The East Asia Center is pleased to welcome Yao Yu, Professor of History at East China Normal University, for a speaker series lecture "China’s Natural Rubber Plantation in the 1950s: A Global View."

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. This case revealed how a sector of China’s economy could deeply be entangled with elements from the East, the West, and the South since the 1950s.

The talk, co-sponsored by the Corcoran Department of History, will be held Friday, April 4, from 3:15 - 4:30 p.m. in Gibson 211.