Description

After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party made “democratic management” a key legitimating slogan of its workplace administration and developed an elaborate complex of related institutions, policies, and practices. In this paper, based on interviews with over 100 workers and cadres from factories in several Chinese cities, as well as party, government, and factory documents, I first examine the system of industrial relations in place during the first four decades of communist power. The system, I conclude, was only democratic in a very limited sense, but workers had considerable influence, an essential foundation for which was permanent job tenure. I next assess the impact of sweeping market reforms since the early 1990s, which have restructured industrial enterprises and eliminated permanent job tenure, fundamentally undermining workers’ influence and producing much more coercive labor relations. Opening up labor markets, I conclude, undercuts employees’ “membership rights,” curtailing possibilities for democratic participation in the workplace.

Joel Andreas, Associate Professor of Sociology at Johns Hopkins University, studies political contention and social change in contemporary China. His recent book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class, analyzes the contentious process through which old and new elites coalesced during the decades following the 1949 Revolution. He is currently investigating changing labor relations in Chinese factories between 1949 and the present.