Wang Bing's Tie Xi Qu (West of the Track), a nine-hour documentary describing the slow decline of Shenyang's industrial Tiexi district from 1999 to 2001, includes footage of workers’ activities in one of the break rooms on the shop floor of Shenyang Metallurgy, one of more than one hundred state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the district. In this particular break room, male workers were getting ready to enter or were coming back from the shower, eating, exchanging a few words with each other, or simply lying on a bench, often with their naked, sluggish bodies numbly exposed to the camera. These workers also watched erotic movies in this room, all with an eerie silence and with strangely inanimate expressions on their faces. Though obviously aware of the camera's existence, they did not seem to care. Disillusionment, resignation, aloofness, and dismay so permeated and depressed the environment that the scene almost seemed like a pre-doomsday shot. In one particular sense, it was indeed pre-doomsday—a few hours after the shot, the factory was declared bankrupt, and all the workers were sent home. The destiny of Shenyang Metallurgy, of course, is not exceptional: with the transition in China's development policy from the socialist industrialization program based on import substitution—the strategy adopted during the Maoist era—to globalized export-oriented industrialization, the majority of China's socialist-era industries have been dismantled, or dragged into chronic decline.Footnote 1 Wang Bing's footage has thus captured the existential state, physically but also psychologically, of workers as they confronted the final day of the factory's operation and their own working lives there. This article aims to contextualize, elaborate, and enrich the psychological and, more broadly, cultural existence and identity of contemporary Chinese SOE workers who are still employed by their factories but are constantly threatened by the prospect of deindustrialization, an irreversible trend experienced by most SOEs in contemporary China. Furthermore, by comparing this neoliberal working-class cultural identity with the one held by an older generation of socialist industrial workers, this study shows how China's great economic transformation has in turn transformed this realm of working-class existence—how it has changed SOE workers’ perception of themselves and their work. To this end, I conduct my research, not at Shenyang Metallurgy, which was left bankrupt ten years ago, but at another SOE, Nanfang Steel (NS),Footnote 2 whose slow decline and continuing struggle for survival allow one to fully observe the unfolding process of such change.
Located in the mountainous area within the province of Sichuan, Nanfang Steel (NS), an essential steel production site in southeast China, was developed as one of thousands of “third-front enterprises” during the Third Front Construction (TFC) era of the 1960s.Footnote 3 During its heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s, NS was one of the biggest taxpayers in Sichuan province and employed around 30,000 workers. In the mid-1990s, a variety of market-oriented reforms, including mergers, downsizing for “efficiency,” burden alleviation, large-scale layoffs, and so on, were imposed on NS.Footnote 4 Instead of revitalizing it, however, these programs have dragged NS into a situation of chronic financial loss and decline. This same period also witnessed a large-scale bankruptcy and privatization of small- and middle-sized SOEs nationwide, which has provoked great anger among newly unemployed/laid-off workers in many parts of the country.Footnote 5 Then, in the first half of 2003, the central government set up the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Council (SASAC) at both the central and local administrative levels to oversee the remaining large SOEs.Footnote 6 Since then, bankruptcies and huge layoffs in the remaining large SOEs have been reduced. Among the remaining large SOEs, some “have managed to prosper throughout China's economic boom.”Footnote 7 Still others—about 2,500 of them, according to one official report—have actually failed the reform (due to the continued losses) but have been saved from collapse, sometimes through state-dictated mergers with key SOEs or through other state subsidization policies, mainly due to political concerns regarding stability.Footnote 8 NS is one of these ailing (yet surviving) SOEs. However, when political expediency is the motivation for avoiding bankruptcy, it may be just a temporary solution: NS's continuing losses make its future highly uncertain and gloomy. Such future uncertainty combined with its almost two-decade-long lingering demise has thus created an especially erosive deindustrialization process there: Half of NS workers have been laid off while the currently employed work in a transformed, alienated, and despotic factory regime and earn an average wage far below that of Sichuan province generally. The once fully functioning, consolidated, and prosperous industrial community supported by NS has irreversibly declined into a working-class slum, with its old comprehensive welfare system totally shattered and all its attendant institutions (hospitals, schools, recreation centers, housing systems, and many others) degraded or abandoned. And, worst of all, the threat of bankruptcy hangs ever present in the air.Footnote 9 More relevant to this study, this disruptive process eventually destroyed the well-established working-class cultural identity developed by an earlier generation of workers who came to NS upon its construction in the early 1960s and retired in the 1980s and early 1990s. A new identity has developed among those currently employed workers who have experienced the turbulence of neoliberal reform and are now self-consciously living at the condescending mercy of the state. In sum, what happened in NS is a vivid illustration of the degradation of SOE workers “under the assault”Footnote 10 of neoliberal market reform in China.
The various aspects of such a process of degradation have been well documented. For instance, studies have described how former SOE workers have been dislocated and reduced “from master to mendicant”;Footnote 11 how SOE pensioners or unemployed/laid-off workers have nostalgically but also creatively resorted to arguments about the “moral economy” or socialist ideology in their fight to survive;Footnote 12 how varying regional political economies have produced different social and political effects upon laid-off SOE workers and how these workers have accordingly developed distinctive patterns of contention and resistance;Footnote 13 how the claims of these “veteran state sector workers” in the rustbelt have differed from those of migrant workers in the sunbelt,Footnote 14 and so on. All of these studies have contributed to our understanding of the social consequences of China's economic reform for its previously proclaimed “master” working class. My study contributes to this literature but differs from the earlier research in several ways.
