Enduring Change: The Labor and Social History of One Third-front Industrial Complex in China from the 1960s to the Present 9783110630527, 9783110626766

Citation preview

Ju Li Enduring Change

Work in Global and Historical Perspective

Edited by Andreas Eckert, Sidney Chalhoub, Mahua Sarkar, Dmitri van den Bersselaar, Christian G. De Vito Work in Global and Historical Perspective is an interdisciplinary series that welcomes scholarship on work/labour that engages a historical perspective in and from any part of the world. The series advocates a definition of work/ labour that is broad, and especially encourages contributions that explore interconnections across political and geographic frontiers, time frames, disciplinary boundaries, as well as conceptual divisions among various forms of commodified work, and between work and ‘non-work’.

Volume 7

Ju Li

Enduring Change The Labor and Social History of One Third-front Industrial Complex in China from the 1960s to the Present

ISBN: 978-3-11-060233-3 e-ISBN (PDF): 978-3-11-060516-7 e-ISBN (ePUB): 978-3-11-060277-7 ISSN: 2509-8861 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 2018965694 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

For my parents 谨以此书献给我的父母

Acknowledgments The writing process of this book was a long one, full of struggle, excitement, depression and self-doubts. Without the support and encouragement of those who accompanied with me all these years, I could have never finished it. The book is partially based on my dissertation research. My full appreciation first goes to my dissertation supervisor Mahua Sarkar for her intellectual enrichment, thoughtful and generous criticisms, and patient support. She helped me to confront all the challenges and crises during the writing process and finally led me stumbling through the fogs. I owe my greatest gratitude to her. I also thank Frederic C Deyo, Leslie C Gates, and John W Chaffee, for their insightful comments and kind support. My gratitude also goes to József Böröcz, for his intellectual guidance, persistent support and understanding during all these years. The year I spent at the Institute of re:work (IGKWork and Human Life Cycle in Global History) at Humboldt University during 2013 – 14 as a junior research fellow was crucial in many ways. I thank Andreas Eckert, Jürgen Kocka, and Felicitas Hentschke for their enthusiastic and generous comments on the project, and their invaluable encouragement and support at the time, and since. Many of the excellent scholars I met there read some of the chapters and gave insightful comments. I thank them all: Lorenzo D’Angelo, Theresa Wobbe, Nurşen Gürboğa, Sigrid Wadauer, Jan Grill, Frank Reichherzer, Won Chul Shin, and Jürgen Schmidt. Marcel van der Linden and Frederick Cooper read and commented on my presentations there and gave great suggestions, for which I am grateful. My special thanks go to Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov, for their intellectual inspiration and precious friendship. My debt towards the people I interviewed in this project is immeasurable. Even though I cannot specify their names here out of considerations of anonymity, I want to express my greatest gratitude for all the trust and support they gave me during the whole research process. Without them this book may never have existed. I give my utmost respect to my aunt Ma, for her undefeated idealism and devotion. The research grant from the Central European University and the sabbatical approved by the Sociology and Social Anthropology department made the final stage of fieldwork possible. I thank my colleagues, Judit Bodnár, Dan Rabinowitz, Andreas Dafinger, Violetta Zentai, Francisca de Haan, and Attila Melegh, for their various kinds of insight and support. I am especially grateful to Don Kalb for his enthusiastic support for the project, and Hyaesin Yoon, for her trustworthy friendship and persistent encouragement.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-001

VIII

Acknowledgments

I owe a lot to my dear friends. I want to thank especially Rui Zhang, Lu Gan, Jianhua Qiu, Yuling Huang, Chiwei Liu, Rui Ru, Jesse Wu, for their consistent encouragement and support over all these years. I dedicate this book to my parents, Hongxin Li and Cailing He. The unlimited love and trust from them have provided an inexhaustible source of strength throughout my life. I also want to thank Feng Li, Wenbing Zen, and Peng Li, for their constant love and support. Finally, I thank my husband, Hongkun for his unconditional love and support, and my two terrific daughters, Wanwan and Doudou, for their incomparable and breathtaking beauty. They are my lights during the darkest nights.

Contents Introduction Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History 1 

When the Global Meets the Local: “Preparing Against the War, Preparing Against the Famine, And All for the People” 24



“Building Up a New World; Buying Time Against the Imperialists”: 47 Stories About Migration and Construction in the Early Stage



The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”



The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 109 2002



Living in the “Zombie Factory”: Post-neoliberalism, Erosive Deindustrialization, and Institutionalized Subaltern 131

Epilogue A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony? Bibliography Index

193

181

174

74

Introduction Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true. – Karl Marx, The German Ideology, 1845 On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, “And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.” Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us secondhand. – Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time

The journey to Nanfang Steel (NS) is a long one. After the airplane lands in Shanghai, I switch to another long flight, followed by a three-hour train ride to a small city within Sichuan province. There, once again, I change to another bus line and, after an hour, I finally reach the industrial town of NS. The scenery, as well as the people, change along the way – the clean and modern skyscrapers of Shanghai slowly give way to shabby apartment blocks and bleak workshops in NS; smug white-collar workers in their smart suits and fine dresses are replaced by desperate and alternately indignant and resigned workers in greasy overalls. On the one hand, such contrasts are normal, even unremarkable in such a vast and unevenly developing country as China. On the other hand, the difference is striking – particularly when the spatial contrast between Shanghai and NS is considered together with the temporal contrast to be found within NS’s own history. Only a few decades ago, those familiar with NS referred to it as “little Shanghai” for its prosperity and liveliness. Now, NS seems like a lost corner of the earth, far removed in both space and time from Shanghai, that symbol of modernity and globalization in China and the world. NS was born as part of China’s grand Third Front Construction (TFC) project in the 1960s, a project that embodied China’s direct response to the specific international situation at that time, particularly the intensified military threat and pressure from the United States along with China’s split with the Soviet Union. The objective of the TFC was to create an entire industrial system within the geographically remote and strategically secure region of China’s interior – the socalled Third Front. From 1966 to 1975, thousands of institutes and enterprises were built, bringing industrialization to the area on an unprecedented scale. NS was one of these https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-002

2

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

sites. Located in the mountainous area within the province of Sichuang, NS is an immense TF enterprise that was developed under the directive of the central state in the 1960s as an essential steel production site in southeast China. After passionate, yet harsh and turbulent early years, NS attained a marked prosperity during the first stage of economic reform in the 1980s. Before the radical neoliberal restructuring took place in the mid-1990s, NS had employed around 30,000 workers. Today, with China’s transition to a globalized market economy, the TFC has generally disintegrated. At NS, a particular process and pattern of decline, persistence, and resistance, which I term “erosive deindustrialization,” is taking place: most workshops have been shut down; the danwei-based welfare system has collapsed; more than two thirds of workers have gone in different directions, with the remaining ones sinking into poverty and apathy; and the previously prosperous industrial community has become steadily dilapidated into a melancholy slum. In many ways NS has never stood alone: in the past, it was one of the thousands of Third Front factories established against the high tide of Cold War international geopolitics; in the present, it represents one among many of other similar “zombie factories” that exemplify a potent tension and dilemma in China’s recent transformation through uneven neoliberal economic development, unjust redistribution policies, and its corresponding social tensions and instabilities – all as the state strides forward to become one of the major players of socalled global capitalism. NS workers as well are not alone: they used to be part of the rhetorically proud socialist workers who contributed with dedication to the grand aim of their country; now, along with millions upon millions of other workers from dying State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) and export-oriented factories, they compose part of a newly formed but gigantic subaltern working mass within contemporary China’s slowly solidifying class structure. Their shadowy existence, though largely made invisible by the dazzling rhetoric of “China’s economic miracle,” has nevertheless brought great tension, dilemmas, and uncertainty to China’s ongoing transformation and her future development. I hence ask the following questions in this book: what has occurred at this particular industrial complex from its establishment during the high tide of the Cold War (the 1960s) to the globalized present? How do the historical social changes that transpired over the past five decades at NS help us to better comprehend the bigger image of China’s socialist past and its current great transformation, through a micro case that has always been closely linked to larger macro conjunctures? Moreover, how have different generations of workers at NS lived through all of these vicissitudes? What are the implications of their concrete and uneven labor and social histories during this half century for labor studies

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

3

both of China and in general? In particular, what kinds of roles have the state and the market played in these processes of social change and in the working lives of laborers? Social change in China over the past half century is always described as a transformation. On the two ends of this transformation stand a totalitarian socialist past and a neoliberal present. Through this view, we then have a labor history that moves from a so-called “communist neo-traditionalism”¹ under a totalitarian regime to a so-called “disorganized despotism”² under a neoliberal regime. By assuming the neat and predominant roles of state or/and market, both narratives tend to reduce a complex history into a narrative of transitions from one “typical pattern” to the next,³ and provide us with some abstract and overgeneralized images of various regimes in China. This study would like to challenge as well as complicate these two assumptions via a micro-historical and ethnographic study. I argue that since both the state and the market are constantly interrupted, complicated, and conditioned by many forces that range all the way from the global structures down to grassroots tactics, their roles have never been neat and all determining when applied to concrete realities. Instead, they appear as “lumpy,”⁴ “sticky,”⁵ and constantly shifting. Based on such a “fussy” understanding of both the state and the market, this study thus moves beyond the clean-cut yet rigid metanarratives of social change and labor history in China to instead reveal a much more detailed, complicated, contingent, and continuous process of social change, and in relation to it presents a multivalent, contradiction-laden, and volatile labor history as actually lived through by different generations of workers. As such, this study takes up a “microhistorical focus on workers and work in relation to the range of social processes in a particular milieu” that at the same time looks “beyond both locality and region toward [a] wider spatial relationship.”⁶

 Andrew G. Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. University of California Press, 1988.  Ching Kwan Lee, From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labour Regimes in Chinese Factories. The China Quarterly 157 (1999): 44– 71.  James Ferguson, Expectations of modernity: Myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt. University of California Press, 1999, 48.  Frederic Cooper, Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. University of California Press, 2005, 21.  József Böröcz, Social Change with Sticky Features and the Failures of Modernizationism. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 10, 2 (1997): 161– 169.  Frederic Cooper: African Labor History, in: Jan Lucassen (ed.): Global Labour History: A State of the Art. Peter Lang 2008, 93.

4

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

“Putting ‘Social Change’ in its Place”:⁷ Socialist History and Post-socialist Transformation Grand historical metanarratives tend to assume a linear teleology and regard social change as either evolution or revolution, moving from a lower-level stage to a more progressive and advanced one. This modernist tradition has indeed been strongly challenged by many scholars, especially the post-colonists, as cliché or simply a mistaken account. Yet, on the other hand, this (r)evolutionary insistence could also be a subconsciously accepted “cosmological blueprint that lays down fundamental categories and meanings for the organization and interpretation of experience.”⁸ When the Berlin Wall fell, for instance, this tradition was immediately and rather conveniently picked up by many mainstream scholars and policy makers, assuming a finally back-on-track transformation within the former socialist countries from their socialist totalitarianism to a capitalist liberalism, a transformation driven by the “inherent” force of History. The blueprint, however, wasn’t realized. As most post-colonist nation states have never reached the idealized yet ambivalent criteria of modernity,⁹ most post-socialist countries have also failed to arrive at their “granted” destiny. Criticism of this “inevitable” teleology thus arose from both historians and sociologists. The so-called revisionist and post-revisionist historians challenged the rigid and reductionist totalitarian imagination of the socialist history – the supposed starting point of the transformation – by portraying more fully textured histories of socialist societies as various forms of really existing socialism.¹⁰ Refuting the general and perfunctory tendency to “exoticize” socialist re-

 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 24.  Ibid. 13 – 14.  David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Duke University Press, 2004.  For detailed discussion of the research paradigms in the study of state socialism, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Revisionism in Soviet History. History and Theory 46, 4 (2007): 77– 91; Mark Edele, Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered, in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, 2 (2007): 349 – 373. For historical works challenging the totalitarian paradigm, among many others, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford University Press, 1994; Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley, 1995; Gail Kligman and Katherine Verdery, Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949 – 1962. Princeton University Press, 2011; Katherine Lebow, Unfinished Utopia. Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949 – 56. Cornell University Press, 2013; Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until it was no more. The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press, 2013. For specific writings on socialist China, among many others, see Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pick-

Socialist History and Post-socialist Transformation

5

gimes,¹¹ these scholars aimed instead to “grasp the variety of human social arrangements” in order to “combat both the stereotypical, propagandizing notions of it so common in the US media and also the Utopian and idealized images held by Western leftists who had not experienced living in it.”¹² Sociologists’ criticisms, on the other hand, largely focused on the route and the destination of the transformation while the forms of both that existed in reality actually parodied the earlier rosy yet naïve imagining around it. From different approaches – many based on detailed ethnographic research – these scholars argued that the transformation had never been smooth, but was always interrupted by many other factors besides market mechanisms and formal democratic voting systems, making it rather rugged, complicated, paradoxical, and uncertain.¹³ Only occasionally is this critical eye applied in socialist and post-socialist studies of China. Partly due to the country’s relatively more successful story of transformation, the teleological imagination of social change in China over the past several decades as an automatic process of “growing out of the plan” through the innate power of the market has not been widely challenged.¹⁴ Popular criticism simply targets the lag of political reform or the “impurity” of implemented market reforms. More critical analyses, on the other hand, typically adopt a macro-analytic framework that focuses more on structural and institutional changes rather than providing in-depth historical and/or ethnographic insights.¹⁵ While illuminating micro-historical studies do exist, most of them turn their gaze merely toward the villages, not industrial sites.¹⁶

owicz, Mark Selden and Kay Ann Johnson. Chinese Village, Socialist State. Yale University Press, 1993; Mobo Gao, Gao Village: a Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China. University of Hawaii Press, 1999.  Michal Buchowski, The specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. Anthropological Quarterly 79, 3 (2006): 463 – 482.  Katherine Verdery, What was Socialism, and What Comes Next?. Princeton University Press, 1996, 11.  Among many others, see, Böröcz, Social change, 161– 169; Michael Burawoy, Uncertain Transition. Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers 2000; Maruška Svašek (eds.): Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. Berghahn 2006; Verdery, What was Socialism.  Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978 – 1993. Cambridge University Press, 1996.  Among many others, see, for example, Arif Dirlik, Modernity as History: Post-revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity. Social History 27, 1 (2002): 16 – 39; Hui Wang and Theodore Huters, China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Harvard University Press, 2003; Lu, Xiaobo Lu and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.). Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Me Sharpe, 1997.

6

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

Taking an industrial complex as my research subject, this study offers a different direction for surveying the larger picture of social change in modern China. It examines the actual historical processes that occurred there during the past half century, by applying the aforementioned critical reading of socialist past and post-socialist transformation upon the specific settings of NS. As such, I start from a concrete rather than an abstract and assumed reality¹⁷ and then analyze this reality in its all complexity. It is an approach of “putting social change in its place,”for, as James Ferguson explains, “[m]y point is not that the changes have been unimportant, only that their nature is not epochal or unidirectional; they are complex, multivalent, and ambiguous, and they are not well captured in a linear sequence of phases.”¹⁸ Based on this contingent rather than teleological understanding of social change, this study emphasizes the concrete power struggles at NS during various historical periods as a way to “account in material terms for what happened at each juncture, to account for how some relationships gained ascendancy over others.”¹⁹ It hence reveals a rugged historical process without a rigid (demonized or idealized) socialist departure and a clear-cut neoliberal destination. In particular, this involves taking note of the conditioned (not just conditioning) roles of both the state and the market in this power analytic framework since both have always been assumed, usually without much careful examination of their premises, as unconditioned and uninterrupted determinants that contribute to the generalization of either socialist totalitarianism (shaped by the state) or capitalist neoliberalism (shaped by the market). In order to do that, first, this study embeds the state within a larger global structure as well as relates it to the grassroots rank and file in order to reveal less of an omnipotent and efficient state and more of a lumpy and ambivalent one. On the one hand, though undoubtedly a strong-handed political apparatus, the Chinese state has always had to respond to, and hence be constrained by, the challenges imposed upon it as well as opportunities afforded by the global structure. When the Third Front Construction (with NS as part of it) was initiated by the state in the 1960s, it was largely a defensive response towards a then hostile international Cold War geopolitics; then, when the market reform in general, and

 See, for example, Friedman, Pickowicz and Selden, Chinese village; Anita Chan, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger, Chen Village. Revolution to Globalization. University of California Press, 2009; Gao, Gao village.  Edmund R. Leach, Rethinking Anthropology. Athlone Press, 1961, 104.  Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 78.  Eric R. Wolf and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Europe and the People without History. University of California Press, 2010, 6.

Socialist History and Post-socialist Transformation

7

SOE reform in particular, began in the 1980s, it went hand in hand with the emergence of a new form of capital accumulation – so-called global capitalism; when the radical neoliberal tenets were imposed on SOEs starting from the second half of the 1990s, this was triggered by the crisis of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, which itself was linked to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the socalled “end of history” metanarrative; and finally, when China was said to be entering another stage of state capitalism (yet still mingled with neoliberalism) since the beginning of the new millennium, it was again closely related to the event of China becoming a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2002. While much more detailed analyses of these moments will be traced in the main contents of the book, the sketch offered here aims to emphasize that the role of the state always has to be read in relation to the impact of global forces. At the same time, the role of the state also has to be interrupted by its own inexperience and incompetence (as frankly admitted by Deng Xiaoping himself through the phase of “touching the stones in order to cross the river”), as well as by the manipulations and resistances from other social groups that always harbor different interests from the center. This means that state policies could not always be implemented at the grassroots level as planned. For instance, the planned construction of the Third Front in general, and NS in particular during the initial stage, was blunted in different ways by resistances from different-level bureaucrats as well as the local peasants alike. The chaos brought about by the turbulent political environment caused by the state’s own inconsistent policies (especially during the Cultural Revolution), and the lack of experience and investment, also played roles. Similarly, the earlier phase of SOE reform that focused on decentralization to incentivize state agents actually led to a de facto “decentralized predation”²⁰ that greatly empowered subnational governments at the cost of both the central state and the SOEs, as seen in the case of NS. Later, while the neoliberal policies promoted by the central state were constantly reinterpreted, circumvented, manipulated, and taken advantage of by various levels of local governments, sometimes at odds with their stated goals, they also aroused widespread resistance from discharged SOE workers nationwide. Such resistance, combined with China’s changing SOE policy (partially in response to joining the WTO in 2002) led to a halt in radical neoliberal reforms amongst surviving SOEs, while NS managed to grasp the chance and subsequently entered into its latest period of “erosive deindustrialization.”

 Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Harvard University Press, 2009, 37.

8

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

In all these processes, the role of the state, while still strong, has been constantly interrupted by various interest groups and, at the same time, constrained by global structures. It thus has always been lumpy, reluctant, oscillating, halting, and sometimes improvident. I would also like to complicate the role of the market by re-politicizing the reforming process at NS. The notion of market reform in China, along with other developmental terms, has a strong tendency to be “depoliticized” and “neutralized.” As Hui Wang pointed out, “in the contemporary Chinese context, notions such as modernization, globalization and growth can be seen as key concepts of a depoliticized or anti-political political ideology, whose widespread usage militates against a popular political understanding of the social and economic shifts at stake in marketization.”²¹ The result of such de-politicization, according to Wang, is that “divisions over questions of development become technical disputes about market-adjustment mechanisms,” such that “political divisions between labour and capital, left and right, are made to disappear.”²² Such de-politicization is indeed an intentional consequence of neoclassical economics – the hegemonic theory in today’s neoliberal capitalism, which assumes and asserts a separation of economic factors from political and social ones. As Edward Nell elaborates, [neoclassical economics] is a theory of general equilibrium in exchange, extended almost as an afterthought, to cover production and distribution. It is not a theory of a social system, still less of economic power and social class. Households and firms are considered only as market agents, never as parts of a social structure. Their “initial endowments,” wealth, skills, and property, are taken as given. Moreover, the object of the theory is to demonstrate the tendency towards equilibrium; class and sectorial conflict is therefore ruled out almost by assumption.²³

Having gained ascendency in China since the 1980s, such neoclassic economics are now acclaimed as the ‘real scientific’ way to study economic phenomena, while Marxist political economics – exactly because it was the only economics allowed before the reform – was despised, though not officially, but as an open secret among “good” Chinese economists as “propagandist,” “dogmatic,” “crude,” and hence “unscientific.” However, by dis-embedding all economic activities from their social and political settings, and assuming an unadulterated  Hui Wang, Depoliticized Politics, from East to West. New Left Review 41 (2006): 39.  Ibid.  Edward Nell, Economics: The Revival of Political Economy. In Randy Albelda (ed.). Alternatives to Economic Orthodoxy: Reader in Political Economy: Reader in Political Economy. Routledge, 2016, 89 – 106, esp. 90.

Socialist History and Post-socialist Transformation

9

role of the invisible hand of market, this new “scientific” economics, while providing many sophisticated and elaborate economic models and theories, suffers from its irrelevance with respect to the market reform processes as they actually happen in China. Market society, as convincingly argued by Polanyi in 1944, has always been “the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of government which imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends.”²⁴ More than half a century later, David Harvey reconfirmed Polanyi’s observation by declaring that neoliberalism in the name of reinstalling the invisible hand of market in our current time is indeed “a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites,”²⁵ and hence “authoritarian, forceful and anti-democratic.”²⁶ Always entangled with politics, marketization in China has taken place under the aegis of the state, such that “many aspects of the apparatus are imbricated in the economic sphere.”²⁷ It is in this sense that economic reform in China has never just been a process of bringing market in, but a process of what kind of market is being brought in, how such kind of market being bringing in, and for whom. Answering these questions means concretizing the otherwise abstract market reform not as an embodiment of economic laws, which nowhere exist, but as the embodiment of power struggle, a reshuffling and reconfiguration of forces in particularized settings – more briefly, to re-politicize market reform. In this study, I will thus reveal a concrete economic reforming process at NS, which, though always in the name of the market, has actually been shaped by various kinds of “politics of calculation,”²⁸ as different social groups played out their roles within the limits set by larger structures. To a major extent, this marketization – whether as decentralization, management contract systems, shareholding reforms, welfare reforms, or labor reforms – is less an unfolding process of abstract economic law and more a power game that has successfully redistributed wealth and resources in extremely unjust and unequal ways. In general, by concretizing and contextualizing the abstract concepts of state and market, and recognizing their entanglement within a much more complicated power analytic framework, this study aims to depict a past, a present, and a

 Karl Polanyi, The great transformation. The political and economic origin of our time. Beacon Press, 1957, 250.  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2007, 19.  Ibid. 37– 38.  Wang, Depoliticized politics, 39.  Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts. Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. University of California Press, 2002, 10.

