Title
China’s Natural Rubber Plantation in the 1950s: A Local History
Abstract
In the 1950s, China started its road towards becoming a major natural rubber producer with huge fluctuations and costs. In response to the Western economic blockade, China and the Soviet Union started it as the alleged second-largest joint economic item in 1951, with an investment of 70 million rubles. However, the evolution of the global economic cold war since the end of 1952 resulted in a dramatic shrinkage of this Sino-Soviet cooperation, which in turn caused bilateral resentments and heavy losses on the side of China.
Since then, though the Soviet Union still maintained influences in some fields until the end of the 1950s, this socialist enterprise relied more and more on those elements related to the West and Southeast Asia, even in the heyday of China’s socialist construction of the Great Leap Forward. In this lecture Dr. Yu Yao used this case study to reveal how a sector of China’s economy has been deeply entangled with elements from the East, the West, and the South since 1950s.
This talk was co-sponsored by the Departments of History, History of Science, Medicine and Technology, and the Center for East Asian Studies.
Biography
Prof. Yao is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute, and Professor of History at East China Normal University (ECNU).