First, when identifying contemporary SOE workers, this study chose to focus on workers who are still employed in the surviving yet struggling SOEs as its research subjects, rather than unemployed or laid-off SOE workers—the primary subjects of most previous studies. This is a category of SOE workers that remains in the gray area between unemployed/laid-off SOE workers and highly protected and privileged workers from monopolistic central-level SOEs.Footnote 15 Although these workers are still employed within the public sector and have not yet been kicked out of their factories, their jobs depend on the condescending pity and fear of the state.Footnote 16 For these workers, the need to endure degraded working/living conditions for practical reasons, such as to preserve their jobs, has engendered not a militant working class, but workers who are more or less resigned to their plight, while also laden with shame and pain (tongku).Footnote 17 Because of their indeterminate status, these workers are easily neglected by public media as well as scholars. Yet according to one official report, this group numbers more than five million nationwide.Footnote 18 So, these workers actually comprise a crucial sector of China's contemporary working class. Thus, an exploration of the situation of this often neglected group will contribute a distinctive viewpoint and enhance our understanding of the relationship between China's transformation and its working class.
Second, while most of the existing studies tend to explore the general deteriorating socioeconomic status of one particular generation of SOE workers—whether they are pensioners or unemployed/laid-off workers—from different factories or even different regions during the same time frame, my study compares the changed life experiences and cultural identities of two distinct generations of workers employed within the same SOE. This temporal, rather than spatial, comparison aims to highlight the shifting meaning of being an SOE worker across time and history. Because this study focuses on only one SOE, my aim is not to draw general conclusions about Chinese workers; nor would I claim that my case is a straightforward or “typical” case. But as some scholars have rightly pointed out, various historical/political/economic factors have contributed to quite diverse restructuring processes in different SOEs in different regions and hence engendered a generally degraded but segmented working class.Footnote 19 This complexity and diversity makes a microstudy such as mine valid and necessary, for this focused case study provides a more detailed as well as a deeper investigation of this type of social change.
Third, in contrast to most studies that regard workers’ changing subjectivity/mentality as simply one side effect of SOE workers’ general socioeconomic degradation, this study brings to center stage individual workers’ subjectivity and cultural identity. Such prominence has its reason: During my field research at NS, what shocked me most was not these workers’ deteriorating “material” existence—their living and working conditions that had been transformed under the attack of neoliberal policies—but their psychic and cultural existence. The widespread desperation, dismay, and disillusionment are so suffocating and depressing that they cannot be simply brushed away as some minor side effects of material degradation; they need to be singled out and explored. This study thus goes beyond the fundamental assumption that workers are essentially economic actors within a collective being; instead, it highlights the psychosocial aspect of work and regards workers as living human beings who, like everybody else, are pursuing autonomy, mastery, purpose, dignity, and respect through their work—in short, who see their working lives as providing more than a mere economic and physical existence. In other words, this study “attempts to reclaim emotional and psychic responses to social class as sociological, mapping out a psychic economy of social class—feelings of inferiority and superiority, visceral aversions, defenses, recognition, and abjection that constitute a new form of class un/consciousness.”Footnote 20 Only in this way, I believe, can we grasp the social cost of China's transformation in a deeper, and to some extent, more profound, sense.
Aiming to analyze the experience of the working class from a more psychic, symbolic, and individual aspect, this study examines how working-class identity has been transformed during the ongoing deindustrializing process in old SOEs, through the case of NS. I explore the changing meaning of being a worker there and investigate how the “glorious” identity, promoted by the state during the Maoist era and emphatically proclaimed by elder workers despite its internal limitations and contradictions, has been dismantled by neoliberal reform in the factory and metamorphosed into a “stigma-laden” cultural identity created by the contemporary hegemonic discourse and bitterly internalized by currently employed younger workers. Section one investigates how the older generation of workers at NS interpreted their work and themselves and how their interpretation was shaped by the hegemonic discourses promoted by the state during their working lives. In comparison, section two explores how the neoliberal transformation has dismantled the original ideas of what it meant to be a worker and bred a new stigma-ridden identity among the workers currently employed at NS. In the conclusion, I compare the workers currently at NS to the migrant workers in the export processing zones, who self-consciously realize that they are contributing to China's “economic miracle” and are hence located “within” the official history. Workers in the remaining struggling SOEs like NS, by contrast, are outsiders, abandoned and expelled from the grand narrative of China's rise as an economic powerhouse.
I used both in-depth interviews and participant-observation in conducting my research. The interviews include twenty-two oral histories of the pioneering SOE workers, now in their seventies and eighties, and twenty-five conversations with currently employed workers, most of whom are in their twenties and thirties. I asked both groups of workers quite similar questions: how and why they came to NS, what their earlier and current work and personal lives looked like, and so on. Interviews were conducted in workers’ homes, nearby teahouses, restaurants, or the rest-cells on the shop floors. All the interviews were recorded with the subjects’ permission and later transcribed.
