ABSTRACT
The industrialisation of China is a gigantic undertaking and the attainment of an advanced degree of socialist industrialisation is hardly likely to take less than two generations. The official Chinese goal is to achieve the essentials of socialist industrialisation, socialist transformation of agriculture and handicrafts and socialisation of private enterprise within about three Five Year Plans, that is, by around 1967. 1 The First Five Year Plan, however ambitiously conceived, is only one link in a long chain of economic development. Therefore, the year 1957 is to some extent an arbitrary terminus ad quem, since many vital heavy industrial projects initiated during the First Five Year Plan will require about five years for their completion. And in the case of other projects only the preliminary surveying and designing work will have been undertaken or begun by 1957. (The endpaper map inside the front cover shows the centres of heavy industry in China.)
