank of that river, another contest began almost simultaneously — not on the battlefield, but in the factories. The front consumed by the day; the rear produced by the year. The gap between the two is the true measure of a country's industrial capacity.
Soldiers can be mobilised and grain can be requisitioned. But the parts of a gun, the charge in a shell, the trucks, tyres and fuel of a supply column, the medicines and gauze for the wounded, the rubber shoes on a soldier's feet and the padded uniforms on his back — none of these grow out of the ground. They come out of factories.
In 1950, China was empty at precisely this layer.
This is not a story about a war. It is a story about what a country does after a war: how it takes its limited money, materials and people and arranges them, in a definite order, into one hundred and fifty factories. Where those factories were built, what they made, who designed them, who installed them and who ran them together form a list. That list is called the "156 Projects". It determined the geographical skeleton of Chinese manufacturing for the next seventy years — and to this day, China's equipment manufacturing, automotive, electronics, steel, non-ferrous metals, chemicals and pharmaceutical industries still grow along the lines it drew.
I. The industrial base of 1950
On 14 June 1954, Mao Zedong delivered a report on the Draft Constitution of the People's Republic of China to the thirtieth session of the Central People's Government Council. Explaining the general task of the transition period, and why priority had to go to heavy industry, he said this:
What can we make now? We can make tables and chairs, we can make teacups and teapots, we can grow grain, we can mill flour, and we can make paper. But we cannot make a single motor vehicle, a single aircraft, a single tank, a single tractor.
The remark was made in explanation of why the draft constitution had to state the general task of the transition period and why heavy industry had to come first. It describes the true position of Chinese industry at the time more plainly than any statistical table.
Historians usually sum up the industry of pre-1948 China in three characters: light, fragmented, skewed.
Light refers to structure. Light industry — textiles, food processing — accounted for the bulk of industrial output, while heavy industry was a small share. Machine building was especially weak: most of the so-called "machine works" were in fact repair shops that could fix things but not make them, assemble things but not design them. The range of steel grades was incomplete; alloy and special steels were almost non-existent, and many critical materials were imported.
Fragmented refers to scale. The number of enterprises looked respectable, but the overwhelming majority were small plants and workshops with obsolete equipment and scattered processes. A single finished product might have to travel back and forth between dozens of small workshops before it could be assembled. Without factories organised into systems, there is no capacity organised into systems.
Skewed refers to location. Modern industry was concentrated in a handful of coastal cities — Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao, Guangzhou, Wuxi, and the Yangtze riverfront at Wuhan — while the vast interior had almost no modern industry at all. This was not a natural outcome. It was shaped by a century of treaty ports, foreign-owned plants and coastal transport conditions. It had one direct consequence: if the coastal corridor were cut, industrial supply in the interior would fall to almost nothing.
These three facts are the entire premise for understanding the 156 Projects. The first explains why heavy industry had to come first; the third explains why the projects had to be placed inland.
II. Four gaps the war exposed
From October 1950 through 1951, conditions at the front threw the weaknesses of industry into relief, one by one.
The first was equipment. The weapons of the units that entered the war came from different sources and different periods, with mixed models and mixed calibres; a single company might carry several incompatible types of small arms. Ammunition supply therefore became extraordinarily complicated — once the cartridges for one calibre ran out, a weapon of another calibre became a useless stick. This was not a tactical problem but a problem of industrial standardisation. A country that cannot design and produce its own standard-issue equipment in a unified way cannot calculate its own logistics.
The second was the consumption of ammunition and materiel. The rate at which modern war consumes ammunition far exceeded anything in China's previous experience of war. The domestic ordnance enterprises of the time were mostly pieced together during the war years from plants relocated and reassembled from various places, with ageing equipment and limited capacity.
The third was transport. From the rear to the front, one had to cross rivers, cross mountains, and evade bombing. Railways, roads, bridges, vehicles and fuel were bottlenecks at every link. Transport was not a question of whether a road existed, but of whether there were enough trucks, enough tyres, enough fuel and enough repair capacity.