Besides these in-depth interviews, I also acted as a participant-observer. This involved my going to the shop floor with workers I knew well, hanging around the factory community, talking to people casually, eating with them at roadside food stands, or playing Mahjong with them. All the data I refer to in this article was collected during my three field trips to NS between 2007 and 2010.
Painted or Not: Pride and Dignity in the Older Generation of NS Workers
In their study of industrial experiences in socialist Hungary, Michael Burawoy and János Lukács put forward the concept of “painted socialism” to illustrate the superficiality and hollowness of socialist ideology and to suggest that its effect on actual production sites (factories) was merely ceremonial and hence quite inconsequential.Footnote 21 This concept implies the binary existence of official ideology and “true” consciousness and reality, as if these two are inevitably separate, contradictory, and mutually exclusive. In his recent study of the last Soviet generation during the Brezhnev era, Alexei Yurchak, however, challenges such a binary understanding, arguing that the “hypernormalized” tendency of official language before Perestroika “still did not preclude a person from feeling an affinity for many of the meanings, possibilities, values, and promises of socialism. It even allowed one to recapture these meanings, values, and promises from the inflexible interpretations provided by the party rhetoric.”Footnote 22 In other words, Yurchak suggests a more complex and nuanced relationship between ideology and Soviet reality, within which people might embrace, reject, be apathetic toward, or creatively reinterpret a certain meaning, norm, or value, depending on the context. My research at NS, especially my conversations with the older generation of workers, supports Yurchak's arguments. Instead of viewing socialist ideology as irrelevant to their lives, senior workers eagerly embraced it, particularly, and unsurprisingly, the rhetoric of the “working class as the leading class.” Even though they clearly realized its distortion in reality and acknowledged the management's power over workers on the shop floor, senior workers at NS all gave voice to this ideal as an indisputable truth to defend their rights and dignity without any reluctance.Footnote 23 Meanwhile, although the ideal itself actually contradicts the requirements of mass production and was never fully realized in the production sites, it did set boundaries for socialist factory regimes by limiting managerial power and guaranteeing workers’ commonweal. It is within this context that the older generation of workers at NS developed their cultural identity.
Hegemonic discourse: “We workers have strength”
Indisputably, socialist ideology in prereform China presumes that the industrial working class will have the eminent role. The first item of the Constitution of the People's Republic of China that was approved by the first National People's Congress at its first session in September 1954 declares, “The People's Republic of China is a people's democratic country led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.” Extolled as the “proletarian vanguard” in official discourse, the Chinese working class was supposed to represent the most “advanced,” “progressive,” and “modern” force (compared to both the peasant class in China and the working classes in the capitalist countries) that would lead the whole country toward the bright communist future. Heroic images of muscular and confident workers with triumphant smiles appeared everywhere from propaganda posters to the national currency. Hymns such as “We Workers Have Strength” were heard every morning from the bullhorns of almost every SOE prior to the 1990s:
We workers have strength/Hi! We workers have strength!/We work hard every day,/Hi! We work hard every day!/Construct the skyscrapers,/Build up the railroads and coal mines,/We are rebuilding a new world!/Ai Hi!/Rumbling, rumbling, we start up the machine,/Clanking, clanking, we raise the hammer!/We make ploughs and hoes for the fields,/We make guns and cannons for the front!/Ai Hi! Ai Hi! Ai Ya!/Our faces are glowing,/Our sweat is flowing!/Why do we do all these things?/For the liberation!/For the liberation!/Ai! Hi! Ai! Hi!/For our China's complete liberation!
By granting work a more profound meaning than that of a mere survival strategy, and by relating it to the glorious ideal of national liberation and the process of making history, this discourse about the working class fit the requirements of both socialist ideology and industrialization. Being the most-advanced class, the Chinese working class should be able to shoulder the historic task of industrializing and modernizing China. To accomplish this, workers should all try their best to become the so-called new socialist workers who will devote themselves to great working-class careers without reservation.
Such sublime and heroic images, of course, were only creations of the state, set up as an ideal model in order to educate Chinese workers, most of whom only recently came from the “backward” countryside and were hence in need of “enlightenment” and transformation into “new socialist workers.” In reality, such ideal images were constantly blunted by everyday conflicts on the shop floor, unfairness caused by bureaucracy and nepotism, tedium and exhaustion engendered by their jobs, and the absence of free choices. Yet, despite all these ironies and the distance they must have felt from the official model image, most workers nonetheless accepted the values that image was meant to convey, such as patriotism, the nobility of labor, the ability to face challenges, and the willingness to work hard, all of which they accepted and respected as qualities a good worker, or simply a good person, should possess. Even more important, this discourse presupposes the innate “goodness,” “progressiveness,” and “civilization” of being a worker. It assumes that workers are innately honorable, honest, hard-working, progressive, and patriotic, and they could and should no longer be subordinate, but “masters” of their own lives, work, and even the fate of their country. Certainly there was a great gap between ideology and reality, but the presumption itself, even if just an illusion, granted workers a sense of dignity: Despite all the unhappiness in their daily lives, being a worker in and of itself was nothing to be ashamed of; rather, it was an honor. This sense of honor is indeed crucial for the development of the cultural identity of the older generation of SOE workers.
