Defence Industrialization in Guangdong

Abstract

Ezra Vogel, in the first of his classic works on Guangdong, cites the dream of 20th-century Cantonese of turning Guangzhou “into an industrial as well as a commercial center.” The victory of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) revived these dreams, but they were dashed for a variety of reasons, including “Communist fears of military vulnerability.” Guangdong and Guangzhou never did develop into the kind of heavy industrial city comparable to Shenyang, Wuhan or other monuments to Soviet-style socialist visions of industrial power and modernity. As Vogel makes clear in his second classic work on Guangdong, in the long term, and especially in the post-Mao period, this was not a bad thing. One of the reasons that Guangdong was able to take off was because there was much less state-owned heavy industry there at the onset of reforms, and thus the burdens of readjustment and state-owned enterprise reform were relatively light. In his later book, Vogel notes that Guangdong was not without defence industry, especially in the 1960s. But he does not see this playing a major role, and the entire output of heavy industry remained smaller than that of light industry, contrary to national trends, and the pattern in most other provinces.