The Tortuous Development Period of China's Machine Tool Industry (1949-1999)

China's machine tool manufacturing industry was founded in the early days of New China, starting from a blank. During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, under the unified leadership of the state's industrial sector, a number of machine tool backbone enterprises (including 18 machine tool factories, 4 tool factories and 2 grinding wheel factories) were established under the unified leadership of the state industrial sector. On this basis, various places have built a local machine tool factory, forming a considerable scale, to meet the needs of domestic industrial development. At the same time, a number of integrated research institutions of departmental machine tools (known as "seven hospitals" of Dalian combined machine tools, Beijing machine tool institute, Jinan casting and forging institute, Chengdu tool institute, Zhengzhou abrasive sabras, Guangzhou machine tool institute, Suzhou Electric Processing Institute, as well as Zhengzhou six institutes), as well as 37 professional research institutes and enterprise design departments for the whole industry ("two types of institutes"), formed a complete supporting industry scientific research and technology research and development system.

In the 1960s and 1970s, in order to break through the foreign technical blockade and solve the urgent need skilled of cutting-edge industries, the State set up a leading group, coordinated the relevant ministries, deployed national forces, organized several machine tool technology, formed a large number of results, including models of high-precision machine tools, key components and related testing equipment, shortenthed the gap with foreign countries.

At the beginning of the reform and opening up, China's numerical control technology began, domestic machine tool products still stay in the traditional manual operation technology. In order to shorten the gap between China and foreign countries, on the one hand, vigorously introduce technology, joint venture cooperation, while the country has organized several consecutive control technology, and achieved some achievements. However, for various reasons, the industrialization of industry numerical control has been slow. By the end of the 20th century, the output value of the machine tool industry was only about 20%.

In 1985, the former Ministry of Machinery enterprises all decentralized. In the early 90's, China took the lead in the field of machine tool products to significantly reduce import tariffs, liberalize import restrictions, and then relax the market access of foreign-funded enterprises. At that time, domestic machine tool enterprises are mostly state-owned enterprises, but also not adapted to the market environment, coupled with the low degree of industry concentration, the weakening of industry management functions, in a large number of imported machine tools under the impact of the collapse of China's machine tool enterprises and the wave of laid-off workers.

The reform of the scientific and technological system, which began in 1999, was transformed into an enterprise by a research institute under the Ministry of Machinery, and the research capacity of the common technology of serving the whole industry was weakened. The existing industry technology innovation force is mainly the backbone of the enterprise's research and development institutions.