10

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

route from the past to the present as something to study rather than something to assume. It is an approach described by James Clifford as “ethnographic-historical realism,” one that “works to represent material constraints, intersecting histories, and emerging social forms without imposing structural closure or developmental destiny.”²⁹ Since “the struggles of different actors within interrelated spaces might have different consequences,”³⁰ the story of social change that emerges here is full of contradictions, paradoxes, tensions, contingencies, ambivalences, and uncertainties, which nonetheless have immense impacts on the living and working experiences of those who have experienced these vicissitudes.

Linking “Social Change’ with Workers: Vicissitudinous Labor History In his 1985 The Politics of Production, Michael Burawoy categorized different types of factory regime: under capitalism, when the state “shapes the factory apparatuses by stipulating, for example, mechanisms for the conduct and resolution of struggle at the point of production,” we have the hegemonic regime; when such a role of the state is absent, and the factory is subjected to “the economic whip of the market,” we have the market despotic regime; under socialism, since the factory “was constituted by the administrative hierarchy of the state,” the regime is bureaucratic despotic.³¹ Later, he makes a finer distinction within the socialist regime by dividing it into two categories: the bureaucratic hegemonic, when the market is introduced to counterbalance the factory’s monopolistic control of scarce goods and services (as the extended arm of the state), and the bureaucratic despotic when such a market is absent.³² Emphasizing the interactive roles of state and market in shaping factory regimes, this paradigm provides a rather clear-cut and general prototypical framework for analyzing particular cases. Andrew Walder, by highlighting the paramount control of the state and hence the total dependence of workers – the so-called “organized dependence”

 James Clifford, Returns. Becoming indigenous in the twenty-first century. Harvard University Press, 2013, 27.  Cooper, African labor history, 93.  Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. Verso Books 1985, 12.  Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukacs, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Linking “Social Change’ with Workers: Vicissitudinous Labor History

11

– produced a typical “bureaucratic despotic” factory regime in socialist Chinese SOEs, which he labeled “communist neo-traditionalism.” In order to develop this idea, Walder declared, “although state policies and management practices have come and gone, the core institutional features endure;” hence, “my purpose is to analyze an institutional framework that has characterized the past 30 years in the People’s Republic of china (despite frequent changes in government policy).”³³ While this assumption – of an intact institutional framework and an endurance of core institutional features for “the past 30 years” – aimed to grasp the fundamental elements of one particular type of factory regime, its overgeneralization dramatically reduced to a single all-embracing abstract label an otherwise uneven and complicated history as it was actually being lived through by Chinese SOE workers. Yet, despite this reductionist tendency, Walder’s generalization of the socialist factory regime – perhaps because it matches so well with the equally reductionist imagination of a socialist totalitarianism – has been uncritically accepted by many later scholars as a fact that can be assumed as self-evident. Ching Kwan Lee, for instance, developed a comparative model of Chinese SOE factory regimes as transforming from one kind of despotism to another, reflecting exactly this total and uncritical acceptance of the kind of perspective Walder offers.³⁴ Lee argues that the old model of danwei socialism, i. e., Walder’s communist neo-traditionalism, has been unraveled by “marketization,” while “a new regime of ‘disorganized despotism’ takes shape.”³⁵ Despite its convincing insights around major features of the transformed factory regime in Lee’s SOEs case during the particular period (the end of 1990s), such an abrupt jump from one “endured” ideal type to another once again writes off all the complexities, ruggedness, dynamism, and intricacies of history and offers a useful, but too time-bound and one-dimensional, analysis. In contrast to these static or monocular approaches, this study opens onto a continuous, dynamic, and multi-leveled labor history that goes beyond the “communist neo-traditionalism” and the “disorganized despotism” – as the implicit or assumed starting and ending points of a linear process in China – and links workers’ working and living experiences with the concrete, contingent, and continuous social changes occurring around them. Such linkage means breaking the fixed image of any “enduring” regime that was determined either by the par Andrew George Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism. Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. University of California Press, 1988, 13.  Ching Kwan Lee, From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism. Changing Labour Regimes in Chinese Factories. The China Quarterly, 157 (1999): 46.  Ibid. 46.

12

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

amount state or the ubiquitous market or both that workers were simply thrown into. Instead, it highlights the entangled and constant interaction among many factors that made a labor history, not as a process jumping from one fixed stage to another, but as uneven and vicissitudinous. In order to achieve this goal, I make three approaches. First, while acknowledging the value of work by Walder and Lee, I complicate and enrich their descriptions to better capture the actual history as it played out. Since the roles of both the state and market have never been clear-cut, but rather are lumpy, ambiguous, and always interrupted by other forces, the tidy and pure paradigms of “communist neo-traditionalism” and “disorganized despotism,” the former – derived from a supposedly totalitarian control by the state, the latter derived from a supposedly paramount process of marketization – must be tainted. For example, while the “communist neo-traditionalism” correctly emphasizes the organized dependence of workers upon the regime, it ignores the complementary (though weaker) dependence of the regime upon its workers as the only ideologically legitimate source of labor supply. This not only conditioned the state’s choices of labor but also, at times, afforded workers avenues of resistance that the perfectly totalitarian “communist neo-traditionalism” framework could not imagine or account for. It also ignores, much more basically, much subtler aspects in real life – most of all the de facto, prevalent “freedom” experienced by workers in their working and living spaces, where truly existant socialism actually “left a large measure of control over production to its lower level managers and workers,” since “the center controlled the sphere of public discussion but not quite the sphere of work,” as Don Kalb keenly observed. Kalb goes even further to declare that “socialism penetrated much less forcefully into the sphere of production than capitalism did.”³⁶ Though such a declaration might need further examination, we should not discard the fact that the real-existent socialist institutions were more porous than “communist neo-traditionalism” could imagine. Similarly, while “disorganized despotism” rightly illustrates a coercive dimension on the shop floor, it ignores the widespread apathy from both managers and workers that loosens any experience of despotism and flattens not just the vertical conflict between managers and workers but brings out the great dilemma and paradox of the reforming process itself.

 Don Kalb, “Worthless Poles” And other dispossessions. In Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella (eds.) Blood and fire: Toward a global anthropology of labor. Berghahn, 2014, 250 – 285, esp. 259.

Linking “Social Change’ with Workers: Vicissitudinous Labor History

13

Second, in contrast to most Chinese labor studies that tend to focus on the labor conditions during one particular historical period,³⁷ this study provides a continuous and long-term labor history. While Jackie Sheehan’s important work provides a much more thorough, yet still abstract working-class history in China, ³⁸ this book traces a half-century of labor history through detailed and vivid historical and ethnographic research at one particular industrial complex. Hence, besides a much more careful reading of the two particular phases described by Walder and Lee, I also depict the labor history in NS during the 1980s (Chapter Three) and the post-neoliberal period after 2003 (Chapter Five) – the two periods less studied by scholars conducting Chinese labor studies, and link them to the abovementioned phases. The 1980s is the decade that was nostalgically remembered by most workers as a golden time, with a steady improvement of living standards, when the austerity of high socialism had ended and the cruel neoliberal restructuring had not yet begun. Similarly, the post-neoliberal period dates from 2003 when the radical neoliberal restructuring stopped at the remaining SOEs and China was said to have entered another stage of state capitalism. This is a period when NS workers witnessed their factory, despite being exempted from bankruptcy by the state out of political considerations, nevertheless becoming one among thousands of “zombie factories” nationwide, and had to live through its painful “erosive deindustrialization” that economically, as well as culturally and psychologically, dragged them down to a bottom, subaltern existence in contemporary China. Such a continuous and long-term reading of different generations of workers’ working and living experiences at one particular industrial complex from its establishment in the 1960s to the contemporary 2010s thus avoids the abruptness of prevailing narrative histories and instead highlights the unevenness and the vicissitudes experienced by workers. As Ferguson argued, [e]mphasizing the continuities across the supposed periods is a device for avoiding the conception of changes as transitions from one ideal-typical phase to the next, and for opening up important empirical questions that otherwise remain too easily obscured, questions having to do both with the plurality of possible patterns or strategies available in any given

 Among many, see, Stephen Andors (eds.). Workers and Workplaces in Revolutionary China. Routledge, 2016; Mark Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace. State, Revolution, and Labor Management. Cambridge University Press, 2002; Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism; Lu and Perry, Danwei; Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. University of California Press, 2007; William Hurst, The Chinese Worker after Socialism. Cambridge University Press, 2009; Mary Elizabeth Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China. Princeton University Press, 2011.  Jackie Sheehan, Chinese Workers: A New History. Routledge 2002.

14

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

period and with changes in the number of nature of these strategies and the frequencies with which they have been employed.³⁹

Third, I argue that to adequately understand these developments also requires an expanded labor history approach that moves beyond conventional analytic paradigms for labor studies that focus strictly on formal experiences and institutions, like a “free” proletarian, trade unions, formally organized strikes, and labor party formations,⁴⁰ since these categories have little relevance to the NS case. Instead, labor history arises from a real-existent society on its own terms that, even without the features of typical Western industrial societies, still has its own logics and dynamics. These logics and dynamics, as consequences of differential power struggles between various political and social forces, provide a certain space and possibilities for workers to live, work, develop, interpret, remember, and resist in their own various and particular ways. Rather than taking up the traditional prototype of working-class studies, this study thus focuses on the informal, spontaneous, pragmatic, and subjective aspects of the labor and social history of the working class at NS; it looks “at different modes of thinking, speaking, and acting as a worker, patterns shaped not by statically conceived ‘cultures’ but by history, by layers of experience and memory.”⁴¹ This focus thus places attention on the following questions: how did various generations of workers respond to the experience of great vicissitudes during their lifetime that were largely out of their control; in what way and why were particular kinds of strategies for survival and resistance selected; how and why did workers choose particular ways to remember the past and interpret the present; and how did workers perceive themselves, not just in relation to managers but also in relation to the great transformation happening over these five decades and why? By answering these questions, I aim to provide, not another exemplary case study derived from the conventional labor study framework, but a “thick” and expanded labor history that reflects different aspects of “people’s internal efforts to make the best of their world as well as to their unchosen need to find the friction-ridden alignments to do so.”⁴² In general, by complicating, extending, and expanding the “old” paradigms of social transformation and labor history alike, this study links concrete labor

 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 78.  Marcel Van der Linden (ed.). Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. Brill, 2008, 2.  Cooper, African labor history, 116  Don Kalb, Expanding Class. Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, the Netherlands 1850 – 1950. Duke University Press, 1997, 3.

A Note on Methods: Insider or Outsider

15

history to contingent social change as it happened at one particular industrial complex in China, not only to analyze both in their own complexities, dynamisms, and characteristics, but also to embed them within a larger structural change at the national and global levels. This thus embodies a historical sociology that aims to “understand the relationship of personal activity and experience on the one hand and social organization on the other as something that is continuously constructed in time”, and hence “makes the continuous process of construction the focal concern of social analysis.”⁴³

A Note on Methods: Insider or Outsider Nanfang Steel is my hometown. I was born and lived there until I went to college. After that, I have always seen going back there as “going home.” To a large extent, I am the participant and witness of the story portrayed here: together with my research subjects, I witnessed the rise and fall of the factory, the development and decline of the industrial community, and the thriving and pauperization of industrial workers. I also shared with them not just the memory of a bygone past but also the confusion, shock, and desperation around the recent transformation, along with the painful realization of a forever-lost hometown. All of these changes, meanwhile – set so sharply and ironically against the so-called “China miracle” with its dazzling economic growth – bewildered and unsettled all of us greatly. Such bewilderment and unsettlement initiated this research project in the first place: I wanted to find out what had happened at this industrial complex and, more importantly, to recount a labor and social history as actually lived through by several generations of workers there – a history that should not be conveniently erased and easily forgotten. To do that I have conducted both historical/archival and ethnographic research. The primary materials used in this book include historical archives, official documents and reports, mass media articles, living-in observations, intensive interviews and oral testimonies. Archival documents come from two sources: the internal enterprise archives of NS and the Provincial Archives. Mass media articles come from relevant local and national newspapers and magazines from the 1950s to the present, including Nanfang Steel’s own enterprise newspaper published from 1977. The interviews and oral testimonies of NS workers, as well as on-site observations, were collected during several field trips to NS

 Abrams Philip, Historical Sociology. Cornell University Press, 1982, 16.

16

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

between 2007 and 2014, and then again during the summer of 2016 when I returned to update my research. During these processes, my status as an “insider” greatly benefited my research. My preexisting personal network with local people, as well as the mutual trust, intimacy, and understanding between myself and most of my research subjects, afforded me access to materials that would be otherwise hard to reach for others. These included enterprise internal archives, documents, newspapers, and personal memoirs and collections. I was also able to conduct indepth interviews and collect extended oral histories. Most of the people I interviewed were eager to talk to me, partly because they believed that I, as a person originally from the factory and thus sharing sentiments and memories (even if only partially) with them, could understand them. Ruixin Ma, one retired female engineer I called “aunt,” for example, walked with me every morning from approximately 9:00am until noon for two continuous weeks during my field trip in 2006, telling me her life from childhood to older age in a very vivid and detailed way. I was also “smuggled” onto the shop floor from time to time by my working-class friends and was able to stay in the workers’ resting cells and talk causally with anyone who just came in for a sip of tea or a quick smoke. Living in the working-class community of NS, I went to the same breakfast stalls, teahouses, parks, and local food markets as other workers did. In addition, I generally socialized with my interviewees – both workers and managers, mainly as friends – by dining, walking, singing karaoke, and chatting together. I even learned how to play Mahjong – a popular form of gambling that can also help one quickly win acquaintances or even friendships. Through such informal interactions, I managed to avoid the formidable bureaucratic procedures of the factory. Yet, this does not mean that the top executives at NS were ignorant of my presence. Instead, I even had the opportunity to interview quite a few of them – but again, merely through informal channels. When top executives agreed to be interviewed, they did so largely because many were eager to vent their grievances about becoming the most convenient scapegoat for Nanfang Steel’s failure. Chatting informally offered them this possibility. On the other hand, however, if pushed further, my status as an “insider” could be rather dubious. To what extent should I be considered as an “insider”? I no longer live in NS: I have been absent from that place for more than two decades with only occasional returns for short-term visits. I do not and have never worked there, but instead am a US-trained, historical sociologist now working at a US university. In contrast to NS workers, I can freely decide when to enter and when to leave. Furthermore, the simple fact of conducting research there already sets me apart from the insiders; as Kirin Narayan rightly declared, “even if one can blend into a particular social group without the quest of fieldwork, the very

A Note on Methods: Insider or Outsider

17

nature of researching what to others is taken-for-granted reality creates an uneasy distance.”⁴⁴ This “uneasy distance”, also clearly sensed at times by my research subjects, had brought a great sense of awkwardness and inadequacy from my side, especially at the beginning of this research. The most common initial reaction was confusion (“why do you want to study NS and us?”) or very occasionally suspicion (I was asked once in a half-joking way by one of my old classmates, who was then a manager at NS, “are you a spy sent by the US?”). At times, there seemed a hint of unspoken self-defense in people’s attitudes. For some of them, I was one of those “lucky” ones, who used to be one of them, but had managed to “escape” the falling factory, leaving everything there behind, and now seemingly living an imagined, brighter, and richer life. Coming back to study them exaggerated this difference and could sometimes be interpreted as condescending, even insulting. Meanwhile, the implicit power structure derived from my ambiguous “outsider” status could also be met in different ways, under different situations, and with different social groups. One summer evening in 2008, I was dining with a group of friends in a restaurant. After a few gulps of liquor, a manager at NS, Achao, suddenly asked me, “How much money did you make in the US?” Without waiting for my response, he continued, “could you make 50k dollars per year?” I stuttered, “not really…” Seeing my obvious embarrassment, another friend cut in, “come on, she’s now just a PhD student. How rude you sounded!” Achao ignored the comment, waved his hands, and drunkenly smiled, “Oh?! Less than 50k dollars?! In that expensive United States! Ai! Then I will envy you no more.” The power relation I had assumed and tried to avoid was bluntly reversed here by Achao’s unexpected frankness. It was obvious that he was in a better shape, at least economically, than I was, and he wanted me to know that. Rather than intending to make me feel bad, he was only anxiously proving to me that he was not a loser, despite being stuck in a “damned SOE” like NS. And alas, such eagerness and anxiety could be no less ubiquitous in contemporary China. Surely ordinary workers did not have the same economic advantage as Achao had, with his much higher managerial salary and (maybe more importantly) the various forms of grey income he was entitled to. Nor did ordinary workers necessarily have the consciousness or confidence to challenge the implicit power relationship between us. Many times, they came to talk to me out of kindness,

 Kirin Narayan, How native is a “native” anthropologist?. American anthropologist 95, 3 (1993): 671– 686, esp. 682.

18

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

curiosity, seeking answers or explanations, and to vent anger. If they were aware of the unequal power relation between us, they usually adopted more subtle strategies of dignity-defense, such as politely declining my dinner invitations or insisting on paying for me when we did dine together. In general, my status as a researcher/scholar seemed highly thought of by them and earned me a general respect. Such respect could also be felt among the retirees I typically called “uncle” or “aunt.” Many of them were eager to share their stories with me, not just because I was the “insider” they claimed to “have known since I was a baby,” but also because I, as a scholar living outside of China and hence also possibly outside of the now-predominant materialism of Chinese society, might be able to better understand them than the other “young people” inside the factory or the country, who always tended to ridicule their experience and beliefs. This of course doesn’t mean that my ethnographic research in NS always went smoothly. The feeling of awkwardness never really left me as refusals or avoidance happened from time to time with my research subjects. The most frustrating experience was my first visit to the enterprise archival office in 2007. One top-level manager known to me through a personal network had introduced me to the office, but the staff member there, a middle-aged woman, received me quite dryly. Though agreeing to give me access to the archives, she refused my access to all documents from 1995 to 2002, the most turbulent neoliberal period in Nanfang. When I asked for such access, she suddently burst out, [w]ho is the leader who introduced you? Why didn’t he dare to sign a note for you? Just a phone call! I am the person who has to take the responsibility afterwards! Those leaders! If there is any trouble, they can just blame everything on me! They can deny everything without a signed note! Such things always happened in Nanfang, you know! Now, you go back to them and ask them to write a guarantee note for me to assure that they will never fire or lay off me because of this! You know how hard it is to get a job outside for a middle-aged woman like me!

I left the office with my proverbial tail between my legs. Here, the staff worker was not just refusing me as an “outside intruder,” or challenging her “leader” or “leaders” as unscrupulous bosses; rather, she was refusing an entire system in which ordinary workers like her were easily victimized and discarded. Her caution was the weapon that could protect her from an abusive power potentially used against her in an unknown future; her anger and despair derived from a strong feeling of vulnerability. This was very similar to the observation made by James Ferguson in the Zambian Copperbelt where “despair, fear, panic; broken lives and shattered expectation; this was not what I had set out to look for,

Organization of the Study

19

but it was, like it or not, what I found,”⁴⁵ and such fear, anger, and insecurity is also everywhere in today’s NS. It was not what I had set out to look for but it was laid open to me – as a hybrid “insider” and “outsider” – in various forms and under varying situations. Carrying “both a personal and an ethnographic self,”⁴⁶ I hence conducted research in my hometown in the “inversing way” that Narayan self-reflectively described, by “absorb(ing) analytic categories that rename and reframe [those] already known” and those newly discovered.⁴⁷ In this process, I was able to look retrospectively and reexamine the whole process from an outsider’s analytical angle and link it to a longer historical thread, connecting various events, and embedding that within a larger, macro structural change. Such an inversing process is the approach proposed (not exclusively) by Cooper as “a willingness to change focus back and forth from the intimacy and complexity of relationships in specific places and their connections to distant places and long-term processes of change.”⁴⁸ In this process, the dichotomy between insider/outsider became blurred.

Organization of the Study As a historical sociology work, this book is organized chronologically. I divide the lifespan of my case into four stages: (1) the initial period from the mid1960s to the end of 1970s, the decade of migration and construction under socalled high socialism swayed by turbulent international geopolitics and uneven domestic state policies; (2) the earlier stage of reform during the 1980s, the decade of “crossing the river by touching the stones,” when the remnant socialist ideology became entangled with the impulse of profit-seeking and when workers were experiencing the end of austerity and a steady improvement of living standards; (3) the radical neoliberal stage starting from 1992 to 2002, the stormiest decade in NS history that swept away all of the previous institutions and threw workers into great turmoil; and (4) the post-neoliberal stage since 2003, when NS stumbled into another decade of “erosive deindustrialization” and became one of thousands of “zombie” factories lingering on the edge of their final death.  Ferguson, Expectation of Modernity, 18.  Edward M. Bruner, Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self. In Paul Benson (ed.). Anthropology and Literature. University of Illinois Press, 1993, 1– 26.  Narayan, How native, 671– 686, esp. 678.  Cooper, African Labor History, 94.

