1st Five-Year Plan (China)

Having restored a viable economic base, the leadership under Chairman Mao Zedong, Premier Zhou Enlai, and other revolutionary veterans sought to implement what they termed a socialist transformation of China. The First Five-Year Plan was deeply influenced by Soviet methodologies and assistance from Soviet planners. The PRC government adopted key elements of the Soviet central planning model, including five-year targets for heavy industry, input allocation through planning bureaus, and state-set prices for industrial goods. Soviet advisors, technical manuals, and blueprints were widely used to support implementation. Compared to the Soviet planning method, however, the Plan had less centralized planning with regard to consumer goods and regional planning authorities had greater authority. == Policies ==

Industrial development was the primary goal. To support these priorities, transportation, communication, and mining surveys also received significant state support.As state-owned enterprises expanded, the danwei (work unit, 單位) system became more institutionalized. Employment was closely tied to one's workplace, which also provided essential welfare benefits such as housing, healthcare, education, and food rations. This arrangement offered a high degree of stability and was commonly referred to as the iron rice bowl (鐵飯碗). While the system helped maintain urban order, it also allowed the Communist Party to exert direct administrative and ideological control over workers’ daily lives. Agriculture, fishing, and forestry would be collectivized. • Lay out the primary foundations for China's socialist industrialization • Develop agricultural producers’ cooperatives to help in the socialist transformation of the agriculture and handicraft industries • Put capitalist industry and commerce on the track of state capitalism • Facilitate the socialist transformation of private industry and commerce. == Results ==

Accumulated investment in capital construction was 55 billion yuan and fixed asset increments reached 46.05 billion yuan, 1.9 times higher than at the end of 1952. About 595 large and medium-sized projects were completed and put into production, laying the framework of China's industrialization. In addition, investments in capital construction in 1956 totaled 14.735 billion yuan, increasing 70% over the previous year. Fiscal expenditure in the form of infrastructure loans rose to 48% from 30% from 1955, putting a strain on the national budget as a result. Agriculture, including water conservancy, accounted for only 4% of the government's investment budget. The gross value of industrial products in 1957 increased 128.6% from 1952. Total production of coal and steel exceeded more than double of the planned growth. By the end of 1955 almost 2/3, about 60%, of all Chinese farmers were engaged in cooperative farming. Farming families, who previously engaged largely in subsistence farming, now began raising and selling livestock based on the increase in grain surpluses, which was directly responsible for the practices popularity and rapid rate of enrollment. Central committee planning dictated that from the loosely structured, tiny mutual aid teams, villages were to advance first to lower-stage, agricultural producers' cooperatives, in which families still received some income on the basis of the amount of land they contributed, and eventually to advanced cooperatives, or collectives beginning in 1958 with the second Five Year Plan. In the agricultural producers' cooperatives, income shares were designed to be based only on the amount of labor contributed. In reality, small farming markets that revolved around cooperative surpluses, sprang up across the nation. The land reforms from 1949 to 1951 increased private land ownership, with typical results increasing land ownership of farmers from just under one acre to approximately three acres. The cooperative process, began in 1953, accelerated quickly, slowly from 1955 to 1956. By 1957 about 93.5% of all farm households had joined producers' cooperatives. In terms of economic growth, the First Five-Year Plan was quite successful, especially in those areas emphasized by the Soviet-style development strategy. During this Plan period, China began developing a heavy-industrial base and brought its industrial production above what it had been prior to war. By 1956, China had completed its socialist transformation of the domestic economy. == References ==