Enfranchised

Chapter 2 recounts how the Chinese Communist Party reorganized industrial enterprises after taking power in 1949. Small numbers of party cadres, typically peasant veterans of the rural insurgency, were dispatched to factories to mobilize workers to attack capitalists and incumbent managers. Through a series of aggressive mass campaigns, the party established its control, recruiting workers to serve as factory leaders and creating party-led institutions of participation. After nationalization was completed in 1956, Mao—concerned that Communist cadres were becoming autocratic and arrogant—initiated a Party Rectification campaign, in which he encouraged unusually freewheeling criticism of “bureaucratism” among party officials. This opening unleashed a torrent of criticism by intellectuals as well as strikes by workers and inspired union leaders to push for greater independence from the party. The campaign, however, was quickly aborted and during the subsequent Anti-Rightist movement those who had spoken out were harshly punished, squelching prospects for autonomous activity.

Lessons and Prospects

Chapter 9 looks back over China’s history since 1949 and considers prospects for the future. Chinese workers are beginning to reorganize, this time largely outside the confines of party-controlled institutions, and their strikes and protests have won important victories. Until they are able to regain some form of workplace citizenship rights, however, their gains will be limited and precarious. The chapter closes with an overview of parallel developments around the globe. It first examines three waves of labor unrest during the twentieth century that gave rise to the participatory institutions that characterized the era of industrial citizenship, before describing the subsequent demise of these institutions.

Reforming the Work Unit System

Chapter 7 looks at the impact on factory governance of the initial reforms carried out during the first decade and a half after Mao’s death in 1976. These reforms left the fundamental features of the work unit system—public ownership and permanent job tenure—in place, and institutional forms of participation, including staff and workers congresses, were revived and enhanced. During the “long 1980s” workers enjoyed substantial influence, especially with regard to the distribution of wages and bonuses, housing, and other welfare entitlements. Although the Chinese Communist Party had by then renounced its original class-leveling mission, workers effectively resisted new distribution policies that violated the egalitarian ethos that had long prevailed under the work unit system. The latter years of this period, however, also marked the beginning of the erosion of industrial citizenship as temporary employment was expanded and the power of the factory director was reinforced in the second half of the decade.

Disenfranchised

Chapter 8 examines the consequences of industrial restructuring, which began in the early 1990s and continues to the present day. The great majority of state-run and collective enterprises have been privatized, and all firms—including those in which the state has retained a stake—have been turned into shareholding companies. Tens of millions of workers have lost their jobs, and permanent job tenure has been replaced by much more precarious employment relations. As work unit communities have been transformed into profit-oriented enterprises, workers have been reduced to hired labor, losing their status as legitimate stakeholders and eroding the foundations for workplace participation. Shop-floor self-management has been replaced by harsh disciplinary regimes enforced by bonuses, fines, and the threat of dismissal, and staff and workers congresses have been sidelined. Workers, whose influence is now explicitly seen as compromising efforts to maximize profits, have been disenfranchised.

Revolutionary Committees

Chapter 6 recounts what happened after Mao, unwilling to allow the establishment of permanent autonomous organizations, called for factories to be governed by new “revolutionary committees,” that included veteran cadres and rebel leaders, as well as military officers assigned to oversee this volatile combination. Rebel leaders were supposed to serve as “mass representatives,” but after their organizations were disbanded, they lost the political base that had given them autonomous power and were no longer accountable to their constituencies. With the masses sidelined, the subsequent factional contention between “new” and “old” cadres hardly served as effective mass supervision. Moreover, this institutionalized form of contention was entirely dependent on Mao’s personal authority and was dismantled with the purge of the radical faction that followed his death in 1976. For all their destructive power, the political experiments of this period failed to do much to make leaders more accountable to those below them.

Big Democracy

Chapter 5 recounts the initial upheavals of the Cultural Revolution, when Mao called on workers to form “rebel” organizations to challenge the authority of the party leadership in their factories. Mao called this unbridled political participation “Big Democracy,” which he contrasted to more civil and institutionalized forms. By fomenting a movement independent of the party organization and loyal to no one but himself, Mao was able to introduce greater autonomy into mass supervision, with lasting consequences for cadre behavior. Local party cadres were criticized for abusing their power, seeking privileges, suppressing criticism from below, isolating themselves from the masses, and governing in a bureaucratic fashion. Virtually all were thrown out of office, and rebel groups were invited to help decide who among them were fit to be rehabilitated. After the party organization was paralyzed, however, factories polarized into rebel and conservative camps and the country descended into increasingly violent factional contention.

Mass Supervision

Chapter 4 examines the Four Cleans movement (1962–1966), the largest and most protracted campaign carried out to that point to mobilize “supervision from below” of party cadres. Supervision from below had been hindered by the Communist Party’s inclination to tightly control all aspects of participation as it was impossible for workers to effectively play their role if they did not have a degree of autonomy from the factory cadres they were expected to supervise. Mao attempted to mitigate this problem by sending in teams of outside party cadres to organize workers to criticize factory party leaders. The Four Cleans campaign was effective in combatting corruption but less effective in dealing with Mao’s main concern—the transformation of the party officialdom into a privileged “bureaucratic class” unaccountable to their subordinates. Dissatisfaction with the results led Mao to launch a much more radical attempt to introduce autonomy into mass supervision.

Participatory Paternalism

Chapter 3 describes the institutional foundations of the Chinese work unit system and the practices of worker participation in the early 1960s, after the system was fully established and before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Participatory institutions included self-managing teams on the shop floor, technical innovation groups, factory elections, representative congresses, and other mechanisms designed to solicit suggestions from below, learn about and defuse employees’ grievances and concerns, and mobilize workers to monitor and criticize factory leaders. Despite high levels of participation, predicated on lifetime job tenure and relatively egalitarian distribution, industrial governance was democratic only in a very limited sense. The party insisted on maintaining a political monopoly and harshly suppressed any hint of independent political activity. Not only was the scope of workers’ influence restricted largely to the shop floor, but they also had little autonomy. Although participation was extensive, the system was more paternalistic than democratic.

China and the Era of Industrial Citizenship

Chapter 1 develops a theoretical framework, involving industrial citizenship and autonomy, to analyze authority relations in workplaces. In factories, as in states, citizenship is the essential prerequisite for democratic participation; if workers’ jobs are not secure and they are not recognized as legitimate stakeholders, they cannot claim rights to participate in decision-making and hold factory leaders accountable. To effectively participate, however, also requires autonomy, that is, the freedom to manage your own work, express opinions, and organize collectively. Both citizenship and autonomy are continuous variables, combinations of which produce four ideal types: market despotism (weak citizenship and little autonomy), individual autonomy (weak citizenship but substantial autonomy), paternalism (strong citizenship but little autonomy), and workplace democracy (strong citizenship and substantial autonomy). During the postwar decades, when workers in many countries enjoyed relatively strong industrial citizenship, workplace democracy was on the agenda, even if it was rarely accomplished in practice.