20

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

As the labor history described in this study spans approximately half a century, I also divide the workers into three generations: (1) the pioneering generation of workers now in their seventies and eighties who worked through the socialist period and retired before the 1990s; (2) the mid-generation now in their fifties and sixties who experienced the neoliberal reconstruction and were often forced into early-retirement in the 1990s; and (3) the younger generation now in their thirties and forties who are currently employed. All three have lived through the vicissitudes of history, each in their different yet still interconnected ways. Chapter One, “When the global meets the local: ‘Preparing against the war, preparing against the famine, and all for the people,’” investigates the initiation and implementation of the Third Front Construction (TFC) in the 1960s, the largest socialist industrialization project in China, and within which, my empirical case Nanfang Steel. I argue that this crucial historical development was neither an isolated nor a top-down totalitarian process as assumed by scholars such as James Scott⁴⁹ and Barry Naughton.⁵⁰ Instead, it was closely linked “outwardly” to the larger global structures at the time, such that its seemingly “autarkic” plan actually evolved as a response to the particular geopolitical circumstances prevailing in the 1960s. These included: China’s peripheral existence in the then world system, established Cold War structures and relations, an intensified military threat and pressure from the United States, the split with the Soviet Union, and constant frictions with other newly independent developing countries, especially in the Sino-India war. At the same time, it was also linked “inwardly” to national and local contexts in China as the TFC plan was negotiated within the Central government, translated unevenly into local realities, and implemented at the grassroots level in a very fraught and, to some extent, unexpected way. Its implementation at local sites, as revealed by historical archives of NS and oral histories from ist pioneering workers, never went smoothly, but typically dragged along, often laden with a variety of constraints and resistances. This in-depth examination moves the story beyond the abstract concepts of “socialism” or “plan,” reveals what really happened, and allows us to see a far more complicated and contingent historical process shaped by various factors. Chapter Two, “‘Building up a new world; Buying time against the imperialists’: Stories about migration and construction in the early stage,” reconstructs  James C Scott, Seeing like a State. How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998.  Barry Naughton, The Third Front. Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior. The China Quarterly 115 (1988): 351– 386.

Organization of the Study

21

the early labor history at NS, by juxtaposing and contrasting three different historical resources of official propaganda, archival materials, and workers’ oral testimonies. While the official discourses of the 1960s depict an imagined utopian story full of revolutionary passion and romanticism, the archival materials disclose a harsh era when the socialist state struggled to realize its modernization goals through mobilization, coercion, and exploitation. Pioneering workers’ testimonies enrich, as well as complicate, both stories, by providing lively and quotidian life stories of common people who sought to negotiate ways between ideology and reality, between passion and survival, and between past and present. By treating each narrative as one particular way of “telling stories” and forming the fabric of history, this chapter provides a multi-dimensional and “thick”⁵¹ understanding of the labor history in NS in its earliest stage. Comprehended in this way, the TFC, as an immense industrialization project implemented by the central state and endowed with a socialist and anti-imperialist ideology, is neither an idealized and holy modernization project constructed by devoted model socialist workers nor a merciless imposition of the state accomplished solely through terror and coercion. It emerges, rather, as a state-imposed modernization project, constructed by people out of their combined idealism, passion, fear, and self-interest. Chapter Three, “The long 1980s: ‘That was the best time we have ever had’” investigates the concrete reforming process of the 1980s – the earliest reforming stage – in NS. It portrays the working and living experiences of NS workers during this period in light of changing global geopolitics and economic structures – like the emergence of global capitalism, the decision for Reform and Openness advocated by Deng Xiaoping at a point of national crisis, and the cautious and ideologically bounded SOE reform centered largely centered on decentralization. All of these larger factors conditioned developments in NS. Meanwhile, local governments and enterprise management, grasping the new opportunities released by these reforms and pursuing their own – and sometimes the community’s – various interests played very active roles. The results at NS are far from any imagined “natural” development of “growing out of the plan,”⁵² but reflect the consequences of a very contextualized “politics of calculation”⁵³ at different times and under varying conditions.

 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture. NY: Basic Books 1973.  Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan.  Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 10.

22

Introduction. Lumpy State, Politicized Market, and Vicissitudinous Labor History

Out of these “politics of calculation” there evolved a temporary collaboration between management and workers that was based on some common interests, though not without conflicts. Historical archives, enterprise documents, reports, documentaries, internal publications, and interviews with workers from different backgrounds together reveal a friction-laden, yet paternalistic labor regime on the shop floor, and a prosperous and bustling industrial community that slowly replaced the earlier stoic and peaceful one. Along with these there also developed an informal and pragmatic, yet at the same time very active and efficient, labor resistance movement organized largely by NS pensioners. For many NS workers, this was the “golden age” of their working lives. Chapter Four, “The ‘restructuring movement’ and the Great Turbulence: 1992–-2002,” explores the radical neo-liberalist reform imposed on NS during this period and its consequences. The end of Cold War with the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the speeding up of globalization, all made for highly turbulent years from the end of the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s that signaled a significant turning point in the world as well as in China. The Chinese central government responded to these changes by displaying a more determined embrace of the new global economic structure and adopting a more radical agenda of reform. This was the decade of “neoliberalism” in China when numerous state enterprises were bankrupted, privatized, or streamlined. Yet, such “neoliberalism” had little to do with the “invisible hand” of the market, but was largely imposed by the “visible hand” of the state. Hence this chapter in particular re-politicizes the radical but ideologically de-politicized neoliberal reform process in NS from the early 1990s to the early 2000s. It reveals how various radical reforming agendas were imposed by the state onto the factory, in highly lumpy, arbitrary, inexperienced, and improvised ways. Yet at the same time, these were also largely based on the very practical interest considerations and calculations of people in power. Referred to by both managers and workers as “political movements,” these measures smashed workers’ beliefs in endless progress established in the earlier decade, threw their lives into tur,oil, uncertainty, and poverty, and destroyed once prosperous and consolidated working-class communities. It was a game of the haves against the have-nots, in the name of the market. Chapter Five, “Living in the ‘zombie factory’: Post-neoliberalism, erosive deindustrialization, and the institutionalized subaltern,” explores the working and living experiences of NS workers in the post-reform era of “erosive deindustrialization.” As a response both to China’s entering the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 and widespread labor unrest since the mid-1990s, the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) was established in 2003,

Organization of the Study

23

and radical neoliberal reform ceased at the remaining SOEs. NS thus escaped bankruptcy but only to enter into another decade of “erosive deindustrialization.” In the aftermath of the turbulent neoliberal “movements” there emerged an alienated, despotic, and cynical labor process on the shop floor, a ghettoized and shrinking working-class community, and widespread poverty and precariousness. Responding to such general degradation, NS pensioners organized the largest and most militant, yet ultimately unsuccessful, labor unrest from 2002 to 2006. Importantly, the currently employed younger workers never organized a single collective action. Instead, they adopted pragmatic and hidden forms of “everyday resistance” beneath an ostensible resignation, which disempowered instead of empowered them. All of this helped to generate a new working-class cultural identity beset with stigma, shame, and pain, which together with the on-going economic degradation signaled the workers’ irreversible slide into a subaltern identity within a perpetuated, class-divided social reality at NS, as well as all across contemporary China. The epilogue, “A Chinese New Deal or the neoliberal hegemony?,” starts with my most recent visit to NS in 2016, right after another huge layoff occurred there. Different from the first radical neoliberal action two decades previously in 1997 that caused sharp pain, confusion, and anger, this time the layoff prompted little disruption. Many workers, as well as some managers, in fact voluntarily left the factory. This contrast with the past is far-reaching. Rather than verifying some scholar’s assumption of a New Deal arising in China, it instead signals the establishment of a neoliberal hegemony that safeguards an ongoing dissolution of the old category of proletarian working class and its replacement with a new labor landscape in contemporary China.

1 When the Global Meets the Local: “Preparing Against the War, Preparing Against the Famine, And All for the People” We must pay close attention to Third Front construction: it’s a way of buying time against the imperialists, against the revisionists … In Third Front Construction, we have begun to build steel, armaments, machinery, chemicals, petroleum and railroad base areas, so that if war breaks out we have nothing to fear. – Mao Zedong I found seeing so many people marooned in these artificial encampments up in the hills troubling, even a little frightening. There was something grotesque about them being stranded up in these god-forsaken places. It made me feel nervous, jumpy, and almost a little guilty when we left the factory. Why were they there? – Tim Clissold, author of Mr. China

Mr. China, a popular biography written by Tim Clissold in 2006, tells the story of how Clissold – our Mr. China, a formerly penniless English young man, gains his fortune and climbs up to a higher social-economic status by catching the train of “China’s miracle.” It was during this “gold-digging” journey (he was sent by a bank on Wall Street to China’s inland to find investment opportunities in the early 1990s, the period when “foreign investment” was regarded as the locomotive of economic openness and development) that Clissold encountered one of the Third-Front sites and uttered the emotional remarks cited above: finding what he saw troubling, frightening, grotesque, and himself stranded, nervous, jumpy, and “almost a little guilty.”¹ Despite his dramatized fragility and innocent ignorance, our Mr. China did rightly grasp the sense of uneasiness of outsiders upon their first glimpse of these “monstrous” “artificial encampments” scattered within the spawning mountainous inner land of China. These “unnatural” “encampments” that are obviously parts of China’s “socialist heritage” must “naturally” remind most liberal and modern viewers of that seemingly irrational and totalitarian era and hence conveniently help them set up the linkage. Barry Naughton, for instance, unequivocally claims that the Third Front Construction merely originated from a xenophobic impulse by a totalitarian socialist government, and had hence caused more far-reaching negative impact on the Chinese economy than even the disruption caused by the Cultural Revolution.² James Scott, in his book, See-

 Tim Clissold, Mr. China. A Memoir. Harper Collins 2006.  Naughton, The Third Front. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-003

1 When the Global Meets the Local

25

ing Like a State, applies such a convenient linkage to a larger scope, especially to those states of “poorer third world nations and Eastern Europe,” who always imposed huge modernization projects upon their societies. These top-down “authoritarian high modernism” efforts, Scott claims, only brought failures and disasters to these societies.³ Beneath such seemingly self-evident linkages and assertions, however, two flaws throw into question these arguments’ plausibility. First, by limiting their analyses solely within national boundaries, both Scott and Naughton missed or deliberately downplayed the larger global structural constraints within which state-oriented projects like the TFC were locked. In other words, both authors seek to dis-embed national developmental policies and their modernization projects from the larger context of the global power structure and to treat them simply as a result of isolated whims by totalitarian leaders. Second, by assuming the predominant role of the central state, they also ignored the divergent, vested, and entangled interests of different social groups in the grassroots, as well as their correspondingly strategic reactions towards and counter-influences upon these state-planned industrialization projects. Just as Cooper observed, “[t]he simplifying logic of high modernism, in each of Scott’s cases, turns out to be anything but simplifying, not so much because of resistance as because the supposedly modern apparatus of rule was itself laced through with particularistic mechanisms.”⁴ In general, by ignoring these important dimensions, scholars like Scott and Naughton hence tend to reconstruct a quite reductive and caricatured history (histories) of the others. Challenging such a tendency, this chapter reveals a much more multifaceted history of the Third Front Construction during its initiation process in the 1960s in order to answer Mr. China’s anxious question “Why were they there?” It examines the complex power struggles involving different political and social forces at various levels. These include the particularly turbulent global geopolitics faced by China in the 1960s, the continuously contested responses made by the central government under the slogan “Preparing against the war, preparing against the famine, and all for the people,” and the generalized skepticism and resistance from local governments and peasants. I hence argue that the initiation and implementation of the TFC in the 1960s was neither an isolated nor a top-down totalitarian process. Instead, it was closely linked “outwardly” to the larger global structures surrounding it such that its seemingly autarkic plan actually evolved as a response to geopolitical cir-

 Scott, Seeing Like a State.  Cooper, Colonialism in Question, 141.

26

1 When the Global Meets the Local

cumstances prevailing in the 1960s. At the same time, it was also linked “inwardly” to the local contexts in China as the plan was translated into reality and implemented at the grassroots level in a very fraught and, to some extent, unexpected way. As Katherine Lebow argues in her study of the social and cultural history of Nowa Huta in Poland, planning could be “far from [a] robust process and … subject to a host of forces that can easily derail the realization of planners’ visions.”⁵ A similar dynamic became visible in the case of the TFC as well. Its implementation at local sites never went smoothly, but typically dragged along, often laden with a variety of constraints and resistances. All this unevenness and hesitance, on the other hand, effectively slowed down the speed of this industrialization movement and to some extent helped to avoid the great social destruction that it might have caused just as the previous fervent “Great Forward Movement” had done. Both the abovementioned arguments are nothing totally new. Many scholars, as I will discuss later in this chapter, have illustrated how the larger global power structures conditioned the possible developmental paths of the former socialist countries. Jozsef Borocz, for example, in one of his studies, highlights the historical relationship between state socialism and global capitalism by examining how “the fact of those states’ embeddedness in the capitalist world-system affected their histories, and what effect their presence exerted, in turn, on the capitalist world-system.”⁶ Likewise, the disruptive roles played by grassroots actors including both local states and common people against the imagined “totalitarian” plan of the socialist central state have also been widely recognized.⁷ The profound historical examination of the initiation and implementation of the TFC provided by this chapter reinforces and enriches these earlier studies by contributing to a collective effort of portraying more fully textured histories of socialist societies as various forms of really existing socialism. To a great extent, such reinforcement and enrichment is necessary and even crucial as a constant reminder of the need for a more reflective and complex understanding of history

 Katherine, Unfinished Utopia, 16.  József Böröcz, The European Union and Global Social Change. A Critical Geopolitical-economic Analysis. Routledge 2009,  Among many, see, for example, Jean Chun Oi, The Evolution of Local State Corporatism. In Andrew Walder (ed.). Zouping in Transition. The Process of Reform in Rural North China. Harvard University Press, 1998, 35 – 61; Shaoguang Wang, The Limits of Decentralization. Beijing 1997; Shaoguang Wang, The Rise of the Regions. Fiscal Reform and the Decline of Central State Capacity in China. In Andrew Walder (ed.). The Waning of the Communist State. Economic Origins of Political Decline in China and Hungary. University of California Press, 1995.

The Global Geopolitical Constraints Of Development

27

that moves beyond the predominant yet oversimplified imagining of totalitarianism.

The Global Geopolitical Constraints of Development: “Preparing Against the War” Since entering the modern world-system in 1949 as a newly independent modern nation-state, China has been embedded in a global power structure full of partitions, inequalities, discrimination, and hostilities. These include, the pre-determined core-periphery world system exemplified by the division of the world into “developed” and “underdeveloped” groups associated with Harry Truman’s 1949 inaugural speech, the entrenched Cold War fronts of the United States and the Soviet Union respectively, the power struggles and ideological conflicts within the socialist camp, and the border clashes among the newly independent Third World countries left behind by colonialism and imperialist interventions. Once World War Two officially ended, the world remained far from peaceful. While the imperialist powers were busily setting rules for others based on their own interests, newly-formed nation-states were anxious to find or fight for niches within this world-system. Blockades, embargoes, invasions, partitions, and boundary frictions composed a crucial part of the turbulent post-war world.⁸ In the most general sense, the three factors of being a socialist, peripheral, and colored nation-state within a wider capitalist, hierarchical, and racial world system largely conditioned the national building and modernization strategies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). First, as a socialist country, and like many other socialist or formerly socialist countries, China stood constantly under the threat not only of outright military hostilities but also of economic embargoes or blockades from the “Capitalist World”; a circumstance paid for by an “adversary” ideology.⁹ Second, as a peripheral country, China also had the feature of “third-world-ness” that differentiated it from other “semi-peripheral” socialist countries – a dimension typically shared with many other “underdeveloped countries” after gaining independence. Such “third-world-ness,” as Arif Dirlik points out, implies that the problem of modernism presents itself to these coun-

 Charles L. Robertson, International Politics Since World War II: A Short History. ME Sharpe 1997.  For the effects of embeddedness within a capitalist world-system for socialist and other former socialist countries, see Borocz, The European Union, chapter 3.

28

1 When the Global Meets the Local

tries not only as a problem of how “to get a grip on the modern world and make themselves at home in it,” but also as a problem of “how to gain admission and feel at home as an autonomous subject in a world that had already been claimed as home by someone else.”¹⁰ Third, China as a colored country also conditioned its position in the world system. Despite a persistent avoidance of the factor of race in International Relations Studies – especially after World War Two when racism within Europe itself had created one of the greatest disasters for human society, and when widespread independence had become inevitable among the previously colonialized and “colored” “third-world” countries – nonetheless, racial and racist factors, as Paul Gordon Lauren noted, “have profoundly influenced global politics, diplomacy, and discrimination.”¹¹ In the case of China, Gong H. Chang, a prominent historian, demonstrates through his intensive government archival research a persistent racialist attitude toward the PRC since the very beginning of its independence in the diplomatic policies and remarks not only of the United States but also the USSR – supposedly the socialist “big brother” of the PRC.¹² All of these structural constraints defined the particular embeddedness of socialist China in the post-war capitalist world-system. Still, initially, China did not intentionally choose its ‘isolation’¹³ from the West. Chang reveals that as early as 1949, as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) approached its victory and for some time thereafter, its leadership publicly announced its interest in establishing trade and diplomatic relationships with all other countries, including those in the West.¹⁴ Only after this offer was consistently refused or ignored, especially by the United States,¹⁵ did China’s developmental policy become more

 Arif Dirlik, Marxism in the Chinese Revolution. Rowman & Littlefield 2005, 114. About the “third-world-ness”, also see Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World. The New Press, 2008.  Paul Gordon Lauren, Power and Prejudice. The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination. Westview Press, 1996, 4.  Gordon H. Chang, Friends and Enemies. The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948 – 1972. Stanford University Press, 1990, 170 – 174.  The quotation marks around “isolation” here underscores the fact that China was never “isolated” in an absolute sense. Even during this period when China found itself in a triangular adversarial relationship with the US and the USSR, it persistently maneuvered within a not-sofriendly global hegemonic system and actively sought different kinds of cooperation not only with so-called “intermediate” countries in the second and third worlds but also with some Western European countries, albeit under strong constraints. For an analysis of such efforts, see Alaba Ogunsanwo, China’s Policy in Africa, 1958 – 71. Cambridge University Press, 2010.  Chang, Friends and Enemies.  Ibid.

The Global Geopolitical Constraints Of Development

29

and more defensive and to some extent, autarkic. Mao Zedong, who always kept a skeptical eye on the imperialist powers, was then made to believe that “self-reliance at the local and national level was essential to break down the hegemony over China of the capitalist world economy.”¹⁶ Certainly, such “self-reliance” thought and policy were not unique in Socialist China. Before the 1980s, many countries in the Global South were actively pursuing the so-called import substitution industrialization policies via the creation of a domestic market with the intention of generating development and self-sufficiency. In China, such an autarkic mode of development reached its zenith during the era of the TFC in the 1960s, as its international geopolitical environment deteriorated.

The Split from the Soviet Union in the 1960s The socialist bloc was never a real “bloc.” From the mid-1950s to the early 1960s, conflicts within this “bloc” increased and intensified.¹⁷ The great-power chauvinism and internal colonialism that the Soviet Union adopted against other socialist countries aroused discontent and resistance in many places, including Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, and then China. The ideological and theoretical disagreements between China and the Soviet Union soon turned into national conflicts and confrontations, culminating finally with a complete split in 1966. From the beginning of its founding, socialist China had intended to form an internationally united front with the Soviet Union and other socialist countries against the West, in order to safeguard new China’s still-fragile prospects for survival. Soon after the establishment of the People’s Republic, Mao traveled to Moscow to discuss the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance. According to this agreement, the Soviet Union could continue using the naval base at Luda, Liaoning Province, while importing rubber, tungsten, aluminum and other raw materials from China at a lower-than–international-market price; in return, the Soviet Union would provide China military support, weapons, and large amounts of economic and technological assistance, including technical advisers and machineries.¹⁸ Mao’s subsequent decision to send troops to Korea during the Korean War found considerable favor with the

 Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, Politics, Scholarship and Chinese Socialism. In Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner (ed.). Marxism and the Chinese Experience. M. E. Sharpe 1989, 30.  Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1967.  Jianzhang Pei, The Diplomatic History of the People’s Republic of China (1949 – 1956). World Knowledge Publisher 1994, 40 – 41. (裴坚章：中华人民共和国外交史（1949 – 1956）北京：世界 知识出版社1994, 40 – 41。)

30

1 When the Global Meets the Local

Soviets and further intensified the collaboration.¹⁹ During this early period in the 1950s, China became quite dependent on the Soviet Union: by acceding to the Soviet leadership in the world communist movement, China passionately embraced and emulated the development models of its “big Soviet brother.”²⁰ In the second half of the 1950s, however, stresses in the Sino-Soviet alliance began to emerge over questions of ideology, security, and economic development. According to official claims made by the CCP, as well as by some foreign observers, the disagreement stemmed from two decisions made at the twentieth National Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, announcing de-Stalinization and a peaceful coexistence with the West.²¹ These decisions brought great shock and confusion to China and other socialist countries. They also, to a large extent, helped to form an at least temporary rapprochement between the two superpowers (the USSR and the USA) and diverted the USA’s main target from the USSR to the PRC for a short period within the 1960s,²² as explored further in the next section. In response, China began to reexamine and question the Soviet model of development in an effort to identify a more “Chinese” but also more radical way to meet the fulfillment of modernization and communism. The subsequent “Great Leap Forward” movement from 1958 to 1960 exemplifies this thinking. At the same time in 1958, without giving the Soviets any advance notice, China unilaterally began a campaign to bombard Jinmen, triggering the second “Taiwan Strait Crisis.” Scholars suggest that, by this action, Mao meant to send a strong message to Moscow that China was an independent state with the ability to handle its own internal affairs.²³ All of this irritated Nikita Khrushchev to a great extent.²⁴

 Zhigua Shen, The Influence of the Soviet Union in the Korean War. Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (2002): 28 – 39. (沈志华, 抗美援朝战争中的苏联因素，当代中国史研究， 2002，第二期)  The term of “big Soviet brother” was used frequently in the Chinese mass media before the Sino-Soviet conflict in the 1960s.  The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, The Dispute around the General Line of the International Communism Movement. The People’s Publisher 1965, 55 – 56. (《关 于国际共产主义运动总路线的论战》，北京：人民出版社); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict. Harvard University Press, 1967; Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton University Press, 2010.  Chang, Friends and Enemies.  Zhikai Don, The Thoughts of Mao Zedong Regarding the Reform of Economic Management in the Period of the Eighth Congress, in Contemporary Chinese History Research 1 (1994): 15 – 22 (董 志凯, “毛泽东在‘八大’前后改革经济管理体制的设想”,《当代中国史研究》); Zhen Wang, The Breakthrough of the Soviet Model during the 1950s”. Contemporary Chinese History Research 2

The Global Geopolitical Constraints Of Development

31

Up to the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute deepened and spread to territorial issues. Boundary disputes came into open in 1963 when China explicitly raised the issue of territory lost through unequal treaties with tsarist Russia during its subjugated period.²⁵ After unsuccessful border consultations in 1964, Moscow began to strengthen its military presence along the border with China and Mongolia. In response, the Chinese Communist Party in 1966 declared it would break ties completely with the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This split significantly changed the then international power configuration and had a far-reaching influence upon its future development. More immediately, it greatly jeopardized the survival of socialist China in the post-war world system: like it or not, China had to operate and make decisions within the prevailing Cold War framework, even without any other superpower to count on.

