Rebuilding the Paper Industry: Pulp Famines, Recycling, and Industrial Governance in Postwar Shanghai

Following the Second World War, a shortage of pulp and paper products swept the globe, driven by rising newspaper consumption, record demand for boxes and containers, and new uses for paper, such as bags for cement and bulk commodities. Paper “famines” were felt most acutely in nations like China seeking to rebuild war-torn societies. This article investigates the recovery of China’s industrial paper industry in Shanghai across the revolutionary divide of 1949, using trade association records from paper producers and paper collectors housed in the Shanghai Municipal Archive. Two insights emerge, both stemming from shortages of wood pulp, the most important material in machine papermaking. These shortages were the industry’s most pressing problem in the years before and after the revolution (~1945 to 1955), leading to numerous production stoppages. First, before 1949, industry leaders consistently petitioned the government to implement a system of centrally-coordinated pulp distribution; after 1949, they helped design the state monopoly system of purchasing and marketing. More than passive or wary partners, the severity of the raw material crisis made private enterprises in the paper industry active participants in welcoming the planned economy and designing its material supply mechanisms. Second, even as these policies alleviated the worst of the famines, mills in Shanghai relied on hundreds of paper pickers whose collection network spanned the entirety of the city. This was the first large-scale and formalized effort in China to collect and reuse paper for new products. The experience of producers and collectors demonstrates the foundational role of pulp in establishing the material legitimacy of the new socialist regime. It also illuminates the interconnected thread between China’s resource constraints in a macro-level political economy and the micro, street-level individuals who expanded subeconomies of recycling to make up the pulp shortage.