Venture Communist: Gu Zhun in Shanghai, 1949-1952

Abstract

When the Communists took Shanghai in 1949, they brought seasoned soldiers, but scarcely an accountant. The victory that they claimed in the city presented both resources and temptations, including riches to fund a fledgling regime but also the taint of capitalism. How would they fight their new battle to control and reform China’s financial heart? For help, they turned to Gu Zhun (1915-1974), an accounting wunderkind, native Shanghainese, and veteran member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Over the next three years, he oversaw and overhauled the city’s financial structure from various perches in government, sometimes concurrently heading as many as three municipal bureaus. He thus shaped many of the dilemmas capitalists confront elsewhere in this volume. That he sometimes shared as much with them as with his superiors in the party perhaps only compounded their predicament.