Alumni Interview with Koji Hirata

Koji Hirata is a Senior Research Fellow in History at Monash University in Australia and Zijiang Visiting Scholar at East China Normal University. A graduate of Stanford History Department (Ph.D. 2018), he worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. His research focuses on modern China, Japan, and Russia/Soviet Union with broader implications for the global history of capitalism and socialism. His book Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), received the 2025 Reid Prize from the Asian Studies Association of Australia. He is currently working on a new book project about Mao-era China’s foreign economic relations.
 

Tell us about your book Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

My book is a transnational history of a single industrial enterprise, Anshan Iron and Steel Works (Angang). Located in the city of Anshan in Manchuria (Northeast China/Dongbei), Angang was China’s largest steelmaker for most of the last century. In the book, I trace Angang’s evolution as a symbol of industrial Manchuria during the twentieth century, especially in the 1940s and 1950s. Angang was originally created as a Japanese colonial enterprise in the 1910s, destroyed by the Soviets after World War II, reorganized and partially reconstructed by Nationalist China, and then expanded by the PRC with Soviet collaboration as China’s model socialist enterprise in the Mao period. I approach Angang as a lens to reflect on Dongbei’s place in China and China’s place in the world.

The book originates from a research paper that I wrote for my first year graduate seminar at Stanford History. I was learning Russian, studying both Chinese and Japanese history, and I thought I could write something original if I chose a topic related to all three countries. I first considered writing a paper on the evolution of industrial policies in Manchuria before and after the Communist Revolution. When discussing my paper topic, my advisor suggested that I choose one city or one factory for an in-depth micro-historical study. I decided to focus on Angang, because the company struck me as a “typical” industrial enterprise of Mao-era China. I wrote my seminar paper on Angang, which later became my doctoral thesis, which eventually became a book.

You use archival and oral history sources in Chinese, Japanese, English, and Russian. Have you run into any challenges in conducting such a multi-lingual, multi-site research?

Looking back now, the book reads like a product of the 2010s archival landscape. Many Chinese archives were increasingly closed compared to the 2000s. I therefore relied heavily on published sources from China and archival holdings in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Russia, and the United States. In fact, Professor Shellen Wu says in review that my book is “a history of late industrialization in China told from the outside in,” and I agree with that statement.

In Japan, in the 1990s, some scholars conducted detailed research through oral-history interviews with Japanese engineers who had worked at Angang and other enterprises first under Manchukuo and, after 1945, for both Nationalist and Communist regimes. That window existed in the 1990s, but when I conducted research in the 2010s, it was no longer an option to interview those engineers themselves. However, I could still interview children of Japanese engineers at Angang, who shared interesting stories about everyday life in the early Mao period.

One lucky thing about my dissertation was that it was still possible to visit Russia for research with a grant from Stanford’s Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies. Once I managed to enter Russia, the archives there were fairly open, and I spent an exciting two months in several archives in Moscow. 

A final stroke of luck: Stanford proved crucial for my research. The Hoover Institution Archives holds many Nationalist Chinese materials unavailable anywhere else. One day, I discussed my research topic with a librarian from Stanford's East Asia Library, and they acquired a huge set of publications from Anshan and Angang, including microfilms of Anshan’s local newspaper. Stanford’s East Asia Library is perhaps the best research library on earth for the study of Anshan and Angang.

What are you working on now?  

I am currently writing an international history of Mao-era China’s foreign trade. Using multilingual sources, I trace how China’s socialist planned economy was tied to the global economy through imports and exports of goods and services, despite its ultimate dream of becoming autarchic. China’s largest economic partner was the Soviet Union in the first half of the Mao period, then Japan in the second. But other economies also played important roles.

I have already found interesting sets of primary sources in archives in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the U.S., the U.K., Canada, and Australia. In-person research in Russia is not feasible for me now, but there are various channels to obtain Russian-language archival sources. Some Chinese archives, such as the Shanghai and Beijing Municipal Archives, remain relatively open, and the primary source collection at East China Normal University is extremely useful.

