ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to clarify the relationship between continuity and discontinuity from the 1930s to the 1950s in Northeast China by tracing the history of the Anshan Iron and Steel Company (AISC). The iron and steel industry was the most important component of the munitions industry. For this reason, its development process strongly reflected the military picture, and was a mirror also of the international order in Asia. The AISC was the iron and steel industry’s second biggest production facility in the Far East, and the biggest complex in China from the 1930s to the 1950s. The company was part of the Yen Bloc from the 1930s to the first half of the 1940s, and thereafter was encompassed by Republican and then Communist China. The AISC was originally established as a production arm of the South Manchuria Railway Company in 1918, and only in 1933 did it become a separate Japanese colonial company. The AISC drastically enhanced its production levels for the military designs of Japanese imperialism. The company’s main equipment was conceived and constructed in the second half of the 1930s under the Manchukuo regime, and this followed the war programme instigated by Japan to fight against the US and the UK. This programme took concrete shape in 1936, and war commenced in 1941. The AISC rapidly increased its production after the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, and it became a gigantic enterprise in the 1940s and 1950s. Production was planned to support the iron and steel industry in Japan, and inhumane working conditions, including a forced labour system, victimized a huge number of Chinese. It is also worth noting that the AISC suffered serious war damage several times during both World War Two and the Chinese civil War (CCW), and production was completely suspended in 1945. Notwithstanding this destruction, the AISC resumed its pre-war maximum production levels by the early 1950s.