The Threat from the US and the Temporary Rapprochement Between the US and USSR In the early 1960s, the United States’ blockade of and confrontation with China escalated when the former became more deeply involved in the Vietnam War. Following the Gulf of Tonkin “incident” in August 1964, the US Congress passed a resolution granting President Lyndon Johnson the authority to assist any Southeast Asian country whose government was considered to be jeopardized by “communist aggression.” This resolution provided Johnson’s administration

(1995): 15 – 24 (王真, “５０年代中期我国对苏联建设模式的突破”, 《当代中国史研究》); Heming Xing, The Changing Attitude of the CCP toward the Soviet Model in 1956, in Resources of CCP’s History 12 (2002): 30 – 37 (刑和明, “１９５６年中共对苏联模式认识的转变及启示”,《党 史研究资料》); Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Soviet bloc, unity and conflict. Harvard University Press, 1967, 271– 308.  Chaowu Dai, The Era of Hostility and Crisis–The Sino-US Relations from 1954 to 1958. The Social Science Documents Press, 2003. (戴超武，敌对与危机的年代――― 1954~1958 年的中美 关系，北京：社会科学文献出版社); Jian Chen, Mao’s China and the Cold War. The University of North Carolina Press, 2001, 179; Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War. America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949 – 1963. Stanford University Press, 2001, 210; M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation. Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes. Princeton University Press, 2008, 173 – 219.  This refers to the treaties of Aigun and Peking that China was forced to sign with Russia in the 1860s. By it, China lost a great tract of territory in Central Asia, ceding to Russia everything north of the Amur River and east of its tributary, effectively cutting off China from the Sea of Japan.

32

1 When the Global Meets the Local

with legal justification for escalating US involvement in the Vietnam War.²⁶ Following the resolution, some US commentators declared that during this war, the government should not allow the existence of any communist “shelter” – in the way that northeast China had served during the Korean War – and that the United States would “hunt down” all enemies to the very last no matter what the cost. In 1965, the Johnson administration sent troops continuously to Đà Nẵng Bay – 35,000 during the month of March alone and another 45,000 to 50,000 by the following summer. As Lorenz Luthi argued, these military operations posed a significant threat to the security of the PRC and aroused great anxieties in the Chinese government,²⁷ who suspected that US ambition went far beyond Vietnam.²⁸ Also during this decade, as mentioned above, the United States began to regard China rather than the Soviet Union as the most urgent threat and thus took up an at least temporary rapprochement with the Soviet Union in order to contain China.²⁹ In addition to Khrushchev’s signal for peaceful coexistence, another reason for this shift in US attention hinged on the desire to prevent China from becoming another nuclear power. China’s successful nuclear tests in 1964 worried both the United States and Soviet Union to such an extent that a joint US-Soviet preemptive nuclear attack on China was discussed between the two countries.³⁰ While such an action was not ultimately pursued, China nevertheless sensed the danger.

 Scott Shane, Vietnam Study, Casting Doubts, Remains Secret (31. Oct. 2005). The New York Times. URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/31/politics/31war.html?_r=1 (3, May. 2008).  Lorenz Luthi, The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964– 1966, in Journal of Cold War Studies 10:1 (2008): 26 – 51.  Donglin Chen, From ‘the Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities’ to ‘Preparing the War’. The Changing Process of the Third-Fifth Thoughts, in Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (1997): 65 – 75 (陈东林，“从‘吃穿用计划’到‘战备计划’—‘三五’计划指导思想的转变过程”, 《当代 中国史研究》); Luthi, The Vietnam War, 26 – 51.  Chang, Friends and Enemies.  Jim Mann, U.S. Considered ’64 Bombing to Keep China Nuclear-Free (27. Sep. 1998). Los Angeles Times. URL: http://articles.latimes.com/1998/sep/27/news/mn-26986 (4, May, 2018); Zhengjia Zhang and Chen Wang, Nuclear Explosion in the United States and China. Contemporary Chinese History Research 3 (1999): 28 – 34 (张振江，王琛，“美国和中国核爆炸”，《当代中国史研 究》).

The Global Geopolitical Constraints Of Development

33

The Sino-India War in 1962 There were not just conflicts with the two superpowers. Earlier, in 1962, China and India clashed along the Himalayan border. Neville Maxwell describes this war as the biggest drama in the history of mid-twentieth-century international relations: “It saw the world’s two most populous states, Asia’s great new republics, which had seemed to be set on a path of amicable co-operation in spite of their opposed political characters, fall out over tracts of desolate, difficult and useless territory, and ultimately fight a short, fierce border war.”³¹ Underlying this clash rested a dilemma confronted by many Third World countries upon entering the global structure as newly independent and modern nation-states, with their colonial or semi-colonial legacies only just behind them: how to accommodate these legacies to their own national interests. The particular conflict between China and India evolved out of a dispute regarding the borderline. Historically, China and India had shared quite similar “traditional” perceptions and logics of territory, as Maxwell describes it: “a sovereignty that shaded off into no-man’s-land, giving a frontier of separation rather than contact, was both familiar and more natural.”³² Yet, similar with Thongchai Winichak’s story of the “mapped Siam,”³³ such mutual yet implicitly traditional perceptions of “borders” was persistently challenged by the imported modern conceptions of a border and the nation-state, and was regarded as “uncertain” and “vague” by the occupying British colonial powers in India. Motivated by their own interests, the British colonial powers then leveraged such uncertainty and vagueness as an excuse to demarcate the borderlines for these “traditional” countries: they hence produced the McMahon Line at the border area between China and India, with an aim to place under British rule major parts of the barren regions of the high altitude Himalayas. When the British finally withdrew from India, they left behind the McMahon Line – a colonial legacy that later led directly to the border clash between China and India.³⁴ The Sino-India war in 1962 inflicted a heavy blow on both countries. Nobody really won. Hostility with China brought down the whole arch of Nehru’s policies,³⁵ while war with India only served to further isolate socialist China interna-

 Neville Maxwell, India’s China War Jonathan Cape 1970, 11.  Ibid. 21.  Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. University of Hawaii Press, 1997.  M. Taylor Fravel, Strong Borders, Secure Nation. Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes. Princeton University Press, 2008, 173 – 219; Maxwell, India’s China War, 11.  Maxwell, India’s China War, 11.

34

1 When the Global Meets the Local

tionally. Moreover, it also greatly impeded the nonaligned movement by breaking up the utopian imagination for a solid Third World, an image that Mao and Nehru had both striven to create as a way to survive in the shadow of two superpowers. These several geopolitical threats that socialist China faced in the 1960s exemplify the dilemmas that China, as a newly independent modern nation-state on the one hand and a poor yet ambitious Third World socialist country on the other, had to confront in the turbulent post-war world. Such an analysis, of course, does not aim to position China as a passive and innocent victim; multiple historical archives and studies reveal the active, and even sometimes aggressive, involvement of the Chinese government into various international issues during this period.³⁶ At the same time, however, to ignore or downplay the hegemonic postwar global structure and the peripheral status of the PRC within that structure would mischaracterize the situation as well. This wider capitalist, hierarchical, and racial world system, in place at the time along with a prevailing Cold War context, thus acted as constraints on the developmental framework of the PRC from its founding. It is this general global structure and the specific historical and geopolitical conjunctures in the 1960s that Naughton and most contemporary scholars tend to ignore or downplay when they calculate the costs or losses of the TFC.³⁷ Yet in the 1960s, the threats faced by China were tangible – to a great extent, they conditioned the framework of available options, and made the plan of the TFC, if not inevitable, then at least reasonable. On the other hand, given the frail national economy and the scarcity of state revenue at the time, this immense project did raise doubts and debate among upper-level officials within the Chinese central government. It also met, from its very outset, with various forms of resistance from local grassroots governments and peasants. Though these oppositions could not prevent the implementation of the TFC under Mao Zedong’s determination, it did serve to avoid or mitigate the most destructive aspects of radical industrialization and make the advance of the TFC more cautious, conservative, if also sometimes more “inefficient.”

 Denny Roy, China’s Foreign Relations. Rowman & Littlefield 1998; Peter Van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy. Peking’s Support for Wars of National Liberation. University of California Press, 1970.  Naughton, The Third Front; John Frankenstein and Bates Gill, Current and Future Challenges Facing Chinese Defence Industries. The China Quarterly 146 (1996): 394– 427; Huang Zhipei, Discussing Some Problems in the Construction of Industry in Inland Areas. Economic Management 5 (1979): 14– 15.

National Negotiation

35

National Negotiation: From “The Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities” to Third Front Construction The construction of the Third Front started in 1964. By that time, China had only just slowly recovered from the disastrous “Great Leap Forward” – the ambitious yet failed socialist experiment of modernization from 1958 to 1960 that caused the starvation of millions of people. The disaster had forced Mao to slow his feverish march towards communism, the destination of modernity in the Marxist imagination. Fulfilling the basic needs of the population then became the most urgent task for the government. On January 1961, during the ninth Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee, the participants passed a general policy of “readjusting, restructuring, consolidating and improving.” In the following central working conference, the central committee issued “The Instructions towards the Problems of Current Industry,” pointing out that readjustment and recovery were to be the main economic focus of the following three years, aiming to substantially cut the planned industrialization projects.³⁸ During the same year, the Central Planning Leading Committee (CPLC) put forward “The Initial Proposal for the Third Five-Year-Plan (1966 – 1970),” reconfirming the central government’s major focus of developing agriculture and meeting people’s basic living needs during that period, with national defense development and basic industry as second and third priorities, respectively. This proposal was hence called “The Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities.” This readjustment policy gradually achieved its aim: between 1961 and 1966, agricultural output grew at an average rate of 9.6 percent a year; the domestic economy slowly recovered; economic stability was restored.³⁹ Meanwhile, almost during the same period, external threats and pressures against China, as detailed in the previous section, also intensified. By 1964, as conflicts between the PRC and the USSR escalated to the brink of military action and the further involvement of the United States in the Vietnam War became inevitable, the War Planning Office of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) sent an urgent report to Mao Zedong on 25 April. The report highlighted the deteriorating international environment and delineated several fatal weaknesses in China’s defensive industry structure, especially the overconcentration on and vulnerabilities of industry and transportation hubs in border areas and coastal provinces. Accordingly, the report proposed relocating those strategically important indus-

 Baohua Yuan, The Painful Adjustment of the National Economy. Contemporary China History Studies 1 (2002): 6 – 17 (袁宝华，“对国民经济的艰苦调整”，《当代中国史研究》，2002, 1).  Ibid.

36

1 When the Global Meets the Local

trial and military assets to China’s heartland.⁴⁰ The report obviously confirmed Mao Zedong’s recurring anxiety about the PRC’s international security. Soon afterward, in a speech at the central working conference, Mao raised and then emphasized the necessity of war preparation and required a replacement of the original Third Five-Year-Plan – the “Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities” with the proposal of Third Front Construction. Disagreements ensued immediately and intense debates occurred among upper-level officials.⁴¹ Responding to these disagreements, Mao then managed to establish another new leading committee, the so-called Little Central Planning Leading Committee (LCPLC), which would be in charge of the Third Front Construction autonomously. This arbitrary decision, which effectively dismembered the original CPLC, forcefully substituted the previous Third Five-Year-Plan of “Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities” with the plan of “Preparation against the War” – the major goal of the Third Front Construction.⁴² The other two guidelines of the Construction, “Preparation against the Famine” and “All for the People,” would come later, partly as gestures of compromise toward the opponents and partly as an effort to keep a balance between defensive industrial expansion and agricultural stability in order to avoid another radical and tragic “Great Leap Forward.” In some respects, this balance was achieved; at least, a disaster similar to the last movement was not repeated, and historical material shows that the economic performance in both agriculture and industry that followed (except during the high tide of the Cultural Revolution of 1967– 1969) was at least acceptable.⁴³ Such achievement was certainly due to a more cautious approach adopted by the central government; but it was also due to counterbalancing forces from the local rank and file, which I will turn to now.

 Donglin Chen, From ‘the Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities’.  Jiaming Yin, Stories Behind the Red Wall I: Turbulent Experiences of the PRC. Beijing: Contemporary China Press, 2010 (尹家民,《红墙知情录一：新中国的风雨历程》当代中国出版社); Donglin Chen, Differences and Disagreement within the Decision Process of the Third Front Construction in 1964. Century China, March 15 2002 (陈东林,”1964年三线建设决策中的分歧”, 《世 纪中国》).  Bo Yibo, Ruogan Zhongda Jueceyu Shijian de Huigu (Reminiscences on Several Important Decisions and Events), People’s Press, 1997, 1207 (薄一波，《若干重大决策与事件的回顾》下卷， 人民出版社).  Dexing Zhao, The Economic History of The People’s Republic of China, 1966 – 1976. Henan People’s Press, 1989 (赵德馨,《中华人民共和国经济史，第三卷》, 河南人民出版社).

“It Was Not an Easy Job”: Struggles, Resistance, and Turbulence

37

“It Was Not an Easy Job”: Struggles, Resistance, and Turbulence Once the decision concerning the Third Front Construction was finally made, it soon became the major national task. Mao Zedong then divided China into three “fronts.” The First Front consisted of the coastal and borderland regions of China, which included Beijing, Shanghai,Tianjing, Liaoning, Helongjiang, Jilin, Xinjiang, Neimenggu, Shangdong, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, etc. Due to its geographical location, the First Front could be easily attacked and was thus the most vulnerable region during a possible war. The Third Front referred to most of the interior land of China, including all of the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia, a portion of Shanxi, and the western, mountainous portions of Henan, Hubei and Hunan. The Second Front included the areas between the First and Third Fronts and served primarily as a buffer zone between the two (see Figure 1). The objective of Third Front Construction (TFC) was to create an entire industrial system within this naturally remote and strategically secure region. The Front was to serve as a large-scale industrial network, linking the entire interior area through major transport and industrial facilities. The thinking behind this initiative was that if war was to erupt and the First and Second fronts were attacked, China would still have a solid interior area to rely on.

38

1 When the Global Meets the Local

Fig. : The Third Front area (darker part).⁴⁴

During the Third Five-Year-Plan (1966 – 1970), investment in the Third Front constituted 52.7 percent of total government investment; during the Fourth Five-Year-Plan (1971– 1975), this proportion dropped slightly but still consumed 41.1 percent.⁴⁵ Total investment during these ten years amounted to approximately 117.342 billion Yuan.⁴⁶ Considering the scarce state capital accumulation by then, this is indeed a huge amount. Numerous Third-Front enterprises were established, accompanied by the growth of fully functioning industrial communities, sometimes even cities, around them. Penetrating deeply into the inner land of China, this enormous project permanently changed the economic structure of the country. In spite all of this, however, the manner in which this grand state plan was implemented in the local reality would be another story. In his 1976 film The Scar, Krzysztof Kieslowski illustrates a divisive confrontation between industrial-

 Donglin Chen and Jiagang Chen, The Third-Front Construction: the Closest Industrial Heritage. Chinese National Geography 6 (2006): 99. (陈东林，陈家钢，“三线建设：离我们最近的工 业遗产”，中国国家地理).  Chen, From ‘the plan of food, clothing and daily necessities’.  Ibid.

“It Was Not an Easy Job”: Struggles, Resistance, and Turbulence

39

ization and society/community in socialist Poland. A great chemical factory, one of Poland’s largest, was built up in Olecko, a peaceful yet poor town. It was claimed that the factory would produce 32,000 tons of nitrates annually for agricultural use and bring jobs and prosperity to the area. But from the outset the director of the factory, an enthusiastic developer, had to confront all of the dilemmas and destruction the factory brought to the local society: a 200-yearold forest was cut down; people’s houses were flattened; normal lives were interrupted; and even factories betrayed their original promise of jobs. As the script itself notes, “everything people worked upon for their old age [is] destroyed.” When the bureaucrats, including the director, called upon the local people to consider the “wider issue of development” and referred to the concerns of townsmen as “personal,” “trivial,” and “lacking perspective,” one old man shouted out, “[y]ou can’t solve the social problems by just sticking slogans all over the town.” Similar dilemmas and resistance also arose during the construction process of the TFC. As an immense project covering a huge area, the TFC progressed from its inception through very uneven development from place to place, depending on a myriad of local factors. In the sections below, I combine the archival materials regarding the general history of the TFC and the specific internal archival materials of Nanfang Steel to reveal a highly contested, hesitant, and even chaotic beginning.

Resistance from the Local Governments and Peasants Even though modernization through industrialization was a national goal, the impact of industrialization on the local society could be double-edged. When the TFC was initiated in the mid-1960s, the terror of the preceding Great Leap Forward still haunted the whole society and was felt more deeply and directly by the local rank and file. Industry’s absolute precedence over agriculture during the former movement had been paid for with millions of people’s lives. Now, sheer survival, rather than industrialization, was the most urgent task for local officials. Another industrial campaign so soon afterwards worried them. For Nanfang Steel, the decision to locate it in Sichuan province in 1964 encountered from the very beginning a fair amount of opposition from the then Southwest Bureau and the Sichuan government. In one of their reports to the central government, the Southwest Bureau and the Sichuan government gave several reasons to justify their opposition, which included: energy shortages of electricity, gas, and water; possible over-industrialization; overloaded transportation capacities

40

1 When the Global Meets the Local

in the future.⁴⁷ Unlike Mao Zedong, pragmatic local officials were often greatly skeptical of the “bright future” promised by industrial development; instead, they worried more about the dilemmas that might result. Could the limited natural resources in their jurisdiction, for instance, be sustainable for such a huge industrial project, since it would definitely and indefinitely consume most of those resources? What sorts of sacrifices or “support” would the localities have to make for this administratively central enterprise? Maybe because the tragic memory of last movement was too painful, this time local officials’ economic calculation seemed to precede their concerns of being politically “correct” that had always been required by the higher authorities. Resistance from the local governments proved so strong that even the central government didn’t push too hard – instead, it left the battlefield to the local governments and the preparation committee of Nanfang Steel (NS) that was in charge of the Metallurgic Ministry. After numerous discussions, calculations, and back-and-forth negotiations, more than one year later the local governments finally gave their approval. This approval, quite interestingly and meaningfully, was most likely achieved due to informal personal networks (the good relationship developed between the preparation committee members and the governmental officials during the long negotiation process) rather than direct political pressure, as one of the earliest members of the preparation committee for NS revealed to me. Major construction on Nanfang Steel finally started in 1966, and was immediately followed by dilemmas and conflicts, just as the anxious local officials had feared in the beginning. Industrial expansion would inexorably preempt development and limited resources for other sectors, especially agriculture, in still poverty-stricken China. The Third Front enterprises’ tremendous demands for energy, water, raw materials, and transportation all but inevitably occasioned great tension and created focal points for conflicts between the factories and their localities. Among them, the most basic, recurrent, and emblematic centered on the acquisition of land. In Nanfang Steel, when the construction workers arrived at the site, their first task was to flatten part of the mountains in order to make space for the factory layout. Tons and tons of dynamite were used to blast the mountains. The inhabitants in or near those mountains were evacuated. After the blasting, bulldozers and construction workers began to level the ground. High-tension wires were installed; railroads were laid; peasants at times were forced to leave their land

 The Historical Material of Nanfang, Nanfang Archival Office, 1985.

“It Was Not an Easy Job”: Struggles, Resistance, and Turbulence

41

and move to more remote mountainous areas.⁴⁸ While collecting data during my fieldwork in 2008, Laowang, then one of the directors of the construction team, pointed to workshops lying beneath the mountains and told me that about half of the factory area had been expropriated from available farmland. Although the central government reiterated frequently that Third Front enterprises should not appropriate any fertile farmland or land in excess of stipulated standards and should not dislocate peasant households except on the grounds of pressing necessity, nonetheless, the conflict between industrial construction and agricultural production remained sharp. What happened in NS happened in other sites too: land, including farming land, was expropriated; trees were chopped down; houses were flattened; and mountains were hollowed and even moved. The excessive land seizure by the TFC project further deepened the contradictions between vast rural populations and limited farmland that always threatened the survival of peasant households in rural China. For example, one investigation noted that the agricultural population in the area of Nangcong Sichuan had increased from 1952 to 1965 by 23 percent while the agriculture acreage decreased 13.6 percent; in some brigades, a peasant only had several fens of farmland each.⁴⁹ Protests occurred accordingly. Desperate peasants complained openly to the local governments: “We are neither like peasants [due to the lack of enough farming land], nor like town residents [due to the lack of urban registration]. We are now asking the government to settle this problem.”⁵⁰ In recognition of this circumstance, the National Capital Construction Committee (NCCC), the Ministry of Metallurgy Industry (MMI), and the local governments repeatedly issued orders requiring Third Front enterprises to clean up and return to the production brigades all land in excess of stipulated standards taken. “It was a political task,” one document issued by the MMI declared.⁵¹ Yet dilemmas persisted. Nevertheless, the Third Front enterprises had their own difficulties and complaints as well. For example, they declared that they needed more land for future expansion and still did not have sufficient space for workers’ living districts. They also complained that even when they appropriated land legally, the peasants were often extremely slow to move out.⁵² And at those times when Third Front enterprises did return land to the communes as per

 Ibid.  “The report of land appropriation for national construction in Nancong” (“关于对南充市国 家建设征用土地使用情况的调查报告”): 1965，3，27.  Ibid.  “The notification of recheck and adjust the behaviors of over-appropriating farm land” (“关 于认真复查和纠正过多过早地占用土地的通知”), (65) 冶设字第1170号, 1965,3,22.  “The summary of land-lending” (“征租土地总结”), from the archival office of Nanfang.