Dignity and pride
To a certain degree, official discourses of the socialist era framed workers’ sense of themselves, but that does not mean that workers blindly swallowed the sublime image of themselves as advanced, progressive, and modern promoted by the state. At the same time, the socialist “iron cage,” with its oppressive bureaucratic structure and protective welfare framework, had an impact on the cultural realm of working-class life that was similar to that of the capitalist “iron cage.” Solidarity, order, discipline, intimacy, commitment, oppression, paternalism—qualities that were identified with Fordist mass production by many Western “nostalgia” scholars,Footnote 24 could also be found at NS, only to a greater degree. The socialist “iron cage” further restrained workers’ freedom, but it also allowed them to develop a strong sense of belonging and security, a predictable “life narrative,”Footnote 25 a sense of professional mastery, commitment, and craftsmanship, and finally a strong feeling of self-respect. From the interaction of these two facets—the rhetorical image propagated in hegemonic discourses and the direct experience of the labor regime—the older generation of socialist workers at NS developed a cultural identity as progressive, industrious, and productive. This identity endowed them with a sense of dignity and pride, regardless of the widespread exploitation, the pretentious propaganda, the oppressive hierarchy, the never-ending skirmishes on the shop floor, the nasty nepotism, and the nagging politics they had to endure. Indeed, among retired workers, pride in their work was the most common feeling described during the interviews.
Zhang Bobo had worked as a mill man at NS for decades before he retired in the 1980s. When describing his earlier working life to me, he could not conceal his pride:
We were always drenched with sweat when we were working on the site. In the winter, big fans blew behind us. Our overalls still got drenched. When dry, the overalls became stinging … In the summer, we worked for a while, then ran outside and laid down on the ground. How cool that was! After lying there for a few minutes, we went back to the mill. Every 15 minutes we had to have a short break. Otherwise we might have been so exhausted that we might have died … Now when my youngest son comes back from his steel-rolling job and complains about how exhausted he is, I say, “How can you feel exhausted? Everything now is mechanized and automated. How can it be exhausting? We were really exhausted before, with only people, no machines!” (Laughs)
Zhang Bobo's emphasis on arduousness and exhaustion in the workplace was not meant as a critique of the abominable working environment or of the exploitative conditions he and his peers had to put up with during their working years. Instead, being able to work hard and endure all the difficulties and hardships was a source of dignity and pride. The performance of this arduous, exhausting work has become a very meaningful and cherished part of his life that he can proudly share with and boast about to his son. Exploitation did exist, but it was not considered exploitation, but an essential part of an honorable life.
Pride was also expressed through workers’ recognition of their mastery of their jobs. Zhiyu Bo, now in his eighties, had labored as a steel worker for decades before retiring in the mid-1980s. During our interview, he vividly recounted a confrontation between himself and a Soviet expert regarding a technical issue that ended with Bo being proven correct:
It was in the 1960s, an expert from the Soviet Union came to our steel shop to guide production. One day during the production process, when I believed that the temperature of the steel furnace was high enough for tapping, I asked the team leader to be ready. But this Soviet expert said that the temperature was not high enough and required us to keep heating. I insisted that I was correct. But the section chief did not listen to me. He criticized me for not obeying the expert. So we kept heating until the furnace body was burned through. When the Soviet expert saw this, he left the scene without a word… Since then, the director of the steel shop has always accepted my suggestions. (Bo laughs loudly) What a triumphant moment that was!
Bo had proved himself to be a better workman than even the expert from the Soviet Union, the supposed absolute authority on the production process, and his “mentor.” There was no doubt he was proud of himself. “I had no degree, you know, but I had practical experience,” Bo exclaimed jauntily. Whether “practical experience” or “bookish knowledge” is more important is always a disputed question. But at least during the Maoist era, “practical experience,” due to its direct relationship with manual labor, was often given priority. Workers’ “practical experience” was actually examined and graded through a program that evaluated workers’ skill using eight grade levels, with the eighth being the highest. Workers who achieved this uppermost skill level were highly respected by both managers and other workers. Such a program of evaluation not only promised workers an upward ladder, but also conveyed acknowledgement of and respect for craftsmanship. And it was exactly this acknowledgement and respect that granted Zhiyu Bo the confidence to challenge the Soviet expert and his manager.
