The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) is delighted to announce that Dr Koji Hirata, a historian from Monash University in Melbourne, has won the 2025 Reid Prize for his recently published book, Making Mao’s Steelworks: Industrial Manchuria and the Transnational Origins of Chinese Socialism (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
The Reid Prize is the most prestigious prize in Australia and New Zealand for work in the field of Asian studies. The prize was established in 2022 to celebrate exemplary contributions to the understanding of Asia thanks to the generosity of Tony and Helen Reid.
Tony Reid’s recent passing makes the announcement of Dr Hirata’s achievement especially poignant. As the winner of the prize in 2025, Dr Hirata will receive a prize worth $8,000 and he will also deliver the Reid Lecture at the ASAA Biennial Conference, which will be hosted by Deakin University in Geelong in mid-2026.
The jurors for this year’s prize were Professor Vedi Hadiz (University of Melbourne), Emeritus Professor Louise Edwards (University of NSW), and Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya (Murdoch University), and the ASAA thanks these colleagues for the time, effort, expertise, and thoughtfulness that they invested in assessing the entries for 2025.
The judges were presented with a short-list of 11 excellent books, spanning the gamut of Asian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, and the judging panel were especially impressed by the work of scholars such as Katherine E. McGregor (Systemic silencing: Activism, memory, and sexual violence in Indonesia), Malini Sur (Jungle passports: Fences, mobility, and citizenship at the Northeast India–Bangladesh border), and Tana Li (A maritime Vietnam: From earliest times to the nineteenth century), but they were also emphatic in their view that Dr Hirata’s Making Mao’s Steelworks was a worthy winner of this year’s prize.
The judges praised its originality, insights, rigor, and implications for the study of contemporary Asia, broadly defined. One of the panellists referred to Dr Hirata’s book as a ‘first-rate, deep historical analysis and reinterpretation of Chinese industrialisation in the 20th century’, another said that it was an ‘important contribution to the transnational framework for the emergence of developmental states in Asia’, and the third commended the author on ‘his meticulous “institutional history” that [shows] deeper patterns of economic and technological change are at play’. A full set of comments from the judges appears at the end of this message.
The ASAA is proud to be able to award the Reid Prize to such a worthy winner, and as noted it would not be possible without the generosity of the Reid family as well as the expertise of the judges. We are also grateful to the Australian National University’s Donor Relations Office for its role in administering the Reid family’s generous endowment and to the publishers of the 11 books for agreeing to providing hard-copy and electronic copies of the books for the judges.
David Hundt
President, Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2025/26
Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University
Detailed comments from the Judges
Juror #1: ‘Provides a first-rate, deep historical analysis and reinterpretation of Chinese industrialisation in the 20th century, especially under Mao. Its arguments are original – and provokes useful comparative debates – as it brings together the different external influences shaping that massive industrialisation drive (from Russia, Japan, global pressures common to late industrialisers). Crucial for understanding an important (long) period in recent Chinese history and its current socio-economic circumstances. It is very useful as well for understanding problems that have faced ambitious state-led industrialisation projects all through the 20th century. Sources used are diverse and very rich.’
Juoror #2: ‘This is an excellent work that places the project of late industrialisation in the vortex of geopolitics and borders, and the different social forces that have shaped such projects of late industrialisation. It shows clearly how the project of late industrialisation needs to be in the broader transnational (or regional context). It shows how ideas and expertise of developmentalism and industrialisation have deeper roots in the imperial politics of the inter-war period – showing continuities between the communist period and earlier period. The book is an important contribution to the transnational framework for the emergence of developmental states in Asia. The section on the state enterprises and industrialisation under communist rule shows how the state–society relations shaped and were shaped by patterns of industrialisation and is impressive in the depth of its research. The chapter showing worker resistance in the reform period. The moves between the micro and macro perspectives – focusing on steel plant – in a deft way that makes this a compelling study.’
Juror #3: ‘This is an impressive study of the many lives and afterlives of the most iconic steelworks of Manchuria, aka Northeast China. Angang Steelworks was made famous in Mao-era propaganda as an icon of socialist industrial might and Chinese economic achievement. But Hirata shows through his meticulous “institutional history” that deeper patterns of economic and technological change are at play – many of which have hitherto gone unnoticed or misunderstood. The patterns Hirata has uncovered expose the weakness of the dominant narrative that Angang was an independent Chinese socialist glory. Rather socialist industrialisation celebrated during the Mao era was intimately connected to imperialist Japanese processes, technologies, and habits. He also shows the impact of Soviet and capitalist styles of steelmaking and industrial organisation further transformed the steelworks as well as broader programs of ‘socialist’ economic models and practices. Hirata reveals that socialist planners interacted with capitalist ideas and that workers and policymakers were effective in influencing state plans and guidelines from the bottom and middle up. Socialist industrialisation in China was not, we learn, always the rigid top-down model that it is caricatured as being.
‘The book draws upon an impressive array of sources produced in Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and English to build the story of how industry and technology evolve in interaction with state and political shifts, across borders, and between competing political ideologies. It includes diverse primary sources, interviews, photographs, economic data, and newspapers as well as official policy documents held in archives across 5 different countries (USA, Taiwan, China, Japan, and Russia). The amount of work in managing this array of material is truly impressive.’