42

1 When the Global Meets the Local

requirements by the higher authorities, the communes and peasants would often demand a land rehabilitation fee from the factory.⁵³ All these conflicts, tensions, resistances, negotiations, and compromises among various social forces signaled a highly uneven and hesitant start to this huge state-planned industrialization project on the local sites. Together, they served as a certain kind of counterinfluence, hence effectively slowing down the development of an otherwise potent industrialization project, and greatly blunting its potentially destructive force. Impediment didn’t just come from the resistance by the local rank and file. Volatile domestic policies and radical political movements initiated by the same state could also interrupt the ambitious preexisting state plans. During the earlier construction process of the TFC, that interruption merely came from the Cultural Revolution.

Disturbance Brought About by the Cultural Revolution Casting aside the ideological debate, the Cultural Revolution, as revealed by numerous accounts, did bring great chaos to Chinese society, especially during its earliest heyday. From 1967 to 1969, armed fights among different factions nationwide were so rampant that many schools and factories were forced to close.⁵⁴ Construction of the Third Front basically came to a halt during these years, in part because many workers took part in the fights, but also because rebellious workers in these factories successfully overthrew the management and made  “The request of land rehabilitation fee” (“请示原江钢土地复原费解决办法”), Nanfang Archival Office, 1965, 12, 7.  Armed conflicts during the Cultural Revolution involved various factions, generally identified as Loyalists and Rebels. The Rebels were mostly youths who sought to seize power from different authorities under the banner of “All Rebellions Are Justified.” Loyalists were other youths who tried to protect the authorities, mostly from their own free will. Fights first erupted in Shanghai and then spread to the whole nation. The weapons used in these fights soon escalated from sticks in the early stages to homemade rifles, grenades, and even artillery. The most numerous confrontations occurred in Chongqing in 1967, where 1,170 people died. The fights were stopped later in 1969 when the People’s Liberation Army intervened. For a more detailed illustration of the armed conflicts during this period, see Weihua Pu, “Breaking the Old World” – Turbulence and Destruction in the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1968). Hong Kong Chinese University Contemporary Chinese Culture Research Center Press, 2008 (卜伟华,《“砸烂旧世界”——文化大革命的 动乱与浩劫（1966—1968）》, 香港中文大學當代中國文化研究中心); Xun Li, Big Collapse: The History of Shanghai Worker-Rebels. Taibei Times Culture Press, 1996 (李逊,《大崩溃：上海工 人造反派兴亡史》,台北时报文化出版公司); Shu He, Fight For Chairman Mao. Recordings of Chongqing Armed Fight in Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong Joint Publishing 2010 (何蜀《为毛 主席而战：文革重庆大武斗实录》,香港三联书店有限公司).

“It Was Not an Easy Job”: Struggles, Resistance, and Turbulence

43

normal construction/production impossible.⁵⁵ At Nanfang Steel, historical documents and senior workers’ oral histories both confirm how destructively that chaotic period affected construction.⁵⁶ One worker vividly described the armed fights he witnessed during these years and concluded, “Nobody worked. It was impossible to work; a lot of people actually left Nanfang for their hometown, merely to avoid the danger caused by armed fights during that period.” Resumption of the construction, both generally and at Nanfang Steel specifically, came about only after the incident of Zhenbao Island (Damansky Island) in March 1969, which ignited a series of armed “border conflicts” between China and the USSR. Such escalated military confrontations made the threat of war even more imminent than before, so that “Preparation against the War” once again became the most predominant and urgent task in China’s general policy orientation.⁵⁷ To this end, the central government soon established a committee to oversee the recovery of the damaged Third Front project, while at the same time, setting up the so-called military control commissions (军管会) at every Third Front site. The involvement of the Liberation Army immediately suppressed the populist violence caused by the Cultural Revolution in these sites. Order was then restored, and construction resumed. Yuan Baohua, the then minister of the Material Management Ministry, detailed in one article how the Ministry had managed to guarantee the material and equipment requirements of the TFC as its most important task during the following years of the Cultural Revolution.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, despite the crucial status accorded to the TFC project and the relatively normal working environment that followed the military’s intervention, factional struggles left over from the previous chaotic period still bubbled beneath the surface. This often resulted in unnecessarily drawn-out construction processes across nearly every TF enterprise. At Nanfang Steel, construction only finished in 1972, four years later than the planned due date, even though partial production had started earlier. In that sense, the state also paradoxically created the counterforce to its own earlier plan.

 Hongjuan Wang, An Outline of the Third Front Construction during the Cultural Revolution. Journal of Jiangxi Institute of Education 5 (2005): 111– 113. ( 汪红娟，“文革时期三线建设述略”， 江西教育学院学报).  The History of Nanfang Steel.  Jun Niu, The Border Conflicts Between China and the USSR in 1969 and the Adjustment of China’s Foreign Policies. Contemporary Chinese History Research 1 (1999): 69 – 70. ( 牛 军，“1969年中苏边境冲突与中国外交战略的调整”，当代中国史研究).  Yuan, The Material Guarantee.

44

1 When the Global Meets the Local

Fig. 2: Propaganda poster for Third Front Construction. In the top left is the mission statement of the TFC quoted from Mao Zedong, “Preparing against the war, preparing against the famine, and all for the people.” At the bottom is written, “Resolutely responding to the call of Chairman Mao, supporting the revolution in the hinterland!”

Conclusion The mission statement of the TFC in its initial stage was: “Preparing against the war, preparing against the famine, and all for the people.” Though obvious propaganda, it did not serve as just an empty slogan. By paralleling “preparing against the war” with “preparing against the famine” and putting them under the name of “all for the people,” this statement reveals the external and internal constraints, contradictions, dilemmas, and struggles inherent in such an immense state-planned project. On one hand, the construction of the Third Front constituted a crucial component of nation-building under Mao’s modernization strategy, guided by the ambition to set up an independent and sound industrial base at the heart of inner China, far removed from the threats of external imperial forces. As this chapter illustrates, to some extent this was an inevitable “modern” choice made by “New China” when facing the particular international structures of

Conclusion

45

the 1960s: China’s then peripheral existence in the world system; the established Cold War structure; the intensified military threat and pressure from the United States; the split with the Soviet Union; and the constant friction with other newly independent developing countries, especially apparent in the Sino-India war. These factors combined to push China’s modern national building toward a more autarkic and defensive path, as exemplified by the TFC project. On the other hand, when the central state launched the TFC during the first part of the 1960s, the terror of the “Three Years of Natural Disaster” was still fresh in people’s minds, and the subsequent “Adjustment Policy” had only slowly started to pull people away from literal starvation.⁵⁹ The fragile national economy determined that any effort toward the TFC would be fraught with doubts and struggles: national building for China at that time had to strike a balance not only between internal survival and external threats, but also between industrialization – a synonym for modernization – and agricultural production, which was crucial to feeding its people. The three-fold task of defending China’s survival and independence in a capitalist Cold War world system, industrializing the national economy, and guaranteeing its people’s basic survival sometimes constituted conflicting goals for this large, yet extremely poor socialist country in the 1960s. With scarce state revenue, any shift favoring one of the three tasks above could put the others at risk. Based on the examination of these deepest contradictions, tensions, and dilemmas, this chapter depicted a finely grained and evolving image of the TFC at the point of its initiation. Manifold forces – including external global geopolitics and internal dilemmas along with struggles within state bureaucracies, through grassroots resistances, and across the changing volatile domestic/political environment, played their contributing and inhibiting roles in shaping the decisionmaking and plan-implementing processes of the project. Such a depiction, by linking China both “outwardly” to the then global world structures and “inwardly” to grassroots and local resistance forces, hence exposes as untenable the currently prevalent academic view of China’s socialist regime and its industrialization effort as an isolated and abstractly totalitarian imagining, even in the face of

 “Three Years of Natural Disaster” refers to the period in China between 1958 and 1961 characterized by widespread famine. Although some degree of drought and weather conditions contributed to the disaster, most of the starvation can be attributed to the policies initiated by the central government, especially the policy and movement of The Great Leap Forward. The “Adjustment Policy” refers to the Eight-Character Guideline – ‘Adjustment, consolidation, enriching and improvement’ issued by the central government in 1960, aimed at alleviating the destruction caused by the “Three Years of Natural Disaster” by focusing on agricultural production and light industries.

46

1 When the Global Meets the Local

the strong will of the state. It is only by basing our understanding of that part of history as a real happened instead of a presumed historical process that we can move on to investigate how people who went to and worked there during this earliest period – the pioneering workers of the TFC – experienced and remembered their working lives then, and why.

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time Against the Imperialists”: Stories About Migration and Construction in the Early Stage We are marching on the Great Avenue Full of militancy and revolutionary ardour Chairman Mao leads our revolutionary people Forging ahead through brambles and thorns, and marching onto the future Marching on! Marching on! Nothing can stop our zeal of revolution Marching on! Marching on! Toward the direction of victory! The five-star flag sways in the wind Working people determine to work hard Build up the gorgeous land diligently Swear to change our motherland into paradise Marching on! Marching on! Nothing can stop our zeal of revolution Marching on! Marching on! Toward the direction of victory! Our Avenue is so broad; Our future is so bright! We dedicate ourselves to this glorious cause With unlimited happiness, unlimited glory Marching on! Marching on! Nothing can stop our zeal of revolution Marching on! Marching on! Toward the direction of victory! – A martial song composed by Jiefu in 1962

Composed in 1962, the song “We are marching on the great avenue” was the anthem of the Third Front Construction. Full of revolutionary idealism and romanticism, it calls on the pride and confidence of the Chinese people that, when faced with coercion and threats from outside forces, will nonetheless help them forge their wellbeing with their own hands, without depending on anything or anybody else to do so. “Victory” here is endowed with meanings of not only the triumph of communism, but also the triumph over imperialism. In accordance with the song, the project of TFC was described by the official discourse at the time as another “revolution,” a revolution of “building up a new world” and “buying time against the imperialists.” In this way, the whole construction process was endowed with an exciting revolutionary romanticism and a heroic, epic, and even sacred aura – working for the Construction meant protecting the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-004

48

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

motherland and the ideal of communism/socialism. Meanwhile, industrial workers involved in the Construction were pushed even more prominently onto the main stage of history, hailed as the masters of modernization, the builders of independence, and the defenders of socialism. It is lofty and heroic, yet to what extent did such grand propagandistic discourse converge on or diverge from the images revealed by historical archives? How did those pioneering workers choose to remember and recount their past working lives, and why? What is the “reality” of that part of labor history? This chapter seeks to answer these questions by analyzing and comparing three different layers of labor history narratives in the 1960s and 70s: the propagandistic discourses constructed by the state, the historical contexts and processes of migration and construction disclosed by archival resources, and the oral testimonies of pioneering workers in Nanfang Steel. By exploring the relations of conflict, struggle, and correlation among these different narratives, this chapter then aims to reconstruct a more multi-dimensional and dialectic early labor history of Nanfang Steel. A widely adopted approach in labor history studies sees them draw on empirical evidence only (most frequently, historical archives), while using oral histories, if at all, merely as a complementary and “minor” source. This approach seems to assume a priori the existence of a single, “objective” and “real” labor history, one that contains “the absolute privilege of ‘what actually happened.’”¹ This chapter contests that any such single, true history exists. Without assuming in advance any necessarily greater importance to each of them, this chapter lets these narratives speak to each other, permeate one another, and contradict each other. Taken together, they constitute not necessarily a “complete picture,” but rather a multi-faceted one in which objectivity and subjectivity are intertwined, and “past” and “present” are entangled.

Migration: “Good People and Good Horses Go to the Third Front” Given the TFC’s defensive aim, almost all TF projects had to be located in the most remote areas of inner China, as outlined in the official guideline “near the mountain, easy to hide and geographically decentralized.” Most of the enterprises were built from nothing. Confronted with the shortage of technology,

 Luisa Passerini, Discontinuity of History and Diaspora of Languages. New Left Review 1 (2000): 137– 144.

Migration: “Good People and Good Horses Go to the Third Front”

49

labor, equipment and experienced labor for most TF enterprises, the central state had to mobilize and, when necessary, force a massive migration using a strategy named “three ways for veterans to help beginners”: that old industrial bases should help new industrial bases; that old enterprises should help new enterprises; and that senior workers should help junior ones.² By utilizing this strategy, the state created a continuous flow of managers, workers, equipment, and technologies from the “mother” enterprises to newly built Third Front enterprises. “Good people and good horses go to the Third Front” and “Going to the places where our motherland needs us most” were the slogans used during this migration process. By appealing to people’s patriotic feelings and highlighting the very selective standard of participants, these slogans emphasized the importance and singularity of the project – only people who were “progressive,” “revolutionary,” and “patriotic” enough could be selected by the Party as honorable participants in the TFC. Such slogans also implied the free will of participants eager to serve their country. The real migration process as revealed in historical archives, however, was a far more complicated one than these grand discourses described.

The Historical Context: Great Downsizing To a certain extent, migration to the TF was not an entirely distinct or autonomous event. Rather, part of it was the final act within another even more extensive state-directed migration – the “great downsizing” movement in the early 1960s. The largest state-directed migration in the history of socialist China, the “great downsizing movement” aimed to reduce and relocate the “redundant workers” who had been recruited from the countryside during the Great Leap Forward (GLF) when many factories had been built in order to realize the goal of “running into communism” through extensive industrialization. The failure of the GLF left behind not only these abandoned factories, but also millions of industrial workers who had to be moved back to the countryside in order to alleviate the pressure of demand in the cities for marketable grain.³ The proposal of the great downsizing was first raised by Zhou Enlai at the Central Working Conference of May 1961. Zhou declared that the fundamental way to solve the current problem of food shortage was to push urban dwellers

 Chen, From ‘the Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities’ to ‘Preparing the War’.  Pinghan Luo, Big Migration: Reducing the Urban Population from 1961 to 1963 (大迁徙:1961– 1963年的城镇人口精简). Guangxi People’s Publication 2003.

50

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

to the countryside. Chen Yun, another participant, expressed his support to this proposal.⁴ Initially, the proposal raised considerable doubt and concern within the party. Many worried that sending millions of workers back to the countryside was against the party’s central principle – that the communist party must rely on its working class. Yang Shankun, who would later be in charge of the downsizing task, responded to these doubts in this way: Relying on the working class doesn’t mean enlarging the working class unnecessarily. How large the working class should be depends on the economic developmental level. Currently, in our country, a large working class means a large consumption of marketable grain. Yet the peasants could no longer bear such huge consumption. So, the continuing existence of a large working class might break the alliance of workers and peasants, impair the ruralurban relationship, and disturb the whole society. All these will harm workers’ interests as well in the end. So, downsizing is actually for the interest of the whole working class, and thus for better reliance on the working class.⁵

Certainly the downsizing movement had little, if anything, to do with “better reliance on the working class,” but instead arose as an urgent remedy for the regime’s last nearly fatal mistake. The cost of such a remedy then had to be borne by those downsized workers. Yet the state needed a sufficient ideological justification. Once that was framed, the state then pushed forward with the great downsizing with a strong hand. By the end of 1963, more than 20 million workers were mobilized or forced to return or move to the countryside.⁶ In the metallurgical industry alone, 3.5 million workers were laid off.⁷ Yang Shangkun later called this state-driven wave of migration an unprecedented instance of “magic,” with “millions of workers moving against the historical trend.”⁸ Magically against the historical trend or not, resistance prevailed. From 1963, more and more laid-off workers streamed into Beijing with pleas and complaints. They organized demonstrations, stopped the cars of the central leaders and for-

 Ibid.  Weiming Su, Three-Year Disaster and the Huge Relocation of 20 Million People to the Countryside Charged by Yang Shangkun (“三年大饥荒杨尚昆负责精简2千万人下乡”) (18. Nov. 2008). The China News Net. URL: http://focus.scol.com.cn/jwxd/content/2008-11/20/content_288124. htm?node=513 (12 May 2018).  “The main points of the working conference regarding workers’ relocation in Liaoning Province, passed by the Party Central Committee and the State Council”, No. [65] 578, (“中共中央， 国务院批转辽宁省安置巩固工作会议纪要”，中发[65]578号), 1965, 9,15.  “The report from the department of metallurgical industry regarding the reduction of workers within the metallurgical industry”, (“冶金工业部关于冶金系统精简职工情况的报告”), 1965, 9, 11.  Su, Three-year Disaster.

Migration: “Good People and Good Horses Go to the Third Front”

51

eign visitors, went on hunger strikes, and in some cases even committed public suicide.⁹ In 1964 alone, tens of thousands of people from Liaoning province alone went to the higher authorities, including those in Beijing, to appeal and protest. Many others simply moved back to cities by themselves, despite the strict control of countryside-to-city migration at the time. According to one report, more than 5,000 downsized workers in 1964 flowed illegally from the countryside back to Shengyang and Fushun, two cities in Liaoning province.¹⁰ Substantial downsizing ended as 1963 came to a close, but the policy officially lasted into 1965. The central government continued calling for strict control of the number of state employees. A report from the Metallurgy Ministry claimed that in the first eight months of 1965, the whole metallurgy industrial system altogether laid off ll 180,000 workers, including 34,000 cadres.¹¹ By this time, however, most of the laid-off workers no longer went to the countryside but were assigned to the Third Front. The decision in 1964 to proceed with the TFC created a new and immediate need for another vast labor force, a need that could be filled perfectly by these laid-off industrial workers. One report claimed, for instance, that the 50,000 posts that should have been created in the metallurgy industry according to the requirements of the TFC in 1965 were filled by those workers.¹² No statistics show what proportion of the early Third Front workforce these previously laid-off workers constituted. Yet, even among workers from other major sources – industrial workers who were relocated from the first- or second-front enterprises,¹³ students who graduated from universities and technical schools and were assigned to the TFC, construction workers from the engineering troops who stayed after the project, and educated youths who had been sent

 “The main points of the working conference regarding workers’ relocation in Liaoning Province, passed by the Party Central Committee and the State Council”, No. [65] 578, (“中共中央， 国务院批转辽宁省安置巩固工作会议纪要”, 中发[65]578号), 1965, 9,15.  “The main points of the working conference regarding workers’ relocation in Liaoning Province, passed by the Party Central Committee and the State Council”, No. [65] 578, (“中共中央， 国务院批转辽宁省安置巩固工作会议纪要”, 中发[65]578号), 1965, 9,15.  “The report from the department of metallurgical industry regarding the reduction of workers within the metallurgical industry”, (“冶金工业部关于冶金系统精简职工情况的报告”), 1965, 9, 11.  “The report from the department of metallurgical industry regarding the reduction of workers within the metallurgical industry”, (“冶金工业部关于冶金系统精简职工情况的报告”), 1965, 9, 11.  “First front” refers to China’s coastal and border areas; “Second front” refers to areas between first and third fronts.

52

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

down to the countryside¹⁴ and were then recruited to the TFC – many were simply administratively assigned by the state, along with or against their will, according to the numerous government documents issued in that era. This meant that, to a great extent, most pioneering TF workers actually had few choices – if they did not go to the TF, they had to go to the countryside or simply get fired. This is the fact that was concealed by slogans such as “going to the places our motherland needs us most” and “good people and good horses go to the Third Front.”

Resistance Against the TF Migration Notwithstanding the mass mobilization and strong state power, open resistance against Third Front migration did happen. In August 1965, for instance, 250 workers who were relocated to the Yunnan Yangchang coal mine, one of the Third Front enterprises, held a large protest and even made a futile attempt to return to their “mother-factory” – the Kailuan coal mine.¹⁵ This was not an isolated case. Before National Day in 1965, the National Construction Committee, the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry, and the Metallurgical office in Sichuan issued several documents successively, demanding that the local governments ensure no petitions and demonstrations from relocated workers took place in Beijing or Chengdu during the holidays. All these documents complicate and contradict the buoyant images painted under the state slogans. Resistance likely increased during the subsequent Cultural Revolution. The anti-bureaucracy and mass-rebellion movement in its early stage offered an excellent opportunity for some relocated workers to fight for their return, sometimes in violent ways. Gongyi, daughter of the general secretary in NS at that time, described in detail what had happened to her father during the Cultural Revolution: Every evening at 7:00pm, the loud horn in the factory would repeatedly announce the place and time of the denouncing meeting against my father. That was the moment I felt humiliated the most … Posters were everywhere with my father’s name on it … These rebellious workers forced my father to sign the agreement for their leaving. But my father refused

 Educated youths refer to those urban middle or high school students who were sent by the state to live and work in the countryside, according to related policies implemented during the Cultural Revolution.  “The notification from the State Infrastructure Commission about the several recent affrays from the relocated workers” (“国家基本建设委员会关于最近发生的几起内迁职工闹事的情况通 报”), 1965,9,17.

Constructing the TFC

53

their request since signing the agreement was against the rules. So they beat him. They knew that he would not sign it, so they beat him cruelly… If my father had not been chosen by the Party as one of the leaders to establish this factory, he wouldn’t have been attacked that much during the Cultural Revolution.

Nevertheless, it seems that such violent resistance against the migration occurred quite sporadically. Even Gongyi noted that only a small group of “very bad ones” were involved in such violence. Also, except for the Yangchang case mentioned earlier, archival resources do not record other large-scale resistance, though individual “escapes” and small-scale petitions might occur from time to time. At Nanfang Steel, as I will record and analyze later in this chapter, most migrating workers seemed to accept their fate at least acquiescently, out of various ideological and pragmatic reasons.

