What Karl Marx termed the “expropriation of the expropriators” and PLA Marshal Lin Biao referred to as “getting property” was key Chinese Communist Party’s industrial strategy and essential to building socialism. In the People’s Republic of China, state control over industry and commerce was achieved in the mid-1950s through a policy of redemption; a controversial solution that preserved a residue of private ownership within the socialist system and determined the fraught relationship between the government and former business owners through the Cultural Revolution and into the early years of Reform and Opening.

Puck Engman is Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley. In the academic year 2022-2023, he is a faculty fellow with the UC Berkeley Social Sciences Matrix. He is currently working on a book that examines how the Chinese state defined and attempted to solve the problem of capitalists following the takeover of private enterprises and the integration of the management in a socialist system. He is the co-editor of "Victims, Perpetrators and the Role of Law in Maoist China: A Case-Study Approach" (De Gruyter 2018, with Daniel Leese) and author of “What Right to Property when Rebellion is Justified? Revolution and Restitution in Shanghai” (in "Justice after Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China," edited by Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman, forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).

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