The fourth was medical supplies and logistics. Medicines, gauze, bandages, surgical instruments, plus uniforms, rubber shoes, canned goods and field rations. None of this was technically demanding, but the volumes were large, the requirements had to be stable, and supply had to be continuous.
Set side by side, these four point to one thing: heavy industry and basic industry — iron and steel, non-ferrous metals, machine building, energy, chemicals and pharmaceuticals. And these four were precisely the weakest sectors in China at the time.
One clarification is necessary. The First Five-Year Plan did not exist because of this war. Preparatory work had begun before it, and the aid negotiations between China and the Soviet Union also predated the Volunteers' crossing. But the war changed one thing: it turned a set of priorities that could have been ordered gradually into a list that admitted no argument. Defence industry was placed first, heavy industry was fixed as a step that could not be bypassed, and an inland industrial layout turned from a long-range vision into something that had to break ground immediately.
III. Five years of revisions to one list
The name "156 Projects" suggests a list agreed once and fixed thereafter. The reality is the opposite: it was a number revised continuously over five years, which finally settled on the label "156" while the content it referred to kept changing.
The timeline runs roughly as follows.
On 14 February 1950, China and the Soviet Union signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance. That same year, the Soviet side undertook to help China build a first batch of fifty key projects. These were mainly in basic industries — energy, metallurgy, machine building — with a modest share for military industry.
In June 1950 the Korean War broke out. In October the Chinese People's Volunteers entered Korea. After that, both the scale and the scope of Soviet aid to China changed markedly.
On 15 May 1953, Li Fuchun, as plenipotentiary representative of the Chinese government, signed an agreement with the Soviet side in Moscow adding ninety-one projects to the existing ones. Fifty plus ninety-one makes one hundred and forty-one.
In October 1954, the Soviet side added fifteen more. One hundred and forty-one plus fifteen makes one hundred and fifty-six. The term "156 Projects" was fixed in that year.
In 1955, sixteen further projects were added, along with two agreed orally, bringing the cumulative total to one hundred and seventy-four.
After that, through repeated verification, mergers, cancellations and adjustments, the figure was finally set at one hundred and fifty-four. The number actually built was one hundred and fifty. Of these, one hundred and forty-seven were scheduled within the First Five-Year Plan and the remaining three were carried into the Second.
There is a fact here that is easily missed: "156 Projects" was never the final count of works. It is a label left over from that period. The real scale of construction was one hundred and fifty projects; the real negotiation was a dynamic process that started at fifty, was augmented several times, and was then trimmed several times.
Why did the list change? The reasons are not mysterious. Some projects turned out on survey to lack the necessary resource conditions; some duplicated capacity already built in China; some were merged after design changes; and some were ultimately designed and built by China itself and dropped from the category of complete-set imports. A country's industrial plan is by nature a product of continuous revision under resource constraints. The changes to the list are themselves evidence of planning capacity growing.
IV. The structure of the 150
Broken down by sector, the one hundred and fifty projects that were actually built look like this:
| Category | Projects | Composition |
|---|---|---|
| Defence industry | 44 | Aviation 12, electronics 10, ordnance 16, aerospace 2, shipbuilding 4 |
| Energy industry | 52 | Coal 25, electric power 25, petroleum 2 |
| Metallurgy | 20 | Iron and steel 7, non-ferrous metals 13 |
| Machine building | 24 | Machine tools, heavy machinery, power equipment, automobiles, tractors, bearings, etc. |
| Chemical industry | 7 | |
| Light industry and pharmaceuticals | 3 | Pharmaceuticals 2, light industry 1 |
| Total | 150 |
Three things in this table are worth pausing over.
First, the forty-four defence projects account for nearly thirty per cent of the total.