Constructing the TFC: “Building Socialism With Greater, Faster, Better and More Economic Results” With little capital accumulation to hand in the 1960s, the central government propelled the TFC under the headline of “building socialism with greater, faster, better and more economic results.” To exemplify this, the Propaganda Department chose Daqing oil field as a model for all enterprises in China and especially for those TF factories that were still under construction at the time. Daqing oil field, the largest oil field in China, was successfully explored at the end of 1963. Such success was soon exploited by the Chinese government as a victorious symbol of China’s socialist modernization. On 20 April 1964, The People’s Daily, the highest official newspaper, published a news report titled “The spirit of Daqing and the people of Daqing.” The report praised “Daqing Ren” (the people of Daqing) for their spirit of bearing extreme hardship and working unselfishly for their motherland.¹⁶ After this report, the movement of “learning from Daqing” quickly swept the whole country. Among the highlighted “Daqing experiences,” “working with revolutionary spirit and selfless devotion,” “first production then living” and “hard working, plain living” were widely adopted by many TF factories in the early stage. The slogan of “working with revolutionary spirit and selfless devotion” highlighted the romanticism that always accompanied the modernization process in socialist China. By treating each construction/production task as a battle or even  Mu Yuan and Rongkang Fang, The Spirit of Daqing and Daqing Ren. The People’s Daily (20. April. 1964).

54

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

a revolution, it effectively equated the meaning of socialist industrialization with the meaning of socialist revolution, thus endowing industrial work with a glorified aura. In this way, it encouraged the totally selfless devotion of industrial workers to their factories. Meanwhile, it also effectively legitimated two other slogans, “first production then living” and “hard work, plain living,” which soon became two major guidelines promoted by the state as strategies of saving money. Limited money had to be used where it was most needed, namely in factory construction and production, rather than for the living necessities of workers, including dwellings. It was out of such considerations of cutting costs that another more concrete yet short-lived policy – combining factories and communes” was adopted during the earliest period of the TFC. In practice, “combining factories and communes” required family members of workers (usually wives and children) to live and work in the local commune’s assigned production teams; or, if there were wastelands in the surrounding area, the factory could organize these family members to reclaim the wastelands and farm on them. Under such circumstances, family members would live in simply constructed cottages made of mud, the so-called “Gandalei”, as previously developed and deployed at Daqing Oil, while factory workers (usually husbands and fathers) lived in the dormitories of the factory under a semi-military form of management. It was claimed that through this strategy these wives and children – but especially wives – would stop being “burdens” or even “parasites” of the state and would, instead, become “honored” productive laborers themselves. Ideally, a “harmonious” scene of male workers working in the front while wives cultivated the land in the background would prevail.¹⁷ One Third Front factory report claimed that in this way the factory could build fewer family living quarters and hence save the country 228,000 Yuan a year.¹⁸ In exchange, factories were required to help communes by developing irrigation systems, providing manure for fertilizer, and establishing some small mills. More significantly, the policy of “combining factories and communes” also intended to establish a new employment system: the “alternate worker system” (轮换工制). First advanced in 1958 by Liu Shaoqi, then President of the country, this system was only put into practice and spread nationally from 1965 to 1966, especially among the Third Front enterprises. This new employment system aimed to recruit the so-called “alternate workers” from the combined communes  “The report of experimenting factories-communes combination” (关于厂社结合试点情况的 报告), 1966, 4, 14.  “The report about developing the spirit of Daqing and promoting the combination of factory and commune in 308 factory” ( 中共三零八厂现场委员会关于发扬大庆精神，试行厂社结合多 块好省地建设新厂的情况报告), 1966, 2.

Constructing the TFC

55

into the enterprises. It was hoped that these “alternate workers” would slowly replace the permanent workers and develop into the future main labor force in the Third Front enterprises and other enterprises.¹⁹ Qualified alternate workers were required to be male or female peasants from 18 to 35 years old, healthy, strong, fairly educated, and with a “clean” political and historical background.²⁰ Alternate workers would work in factories only for a set number of years; after that, they would return to their original communes. New alternate workers from communes would then be recruited and later return. In propaganda, the “alternate worker system” was declared to be an attempt to diminish the gap not only between workers and peasants, but also between the cities and the countryside. In reality, it was one of the central government’s attempts to set up a more flexible employment system during the 1960s.²¹ Practically, this system could guarantee a sufficient supply of strong and young labor force for the factories while also permitting a smooth substitution of workers. It also served to lower the labor reproduction costs of the factories, since alternate workers had much lower wages and would not enjoy the same benefits and welfare that permanent workers did. Lastly, because the alternate workers did not need to bring their family members with them, factories would be largely relieved from having to provide living and welfare facilities for those family members.²² Even under the ideological cover of “diminishing the urban-rural gap,” the policy of “combining factories and communes” in 1965 – 1966 engendered great doubts and resistance from almost everyone at the grassroots level. Local governments worried that the “alternate worker system” would affect urban employment. For instance, the labor bureau of Chengdu warned the central state that recruiting alternate workers from rural areas might or would preclude employ-

 “The report from the Sichuan labor bureau about the promotion of the ‘either worker or peasant’ system” (“四川省劳动局分党组关于推行亦工亦农劳动制度的试点情况和今后意见的 报告”), 1965, 4, 7.  “The ways of promoting ‘either worker or peasant’ in 308 and 338” (“308厂, 338厂试行亦工 亦农轮换工制办法”), 1966, 2, 26.  In 1964, Liu Shaoqi gave an important speech called “The implementation of a labor system that combines permanent workers and contract workers”. In this speech, Liu urged the enterprises to “try their best to use temporary workers and contract workers.”  “The report from the city labor bureau about the promotion of ‘either worker or peasant’, forwarded by Chengdu Municipal Party Committee” (“中共成都市委批转市劳动局党组关于推 行亦工亦农劳动制度的情况和今后意见的请示报告”), 1965, 9, 1; “The report from the provincial labor bureau about the promotion of ‘either worker or peasant’, forwarded by Sichuan provincial Municipal Party Committee” (“中共四川省委批转省劳动局分党组关于推行亦工亦农劳动制 度的情况和今后意见的报告”), 1965, 4, 13.

56

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

ment for the many unemployed city-dwellers who needed jobs;²³ local peasants were afraid that these TF wives and children who were assigned to their communes would squeeze their limited resources and products;²⁴ commune cadres also worried they might lose all of the young and strong laborers to factories as alternate workers;²⁵ factory workers and their family members had even more fears and complaints: the prospective life seemed not just extremely harsh but also highly insecure. Complaints and grievances were prevalent. Different government and factory documents show that many meetings were held during this period in order to appease the disgruntled workers. They also show that under the pressure from workers, factory directors had to appeal constantly to higher authorities for money and to the local governments for land acquisition in order to build more living quarters for workers and their families.²⁶ Partly due to these resistances, partly because of the policy’s own impracticality, and partly because of the overthrow of its main advocate, Liu Shaoqi, during the subsequent Cultural Revolution, this policy lasted a little more than one year and basically failed to realize its goals.²⁷ Many “alternate workers” who had already been recruited into the factories were simply turned into permanent workers.²⁸ Ironically, in many ways, these slogans and their related polices revealed the most about the extreme hardship and cruel exploitation that Third Front workers had to bear during the early construction era. While the working people were extolled for their “revolutionary zeal” while “forging ahead through brambles and thorns,” and for their effort in “building up the gorgeous land diligently” and “swearing to change our motherland into paradise” under the auspices of grandiose state discourses, the historical archives, on the other hand, disclose a much harsher era with all the grievances, struggles, and resistances hidden underneath the abstract patriotism and nationalism.

 “The report from the city labor bureau about the promotion of ‘either worker or peasant’, forwarded by Chengdu Municipal Party Committee” (“中共成都市委批转市劳动局党组关于推 行亦工亦农劳动制度的情况和今后意见的请示报告”), 1965, 9, 1.  “The report from Jiangyou Party Committee about the combination of factory and commune” (“中共江油县委关于贯彻厂社结合县委常委讨论意见的报告”), 1966, 1, 30.  Ibid.  “Appealing for more resources to build up workers’ dwelling”, from the enterprise archives, 1965, 4; “Appealing for the land acquisition to build up workers’ dwellings”, from the enterprise archives, 1966, 8.  During the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi was condemned by Chairman Mao as revisionist and removed from his post.  From the enterprise’s internal publication, The History of Nanfang 1965 – 1985.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

57

Having investigated the migration and construction processes within and beyond the propagandist discourses in its earliest stage, I now shift focus to explore the “subjective” layer of this part of labor history, by turning to the ordinary people who actually lived through it, not as abstract tenets but as irreversible life experiences. Specifically, I ask: how do the pioneering workers in Nanfang Steel choose to remember and recount all these hardships and sacrifices? How do they regard the exploitation and political coercion that characterized both the migration and the construction processes, and why?

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC Altogether, I collected 26 oral histories from the pioneering workers of NS. All of these workers are in their seventies and eighties and had been retired since the 1980s or early 1990s. Their life experiences varied greatly. These workers had come to Nanfang under varied circumstances, whether as transferred workers, college graduates, or construction workers. They performed different jobs, from steel workers to technicians to engineers. Their current financial status also varied, though not so much due to their pensions – which are similarly meager, despite minor differences – as due to their childrens’ incomes. Some workers have to help out their children (usually the case if their children are also workers in Nanfang, or have simply been laid-off or retired early), while others receive financial assistance from their children (usually the case if their children have highly paid jobs outside Nanfang). I conducted interviews sometimes in the homes of the narrators, sometimes in the teahouses nearby. Principally, I asked interviewees to describe their life experiences in the Third Front: how and why they came here, what their earlier work and lives looked like, and so on. The interviews were conducted in a mostly unstructured, open-ended way, making space for the interviewees to immerse themselves in their own memories and speak for hours without much interference.²⁹

 According to Gabriele Rosenthal, Fritz Schutze first developed the narrative interview method that asks for the whole life story to be told regardless of specific research questions. The method rests on certain fundamental theoretical assumptions: “in order to understand and explain social and psychological phenomena we have to reconstruct their genesis – the process of their creation, reproduction and transformation”; “in order to understand and explain people’s actions it is necessary to find out about both the subjective perspective of the actors and the courses of action”; “in order to be able to understand and explain the statements of an interviewee/biographer about particular topic and experiences in his/her past it is necessary to interpret them as part of the overall context of his/her current life and his/her resulting present

58

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

Remembering the Migration to Nanfang Steel Workers’ oral testimonies about the migration reveal a much more variegated and subjective image of this historical event than seen in either the propagandistic or archival official discourses. On the one hand, they disclose the fact that, contrary to the grand and homogenizing narrative of “good people and good horses going to the Third Front,” people came to Nanfang from many different backgrounds and for many different reasons. For instance, while none of the interviewees directly mentioned the lasting effect of the “great downsizing” on their migration experience, some indirectly implied it, observing, “if you didn’t go, you would be fired” or “if I ran away, I could only go back to the countryside.” Sometimes they spoke about other people’s experiences: “they were originally recruited from the countryside, so they preferred to come here since in this way they could become a formal state-worker; otherwise they would be sent back to the countryside,” or “when they came here, their wives or children who had no formal jobs before could get a job here since Nanfang was a new factory and thus needed a lot of workers.” These testimonies enrich the archival materials and contradict the propagandistic discourse. Forced or not, migration for most people to the Third Front mainly involved practical survival strategies to keep their status as stateworkers, to take advantage of the opportunity to find state jobs for family members, or, in some situations described more fully below, to escape turbulent political movements, especially the Cultural Revolution, and the chaos and uncertainty these brought to people’s lives. Ma Shu, then a young man from Shanghai and later transferred to NS, told me: I came to Nanfang Steel in 1968. More than forty years has passed since then. I was first assigned to Shanghai Steel after I graduated from the technical secondary school. All the students who graduated and were assigned to Shanghai Steel at that year went directly to Nanfang … At that time, it was the military managerial committee that took charge of everything. You couldn’t decide your own fate … But I didn’t feel sad. It was fine for me, as it was for many of my colleagues. We were young, with no family burden. Everybody told us that Sichuan was arduous. We made preparation for it … When we got here, it was better than we imagined. Our school had prepared us a lot even before we graduated. Many slogans painted on the school walls were about the Third Front Construction. The organizers told us that Chairman Mao cared for the Third Front very much … At that time, we were still so young; we wanted to work after some chaos brought by the Cultural Revolu-

and future perspective.” See Gabriele Rosenthal, Biographical Research. In Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman (Ed.). Qualitative Research Practice. Sage, 2004, 48 – 64.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

59

tion. Also, Chairman Mao had a very high prestige in our hearts … The Third Front was an honor then … I didn’t hear other classmates complaining. Among two hundred students assigned here that year, only one cried… When I look back on this experience, I don’t feel the pain. It was not a forced behavior too. It was true that we couldn’t resist our fate, but nobody even thought of resisting. We were just workers … We didn’t have any wild wishes. We just thought of working hard and maybe making some technological renovations if possible. That was all.

I had expected a more resentful story from him. After all, given the insurmountable urban-rural gap in China, Ma Shu had to give up all of the benefits associated with living in a big city like Shanghai and relocate himself to a remote and tough rural “nothing.” The outpouring of resentment didn’t come; instead, Ma Shu only calmly admitted an uncontrollable fate while at the same time emphasizing his willing obedience borne of a sense of duty and respect. Many other interviewees also highlighted this willing obedience, which might originate from a combination of several factors: a sense of duty and honor, admiration for Mao Zedong, and maybe more importantly, the necessity of survival. Ma shu and his colleagues were assigned to Nanfang in 1968, during the height of the Cultural Revolution. After initial enthusiasm, many young people, including students, became confused or disenchanted by the chaos unleashed by the Cultural Revolution and lost direction. Venturing to the Third Front provided a way out of such chaos and confusion, as Ma Shu mentioned when stating that, “besides, we wanted to work after some chaos brought by the Cultural Revolution.” In this sense, migration to the Third Front could provide an alternative means of salvation for these young students: finally, they had someplace to go and a job to do. However arduous life in the TFC seemed, it was at least more predictable. While Ma Shu only mentioned the Cultural Revolution in passing and let it be overshadowed by the declaration of his willing obedience and sense of optimism, Du Shu identified it as an overwhelming factor that pushed him toward Nanfang Steel, specifically for a sense of escape and salvation. Du Shu was one of the so-called “educated youth” sent during the Cultural Revolution into rural areas under the policy and banner of “educated urban youth going to the countryside”. He described his two-year-stay in the countryside: Before I came to Nanfang Steel, I was an educated youth who had been sent to the countryside. Before that I had been a student, a high school student. To put it more accurately, I had been a young student Red Guard. When the Cultural Revolution began in 1967, I was in the second grade of high school. Soon the school closed and the Revolution began … The main aim for Chairman Mao to launch the Cultural Revolution was to realize his theory of proletarian and his route of Chinese modernization … He tried to use the Cultural Revolution, the method of “speaking out freely and airing one’s views fully” and writ-

60

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

ing big-character posters to break the bureaucratic order in China of the time. Furthermore, he tried to use the way of mass movement to solve the problems in ideology and superstructure. Then from the collapse of the old order, a new and better order was hoped to be established. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen … Then, Mao had to deal with these millions upon millions of student Red Guards, who, because of the Revolution, had no schools to go to, and no jobs to do. Being formed under the banner of “rebel justified,” these former students now Red Guards didn’t know what they could do … Then Chairman Mao adopted the policy of “educated urban youth going to the countryside.” We went to the countryside under this background. We knew that; we already saw the dead end of the Cultural Revolution; we were also fully aware that we had lost our direction, whether in study or in contributing to the country. We didn’t know what we could do and the country didn’t know how to handle us … I went to the countryside in 1969… I felt desperate there. It was not because of hardships, but because of the unknown or even dark future. What should and could I do? Will I be a peasant forever? It was ok to be a peasant, but our education always told us to be a scientist! Besides, the status of peasants in China was very low, even though politically it was extolled so highly …

The movement of “educated urban youth [zhishi qingnian, 知识青年] going to the countryside” actually began much earlier in 1955, but only on a very limited scale. Its major practical aims were to solve the problem of unemployment in the urban areas, while at the same time, hopefully, to bring knowledge and technology to the countryside through these youths. The movement was meant also to help to break up the so-called “three differences” – the difference between urban and rural, between peasant and worker, and between manual labor and brain labor – in order to build up a more equal and classless society.³⁰ Not initially widespread, the movement accelerated sharply after 1968, largely as a response to the more and more uncontrollable millions of student Red Guards engendered under the banner of “Rebellion against the bureaucracy” during the Cultural Revolution in 1967. With schools still closed due to these rebellions, the government aspired to remove these numerous, roaming, and potentially militant urban youths to rural areas. From 1968 to 1975, approximately 12 million urban youths consisting of secondary school graduates and students were mobilized and sent “up to the mountains and down to the villages” (上山下乡, shangshan xiaxiang) under the slogan of “going to the wide countryside to fully realize our potential.”³¹ These glorified ideals and slogans soon ran headfirst into harsh

 Hongzhang Gu, The History of ‘Up the Mountain Down to the Countryside. China Procuratorate Press, 1997. (顾洪章主编，《中国知识青年上山下乡始末》。中国检察出版社（北京）， 1997年.)  For the history of Red Guard, see, Guobin Yang, The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China. Columbia University Press, 2016. For Educated Youth, see, Gu, The History of ‘Up the Mountain Down to the Countryside’.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

61

and disheartening realities in the countryside. The original passion that students had harbored soon receded and was replaced with outright fear, as Du Shu expressed it.³² People like him then began to grasp desperately at any opportunity that might change their fate. Third Front Construction offered such a chance, as Du Shu recalled: It wasn’t until 1971 that the policy regarding the sent-down educated youth began to show some flexibility. Since the Third Front Construction already started, recruitment began … We were all so happy. Everybody wanted to go. But the quota was very small in the beginning and the competition was fierce … We had to pass the commune evaluation, the health examination, and then the political records examination … It would take two months for the decision being finally made. During these two months, we were so anxious that we almost couldn’t work … Every step was risky… The whole family had to exhaust its material and financial resources (to bribe the commune Party Committee members) to guarantee the success; otherwise their son or daughter would stay in the countryside forever … I finally went to Nanfang in 1971 … I didn’t care what kind of enterprise it was, as long as I could leave the countryside.

Like Ma Shu, Du Shu’s “coming-to-Nanfang” story emphasizes how it was a way to escape the uncertainty and chaos brought about by political movements. Yet his circumstances were much more desperate. While many “sent-down” urban youths finally managed to leave the countryside through various means, labor recruitment for the Third Front Construction provided the first ray of hope for these despairing students. People like Du Shu grasped the straw and changed their destiny. In this way, “urban youth” became another significant part of the earliest labor force for many Third Front enterprises. On the other hand, along with these pragmatic needs for survival, workers also highlighted the sentiments of patriotism and nationalism regarding Third Front migration. Frequently referring back to propagandistic slogans such as “going to the places our motherland needs us the most,” many interviewees attributed their choice to go to the Third Front to patriotism or their heartfelt adoration of Chairman Mao. Before retiring, Ma Yi worked as an engineer in Nanfang. Born to a “red” family, one of her uncles, a communist military officer, had died in the liberation war, while her father, who had studied in the Soviet Union before 1949, was also a veteran of the Revolution. After the liberation, her father volunteered for the  Such fear and resistance is widely described in many Chinese literatures. Among them, see Xian Den, The Dream of Chinese Intellectual Youth. Writers Press, 2009 (邓贤, 《中国知青梦》， 作家出版社, 2009); Peng Deng, The Silent Group: Memories of Intellectual Youth from Daba Mountain (1964 – 1965). Chongqing Press, 2006. (邓鹏,《无声的群落：大巴山老知青回忆录 （1964– 1965）》，重庆出版社）

62

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

Construction of the Great Northern Wilderness, another modernizing project initiated in the northeast part of China during the 1950s. Ma grew up there and, as one of the best students, was admitted to Qinghua University, the best university in China. With her strong family influences, Ma was a determined and idealistic communist intellectual. She told me that the decision to go to Nanfang stemmed from her passion and eagerness to devote herself to her “motherland”: We were so ardent and ambitious at that time. I knew that the circumstance here was very arduous. I chose it by myself. At that time, the factory was still referred to with a code instead of a name as Nanfang Steel. It was something sacred and important. Just before my graduation, the cadres of the factory went to Qinghua University to check the backgrounds of applicants. They finally picked up several students from many. Those students who had not been picked even cried. They thought that the party didn’t trust them. I felt very honored … In my job-assignment wish list, I wrote in the first line as “going to the most arduous and needed place by our country.” I didn’t mean just saying beautiful words. I really meant it.

But this doesn’t mean that struggles and personal hesitations never existed. Ma Yi described one such hesitation: Actually in the job-assignment list that year, there was a job in my hometown. Also there was another job in Chengdu, where my boyfriend worked. I wrote a letter to my father for his advice. I wrote, “My teacher has told me the possibly assigned jobs. If I choose Fulaerji, I can live close to you and mother; if I choose Chengdu, I can be with my boyfriend. What is your suggestion?” Do you know what my father wrote back to me? He wrote, “I got your letter. It seemed that you were struggling a lot. But all your struggles have not jumped out of the small individualist circle.” These were the exact words of my father. You know, he had never criticized me like that before. Now, he was criticizing me in a very serious manner. That is why I can still recite every word he wrote in the letter, “I have told you before that we raised you up not for supporting us in our old age, but for doing your duty for our country. Haven’t you ever thought of the fact that it was our country that had educated you for these many years? …You can say a lot of beautiful and loyal words in the classroom of Qinghua University. It is easy. But now it is the first time for the Party to test you … Why didn’t you consider the place where our country needs you the most? … Right now, it is a great moment for our country to construct the Third Front. A lot of capable people are needed there. The circumstances there might be arduous, different from Qinghua University. You have to build it from nothing. Be prepared for it. It will be just like how the Soviet Union built Komsomolsk …” I felt so ashamed and angry when I read the letter. It seemed that my father denied all I had said and done before. When the real test came, I just forgot all the needs of our country, but started thinking only of my parents and boyfriend! … Ok, then, I would neither go to my hometown nor to Chengdu with my boyfriend. I came here.