The ability to develop mastery and craftsmanship, and to be recognized for these accomplishments, also ensured workers’ continuing commitment to their jobs. This combination of pride in their work and commitment to it gave workers a strong sense of dignity, self-respect, and fulfillment. Ma Ruixin, a retired female engineer in her seventies, spent several afternoons—a total of about six hours—explaining to me the very detailed technical methods involved in producing each new steel grade she had developed. She ended her long story with this anecdote:
As long as I got the technical requirements for the steel, I could always figure out what the whole technical process should be in my head and what the sample should look like under the microscope after it was done. When at the end I saw the final samples through the microscope and found that the result was exactly as I had predicted, I can tell you that was a great feeling! That sense of accomplishment and happiness was incomparable. Whenever I was unhappy, I went to the microscope room, picked up one sample, ground it and looked at it through the microscope. All my rage would disappear suddenly. I was totally in it, very tranquil. The world under the microscope was like the underwater world on television, that colorful, that beautiful, and that wide. I felt so comfortable, tranquil, and happy. I enjoyed it. Ordinary people have no chance to feel this … I could also feel this happiness when I went to the workshops. As soon as I entered the workshop, climbed the steps, and stood on the elevated platform, the workers would come to me and ask, “Engineer Ma, what kind of steel are we supposed to make today and what are the requirements?” I then began to explain and they took notes. You know, these workers actually loved study. You told them new things and they were all eager to learn. I illustrated the process to them by drawing … When the red steel was hung out, I went with workers to the rolling mill, watching for the pressing process … At last the steel came out successfully. We were all so happy and satisfied … No matter how late it was when I returned from the workshop, I never felt tired, really. I rode my bicycle back home, enjoying the gentle breeze of a summer night. I was only happy. No tiredness, no. As long as I was in the production field, participating in the scene of mass production, working with these young workers, I felt that I would be young forever, vigorous, relaxed, and independent …
Ma recalls a quite romantic production scene. It was also very idealistic and very similar to the propaganda produced by the state and screened on television or in the movies. How close it was to reality is hard to say, since her memory, as well as other elder workers’ memories recorded earlier in this article, could be highly selective and even distorted. But it is important to distinguish between the selectively remembered life/work experiences described by these oral narratives and the “true” subjectivity they conveyed. As Alessandro Portelli puts it, even so-called wrong statements can be “psychologically true.”Footnote 26 This “truth” tells “what people might wish for or desire”Footnote 27 —how they try to make sense of and give meaning to their lives and their relationship with history and society. In other words, the value of these workers’ oral accounts lies in the “reliability” of their recollections, not as “depositories of facts,” but as “processes of meaning-creation”:Footnote 28 Through the selected memory or narration of their working/living experiences, these elder workers were trying to locate and understand their existence in a bygone historical time and to assign significance to their former work/life. Thus, narrations may be selective, but they are exactly how Ma, and others, chose to remember and recount their previous working lives—lives full of passion, confidence, and commitment. In this sense, the “feeling” expressed by these narratives is genuine—the emotion they are conveying defines their working identity, makes their lives meaningful, and proclaims them to be contributing members of society and, hence, deserving of respect rather than oblivion.
Pride and dignity, of course, could not have been the only cultural identities that defined this earlier generation of workers at NS. Resentment and frustration must have been components as well, as in any other society, not necessarily more or less. Nonetheless, their pride and dignity undoubtedly constitute the keynote of their memories of working at NS. By contrast, these qualities are completely absent from the accounts of the younger generation of workers who are currently employed.
Lost as Nobody: The Redefined Cultural Identity among Younger Workers
In his text, Speenhamland, 1795, Karl Polanyi examines the Speenhamland Law adopted in England in 1795 as a temporarily effective, yet ultimately failed attempt to stop the triumphant takeover of the market economy by preventing the establishment of a competitive labor market. Polanyi argues that even though the intention of Speenhamland was to protect laborers from the danger of the market system and so grant them the “right to live,” ironically, it eventually ruined the people whom it was ostensibly designed to protect, by demoralizing them and turning them into paupers.Footnote 29
A similar irony emerges in the Chinese state's efforts to preserve large-scale SOEs and protect their workers from the encroachments of the globalizing economy. These efforts have prevented NS's bankruptcy, at least temporarily. But the twenty-year-long lingering death of the factory and the state's later reluctant preservation efforts have produced a painfully stretched-out process of deindustrialization at NS and in similar industrial communities that have led to the demoralization of workers there. This process has greatly influenced the cultural existence of the currently employed workers. It has generated a condescending tone that regards workers as both pitiful and potentially threatening, thus reinforcing the contemporary hegemonic discourse concerning SOE workers that first regards them as “incapable,” “lazy,” “burdensome,” and “backward,” and later as “ruoshi qunti” (the subaltern/weak group).Footnote 30 This combination of changes in both the material and cultural aspects of their working lives has crushed the pride and dignity felt by the earlier generation of workers and given birth to a totally new working-class cultural identity.
The receding of SOE working class from history
The changing discourse regarding the working class is a spontaneous consequence of the changing route to modernization that China adopted after market reform, when all the efforts to build up a new modern society better than and different from capitalist modernity failed and were, ultimately, abandoned. Now capital, instead of the working class, is considered the driving force of modernization. Songs like “We Workers Have Strength” and images of muscular workers have slowly vanished from both propaganda and the public imagination. Instead, during the 1990s, most notably, the official mass media was filled with articles that urged SOE workers to discard their “stupid” pride and stop being lazy in order to survive. Numerous heroic stories about how laid-off workers became rich in the “free” market after they threw away the “illusive pride” of being SOE workers and relied solely on their diligence and talents were created by the mainstream media. Beneath these stories lie deliberate efforts to transform the image of SOE workers from “the most advanced” historical force to a group of people who are “self-deceptively arrogant,” “inefficient,” “lazy,” “backward,” and “burdensome” to reform and progress. These efforts, of course, were pivotal in justifying widespread SOE bankruptcies and layoffs, most notably during the 1990s.