Interestingly, the United States looms larger in this story than its bilateral trade figures suggest. Direct U.S.-China trade was almost negligible at the time due to the U.S.-led embargo against the P.R.C. Nevertheless, the United States crucially influenced China’s foreign trade not only through grand policies such as embargoes and Nixon’s China visit, but also through more mundane forms of power such as regulations on U.S. businesses or day-to-day pressure on its allies. One thread of my next book will be to re-examine U.S. power in building an international political-economic order, using non-U.S. archives to see that power from the outside.

You studied Law and Politics at college. What would you tell your undergraduate self now about studying History? 

History is full of contingencies. At least, your life will be.

How did your background in Political Science and Law inform your graduate work in History?

I moved to History, because I didn’t enjoy studying Law and Politics at the time. I thought I was abandoning them with this switch. In retrospect, even basic training in these subjects still helps me in indirect ways, as it taught me how complex political and legal systems are in practice. States are contested, multi-layered entities, and anything but monolithic. That perspective quietly informs both my research and my teaching, I think.

What texts inspired you the most in your career? 

Two books on the 1920s come to mind. Robert Bickers’ Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (2003) reconstructs the life of an ordinary Scottish policeman in Shanghai. Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (1995) narrates Soviet socialism as practiced in the Ural steel town of Magnitogorsk. Each uses deep research on one person or one place to illuminate a vast system—British colonialism in the case of Bickers’s book and Stalinism in the case of Kotkin’s. They are exemplary works of what the Chinese call “以小見大” [seeing the large through the small].

Your book builds upon your 2018 Stanford History dissertation. In one word, how would you describe your experience in turning your dissertation into a book manuscript? 

Chaotic. In other words, as unplanned as most so-called “planned economies” that have existed in history. 

Immediately after I finished my Ph.D. in the summer of 2018, I started a generous three-year research-focused post-doctoral research fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Because (I thought) I had plenty of time thanks to my postdoc, I decided to do a major revision. Although my dissertation examined both Angang the company and Anshan the city, I focused on the company in the book. At the same time, I extended the timeframe to include the late Mao period and the Deng Xiaoping period. Hence, I cut one whole chapter, which appeared as a journal article. I also added two new chapters, while the remaining chapters were substantially revised. The introduction and conclusion were totally rewritten. I had time, intellectual stimulation, and, importantly, the recklessness to undertake that kind of revision thanks to my postdoctoral fellowship at Emmanuel.

My plan changed at the beginning of my second year at Cambridge, when I was offered a permanent, tenure-line position at Monash University in Australia. I shortened my postdoctoral fellowship by a year, planning to move to Australia in the summer of 2020. The plan changed again in an unexpected way due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. I moved to Shanghai, where my family was, in the spring of 2020, and ended up being stuck there for more than two years. Emmanuel kindly allowed me to remotely continue my postdoctoral fellowship, and Monash generously arranged an online teaching option for the 2021-2022 academic year. 

I signed my publication contract with Cambridge University Press in early 2022, which came as a huge joy and relief. I then began the final, final revision to my book. Before finishing it, I experienced a draconian Shanghai Lockdown. Local government control was very powerful and hands-on, yet, rather malfunctioning and confusing. For instance, they tried to distribute food to each household through neighborhood committees, but the distribution failed in many areas including mine. I finally had an in-person experience of how a planned economy worked or did not work. Dreams come true sometimes, in unexpected ways.

What is your favorite archive, and why?

Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa. It’s open, welcoming, and largely bilingual. The archivists get even kinder when you try to talk to them in French, even in a very rusty, hardly comprehensible French like mine. Québec is just a twenty-minute walk, across a beautiful bridge, from the archives. On the last day of my research, I had a walk and crossed the bridge so that I can say “I have been to Québec” for the rest of my life.

What are some key things you remember from your time at Stanford?

The Stanford Theatre, where you can see classic Hollywood on the big screen, and Panda Express, where you can enjoy decent Americanized Chinese food at a fair price. Together, in their own ways, they represent the best parts of the United States.