This is the most distinctive feature of the list. Aviation twelve, electronics ten, ordnance sixteen, aerospace two, shipbuilding four — five categories covering the full chain from materials and components to complete machines and final assembly. It reflects the judgement set out above: the lessons of the war were written directly into the investment structure.
Related to this is location. Most of the forty-four defence projects were not on the coast but in the interior, with a considerable share concentrated in Sichuan and Shaanxi. It was the first time the industrial layout of New China tilted systematically inland.
Second, energy at fifty-two projects is the largest single block by count.
This is often overlooked. People remember the Jiefang trucks from First Automobile Works and the Dongfanghong tractors from Luoyang, but counted by project number the largest block is coal mines and power stations — coal twenty-five, electric power twenty-five, petroleum two.
The logic is not complicated. Every factory needs electricity, every metallurgical plant needs coking coal, every machine works needs power. Without energy, not one of the other projects could turn over. Twenty-five coal mines and twenty-five power stations, distributed across the coalfields and load centres of the Northeast, North China and the Northwest, formed the base plate of this industrial grid.
Third, of the twenty metallurgy projects, only seven are iron and steel while thirteen are non-ferrous metals.
Iron and steel were few not because steel was unimportant, but because steel was mainly expanded rather than built new — Anshan, Benxi, Wuhan and Baotou. These four names are the four pillars of New China's steel industry: Anshan and Benxi were large-scale expansions of existing plants, while Wuhan and Baotou were built from scratch on open ground.
Non-ferrous metals at thirteen carried a higher share for two reasons. One is resources: China is rich in tungsten, tin, antimony, aluminium and copper, and tungsten and tin were then strategic materials that could be exported to earn foreign exchange — exchange that was needed to pay for the complete sets of equipment. The other is materials: the aviation industry needs aluminium alloys, the electronics industry needs various rare metals. Without these thirteen, the forty-four defence projects would have had nothing to cook with.
Machine building at twenty-four is the most "civilian" block on the list, and the easiest to recognise today. Changchun No.1 Automobile Plant, Luoyang Tractor Plant, Shenyang No.1 Machine Tool Plant, Shenyang No.2 Machine Tool Plant, Harbin Boiler Plant, Harbin Steam Turbine Plant, the turbo-generator workshop of Harbin Electric Machinery Plant, Harbin Measuring and Cutting Tool Plant, Harbin Ball Bearing Plant, Harbin Electric Carbon Plant, Fularki Heavy Machinery Plant, Wuhan Heavy Machine Tool Plant, Luoyang Mining Machinery Plant, Luoyang Ball Bearing Plant, Lanzhou Petroleum Machinery Plant, Lanzhou Refining and Chemical Machinery Plant, Xi'an High Voltage Porcelain Insulator Plant, Xi'an Switch and Rectifier Plant, Xi'an Insulating Materials Plant, Xi'an Power Capacitor Plant, Shenyang Pneumatic Tool Plant, Shenyang Cable Plant, Xiangtan Marine Motor Plant... the great majority of the names on this list can still be found today in corporate histories.
V. Geography: two axes
The one hundred and fifty projects were distributed across seventeen provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities. Broken down by region:
| Region | Projects |
|---|---|
| Northeast | 56 (Liaoning 24, Heilongjiang 22, Jilin 10) |
| Northwest | 33 (Shaanxi 24, Gansu 8, Xinjiang 1) |
| North China | 29 |
| Central China | 17 |
| Southwest | 10 |
| East China | 5 |
| Total | 150 |
The Northeast and Northwest together account for eighty-nine projects, close to sixty per cent. That diagonal from the Northeast to the Northwest is the basic orientation of Chinese heavy industry for the decades that followed.
Why the Northeast?
The answer lies in four overlapping conditions.
The first is foundations. By the first half of the twentieth century the Northeast had already accumulated heavy industry on a considerable scale: the iron ore and steel of Anshan, the coal of Fushun and Fuxin, the coal and iron of Benxi, the hydropower of Fengman, the machining capacity of Shenyang. All of it was there. Expanding on these sites was much faster and much cheaper than building on empty land.