Since the early 2000s, as extensive SOE closures have aroused widespread public anger and created social instability, such harsh criticism of SOE workers has begun to fade from the mass media. Now, SOE workers are described as part of the “ruoshi qunti” (subaltern/weak groups), a newly created term that encompasses everyone at the lowest end of society, including peasants, workers (migrant workers, informal workers, struggling or dismissed SOE workers, and so on), the unemployed, the disabled, and so on. These groups of people are defenseless and pitiful, as the adjective “weak” suggests. Further, their misfortunes could only be explained by the inadequacies always attributed to all subordinated groups by the ruling elites almost everywhere: their incapability, their lack of education and intelligence, and their laziness. In this way, SOE workers gradually lost their position in history, becoming nobodies. This loss is vividly illustrated by the changing images printed on Chinese currency: the steel workers and lathe workers who previously appeared on the five yuan and two yuan bills, respectively, were replaced by a portrait of Mao Zedong in the 1980s when the new (fourth) version of the currency was issued. Although the currency has since been redesigned yet again, the images of workers have not reappeared.
Shame and pain: “Our small workers”
The sense of pride and dignity I encountered almost every time I talked to the retired workers never once appeared in my interviews with the younger and currently employed workers. Once when I was in the workshop, I recognized the name of a worker I know on a poster announcing him as the winner of a technical contest. The next time I saw this worker I mentioned the award and congratulated him. He simply replied, “Oh that was just shit.” Then he paused for a moment and asked me, “You tell me, what is the use of being good at the jobs that we are doing?” He is definitely a good worker and has a certain technical mastery (good enough to win the contest), yet he despises his job. The contempt of this younger generation toward their own jobs contrasts sharply with the general attitude of the older workers I interviewed, who always happily showed me their medals of honor, award certificates, or photos at award ceremonies, if they had any. These symbolic elements of recognition that brought acknowledgement, meaning, and respect to older workers are just useless trash for the younger ones, mostly because they highlight the dramatic contradiction between workers’ everyday living and working realities and the popular image of SOE workers portrayed by the contemporary hegemonic discourse.
The presumption of SOE workers has changed: They are no longer part of an innately honorable and “advanced” social class that is propelling the progress of history, but are instead seen as lazy, incapable, uneducated, insufficiently intelligent, potentially rebellious beings who warrant both condescending pity and strict management. And that is how they are treated: as dispensable commodities, forced to work out of fear of hunger. Certainly, this might always have been the fundamental truth for workers, for the true ideal of a “workers’ state” was never realized in reality.Footnote 31 However, the abandonment of this ideal, politically, rhetorically, and practically, has removed the political and cultural veneer of equality from economic activities, destroyed the promise and hope it once offered, and ridicules the values and norms it used to convey. Mastery and craftsmanship are now underappreciated; commitment to work is meaningless and even laughable; and unlike the older generation of workers who could predict what their retired life, their pension, and their “cumulative achievement” would look like,Footnote 32 this generation of workers does not know what will happen, not only decades from now, but five years or two years down the road, or even tomorrow. They are adrift, without an “expected life narrative,” and unable to control their fates.Footnote 33 At the same time, they also know very clearly that the factory is operating at a continuing loss and the only reason they still have jobs is because the state both pities and fears them. All of these developments have forced workers to internalize the popular image created by the contemporary hegemonic discourse, bringing them much shame and pain.
While in the field, I once overheard a mother scolding her son and urging him to study hard: “All you know is play, play, and play! You know you have to study hard! Otherwise, you will only end up as a good-for-nothing worker, like your pathetic dad!” Unlike Zhang Bobo, the retired worker I mentioned earlier, who could proudly boast to his son about his identity as a devoted worker, this little boy's father offers only a negative example of a failed life. And not just in the eyes of others; most currently employed workers also look down on themselves. They refer to themselves as “our small workers” and taunt themselves for being “real proletarians” with no money, no school degree, no power, and no ability. Yong, one male NS worker in his early 30s, mourned to me:
If I tell other people that I work in NS, they will feel only pity for me! I feel so embarrassed to mention NS to others. Who are we as SOE workers? I used to have many friends outside. You know, I was playful before. Now I dare not hang out with them anymore. We are on different levels now. They have money, but our workers don't … It seems that they can make money so easily that they can use money without much reservation. Not like us. We feel that it is not easy for our workers to make money—even for the little money we get we have to work very hard—so we dare not use our money as they do. But I don't want them to laugh at me or pity me, so I cut off the relationship … So, being a worker? (Sighs heavily) I only wish that I had studied harder before …
The sudden rise of other social groups (such as his non-working-class friends) and the fall of his people bewildered as well as shamed Yong. To avoid such “embarrassment,” he cut off ties with one-time friends and now only hangs around with “his own people.” This is actually part of the ongoing process of social stratification and segregation within NS, as well as in contemporary Chinese society generally: intimate old friends who used to drink together now rarely see each other, since the reform has reshuffled the power relationships among different social classes.Footnote 34 Like most other currently employed workers, Yong is angry about this decline, which has been accompanied by meager paychecks inadequate to cope with the rising cost of living, shaky job security, and social discrimination. Yet, besides cursing corrupt managers as he consistently did during the interview, Yong secretly swallowed the bitter pill by blaming himself for not studying harder during his earlier school years. Despite the systemic and general nature of market reform and its deliberate degradation of the working class as part of the reform package, most workers, like Yong, tend to blame themselves for their degraded circumstances.
