The early People’s Republic of China (PRC) sought rapid industrialization as its top priority. But these ambitious developmental goals were hamstrung by poor natural resource endowments and limited access to advanced industrial technologies. The Maoist state thus pursued a labor-intensive path of accumulation. Throughout the Maoist era, muscle-powered transportation (MPT) technologies such as wheelbarrows and animal-drawn carts were central to all facets of economic life. Without human and animal powered wheels and carts, socialist China would never have been able to construct its reservoirs, urban cityscapes, and railroads. The peasants relied on wheelbarrows to move dirt, carry fertilizer, and transport produce. In marketing, despite rolling out unprecedented miles of track, animal-drawn carts hauled the last 10 to 50 miles of goods and supplies to their users throughout the entire Mao era. In short, these everyday transport technologies carried the heavy bottom of the Socialist economy, served as the material lifeblood of Socialist China, and suffused its very culture. But how did the Chinese Communist Party reconfigure the socio-technological system to support its modernizing and revolutionary agenda, with largely un-mechanized technologies using organic energy? What were the outcomes of these endeavors when it clashed with the material reality, economic structure, and ideological commitment?This study brings extensive archival research and oral histories conducted in North China to bear on these questions. The north, where the Loess Plateau gives way to the Gobi Desert, is marked by a dearth of waterbound shipping routes. Thus, a great portion of rural labor was devoted to muscle-powered transportation. I find that the state launched a bevy of incessant programs and political campaigns to enhance the MPT efficiency. It promoted Taylorist body management, in which cadres overseeing peasant laborers on state infrastructure projects mobilized the peasants to rationalize their own body practice. It rolled out of nationwide semi-mechanization campaigns since the Great Leap Forward in which workers and peasants were asked to handcraft parts, such as ball bearings, to improve labor efficiency. These programs emphasized incremental improvements and encouraged grassroots innovations, but also insisted on the political selection of technology and mass-scale implementation that ignored local conditions. As the Maoist state shifted away from 1950s Soviet-style rationalization, it entrenched the rural-urban divide and organized the peasants into self-sufficient, collective economy. Where and how to use muscle-powered transportation power—which accounted for the major part of labor allocated in non-agricultural production—became a thorny political question of what counted as correct application of Mao Zedong thoughts. Importantly, even in today’s hypercapitalist and appreciably wealthier China, the legacy of its MPT-dependent path remains palpable. The choices that the Maoist state made about how to harness muscle power continue to echo in the post-socialist era. “Wheels and Sweat” contributes to the history of modern China as well as to global Science Technology and Society (STS) studies. Despite muscle-powered technologies’ persistent importance in the modern history, they have been treated as residual, alternative, and marginal. This dissertation foregrounds muscle powered technologies, not only as a major productive factor that kept evolving, but also as a crucial social component that profoundly shaped the knowledge production in the everyday. Thus, this dissertation not only provides new perspectives on how the common peasants experienced the modernization and revolution—it also enriches our theoretical framework by expanding the boundaries of what technology means.