The second is resources. Coal, iron, oil shale, timber and hydropower — the Northeast had almost all of them. Heavy industry is first of all a resource industry; the closer to the resource, the lower the cost.
The third is transport. The Northeast had the densest railway network in the country at the time, with trunk lines, branch lines and industrial sidings joined into a single system, which guaranteed the movement of large equipment.
The fourth is position. The Northeast bordered the Soviet Union, which meant the shortest transport distance for complete sets of equipment and the easiest movement of Soviet specialists.
Liaoning twenty-four, Heilongjiang twenty-two, Jilin ten — fifty-six across three provinces, the only region with more than fifty. Anshan and Benxi steel, the Fushun aluminium plant, the machine tools and pneumatic tools of Shenyang, the "three big power" plants of Harbin, First Automobile Works in Changchun, the fertiliser and dye plants of Jilin, the special steel and heavy machinery of Fularki — a complete heavy industrial chain laid out across this one piece of land at the same time.
Why the Northwest?
The Northwest's thirty-three projects are second only to the Northeast. But unlike the Northeast, the Northwest had almost no existing industrial base; its thirty-three projects were essentially built from bare ground, and the cost was the highest of any region.
Two considerations drove the choice.
The first is security. The coast was the most exposed direction at the time. Placing important industrial capacity deep inland was a choice that had to be made in that era. Shaanxi's twenty-four and Gansu's eight were all in the interior.
The second is resources and subsequent development. Shaanxi had coal; Gansu had petroleum, non-ferrous metals and Yellow River hydropower; Xinjiang had petroleum. More importantly, the Northwest was the emptiest part of China's industrial map, and putting projects there could change the face of a province in a single step.
It should be said plainly that the cost of this layout was obvious: infrastructure had to be built from zero, supporting industries had to be assembled from nothing, and technical staff had to be transferred in from elsewhere. A project that might have taken two years to reach production in the Northeast might take five in the Northwest. That bill was calculated at the time, and it was accepted.
North China's twenty-nine were concentrated in Shanxi, Hebei and Inner Mongolia — Baotou Steel, the chemical works of Taiyuan, the pharmaceutical plant in Shijiazhuang, the power station in Beijing. Central China's seventeen were spread across Henan, Hubei and Hunan: Henan ten, with three large projects concentrated in Luoyang alone — tractors, mining machinery and ball bearings; Hubei three, with Wuhan Steel, the Wuhan Heavy Machine Tool Plant and the Qingshan thermal power station all in Wuhan; Hunan four, in Zhuzhou and Xiangtan, in cemented carbide, power and marine motors. The Southwest's ten were mainly in Sichuan and Yunnan. East China had only five, the smallest of the six regions: one in Huainan, Anhui, and four in Jiangxi (three tungsten mines and one aviation project). Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shandong, Fujian and Guangdong — six provinces and municipalities — had not a single one. The places with the best industrial foundations in the country were precisely the ones absent from the First Five-Year Plan's list of key projects.
VI. Cities: the concrete shape of a project
At city level the macro geography becomes clearer still.
Liaoning's twenty-four: Shenyang seven, Fushun eight, Fuxin four, with the rest in Anshan, Benxi, Dalian, Huludao and Yangjiazhangzi. Fushun's eight and Fuxin's four were almost entirely coal mines and coal chemicals — the industrialised form of a "coal capital". Shenyang's seven concentrated on machine tools, pneumatic tools and cable — machining and electrical materials, the form of an "equipment department".
Heilongjiang's twenty-two: Harbin ten, Hegang four, Qiqihar three, Jiamusi two, Jixi two, Shuangyashan one. Harbin's ten formed the core that came to be known as the "three big power" plants: boiler, steam turbine and electric machinery, joined by measuring and cutting tools, ball bearings, electric carbon and instruments. This combination was not assembled at random — a power station needs all three of boiler, turbine and generator together, and missing any one means no generating set can be assembled. This is what the word "complete set" means at the level of a city.