This tendency toward self-blame was further reinforced by most workers’ failed attempts to become “successful” in the “free” market society at the end of the 1990s, when the market reform at NS was in its most turbulent phase and many workers were either laid off or sent on long, unpaid vacations due to the closure of workshops. Many workers I interviewed took advantage of this period to try their luck in the outside world. During the 1990s, at least according to the mass media, the world outside NS was still full of temptations—the “free” market society always seemed to imply a better future since it supposedly provided many opportunities that had been previously suppressed. Yet it turned out that these opportunities were not necessarily available to the common worker. Some went to work in township and village enterprises, others in private enterprises—without exception as manual workers. All of them ended their journeys by returning to NS when the radical marketization phase ended and some production returned to normal in the early 2000s. In most cases, workers did not feel comfortable talking about their experiences during this period and chose to go through it very briefly, usually with one or two sentences, like “it is not easy to make money outside” or “how could a guy like me make it outside?” The fact that they had tried but failed embarrassed them. Being bombarded with numerous stories of market heroes by the mass media, they are unable to answer the question, “If they could do it, why couldn't you?” The experience of working outside, whether for a few months or several years, definitely confused them, and to some extent, aroused painful feelings of failure and shame and shifted the workers’ anger and grievances away from neoliberal policies toward corrupt management and, worse, themselves: perhaps if they were smarter, had college degrees, and/or had tried harder, they might have done better. To some extent, for these workers, this failure seemed to confirm the negative image of the SOE workers in the dominant discourses, which describes them as incapable and lazy. As Aqiu, an electrician in his thirties, bitterly concluded, “[O]nly useless people like us stay here. Capable people left a long time ago.”
Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb use the term “the badges of ability” to describe the hidden dimensions of individualism developed in industrialized capitalist society. According to Andrew Carnegie, the justice of industrial capitalism in America “is that society here will not fail to reward a man of talent. If a man is worthy of escaping poverty's terrors, he can do so. If he doesn't have the ability to ‘make it,’ by what right does he complain?”Footnote 35 This “bastardized version of Darwinian evolution” imported from the West has become the most hegemonic value system in contemporary China since the market reform.Footnote 36 The acceptance of such hegemony by most workers thus further strengthens their feelings of inadequacy, deprives them of a sense of dignity and pride, and instead engenders in them suppressed shame and pain.Footnote 37
In fact, “pain” (tongku) was another word I routinely encountered when I talked to these young workers. One day I met a small group of workers in front of the steel shop. They had just finished their shift and were resting under the shade of a tree. Their sweat-drenched overalls had been removed to dry in the sun. After I explained my project, they kept silent for a while. Then one worker opened his mouth: “Our working class only feels pain (tongku). No matter how this enterprise or this country changes, we workers work as before, but now with no pay or very little pay. The prices are so high now. We feel very pained (tongku).”
Instead of using the word “difficult” to describe their lives, this worker chose “pained” (tongku)—a feeling that does not just originate from poverty, but also from a sense of powerlessness and of having “no way out,” no way of escaping from the economic and political forces controlling the system. It is “the feeling of not getting anywhere despite one's efforts, the feeling of vulnerability in contrasting oneself to others at a higher social level, the buried sense of inadequacy that one resents oneself for feeling.”Footnote 38 This sense of powerlessness imposes great anxiety and pressure on most workers, as Xiaozhang, a male worker in his late twenties, cried out:
People like us couldn't understand the stuff about the reform, but we could feel the pain (tongku) in the grassroots enterprise. We feel that our nerves have nearly been broken down. I feel that in present China (smiles bitterly), if you are not strong enough, you will really collapse. I am just in so much pain (tongku).
I met Xiaozhang by accident in the steel shop while I was waiting to interview another section chief. The section chief was delayed, so he had asked me to wait for him in an open office. Xiaozhang was there, writing some reports. I introduced myself and talked with him casually. In the beginning, Xiaozhang was very shy. He told me that he had graduated from university and thus had a bachelor's degree, which I later learned was untrue. I am not sure why he lied to me. Maybe he felt too ashamed of being a worker, especially when he realized that I hold a doctoral degree from the United States. So, lying became one way to protect his dignity, which has been threatened by his status as a common SOE worker. Or maybe for him, only under the cover of this lie could he talk with me equally and easily. Either way, pain and shame were intertwined beneath the lie. They constitute the most fundamental aspects of the cultural identity of currently employed workers at NS, and most likely, of many other surviving but struggling SOE workers in China, who, just as those Boston workers described by Sennett and Cobb, “have been denied the presumption, rather than the possibility, of societal respect, denied some way of moving through daily life without being defensive and on guard, some way of being open with other people without being hurt.”Footnote 39
Conclusion: Not Only Losers, but also Outsiders
By comparing the different cultural identities held by two generations of workers in one particular surviving SOE in contemporary China, this study has attempted to grasp a specific dimension of the social cost of China's ongoing transformation into a member of globalized capitalist society. Such a transformation has made many SOEs redundant and ready to be expelled from China's new export-oriented industrialization track. Workers in these SOEs have thus experienced the transformation, not as “economic magic,” but as a process of “abjection”—“a process of being thrown aside, expelled, or discarded.”Footnote 40 No longer participants in history, now they are outsiders to it, people who should be left behind and written off.
