When scholars predicted that democracy would emerge with China's shift from Maoism to market capitalism, they failed to acknowledge the workplace democratic structures put into place under Mao. Instead of nurturing worker democracy, market capitalism squelched it. In Disenfranchised, Joel Andreas follows the arc of industrial democracy from the rise through the demise of the Mao-era (1949–76) system of work units—workplaces that granted permanent employment to most while providing for virtually all workers’ needs, including housing, medical clinics, and schools for workers and their children.
The study asks, to what extent did structures of industrial democracy lend workers access to economic entitlements, political rights, autonomy, and a sense of belonging? By focusing on citizenship and autonomy, Andreas brings China's experience into conversation with global histories of the workplace as a site of worker stake holding. A tide of industrial citizenship that spread throughout the world from the end of World War II through the late 1960s evinced two patterns: a “bottom-up” formation of trade unions and work councils and a “top-down” organization of industrial citizenship, with China following the latter pattern, offering robust industrial citizenship but little worker autonomy. Andreas's study offers a rich and fascinating historical account of varied democratic forms and struggles in China's urban work units, largely based on interviews with 121 workers and cadres attached to Chinese factories from the 1940s to the present, as well as archival sources and statistical data. While workers experienced little autonomy, a procession of campaigns offered occasional, albeit risky, opportunities for workers to self-organize to broaden their influence. The result was rarely, if ever, decisive for either workers or managers, but it maintained a near-constant tension between the sides. To the extent that it kept managers in check, the tension itself can be viewed as an accomplishment.
The book proceeds chronologically. While chapter 1 lays out the theoretical frame and historical themes of the study, chapter 2 describes the process of recruiting workers to transition capitalist factories to work units controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) beginning in 1949. Workers, led by rural veterans of the Party's civil war, supervised managers, technicians, and owners. In this process, “Hired hands became industrial citizens” (p. 28), gaining access to labor insurance and higher wages and, for many, permanent job tenure, while also engaging in democratic forms, including labor-capital consultative congresses, union elections, and staff and worker congresses. Once workers took over the factories, the Party consolidated its power and delimited their supervisory powers. The trade union was gutted, prompting a wave of strikes, as workers contested the terms of their incorporation into industrial arrangements. It was these strikes, according to Andreas, that inspired the Party Rectification campaign and the Anti-Rightest backlash, which in factories were highly choreographed by leadership.
Chapter 3 offers a close analysis of the work unit system, concentrating on participatory institutions such as self-managing teams, elections, and staff and worker congresses. Chapter 4 explores the central Party principle of mass supervision, which called for worker oversight of factory managers and Party functionaries through criticism and elections. Mao's preference for fomenting democracy through campaigns, rather than through the array of organizational channels for democracy already in place, reached its apogee during the Cultural Revolution launched in 1966, the subject of chapter 5. Unlike prior campaigns, workers were encouraged to mobilize without input from leaders, unleashing torrents of worker criticism. A worker captured the spirit of the day: “The higher levels were all in trouble. It was Big Democracy!” (p. 106). Two camps formed. Conservatives comprised leaders, cadres, skilled and educated workers, with a rebel camp encompassing younger, disaffected workers. Workers deposed factory leaders, restructuring factory power relations. Eventually, the People's Liberation Army was deployed to coordinate with the camps to restore order, and factory leaders were reinstated.
Chapter 6 examines the subsequent years of the Cultural Revolution, focusing on two provinces, Hubei and Henan, where, like most of the country, conservative factions held sway, but not without challenge from the rebels. Once the economy restabilized in 1971 as the rivalries faded, the state council regularized 6.5 million temporary workers, a key demands of the rebels.
In chapter 7, Andreas shows how the work unit system thrived in the early years of market reform after a purge of rebel activists. As Deng Xiaoping, the CCP's new leader, decentralized control, work units expanded housing, clinics, and childcare and more than doubled wages between 1978 and 1986. Staff and worker congresses oversaw these changes and worker control grew, until market reforms gained traction in cities in the late 1980s and 1990s. Chapter 8 follows the processes of worker disenfranchisement as work units were transformed into vehicles of profit in the course of market restructuring. Between 1993 and 2003, more than 50 million workers lost their jobs as committees were replaced by shareholders, labor laws ended in-kind entitlements, and avenues for sharing worker grievances were curtailed. Workers responded with mass protests. The result, Andreas argues, was that the tight connection between Party and worker “atrophied to insignificance” (p. 212).
In the final chapter, Andreas once again locates Maoist China within a global landscape of movements for industrial citizenship in nations ranging from socialist to capitalist, most of which experienced the demise of workplace democracy as neoliberalism spread. From the neoliberal perspective, claims to industrial citizenship erode capital's property rights, with the latter accorded something akin to sacred status around the world, especially in the United States. While twentieth-century industrial citizenship represented an extraordinary accomplishment for its empowerment of workers, the model suffered from limitations, especially in its privileging of men and frequent exclusion of immigrants, which, as Andreas point out, leaves considerable room for improvement.
An initial step toward this goal might have been accomplished within Andreas's study, had the author shed more light on the ways that gender exclusions were built into the foundation of Mao-era industrial citizenship throughout the book. While Andreas occasionally addresses these issues, for example, by pointing out that women (90 percent of whom were employed at one point) had unequal responsibility for housework, despite the Party's socialization of some reproductive labor, he only hints at the ways in which this affected the gendered constitution of industrial citizenship. How did programs to push women out of the workforce when unemployment was high, such as the “Let's Be Pretty” campaign and women's forced retirement ten years earlier than men, affect their membership in the industrial community? How did these inequalities condition the sharp sexism that emerged with economic reforms? Perhaps these are questions for future scholarship.
Overall, the book successfully reframes received understandings of the Mao era by illuminating the dynamics of worker democracy while situating it in larger social movement trends spanning politically diverse nations. The structures that Andreas explores hardly represented full-fledged democratization of work, but they did allow workers meaningful scope to arrange shop-floor life and keep check on management. Andreas's study also casts new light on the profound sociopolitical losses of workers who once commanded respect as full-fledged members of production units, as they became mere hired hands under market restructuring. Anyone interested in worker empowerment and Maoist history will benefit from reading this important work.