Shaanxi's twenty-four: Xi'an fourteen, Xingping four, Baoji two, with the rest in Huxian, Tongchuan and Weinan. Four of Xi'an's fourteen stood side by side: Xi'an High Voltage Porcelain Insulator, Xi'an Switch and Rectifier, Xi'an Insulating Materials, and Xi'an Power Capacitor. The four plants were close together and their products interlocked — porcelain for insulators, switches for circuit breakers, insulating materials for dielectrics, capacitors for compensation. Together they formed a complete power transmission and distribution equipment cluster inside one city. That cluster later became Xi'an Electric Machinery Manufacturing Company, and later still the transmission and distribution equipment base of today.
Henan had few projects, but their placement was precise. Luoyang alone concentrated three large projects: the Luoyang Tractor Plant, the Luoyang Mining Machinery Plant and the Luoyang Ball Bearing Plant. An inland city that had lived on agriculture thus became a city of machine building within one five-year plan. The tractor plant broke ground on National Day 1955, produced its first "Dongfanghong" crawler tractor in July 1958, and passed state acceptance to enter formal production in 1959. For decades afterwards, those three characters were synonymous with China's agricultural machinery industry.
Gansu's eight clustered around Lanzhou in refining, chemicals and petroleum machinery, forming the Northwest's first petrochemical base. Baotou Steel in Inner Mongolia brought a steel city into being on the grassland. The North China Pharmaceutical Plant in Shijiazhuang, which broke ground in 1954 and went into production in 1958, is where penicillin and streptomycin became domestically produced — the most important of the three light-industry and pharmaceutical projects, and the closest of all the 156 to ordinary people's lives.
VII. "Complete sets": a mode of import
Looking back today, the 156 Projects are easily understood as "buying the equipment for one hundred and fifty factories". That is incomplete, and it understates what they were.
Their real form was the complete set.
Complete-set design — from site survey, general layout and process flow to equipment selection, the Soviet side provided the full design, with Chinese staff participating and learning.
Complete-set equipment — not scattered purchases of individual machines, but whole production lines configured to the process, including main units, auxiliaries, piping, instrumentation and electrical systems.
Complete-set dispatch of specialists — every project came with its corresponding Soviet specialists, present from civil works and installation through to commissioning.
Complete-set intake of people — at the same time, large numbers of Chinese students and trainees were sent to the Soviet Union to study in matched specialties, returning to work in the corresponding plants.
Together these four amounted to more than a batch of equipment: they transferred an entire method of building a factory. Equipment wears out and drawings go out of date, but once a method is grasped it can be replicated in the one hundred and fifty-first factory, and the two hundredth.
That learning curve has several clear markings.
Changchun No.1 Automobile Plant broke ground on 15 July 1953; on 13 July 1956 the first Jiefang truck rolled off the line. Three years from bare ground to a truck that could run.
Shenyang No.1 Machine Tool Plant began reconstruction in 1953 and was completed in 1955, with a capacity of four thousand machine tools a year.
The Luoyang Tractor Plant broke ground in 1955 and entered production in 1959, with a design capacity of fifteen thousand tractors a year.
The Harbin Boiler Plant was built in two phases between 1954 and 1960, reaching a capacity of four thousand and eighty tonnes of medium- and high-pressure boilers a year.
The North China Pharmaceutical Plant broke ground in 1954 and went into production in 1958, with an annual output of one hundred and fifteen tonnes of penicillin, streptomycin and similar antibiotics, plus fifteen thousand tonnes of starch.
None of these figures looks large today. Their significance lies not in scale but in going from zero to one: before them, China could not build its own trucks, its own tractors, its own machine tools, its own power-station boilers, or produce its own penicillin. After them, all of those "could nots" were void.
VIII. Behind the drawings: standards, metrology and process specifications
What a factory produces depends on three things: equipment, drawings and standards.
