Shanghai

Shanghai was opened as a treaty port by the Treaty of Nanking of 1842 and, Wikipedia says, was Asia’s chief commercial and financial centre in the 1930s and China’s industrial centre, with its most skilled workers, in the 1950s.¹

Imported watches were finished here. Chinese Watch Wiki says that before 1955 China mostly bought complete movements and cased them locally, largely in Shanghai.²

The city had a clock trade but not a watch trade. Chinese Wikipedia says its factories could make only rough pin-lever works for alarm clocks and timers, and names thirteen clock factories, among them Daguangming and the China Clock Factory, that lent men to the watch trial.⁵

The state asked for watches. The Yangpu district account cites the city’s light industry gazetteer for Vice-Premier Li Fuchun’s visit of 1954, and both it and Chinese Wikipedia say dozens of the city’s watch workers wrote to the party committee in 1955 asking to make them.^3, 5

A trial group of 58 people, formed in 1955 by the Second Light Industry Bureau and the clock and watch trade association, built the city’s trial watches.^3, 4, 5

The Yangpu account says two engineers, Xi Guozhen, who had designed locomotives, and Tong Qinfen, who had made medical needles, spent more than four months in 1957 drawing over 150 parts and a production process of 1,070 steps from measured samples and a Soviet textbook.³

The Shanghai Watch Factory was established on 23 April 1958; the Yangpu account places it at 200 Yulin Road, in Yangpu district, from 1960.^3, 4

More factories followed. Chinese Watch Wiki says a heavily revised Shanghai movement of 1968 was passed to the new Shanghai No. 2 and No. 3 watch factories, and that No. 2 made the trial runs of the national standard movement; Wikipedia names the Shanghai Clock & Watch Industry Company in its design group.^2, 7

The model was Swiss: The Paper and Chinese Wikipedia name the Sercal, Chinese Watch Wiki the AS 1187.^2, 4, 5

The method was partly Soviet: the Yangpu account says the 1957 engineers worked from a Soviet textbook of production processes.³

The watches went to the whole country. The Paper says that until the mid-1990s about one in four people in China who wore a wristwatch wore a Shanghai.⁴

Chinese Wikipedia, citing his chief bodyguard’s memoir, says Premier Zhou Enlai bought a Shanghai A623 calendar watch, wore it until his death and that it is now in the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution.⁵

Capital and people moved the other way too: Chinese Wikipedia says Shanghai industrialists who left for Hong Kong in the 1950s helped start its manufacturing boom; Donzé records that the Hong Kong watch group Stelux opened a subsidiary in Shanghai in 2003.^8, 9

After rationing ended in the 1980s and foreign watches came in, Chinese Wikipedia says, the Shanghai Watch Factory fell into crisis, with steel watches once priced at 120 yuan sold for ten or so.⁵

By Chinese Wikipedia’s count the factory made its hundred-millionth watch on 29 October 1990 and 120 million in all between 1958 and 1995.⁵

It was restructured as Shanghai Watch Co. Ltd. in April 2000.^3, 4

In 2008 the astronaut Zhai Zhigang wore a Shanghai-made watch on China’s first spacewalk, from Shenzhou VII; The Paper says it was made with Fiyta.^4, 5