Ma was 23 when she migrated in 1962 to Nanfang Steel and has remained there since. Her then boyfriend, later husband, joined her shortly afterwards. As we

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

63

can see from the narration, it was an involuntary choice. Yet, it was not one person’s choice – she was strongly influenced by her father. But while she ultimately followed his advice, it was not merely out of daughterly submission but rather from a sentiment of patriotism and nationalism shared between two generations of Chinese intellectuals during that period. Her father’s letter, which Ma could still recite, reads very much like a propagandistic cliché today, but for many Chinese intellectuals who had experienced China’s chaotic and humiliating pre-1949 history, and thus passionately embraced the hope and promise that the new PRC depicted and promised, such “clichés” could be very authentic. Patriotism and nationalism have a long tradition in China’s history, especially among its intellectual class, as exemplified by the Confucian classics as well as the numerous Chinese historical writings, literature, and poetry. Regarded by some Occidental scholars as a unique marker of Chinese traditional culture and labeled as “culturalism,” this tradition was argued by them as something predating and later replaced by the modern and western concept of nationalism that “spread” to China after late Qing dynasty.³³ However, more contemporary scholars challenged such culturalism/nationalism dichotomy, arguing that the two phenomena are actually complementary rather than incompatible and substitutive.³⁴ In State and Nation, for instance, Benjamin Azkin identifies China as an ancient nation that entered modern history with nationality and nationalism both present.³⁵ In this light, China’s modern nationalism has two layers: its own historical lineage connected to Confucian moral tradition and philosophy, and the modern elements developed mainly out of China’s particular early modern history. Almost two centuries of foreign military subjugation, civil war, and their corresponding chaos and poverty had delivered Chinese political elites and intellectuals a heavy blow and forced them to re-center China – the self-proclaimed “central empire of the world” – within a changing new world. The sense of humiliation this engendered was answered by a strong sentiment of patriotism and nationalism among political elites and intellectuals. Eagerly, they longed for new forms of authority that could “satisfy their need to reassert a historic selfconfidence and also provide the basis for reordering their society in modern times.”³⁶ National salvation and regeneration thus became a ubiquitous theme

 James Harrison, Modern Chinese Nationalism. New York 1962; Joseph R. Levenson, Liang Ch’ich’ao and the Mind of Modern China. Berkeley 1953.  James Townsend, Chinese Nationalism. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 27 (1992): 97– 130.  Benjamin Akzin, State and Nation. Hutchinson 1964. 41, 46, 77– 79.  Lucian Pye, The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development. MIT University Press, 1970, 5 – 6.

64

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

for generations of Chinese intellectuals and elites’ writing in the early modern era. To a great extent, newly independent socialist China in 1949 provided such a possibility. The PRC’s efforts to restore a national unity and central power that had been lost since the early nineteenth century were widely welcomed by a majority of Chinese intellectuals as well as the common people, at least in the beginning. Independence and development soon became national aspirations. Official propaganda, which turned the state’s development program into a collective effort to transform China from a poor and war-ridden “Sick-Man of East Asia” into a newly powerful and modernized state that would never be bullied by foreign powers ever again, ignited the passion of patriotism in many Chinese quite successfully. The newly escalated international conflicts and threats of the 1960s only strengthened such sentiment: threats from both the United States and the Soviet Union during this period easily reminded Chinese intellectuals and elites of a not-so-long-past and extremely unpleasant history. Official propaganda then effectively strengthened and channeled such sentiment in more manageable and predictable ways, one of which was framing any contribution to Third Front enterprises as efforts of protecting and building up the motherland.³⁷ Many other interviewees also repeated the determination expressed by Ma Yi to go to China’s “most arduous and needed place” as their first choice of job assignment. People at the time, especially young intellectuals, often connected their individual lives with the fortune of the country as a whole, and found ample social support for equating the meaning of life in general with the contribution they could make to their country. For them, the idea of communism was not only an ideology imposed by the state but could also be a beautiful ideal by itself: a hope that would finally erase or redeem a painful past and a better future that deserved effort and sacrifice, even if such idealism was constantly shattered by harsher realities. The letter from Ma Yi’s father and her own later choice are better understood in this historical and intellectual context – not merely as blind obedience to state dicta or an individualistic whim constrained only by sheer economic or pragmatic self-interest, but a complex nexus of a desire for meaningful self-expression within the range of life-possibilities made available by the state and social structures of the day.  Richard Stites also argues that in Russia utopianism was not some peculiar and supposedly dangerous proclivity of the revolutionary intelligentsia, but a widely shared and legitimate aspiration with a long history that was finally given free reign in 1917. See, Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

65

Striking a slightly different tone from this patriotic or nationalist sentiment, Zhiyu Bo, a worker who was transferred from other factory to NS in 1971, referred to his deep emotion toward Mao Zedong when describing the rationale for his migration: In 1971, the Central Communist Party called upon supporting the Third Front Construction. The party branch in our department tried to mobilize several comrades for the construction of Nanfang. Most of them didn’t want to go. In order to fulfill the task, the party secretary came to me. I said, “I am not a communist party member, does the party trust me? If the party trusts me, I will go tomorrow.” The next day, I found my name listed in the honor poster for the TFC. I was so happy, because I felt that the party trusted me. But many of my comrades persuaded me not to go by saying that there was no sunshine to enjoy and no fish to eat in Sichuan. I told these comrades who were concerned about me, “as long as other people can survive there, I can survive. The worst thing can only be hardships. In order to let Chairman Mao have a good rest, I was determined to go to the Third Front.” You know, Chairman Mao couldn’t sleep well if the Third Front construction failed.³⁸ I left Huangshi for Jiangyou on April 12, 1971, by train. Comrades came to the station to see me off. When the bell rang, the train moved slowly out of Huangshi city. I was so touched – I was leaving these comrades with whom I worked for so many years. My tears just kept falling. I couldn’t say a word. I could only wave my hands to my comrades … They all cried too. Among them, my manager cried the most. I can’t forget that even today.

In his statement, by mentioning the need to “fulfill the quota” and the resistance of “others” against the migration, Zhiyu Bo did not deny the compulsory elements of the migration. Rather, he cited these circumstances to contrast and highlight his own “progressiveness” and devotion to Chairman Mao. Surely one may question to what extent such devotion supplied a primary motivation for his migration. Indeed, there might well be other stories that Zhiyu Bo selected not to relate. However, such devotion can’t be presumptuously interpreted as simply naïve or deceiving. Originally from an extremely poor village, Zhiyu Bo told me that he would always be grateful to and trust Mao since Mao and the new China had changed his life forever. Zhiyu Bo, of course, was not the only interviewee who referred to his admiration for Mao as his motivation for migration; many other workers I interviewed also mentioned this. The slogan of “Chairman Mao could not sleep well unless the TFC succeeds” sounds quite comical today but was cited frequently during the interviews. Far from the indifference or sarcasm some intellectuals later developed toward Mao, all of the workers I interviewed, especially the older ones, still expressed their devotion towards him. In the shabby home of Laocui, a re “Chairman Mao couldn’t sleep well if the TFC did not succeed” was a widespread saying during mobilization for the TFC.

66

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

tired worker in his eighties, I saw two large portraits of Chairman Mao hanging on different walls and another smaller one pasted on the door. Showing me the latter, Laocui stared at the portrait, caressed it, and murmured, “Chairman Mao looks so young.” Then he sat down and told me a story about his childhood: his father used to be a penniless beggar; he and his brother were always hungry; it was Mao who liberated his whole family and gave him a good job. Qiubo, also in his eighties, told me that he would offer incense to Mao every Qingming Festival.³⁹ None of them had ever seen Mao in person; for them, Mao existed just like the picture pasted on the door, forever young and shining. Criticism of Mao since the late 1980s in the intellectual world seemed to have had little influence on these workers’ choice of of remembrance or imagination of him. On the one hand, this tenacious myth of Mao as the “Messiah of the poor” has its historical foundation: almost all of these pioneering workers were either rural or urbanpoor in origin and had experienced first-hand how the socialist regime changed their lives. Even the Great Leap Forward generally failed to shake their belief. Whatever often extremely hard time they might have experienced during this period, they still believed that life would have been worse without the revolution.

Remembering the Construction When asked to describe their early lives in Nanfang, all workers highlighted the abominable environment and the arduous work, but they did so in a way that was quite proud, rather than resentful. Being able to endure all these hardships and difficulties constituted a meaningful part of their lives. For these senior workers, it also proved the “progressiveness” of the working class as a leading class in the socialist era – daring and willing to work hard. Even though the old heroic image of the working class has been totally toppled by current discourses, these older workers still firmly held on to it, declaring that it once granted, and should continue to grant them well-deserved dignity and respect. One day, I talked with Zhang Bobo, a retired worker in his eighties, at his home. Like many others, he began his story by talking about the hardship of Nanfang of that time. His wife, Zhang Yi, who also wanted to join our conversation, cut in: “Life in Daye [one of the “mother” factories of Nanfang] had been so good. We had lived in such a good apartment. We had had everything. But after

 Qingming Festival has also been called Tomb Sweeping Day. It is a traditional festival in China to show respect to one’s ancestors and to seek protection from them.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

67

coming here, everything changed. We had nothing. We even had to fetch water from the well. I did not have that strength … I cried. I quarreled a lot with my husband. I asked him why he brought us here!” Listening carefully to his wife, Zhang Bobo smiled, “How backward you were!” Beneath this half-joking reprimand, Zhang Bobo was telling me that he had never been so “backward.” Here, being backward meant being afraid of hardships and difficulties. In their statements, it was and still is a shame for these older workers to refer to such fears, as it goes against not only the socialist image of the “new working class,” but also the working class’ basic ethics. Labor, especially labor in the name of “building and defending our motherland,” granted these workers a sense of dignity. While they may well have realized the existence of extreme exploitation during the process, in their testimonies these workers justified it as the need to “build a new China” or simply to “be a good worker.” As in the testimonies about the TFC migration, revolutionary romanticism can also be found here. Ma Yi, the retired female engineer, described such revolutionary romanticism vividly: “My father always said that our generation fought to establish a new China, now it was your generation’s turn to build a new China.” Such a grand goal trivialized and even romanticized all the arduousness and hardships she had to confront when she came to Nanfang at that time: I was first assigned to the construction team in Nanfang after I graduated from the university. We went to work at 6am every morning … Sometimes we had to work until the midnight. You see, we worked from 6am in the morning to the midnight! Our overalls were always wet. The sweat just soaked with cement dusts in our overalls. When we got off work and went back home, we took off the overall and hung it up. We were too tired to wash it. We could not wash ourselves too. There was no place to take a shower, and no hot water. We just let it be. We just lied on the bed and slept. Next morning when we got up, the overall had dried up, right? When it dried up, the overall seemed being starched and it was so hard! We just put it on. It felt like armor! I even felt proud (laugh). When the sweat wet it, it was soft again. It was just like that. No time and no place to take a shower. At that time from my deep heart, I just felt so proud. I always thought of Paul, you know, Paul Kocakin, the character in the book How the Steel was Tempered. Do you remember that part when he was repairing road? When he was repairing road, the sole of his boots fell off. But he still stepped on the frozen soil with his bare feet and worked. How hard that might be! I thought my situation was almost the same (laugh). When I was old, I could write something about these too, right (laugh)? I really felt proud … In the letter I wrote to my mother, I proudly described my life here. And soon my mother wrote me back. She said, “My child, you can work revolutionarily and with all your life, but also remember to keep your life” (laugh).

While Ma Yi was talking, her eyes glowed behind the spectacles – she was apparently very happy. That was her younger life, full of passion and beliefs, full of the eagerness to enrich or even transcend one’s personal life. Ma was able

68

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

to grant all the hardships a romantic beauty as working and living for a higher aim in connection with grand ideals, beyond mere physical and material survival. It was also an era when such passions and beliefs were highly encouraged and cherished. To believe and behave in this way had brought Ma pride, and she wanted me to know that. And, perhaps more importantly and urgently, by telling the story in an outpouring of passion, she also wanted me to know that it still brings her pride to this very day and should not be mocked or denied. Most common workers, on the other hand, hardly connected their hard work with such romanticism. They simply reminded me of this building or that workshop, and proudly announced that they had built them with their hands: “we built them brick by brick.” They built this tremendous factory from nothing. It was a project full of their effort, sweat, and even sacrifices. Most Third Front projects were built near or even within large mountains. Construction, then, always involved a pressing threat of danger or even death. Zhang Guirong, a construction worker then, and now in his seventies, came to Nanfang in 1965. He explained his survival at the site as sheer good luck: When we came here in 1965, we brought sixty tons of dynamite with us to explode the mountain. All the local people had been evacuated … Several workers died in this process … One time, a wood worker in our team had a very high fever. The doctor gave him a threeday’s off pass. He put the sick note in his pocket and went back to work. He fell off from a high place because of the dizziness caused by his sickness. Actually we had a very good safety measures. You know, there were safety nets all around. But he just fell between the two nets, hit a big screw and died. Quite a few workers in our team died. We were lucky to have survived.

Nobody knows for sure today why that wood worker returned to work with a high fever and a sick note from the doctor. “Revolutionary passion” seemed unlikely to be the reason, and Zhang Guirong attributed it to the bonus system at the time: We were very loyal to our work. We always worked more than 11 or 12 hours a day. You know, we had bonus for the extra hours at that time … No, I didn’t have the feeling of doing a great and honored job. Just for the money. Many workers didn’t take a rest even if they had the sick note from the doctor, but not for any grand goal. You know, we didn’t think in that way. Workers really worked hard at that time. No need to call, no need for the slogan, we didn’t want to stop working by ourselves. We just wanted to overfill the quota, so we could receive a bonus. Otherwise we would only have the salary. Everybody overfilled the quota …

Thus, the construction process, especially during its early stage, relied on the strategy not only of political mobilization but also economic incentives. As illustrated by Christopher Howe, economic incentives, such as piecework system, em-

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

69

ulation campaign, bonus scheme, and premium payment, always played significantly complementary role during Maoist era.⁴⁰ While the official discourses concealed this fact and only highlighted workers’ “revolutionary spirit,” it proved an effective supplement for the political mobilization itself; taken together, the two motivators greatly pushed forward the construction of the Third Front. Meanwhile, whatever the specific motivation, senior workers’ testimonies always tended to highlight working hard as a major source of respect and dignity. For instance, even as Zhang Guirong flatly denied having any grand goal in his mind, he showed great pride in his team and his work: When we marched into this place, there was no bridge across the river. All the transportation depended on ferry. So the first thing for us to do was to build the bridge; otherwise the equipment couldn’t be transported in. We built the bridge from day to night. We even established a precast concrete workshop near the site to produce the necessary construction supplies … Within only one month, the bridge was done. That was really something. You know, our team was so strong technologically. Workers were so good. They didn’t fear any hardship.

“They did not fear any hardship” was the recurrent theme in almost all senior workers’ testimonies, no matter whether they put it within a framework of patriotism and nationalism or not. This was cited as proof of how good they were as workers, how they did not bring shame to the project and their own lives.

Interpreting Remembrance In many ways, the oral testimonies of these workers enrich and complicate available archival material and propagandistic discourses to offer a more variegated and subtle image of this specific labor history. They also provide a quite meaningful “subjective” dimension to it by revealing how these pioneering workers have chosen to remember that history and to interpret their experiences within a broader historical process. While almost all of the people I interviewed – whether common workers or engineers – acknowledged the existence of political coercion and economic exploitation in the processes of migration and construction alike, they also tended to downplay or justify these dimensions. Exploitation, hardship, and oppression were always embroidered with a romantic aura borrowed from the propagandistic discourses. Practical survival strategies coex-

 Christopher Howe, Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China: 1919 – 1972. Cambridge University Press, 1973, 118 – 35.

70

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

isted with these justifications and to some extent wove together with ideas such as patriotism, adoration of Mao, or the workers’ ethos, in different workers’ stories, or within the same narrative of one single worker. How then should we understand these particular ways of remembering? Are they just moral claims being made by the workers in retrospect? Should we simply attribute this particular way of remembering to workers’ nostalgia and imagining of the socialist past,⁴¹ or worse, their dogged “backwardness” in remaining “brainwashed” by an outdated ideology? Or, on the contrary, should we view these marginalized memories as a revolutionary alternative to the “positive”/official history, or even, as the “real” history? In other words, how should we situate workers’ oral history in the history of the TFC? Early advocates conceived the role of oral history as having two major aspects: to provide “a more realistic and fair reconstruction of the past”⁴² by “bringing recognition to substantial groups of people who had been ignored,”⁴³ and to criticize and correct usually “state-managed”⁴⁴ history. Inspired by the socalled post-positivist approaches to memory and subjectivity,⁴⁵ my interpretation of workers’ oral testimonies avoids both of these assumptions. First, I do not treat oral testimonies “simply as a series of given facts, to be discovered and described,”⁴⁶ but rather as “conscious and unconscious meanings of experience as lived and remembered.”⁴⁷ That is to say, I regard workers’ oral testimonies then as “problematic sites of query in themselves,”⁴⁸ where the focus falls not only on what is remembered, but also on how and why. Second, I also question the op-

 Ching Kwan Lee, What Was Socialism to Chinese Workers? Collective Memories and Labor Politics, . In Chingkwan Lee and Guobin Yang (ed.). Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: the Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China. Stanford University Press, 2007, 141– 165.  Paul Thompson, The voice of the Past – Oral History. In Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (ed.). The Oral History Reader. London: Routlege 1998, 24.  Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, Introduction. In Perks and Thomson (ed.), The Oral History Reader, 1– 8, esp. 2.  Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Harvard University Press, 1997.  Mahua Sarkar, Between Craft and Method. Meaning and Inter-subjectivity in Oral History Analysis. The Journal of Historical Sociology 25:4 (2012); Alistair Thomson, Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History. The Oral history review, 34 (2007): 49 – 70.  Luisa Passerini, Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism. In Perks and Thomson (ed.), The Oral History Reader, 67– 76, esp. 54.  Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory. The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge University Press, 1987.  Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, Casting for the Colonial. Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java. Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:1 (2000): 4– 48, esp. 4.

Pioneering Workers’ Memories: Remembering the TFC

71

timistic assumption that oral history will always challenge the hegemonic discourse; instead, I argue that the relationship between oral history and hegemonic discourse could be more complex. In light of this, these workers’ particular ways of remembering their pasts emerge in two seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, it confirms the argument made by the Popular Memory Group: that dominant historical discourses often “supply the very terms by which a private history is thought through.”⁴⁹ This points to Gramsci’s notion of “domination by consent.”⁵⁰ In this way, we see how these workers to varying extents have internalized and identified with the socialist beliefs and discourses that permeated their working lives. The grand propagandistic discourses and the elevated images promoted by the state could, of course, diverge wildly from reality. Yet, on the other hand, they might not be so empty and alienated as we tend to believe. At a minimum, they provided an interpretive framework for people who took part in the TFC project to not only qualify their choices (whether involuntary or forced), but also give meanings to their working lives above and beyond mere physical/material survival and hence grant them a sense of dignity and respect. In this sense, most workers cherish rather than despise those propagandistic beliefs and discourses. This is hence the cultural and subjective aspect of the socialist regime also noted by Stephen Kotkin, when he claims that, “more than simply a battle for political power culminating in the Bolshevik dictatorship … the revolution constantly announced itself as being about values, behavior, and beliefs.”⁵¹ The socialist past for these workers is, in other words, “a widely shared and legitimate aspiration.”⁵² This internalization and identification, rarely evident in historical archives, has to a great extent supplied the inner legitimacy of the socialist regime to these workers’ perceptions. On the other hand, it also exemplifies the agency of remembering. These older workers choose to identify with the discourses that sound legitimate to them, and thus remember their past in particular ways, both consciously and subconsciously. People are always “actively making memories,”⁵³ in different

 Popular Memory Group, Popular Memory. Theory, Politics, Method. In Perks and Thomson (ed.), The Oral History Reader, 75 – 86, esp. 78.  Antonio Gramsci, Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. International Publishers 1995, 337.  Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 14.  Ibid. 15.  Paua Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Introduction. Building Partnerships between Oral History and Memory Studies. In Paua Hamilton and Linda Shopes (eds.). Oral History and Public Memories. Temple University Press, 2008, vii – xvii, viii.

72

2 “Building Up a New World; Buying Time against the Imperialists”

ways at different life stages. While doing my research, I kept wondering whether the workers’ stories might be different if I interviewed them during different periods – for instance, in the 1970s or 1980s when most of them were still middle aged. Differences seem likely, not only because the process of aging itself changes the way we remember our past – i. e., factors that are important in youth and middle age are not necessarily important in old age, but also because these workers’ later years have been highly disturbed by the turbulent social transformations through which they have lived, especially after the mid-1990s. The respectable, peaceful and well-to-do life of retirement that the regime used to picture for them and that they used to take for granted has never been realized; instead, as I will describe in later chapters, most workers’ lives in old age have become very vulnerable. The implications of this particular way of aging, I believe, have been crucial in shaping workers’ memories. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues, “memory is, not only the constituting consciousness of the past, but an effort to reopen time on the basis of the implications contained in the present.”⁵⁴ Hence, the shared eagerness and even urgency in workers’ oral testimonies to highlight past beliefs reflects a desire to do more than merely confirm their identification with those beliefs or justify the harsh early years. Instead, by highlighting the historical significance or, at least, the meaning of their work/life in the past, workers attempt to challenge multiple forces in their present: not only their erasure or denigration within contemporary historiography, but also the current wave of market reform that has destroyed all their efforts and achievements, and thrust them into poverty and insecurity. Their particular way of remembering hence actually serves as a safeguard of the past and a self-protective resistance toward the present and future. I will return to this resistant dimension in a more detailed way in Chapter Five, after characterizing the transformation that happened since the mid-1990s and investigating its meaning for these pioneering workers.

Conclusion This chapter reconstructed the early labor history of the Third Front industrial complex of Nanfang Steel, by juxtaposing and contrasting three different historical resources of official propaganda, archival materials, and workers’ oral testimonies. While the official discourses of the 1960s depict an imagined utopian

 Maurice Merleau-Ponty (trans. Paul Kegan), Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge 2003, 210.