Equipment can be bought. Drawings can be handed over. Standards are the hardest.
By standards we mean not only product quality indicators but an entire set of things that allows different factories, different processes and different people to make the same part: material grades and heat-treatment specifications, cutting speeds and feeds, welding currents and groove preparation, inspection tolerances and flaw detection methods, and the chain of metrological references and transfer.
Without this, the same drawing taken to ten factories will produce ten sets of parts that cannot be fitted to one another.
The import of the 156 Projects in substance moved an entire industrial standards system over wholesale. That system had been running in the Soviet Union for decades, covering materials, processes, inspection and metrology. In receiving the equipment, China received the system as well, and on that foundation gradually built up its own national standards, ministerial standards and enterprise process specifications.
This thread is clearest in the list of the twenty-four machine-building projects: the Harbin Measuring and Cutting Tool Plant.
A measuring and cutting tool plant does not make final products. It makes measurement itself — callipers, micrometers, gauge blocks, taps, milling cutters. The precision ceiling of a country's machine-building industry depends on its metrology. Without qualified measuring instruments, even the best machine tool cannot produce a qualified part, because there is no way to judge whether what comes out is qualified. Putting a project like this among the twenty-four shows that the planners of the time understood "industrial capacity" in a complete sense: being able to make machines is not the same as having industry; being able to make the tools that measure machines is.
Equally worth noting is the name of another project: the turbo-generator workshop of the Harbin Electric Machinery Plant. It was not a new complete factory but a workshop inside an existing plant. The existence of such workshop-level projects shows that the construction approach of the time was not simply about starting new operations; at points of bottleneck in existing capacity, it made precise additions — whatever segment was missing, that segment was filled.
IX. People: from students abroad to technical school graduates
Equipment depreciates, drawings go out of date, people remain.
Investment in people under the 156 Projects took three routes.
The first was sending people out. Throughout the 1950s, large numbers of Chinese students were sent to Soviet universities to study in matched specialties — metallurgy, machine building, electric power, chemicals, aviation, electronics. At the same time, large numbers of skilled workers and managers entered corresponding Soviet factories as interns, working alongside production teams. On returning home, the great majority of them went into enterprises associated with the 156 Projects.
The second was bringing people in. Every project was assigned Soviet specialists who took part throughout, from survey and design through civil construction and equipment installation to commissioning, while training Chinese technical staff alongside.
The third was training our own. Many projects established technical schools, secondary specialised schools and evening classes at the same time as the factory itself. Workers were in the workshop by day and in the classroom by night, learning drafting, tolerances and process. This route trained the largest number of people and attracted the least attention, but it settled one question: after the foreign specialists left, could the factory keep running?
Taken together, the three routes produced not a cohort of equipment operators but a cohort of people who knew how to build factories.
This became especially clear later. After 1964, when the Third Front construction unfolded on a large scale and thousands of plants were built deep in the mountains of the Southwest and Northwest, the main force behind the design, construction, commissioning and training of these new plants was the generation that had grown up inside the 156 Projects during the First Five-Year Plan. A workshop director who had learned in Luoyang to read drawings, sequence operations and lead a team could very well be transferred a few years later to an unfamiliar province and start building the same factory again from bare ground.
A factory can be replicated — provided someone knows how to replicate it. The deepest legacy of the 156 Projects is not in those one hundred and fifty factory buildings. It is in those people.
X. Seventy years on: the workshops are still there
The most striking thing about the 156 Projects is their survival rate.
More than seventy years later, a considerable number of the one hundred and fifty are still operating in the same city and on the same site, with different names, different products and different equipment.
First Automobile Works in Changchun later became China FAW Group. The Changchun Automotive Economic and Technological Development Zone where it stands is still one of the most concentrated automotive districts in China.
The First Tractor Plant in Luoyang later became YTO Group. The Soviet-style workshops and workers' housing in Luoyang's Jianxi district are still standing.
