In an age marked by increasing precarity in the workplace, the idea that workers might exercise greater power in factories and be able to self-manage and organize collectively seems surreal and even utopian. This utopian vision, however, was actualized and witnessed several times in workplaces during the past century and later fondly recalled by many workers. But since the 1980s, as neoliberalism has taken hold globally, the heydays where workers were key legitimate stakeholders and even masters of their workplace have passed.

The aim of Joel Andreas's book, Disenfranchised, is to revive this forgotten working-class history. Through his ten years of prodigious research involving over 50 state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and 128 interviews, Andreas tells a vivid but ultimately gloomy story about factory workers through two radically different eras for SOEs in China, namely, the work-unit system (1950s to 1980s) and the modern enterprise system (1990s to the present). SOEs are not a new topic in the field of Chinese labour studies. Ever since Andrew Walder's classic book Communist Neo-Traditionalism (1986), many labour specialists have focused on various aspects of Chinese SOE workers, including working conditions and redundancies. However, as Andreas argues, most of this research has concentrated on the modern enterprise system rather than the work unit system. More importantly, most studies on SOE workers have focused exclusively on the economic rather than the political impacts of the work unit systems on workers. It is precisely Andreas's specific focus on the political impacts that makes his book stand out as theoretically groundbreaking, not only in Chinese labour studies but also in political sociology. Through his insightful conceptual innovation that considers enterprise as equivalent to a polity, and workplace citizenship as equivalent to citizenship in a nation-state, Andreas suggests a novel framework to test the limits of industrial democracy and workers’ autonomy.

The book has nine chapters and a preface. In the preface, Andreas makes a brief detour to his 2009 book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China's New Class (Stanford University Press), and details how this previous project led him to turn to SOEs as the main sites through which the Chinese Communist Party governed the population, and as key battlefields during Cultural Revolution. Chapter one locates the changes in industrial employment – from a system of permanent job tenure to flexible and precarious labour – in the wider and historical context of industrial citizenship and democratic participation. By retracing the rise of capitalism and the modern nation-state, Andreas argues that the 20th-century communist project aimed to combine the economic and the political through a series of socialist experiments. In particular, the socialist state turned workplaces into sites of governance characterized by strong norms of industrial citizenship on the one hand, but a lack of workers’ autonomy on the other. This chapter also introduces the analytical framework, which classifies four types of labour relations based on the two dimensions of “workplace citizenship” and “autonomy in the workplace”: paternalism; market despotism; workplace democracy; and individual autonomy.

Chapter two examines four major institutions established in the 1950s to mobilize factory workers to supervise capitalists and incumbent managers: the Labour-capital Consultative Conference; the Factory Management Committee; the Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress (SWC) and the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. According to Andreas, “the main role of the union and these representative organizations was to mobilize workers to assist party leaders in gaining control of the factories, both private and public” (p. 30) through a series of mass political movements, most influential of which were the Democratic Reform Movement (1950–1953), the Three Antis Campaign (1951–1952) and the Five Antis Campaign (1952). This chapter offers a necessary context for understanding how the paternalistic authority structure emerged in the work unit system, a structure that later greatly limited workers’ autonomy in the workplace.

Chapter three highlights participatory paternalism in China's work unit system. While the system featured, through its long-term membership, egalitarian norms and a strong collective identity underpinning high levels of worker participation, it was fundamentally paternalistic due to constraints on workers’ autonomy. While workers were encouraged to manage factory affairs and to raise recommendations and complaints, real decision-making power was still concentrated in the hands of Party leaders, and workers could not challenge their authority.

Chapters four to six detail how mass supervision was used to monitor Party cadres in order to combat corruption and prevent the formation of a bureaucratic class. While chapter four focuses on examining how the party-state strengthened some institutional mechanisms (e.g. SWC and workplace elections) to oversee Party cadres, chapter five stresses how the party-state, especially Mao, actively and deliberately granted workers the greatest extent of autonomy (even allowing them to seize power from factory management), which led to the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Chapters five and six are the most thrilling chapters as they carefully trace the development of the Cultural Revolution from national to local factory contexts. In chapter six, Andreas takes two factory cases, in Hubei and Henan provinces, to examine the fractious evolution of revolutionary committees in 1967 and 1968. It highlights the significant role of military commanders in making alliances with conservative leaders to counter radical rebel groups. Andreas masterfully rearticulates the fundamental question regarding the 20th-century socialist project, a question that still haunted Mao on his death bed – is there a need for continuous revolution against the endless creation of a new bureaucratic class?

Chapters seven and eight examine the era of “modern enterprise system.” In the final days of Maoism, Deng Xiaoping had already made changes to the work unit system, including a focus on economic production, increasing the technocratic composition of the workforce, and using institutional mechanisms such as elections and cadre-evaluation systems to exercise mass supervision. This also paved the way for the demise of the “iron rice bowl” in the mid-1980s, which resulted in the breakdown of the collectivist ethic and generated economic inequality in the 1990s. Chapter eight explores how factory workers were “disenfranchised” – i.e. losing their status as citizens of a workplace community – in the 1990s and how industrial restructuring impacted their political status and power. By using Albert Hirschman's concepts of “exit, voice and loyalty,” Andreas suggests how industrial work units’ “membership organizations, strong citizenship rights and formidable boundaries made it very difficult for workers to quit or be fired, creating a political terrain inside the factory in which there was substantial room for both loyalty and voice” (pp. 217–218). By contrast, industrial restructuring not only opened up the likelihoods for voluntary exit, but also eroded workers’ capacity to be heard. Chapter nine summarizes the major arguments of the book and highlights the conceptual utility its “workplace citizenship-autonomy” framework in examining the global patterns of labour relations and the three waves of industrial citizenship in the 20th century.

This is a fascinating book. Readers interested in Chinese labour, industrial democracy and political sociology will find it indispensable. Andreas demonstrates the state's impact on workers’ citizenship rights and autonomy. In the state-centric period under Mao's governance, the scopes of workplace citizenship and workers’ autonomy were by and large defined by the party-state, which inevitably led to paternalism. Workers’ participation, which involved different types of workers in the factory decision-making process, was a state-defined agenda-setting process. From Stephen Lukes's (1974) analysis of three faces of power, we understand that agenda-setting is where real power comes from. The Chinese SOE workers were at the outset deprived of this particular autonomy to set their own agenda in terms of the scope of their citizenship rights and autonomy. This is vividly demonstrated in many workplace elections where the party-state had the final decision in appointments. Even during Cultural Revolution, when workers had tremendous autonomy, its scope was defined by the party-state, mostly by Mao. Thus, to be more accurate, when applied to the Chinese context the two fundamental concepts that form Andreas's analytical framework should be qualified as “state-defined workplace citizenship” and “state-defined autonomy in the workplace.” But the theoretical irony is that, just as Andreas convincingly argues, the political and the economic cannot be separated. Neoliberals’ advocacy for such a separation is actually a deliberate political project to undermine workers’ workplace power by claiming the economic realm as capital's sovereignty. Seen in this way, the key factor to enhance workers’ industrial citizenship and workplace autonomy is the struggle of agenda-setting power between state, capital and labour. This point is even more relevant in today's industrial relations where neoliberal practices dominate. Not only are the workers deprived of this agenda-setting power when it comes to determining their rights in the workplace, but the state also retreats in defining workers’ rights, leading to capital having overriding power in determining workplace and labour market conditions.