This sense of redundancy and abjection distinguishes struggling SOE workers from the migrant workers who labor in the globalized export-oriented factories. Despite the alarming exploitation of and inhumane treatment meted out to these migrant workers, as disclosed by news reports and scholarly research, a budding sense of self-awareness is slowly emerging for some of them. These migrant workers, especially the so-called new generation of migrant workers born after 1980, “have enjoyed relatively better living and education standards”; these workers have 9.8 years education, on average, and more than 5 percent of them are college-educated.Footnote 41 Compared to their parents, they are more self-conscious of the fact that it is largely through their labor that the so-called Chinese economic miracle is made possible. By going on the Internet and reading newspapers, a lot of them are even quite aware that they were chosen by Time magazine as the “Person of the Year 2009,” as well as the reason behind it, as Time itself explained:
In China they have a word for it. Baoba means “protect eight,” the 8 percent annual economic growth rate that officials believe is critical to ensuring social stability. A year ago, many thought hitting such a figure in 2009 was a pipe dream. But China has done it, and this year it remains the world's fastest-growing major economy—and an economic stimulus for everyone else. Who deserves the credit? Above all, the tens of millions of workers who have left their homes, and often their families, to find work in the factories of China's booming coastal cities—in plants like the Shenzhen Guangke Technology Co.'s, just outside Hong Kong, which sits amid a jumble of snack stands, cheap clothing stalls and old men dragging carts filled with candy to sell to workers on their day off.Footnote 42
Giving them the “credit” for China's economic ascendency grants migrant workers the sense of contributing to and living “within history.” Even though they still belong to subordinate groups like the struggling SOE workers and are widely discriminated against, they are the protagonists of the story of China's rise, exploited but also contributing, floating but also growing, oppressed but also ready to fight. They represent the present and the future, while workers in the surviving SOEs are sinking into the doomed past.
The 2011 Central China Television spring festival show, the biggest and most popular entertainment show for Chinese New Year, featured a group of migrant workers from Shengzheng performing for the whole country a hip-hop dance called “Our Workers Have Strength.” In their overalls and helmets and with a brick in each hand, these workers danced energetically to a song that had been played every weekday from the bullhorn of every SOE before the 1990s but has long since disappeared and been forgotten. The song sounded very familiar yet different: Both the tune and the lyrics had been changed. The tune was recomposed to make it sound more like hip-hop, more Western and avant-garde and, hence, less related to the socialist past. The lyrics preserved only a small part of the original version: “Hi! We workers have strength!/We work hard every day,/Hi! We work hard every day!/Construct the skyscrapers,/Build up the railroads and coal mines.”
“We are rebuilding a new world” was replaced with “We are bettering the world.” And the following several lines were dropped: “Rumbling, rumbling, we start up the machine,/Clanking, clanking, we raise the hammer!/We make ploughs and hoes for the fields,/We make guns and cannons for the front!/Ai Hi! Ai Hi! Ai Ya!/Our faces are glowing,/Our sweat is flowing!/Why do we do all these things?/For the liberation!/For the liberation!/Ai! Hi! Ai! Hi!/For our China's complete liberation!” Sensitive words such as “new world” and “liberation” were omitted as potentially threatening stability and frightening the state. Yet, the country definitely still needs workers with strength, new workers who will rise up and accommodate themselves to the new era. Hence, in the middle of this new version, a few notes from the song “O Sole Mio (My Sun)” were inserted. Along with the sonorous singing, “O sole, O sole mio (The Sun, My Sun),” several dancers slowly lifted another dancer up, like the sun rising. Perhaps migrant workers are “sunrise” workers within a “sunrise” industry indeed, but they have nothing to do with SOE workers, who are sunset workers in an industry that is dying out, relevant no more. Even the song that was written for them is no longer theirs—it has been changed too much.
But even how long this new “sunrise” and vigorous new working class can endure is an unsettled question. With the rising wages demanded by Chinese labor and their waking sense of their rights as workers, some of the managers of global capital, “impatient” as they are,Footnote 43 have already shown traces of “escaping for even cheaper places.”Footnote 44 If that really happens on a large scale in the near future, we might witness another inverted migration with millions of migrant workers returning to their places of origin in the countryside, as has happened in Zambia's copper belt.Footnote 45 A new wave of deindustrialization might then soon transform these new migrant workers, too, making them redundant outsiders, just like the current generation of SOE workers.