The "three big power" plants of Harbin — boiler, steam turbine and electric machinery — were later integrated into Harbin Electric Corporation, still one of the main suppliers of power station equipment in China.
Shenyang No.1 Machine Tool Plant became Shenyang Machine Tool.
The four electrical projects in Xi'an became XD Group; transmission and distribution equipment remains one of Xi'an's pillar industries.
The North China Pharmaceutical Plant in Shijiazhuang became North China Pharmaceutical Group.
Baotou Steel in Baotou, Wuhan Steel in Wuhan, Anshan Steel in Anshan and Benxi Steel in Benxi are still producing on their original sites; Wuhan Steel later joined China Baowu.
Refining and petroleum machinery in Lanzhou became Lanzhou Petrochemical and Lanshi Group. The heavy machinery plant at Fularki became China First Heavy Industries. The ball bearing plant in Luoyang became LYC Bearing.
Line these names up and a pattern emerges: the industrial orientation of these enterprises has barely changed in seventy years. FAW still makes vehicles, YTO still makes agricultural machinery, Harbin Electric still makes power station equipment, XD still makes transmission and distribution equipment, Baotou Steel still makes steel. What has changed is scale, technology and product range. What has not changed is the bond between the city and the industry.
This is the power of an industrial layout. Factory buildings can be rebuilt, equipment can be replaced and products can be superseded, but once a city has formed a complete supporting system around an industry — suppliers, skilled workers, vocational schools, research institutes, testing bodies — that combination is very hard to move. It stays there for a long time.
Today's geography of Chinese manufacturing — equipment manufacturing in the Northeast and Shaanxi, automobiles in Changchun, Wuhan and Chongqing, steel in Anshan, Baotou, Wuhan and Shanghai, non-ferrous metals in Gansu, Yunnan and Henan, agricultural machinery in Luoyang, transmission and distribution in Xi'an, power station equipment in Harbin and Shanghai — overlaps to a remarkable degree with the distribution table of 1954.
Conclusion
Go back to October 1950.
That year, China had just emerged from more than twenty years of war, and its industrial base was thin enough that it "could not make a single motor vehicle, a single aircraft, a single tank, a single tractor". And the supply pressure from the rear pressed in, in a manner that allowed no bargaining.
What happened next was not a miracle. It was an extremely disciplined act of sequencing: taking limited foreign exchange, limited technical staff and limited construction capacity and concentrating them on one hundred and fifty points, each corresponding to the shortest gap in a supply chain. First whether, then how good; first energy and metallurgy, then machinery and defence; first put the plants somewhere safe, then think about cost.
That sequencing had its costs. Light industry was pushed back and consumer goods were in short supply for a long time; the industrial potential of the coast was suppressed; inland projects ran at low efficiency because support systems were incomplete; and an over-concentrated investment structure made later adjustments difficult. These are facts and need not be avoided.
But another set of facts is equally clear. It was precisely these one hundred and fifty projects that turned China from a country that could make only tables and chairs into one that could make motor vehicles, aircraft, tanks, tractors, power station equipment and antibiotics. Once the threshold of industrial capacity is crossed, it does not retreat.
The sources for this article are mainly Volume 6 of the Collected Works of Mao Zedong; "The 156 Projects That Laid the Foundation of New China's Industry" in China Archives News, 22 September 2023; Dong Zhikai and Wu Jiang, The Cornerstone of New China's Industry: A Study of the 156 Construction Projects; Bo Yibo, Recollections of Several Major Decisions and Events; and the relevant chapters of A Reader of the Communist Party of China published by People's Daily Online. Published sources differ slightly on the attribution and counting of individual projects — for example, shipbuilding is recorded as three by some and four by others, and the project counts for Liaoning and Shaanxi differ by one between studies. This article adopts the more widely circulated version and retains "about" and "nearly" where the sources warrant it.
Statements in this article concerning the current status and industrial orientation of enterprises can be checked one by one against the Tianxia Gongchang company archives.