This article views the economic development history of New China as a history of openness and constant adjustment. We examine China’s economic development and early open policies from 1953 to 1978, analyze how the nation navigated between planned and open economic models during the formative period. Through a comprehensive review ofthe key Chinese and Western scholarship, investigates major initiatives including the Soviet-assisted 156 Projects, First Five-Year Plan, The policy of Eight Characters and the later “Four Three Plan” of the Western engagement. The study highlights both achievements and challenges, particularly in industrial growth and technology transfer, while assessing the impact of critical events like the Sino-Soviet split. Statistical analysis and quantitative models demonstrate how these early experiments with economic openness, despite ideological constraints and operational difficulties, established crucial institutional and technological foundations for China’s subsequent reform and modernization. The findings offer valuable insights into China’s unique development path and its implications for emerging economies.

This paper investigates the outstanding economic and scientific-technological achievements of the Soviet Union during the 1945–1953 period and analyzes how these successes influenced New China’s decision to adopt the Soviet development model. Drawing upon a review of the key Chinese studies and the influential Western works, this study synthesizes diverse research methods, including historical institutional analysis, archival research, and econometric modeling, to examine the driving forces behind Soviet economic development, its quantitative achievements, and its evolving international status relative to the United States. Moreover, the paper reviews the development of Sino-Soviet relations during both the Kuomintang era and the early years of the People’s Republic of China, and it provides a comprehensive factor analysis of why New China chose to introduce the “Soviet model.” The paper also discusses recent quantitative research that employs statistical models to assess the impact of Soviet achievements on China’s economic planning. The findings underscore that the rapid reconstruction and modernization of the Soviet economy not only set new benchmarks in industrial output and scientific progress but also provided a persuasive example that shaped China’s early development strategy.

This paper examines the intricate relationship between China’s First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957) and the extensive Soviet aid that played a pivotal role in shaping early industrialization and economic policy in New China. Drawing upon both Chinese and Western literature, the study reviews the evolution of planned economy practices and Soviet economic assistance, analyzes the process of plan formulation and the formulation of key industrial targets, and assesses the quantitative and qualitative impact of Soviet aid on the successful implementation of the plan. By employing a multi-perspective literature review, archival research, and statistical data analysis, the paper identifies that Soviet technology, machinery, and planning expertise contributed significantly, estimates suggest that Soviet aid accounted for 30-40% of the capital inputs in key sectors and that this collaboration was instrumental in achieving heavy industry targets before the advent of reform and opening-up policies. Furthermore, the paper explores the subsequent divergence in the economic models of China and the Soviet Union, offering lessons on dependency, technology transfer, and the political dimensions of foreign aid. The findings not only contribute to our understanding of the early stages of China’s economic development but also shed light on the broader dynamics of Cold War-era international economic cooperation.

This study examines the enduring effects of China’s planned economy on contemporary social attitudes. By leveraging spatial disparities in the historical distribution of state-owned enterprises and external shocks such as the First Five-Year Plan and the Third Front Construction movement, we find that a one percentage point increase in the historical SOE proportion of industrial output corresponds with a 0.57% to 0.89% increase in the contemporary preference for state-owned sectors. The results are robust after controlling the contemporary SOE employment share, and this effect does not apply to the younger generation born after the marketization reform. Furthermore, we provide evidence that city-level state ownership preferences significantly impact the likelihood of SOEs receiving subsidies, with this effect notably amplified in cities governed by locally-born leaders, but the share of locally-born leaders has been trending down.

This paper examines the effects of economic shocks originating from China’s Five-Year Plans on firms’ shareholders and stakeholders in the U.S. Using establishment-level data, we show that the shocks were not preceded by low production or employment, nor were they anticipated by the U.S. stock market, but were followed by shrinkage of targeted sectors. Well-financed firms with adaptable sectorial and territorial layouts came out mostly unscathed due to within-firm adjustments, such as shifting production to upstream or downstream industries that benefited from the boost in the focal industries in China, or offshoring to encouraged industries in China. These adjustments extended limited benefits to employees and communities, measured by employment and opioid usage.

In the era of big data, asset pricing is influenced by various factors, which are extracted from multi-source heterogeneous information, such as high frequency market and sentiment information, low frequency firm characteristic and macroeconomic information. Especially, low frequency policy information plays a significant role in the long-term pricing in China but it is barely investigated due to its textual form. To this end, we first extract policy variables from major national development plans (“Five-Year Plans”, “Government Work Reports”, and “Monetary Policy Reports”) using Natural Language Processing (NLP) technique and Dynamic Topic Model (DTM). However, traditional models are inadequate for mixed frequency data modeling and feature extraction. Then, we propose a mixed frequency deep factor asset pricing model (MIDAS-DF) that solves the asset pricing problems under the mixed frequency data environment through mixed data sampling (MIDAS) technique and deep learning architecture. Time-varying latent factors and factor loadings can be modeled from mixed frequency data directly in a nonlinear and data-driven way. Thus, the MIDAS-DF model is able to learn the nonlinear joint-patterns hidden in multi-source heterogeneous information. Our empirical studies of 4939 stocks on the Chinese A-share market from January 2003 to July 2022 demonstrate that low frequency policy information has profound impacts on asset pricing, which anchors the long-term pricing direction, and high frequency market and sentiment information have significant influences on stock prices, which optimize the short-term pricing accuracy, they together enhance the pricing effects. Consequently, pricing effects the MIDAS-DF model outperform the five competing models on individual stocks, various test portfolios, and investment portfolios. Our research about heterogeneous information provides implications to the government and regulators for decision-support in policy-making and our investment portfolio is of great importance for investors’ financial decisions.