Conclusion

73

story full of revolutionary passion and romanticism, the archival materials disclose a harsh era when the socialist state struggled to realize its modernization goals by manipulating and exploiting the general populace under its will. Pioneering workers’ testimonies enrich, as well as complicate, both stories, by providing lively and quotidian life stories of common people who sought to negotiate ways between ideology and reality, between passion and survival, and between past and present. By treating each narrative as one particular way of “telling stories” and forming the fabric of history, this chapter has sought to provide a multi-dimensional or “thick”⁵⁵ understanding of the labor history in NS in its earliest stage. Comprehending the TFC in this way as an immense industrialization project implemented by the central state and endowed with a socialist and anti-imperialist ideology is neither an idealized and holy modernization project constructed by devoted model socialist workers nor a merciless imposition of the state accomplished solely through terror and coercion. It emerges, rather, as a state-imposed modernization project, constructed by people out of their combined idealism, passion, fear, and self-interest. Such an image differs from that found in many other literatures that focus simply on the alienation or irrelevance of socialist discourses with respect to social reality.⁵⁶ By attending to the “subjective” dimension of the labor history, we have seen how pioneering workers oriented themselves to the predominant ideology and discourses, despite the objective existence of coercion and exploitation. No matter how “painted”⁵⁷ these official discourses were, they did effectively mobilize many people to connect their lives to this grand modernization project, justifying rather than mock people’s choices and lives, and granting them meaning and pride. And this dimension, as I would like to emphasize again, is as important as other “objective” dimensions of the labor history I have depicted here. Meanwhile, as I mentioned earlier, such orientation could also be understood as pointing less to the past than to the present when the old ideology and promises first started to be haken and then were totally abandoned. The next chapter will explore the first stage of such change.

 Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture.  Miklos Haraszti, A Worker in a Workers’ State. Universe Books 1978; Michael Burawoy and Janos Lukcas, The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. University of Chicago Press, 1992; Deborah, A. Kaple, Dream of a Red Factory. The Legacy of High Stalinism in China. Oxford University Press, 1994; Boleslaw Janus, Labor’s Paradise. Family, Work, and Home in Nowa Huta, Poland, 1950 – 1960. East European Quarterly 33: 4 (1999): 453 – 474.  Burawoy and Lukcas, The Radiant Past, 26.

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had” 我的时代在背后 突然敲响大鼓 – 北岛：《岗位》，1979 My era Suddenly struck its drum Behind my back – Beidao, The Posts, 1979

The austere and highly political-aspired era in NS gradually ended with the unfolding of the 1980s, when the so-called economic reform in China was taken up nationally. In his Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi points out that the sphere of national ideological hegemony is always linked to international political relations.¹ If the autarkic mode of modernization during the Maoist era was born within the hegemonic Cold War world system, the eventual shift away from it was tightly linked to the emergence of global capitalism that slowly dissolved the bulwark of the Cold War and incorporated the nation-states in a new way. Under this “new leviathan,” “capitalism is no longer well comprehended by conceiving of a system of national oligopolies in which nations are in a fixed hierarchy of international exchange,”² instead, global capitalism diffuses manufacturing around the world through a new strategy called “the commodity chain”³ and creates the so-called “new international division of labor.”⁴ Have evolved since the late 1970s and early 1980s, such new global structures coincided with the death of Mao Zedong and the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping in China. This concurrent power change, domestically and internationally, followed the tragic failure of Mao’s modernization strategy, which had developed into socialist fundamentalism and peaked in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The death of Mao and the traumatic destruction these events brought to society pushed the regime into a serious legitimate crisis. They also triggered

 Giovanni Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century. Verso, 1994.  Robert Ross and Kent Trachte, Global Capitalism. The New Leviathan. State University of New York Press, 1990, 5.  Harvey, A Brief History.  Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye: The New International Division of Labour. Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries. Cambridge University Press, 1980. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-005

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

75

and justified the reforms that followed. In this sense, those reforms, at least in their early stage, contained significant elements of social resistance against and historical introspection towards the radical socialist fundamentalism adopted earlier.⁵ Meanwhile, the changing international geopolitics and global economic structure seemed to be providing new opportunities. In 1978, China decided to sign up for 780 billion dollars of foreign investment.⁶ At the famous Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee that followed, the central government declared that the major role of the Party would then shift away from political and ideological struggle towards economic development and modernization. In the following year, China established diplomatic relationships with the USA. The general policy of Reform and Openness was hence established. With that, China entered into its crucial decade of the 1980s. For many, this decade is a turning point in China’s contemporary history: it is a final farewell to a harsh and radical revolutionary era and signifies the coming of a new neoliberal age. David Harvey, for instance, parallels the policy of Reform and Openness adopted by Deng during this period with the policies adopted by Regan and Thatcher, and regards all of them as crucial signifiers of the coming of global neoliberalism.⁷ However, this is a misconception. Despite its later development, this initial stage of reform, as rightly analyzed by Wang Hui, was more like an effort borne of the Chinese socialist regime’s self-reflection and self-correction at the time in order to resume, in a more productive and rational way, the socialist modernization project that had been interrupted by previous radical political movements than a deliberate embracing of neoliberal capitalism.⁸ It is only in retrospect that the changes that happened during this decade seemed so irreversible and deterministic. By then, the reforming process was highly ideologically bound, as Deng clearly demanded in 1979 that the reforms must adhere to the so-called Four Cardinal Principles: upholding the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. It was also a process full of debates, struggles, reluctance, contradictions, and uncertainties, as again admitted by Deng himself when describing it as “crossing the river by

 Daniel Kelliher, Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural Reform, 1979 – 1989. Yale University Press, 1992.  Ming Peng, The Infrastructure Construction of Contemporary China. Beijing 1989, 241(彭敏专编: 《当代中国的基本建设》,北京:中国社会科学出版社).  Harvey, A Brief History, 120  Hui Wang, The Gradual Revolution: China’s Economic Reform Movement. Transaction Publishers, 1994.

76

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

touching the stones.” The widely accepted hindsight observation of “leftism in the years with odd number; rightism in the years with even number” might be an overgeneralized description of the oscillating state policies during this period, but it does suggest the struggles between the so-called “liberal reformers” and “conservative reformers” within the central government. Such struggles made the reforming process constantly vacillate back and forth, hence effectively slowing the speed of reform. It was against this larger structural framework that the general state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform and the specific and concrete reforming process in NS took place. That concrete process, as I will investigate in the first part of this chapter, was further complicated by the entangled, unequal, and always-changing power configurations among different actors at the grassroots. Among them, local governments and enterprise management, by grasping the new possibilities released by reforms in order to pursue their own and sometimes the community’s various interests, played very active roles. The results at the site, then, were far from the imagined “natural” development of “growing out of the plan,”⁹ but the consequences of a contextualized “politics of calculation”¹⁰ under different conditions. Out of such “politics of calculation” evolved a temporary collaboration between management and workers based on some common interests, though not without conflicts. Historical archives, enterprise documents, reports, documentaries, internal publications, and interviews with workers from different backgrounds together reveal a friction-laden, yet paternalistic labor regime on the shop floor, as well as a prosperous and bustling industrial community that slowly replaced the earlier stoic and peaceful one. Along with these there also developed an informal and pragmatic, yet at the same time very active and efficient labor resistant movement, largely organized by NS pensioners. For many NS workers, this was the “golden age” of their working lives. The second part of this chapter tells that part of the story.

“Growing Out of Plan” or “Politics of Calculation”? General SOE reform started in 1982. Compared to the agriculture reform initiated several years earlier, the SOE reform at this early stage was even more cautious and ideologically bound, as it followed a “cage and bird” policy, which insisted

 Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan.  Mitchell, Rule of Experts, 10.

“Growing Out of Plan” or “Politics of Calculation”?

77

that SOEs be a bird with its wings untied, but that it could fly only within the “big cage” of the socialist state-owned economy.¹¹ Largely because of this ideological constraint, the SOE reform in the 1980s has always been described as a “transition.” Naughton argues that it is a process of “growing out of the plan,” as indicated by the title of his widely regarded book. By using Naughton’s own words, “growing out of the plan” means that, “there are certain critical, or core, features of the command economy, and once those are eliminated or weakened, the system has a tendency to devolve into a different type of system.”¹² Under this logic, then, once the policymakers gave up some core features of the command economy and allowed the non-state enterprises to enter the economic field, the stateowned enterprises would be forced to face the competition from other economic sectors, improve their performance, and hence successfully grow out of the plan and adjust to the market. The main implication here is that transition to a market economy is an autonomous and self-enforcing process, once the market – “the invisible hand” – is set free. Such an assumption of the omnipotent and neutral role of the market reduces the concrete reforming process into a seemingly selfevident and abstract logic, and thus ignores the complicated power struggles among unequal social forces, while in reality it was exactly these power struggles that were defining the real meaning of the “market” and the role it played, hence shaping the route and result of the reforming process in SOEs during this period. Wang once pointed out that the crucial part of the reform package during the early stage of reform was not introducing market mechanisms, but power decentralization.¹³ Power decentralization aimed to loosen up the central state’s tight control of economic activities at all levels and grant larger autonomy to both local states and SOEs. When put into practice, it reconfigured power relations among different social forces in China. By transferring certain resources from the central state to the local ones, it greatly increased the automatic power of the local states and hence slowly transformed the political structure of China into a form of “local state corporatism.”¹⁴

 Xiaobo Wu, The Turbulent Three Decades. Beijing 2008, 67 (吴晓波，激荡三十年， 中信出版 社).  Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan, 309  Hui Wang, The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Origins of Neo-liberalism in China. Asian Exchange 18: 2 (2003): 211– 223, esp. 213.  Among many, see, for example Jean Chun Oi, The Evolution of Local State Corporatism. In Andrew Walder (ed.). Zouping in Transition. The Process of Reform in Rural North China. Harvard University Press, 1998, 35 – 61; Shaoguang Wang, The Limits of Decentralization. Beijing 1997; Shaoguang Wang, The Rise of the Regions. Fiscal Reform and the Decline of Central State Ca-

78

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

The consequences of such power decentralization for SOEs were rather complicated and paradoxical. While the loosened control from the central state was supposed to grant the SOEs more autonomy, the empowered local states immediately stepped in.¹⁵ Motivated primarily by their own political and economic calculations, local states meddled in the affairs of the SOEs within their administrative charge, many times in quite extractive or even predatory ways, making the enterprises even more vulnerable to bureaucratic imposition, as will be revealed later through Nanfang Steel’s experience during this period. Minxin Pei used the term “decentralized predation” to describe this feature, as he argued, “the decentralization of decision making, needed to reincentivize state agents, led to a restructuring of the contracts between the state and its agents, which proved to be extremely advantageous to the latter.”¹⁶ Specifically, decentralization in the early stage of SOE reform took two major initiatives. The first one was the so-called “government appropriation being replaced by bank loans” (Bo Gai Dai), promoted by the central state in the 1980s. Before the reform, the general fiscal policy regarding SOE was “state appropriation,” which means that an SOE should turn over all of its profits to the state and then receive allocated funds back from the state for its various costs. Such a policy, as criticized by Kornai and others, caused a so-called “soft budget constraint” in socialist regimes, including China.¹⁷ The new policy aimed to overcome this constraint. Beginning in 1983, direct allocation of investment funds from the central state to SOEs was gradually reduced and then replaced by bank loans with interest. Meanwhile, the central state now allowed the SOEs to retain a certain amount of profit for reproduction, the second initiative of decentralization. The ideal behind these two initiatives was to increase SOEs’ autonomy, enhance their incentives, and slowly turn them into independent economic entities in the long run. However, this goal was not achieved. As I will underline below, the increasing subnational states’ intervention and their various extractive programs imposed upon SOEs effectively pulled large portions of the enterprises’ retained

pacity in China. In Andrew Walder (ed.). The Waning of the Communist State. Economic Origins of Political Decline in China and Hungary. University of California Press, 1995, 88 – 114.  Wang, The Rise of the Regions.  Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition. The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Harvard University Press, 2009, 40.  Ja´nos Kornai, Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North-Holland 1980; in the case of China, see David D. Li and Minsong Liang, Causes of the Soft Budget Constraint: Evidence on Three Explanations. Journal of Comparative Economics 26, 1 (1998): 104– 116.

“Growing Out of Plan” or “Politics of Calculation”?

79

profits into their pockets and hence debilitated rather than nursed the long-term development of SOEs. In NS, as part of the decentralization package, jurisdiction over the factory was transferred from the central state to the Metallurgy Ministry in 1985. Soon after this power transfer, the Ministry required NS to carry out a profit retention contract. The contract demanded that after turning over a designated amount of profit to the central state (the amount would keep on changing due to various conditions and negotiations), NS had to share the remaining profit with the Metallurgy Ministry, with the Ministry taking 70 percent and the factory only 30 percent.¹⁸ This extractive strategy continued after NS was taken over by the Sichuan province from the Metallurgy Ministry in 1987, as another decentralization effort. From 1988 to 1991, NS was required to sign a new contract with the provincial government. Under this new contract, the amount of profit that Nanfang should turn over to the province would be increased proportionally year by year based on the gross profit of Nanfang in 1987. The increasing rate for each year would then be 5 percent, 6 percent, and 7 percent respectively.¹⁹ As a result, from 1989 to 1991, the percentage of profit retained by Nanfang dropped from 48.5 percent to 27 percent.²⁰ This was an even more predatory system. Even Laoma, who had been a provincial government bureaucrat before his retirement in the 1990s, admitted to me that, [t]he policies at that time were absurd. After the policy of “government appropriation being replaced by bank loans,” the enterprises now had to rely on banks for loans. But on the other hand, a huge portion of their profits had to be turned over to the governments. The retained portion was very small, especially compared to the loans and the interests that had to be shouldered by the enterprises.

Besides these extractive contracts signed between the SOEs and their upper administrations, another form of extraction came from the various “contributions” SOEs had to make under the requirement of local governments. To be sure, the role of local governments could be both protective and extractive. Usually local governments would protect their SOEs from outside competition and help them to raise their bargaining power against the central state in order to get more profit retentions. But to a great extent, these protective efforts were done largely for

 “The reform of profit retention with the Metallurgy Department: new opportunity for Nanfang”, Nanfang News, 1985, 5,6.  “A Great Exploration: the Memorial of Ten-year Reform in Nanfang”. Nanfang News, 1995, 2, 10.  “Emancipating the mind, speeding up the reform and realizing a new jump in the nineties”. Nanfang News.

80

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

more extractive ends, since the local governments could benefit both directly and indirectly from what the SOEs retained, in various ways, as Wang Shaoguang pointed out: Direct benefits usually take the form of what is known in Chinese as Tanpai – the imposition of various fees on enterprises in addition to formal tax obligations; another strategy is Pingpan (assortment plate), which refers to schemes in which various local enterprises are “invited” to invest in projects local governments consider vital for regional development.²¹

Both extractive strategies – Tanpai and Pingpan – were used against NS, especially during the second half of the 1980s and early 1990s when NS was one of the largest and most profitable enterprises in the province. It was, according to Laowu, one of the senior managers of NS during that period, the “cash cow” for the local governments (hence one of their favorites): The local governments had never tried to support you. Instead, it treated you only as a “cash cow.” It did its best to squeeze money from you by imposing more and more taxes on you and asking you to build roads or bridges or whatever. No, no support, only exploitation.

Such a harsh accusation might just be a one-side story, yet it did exemplify the tension between local states and most SOEs during this period. To a great extent, decentralization did not result in the attenuation, but rather the multiplication, of bureaucracies as various sub-national states jumped into the game. Largely based on the political and economic calculations aiming to serve their own parochial interests, these sub-national states interpreted and manipulated the central state’s policies strategically and employed their power of intervention and extraction rather effectively. All of these extractive measures – the various contracts and numerous unwarranted “contributions” imposed by different sub-national states upon the factory – sucked the largest part of the retained profit away from NS, leaving the remnant too small for the factory to guarantee further reproducing it. Meanwhile, due to the policy of “government appropriations being replaced by loans,” investment from the central state was quickly diminishing. Now the factory had to seek loans from the state-owned banks, year after year, without any idea of how and when to pay them back. Even the loan interest alone proved to be a big burden: the official report of the factory complained that it had to spend a large portion of its retained profit (already small after the governments’ extrac-

 Wang, The Rise of the Regions, 102.

“Growing Out of Plan” or “Politics of Calculation”?

81

tion) simply to pay the loan interest each year. In 1991, for example, NS paid more than 100 million Yuan in loan interest.²² The factory was hence trapped in a vicious debt abyss. Nor was NS in any sense exceptional in this. Statistics from the State Plan Committee shows that in 1993 the average debt ratio for SOEs was 68.2 percent. The possibility of paying this back was almost zero.²³ Debts also came in another form: the so-called triangular debt chains within SOEs, which emerged rampantly from the 1980s as another unexpected result of the policy of “government appropriations being replaced by loans.” When SOEs could not get large enough loans from the banks, they would sometimes delay their payments to suppliers, such that when several enterprises became indebted to each other in this way, triangular debt chains were created.²⁴ In 1990, NS owed its supplying enterprises 440 million Yuan, mostly for purchasing materials, while its buying enterprises owed NS 660 million Yuan for product purchasing. This chain of debts almost drained the circulating funds of NS. Moreover, the difficulty of getting the currency withdrawn from the circulation domain forced SOEs to go back to banks and pay interest rates that were steadily increasing. In the case of NS, the interest paid to banks almost doubled from 1989 to 1992.²⁵ Meaningfully, despite all of these crises, on the surface Nanfang seemed to be doing quite well during this period: as a large SOE, it had no problems getting loans from the state banks in spite of its huge debts to them; its products sold well, especially during the second half of the 1980s, when steel prices reached an irrationally high point due to the overheated economy and high inflation. Such ostensible prosperity temporarily covered the accumulated contradictions and pitfalls brought by this early stage of reform. However, sustained by unconditional loans from the state banks and the irrationally high price of its products, such prosperity was very unstable. Nevertheless, prior to 1992, despite already huge latent losses due to its gigantic debt to the state banks, NS was still profitable on its balance sheet. Its workers, by slowly getting used to steadily improving living standards until then, started to believe that life was getting better and better and hence would continue this way forever.

 “Enterprise report”, the enterprise archives, 1992, 3, 11.  Qinglian He, The Pitfalls of China’s Modernization. Hong Kong 1998, 96.  For an excellent explanation of how the triangular debt chains weighed down the SOEs, see Pak K Lee, The Political Economy of State Enterprise Relations in China’s Shaanxi Province. Journal of Contemporary Asia 27,3 (1997): 287– 314.  “Emancipating the mind, speeding up the reform and realizing a new jump in the nineties”. Nanfang News, 1992, 10, 13. (长钢报，“解放思想，加快改革，实现九十年代新腾飞”).

82

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade” The earlier stage of SOE reform aimed to slowly strengthen the economic function of the state-owned enterprises, separate administration from management, and reduce the direct involvement of the Party in the production process, especially through the establishment of the so-called “factory director responsibility system.” But the grassroots Party organization in the factory, while never totally losing its control in the production process, always had the final say regarding the redistribution (sometimes through the official trade union). Two trends hence can be observed for this period, in NS as well as in other SOEs by and large. First, decentralization and profit retention, though not being able to guarantee the enterprise’s reproduction, did provide more money and space for the factory to develop a more prosperous industrial community and to raise the living standards of its workers. Meanwhile, a consumer market outside the factory supply network slowly emerged due largely to earlier agricultural reforms,²⁶ while the cautious growth of non-state economic sectors outside the planned economy began to offer state workers some alternative employment opportunities, though they were still perceived as sub-optimal choices at that time. By weakening workers’ structural dependence upon the regime, all these developments helped to create a rather paternalistic labor regime at NS, as I will illustrate later. Second, by the second half of the 1980s, the central government began to endorse a series of reforms that sought to give factory managers more authority, as well as to introduce more flexible labor policies.²⁷ The establishment of the socalled “factory director responsibility system” since the mid-1980s put more power in the hands of factory managers, and income gaps (in the form of wages, bonuses, and the assignment of housing), especially between workers and managers, widened markedly.²⁸

 In 1985, the central government decided to reform the rationing system. The constantly increasing supplies of food and consumer goods, the gradual easing of rationing, and the opening up of a private trade and services sector in cities have provided alternative sources for the satisfaction of many needs.  Wing-yue Leung, Smashing the Iron Rice Pot. Workers and Unions in China’s Market Socialism. Hong Kong 1988, 99.  Sheehan, Chinese Workers, 197– 198; Anita Chan, Revolution or Corporatism? Workers and Trade Unions in Post-Mao China. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 29 (1993): 31– 61, esp. 40; Andrew Walder, Workers, Managers and the State. The Reform Era and the Political Crisis of 1989. The China Quarterly, 127 (1991): 467– 492, esp. 479.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

83

These two contradictory trends generated a sort of tension within the stillpreserved socialist social contract during this period, which saw the simultaneous improvement of welfare provisions and the beginnings of different kinds of status degradation and threats to job security. However, since the ideological “cage” in this period was still in place, the socialist social contract between state and state workers, while becoming more shaky, remained largely preserved: the tenure labor system remained intact; management still did not develop any enhanced powers against workers, such as the threat of lay-offs; and cautious efforts by the government in the 1980s to introduce a more flexible labor system remained largely ineffective. In this way, in 1988 when the state started to encourage enterprises to cut down on “redundant” workers in order to deal with widespread “over-manning,” in practice they fired virtually no workers, although some were put on reduced wages.²⁹ Following this general situation, the contract labor system introduced at NS in 1986 also applied only to newly recruited employees, while the status of existing permanent workers did not change at all. For most NS workers, the 1980s was thus their golden age. Life had never been so good before; and, as it turned out later, would never be so good after. The earlier harsh and turbulent political movements were over; with production getting normalized, everyday life finally returned to a relatively calm and predictable track; wages increased with the passing years, and people’s living standards improved in a quite perceptible way;³⁰ work could still be tedious and hard, but was accompanied by accumulative rewards, potential internal upward mobility, and increasing negotiation power (though in a limited way). While people still nagged at each other over various practical issues (wages, bonuses, accommodation, promotion, etc.), and were angered and frustrated by corruption, nepotism, and other everyday frictions, a sense of shared identity nevertheless developed and consolidated. The industrial community – due to the steady investment from the factory during these years and the development of a market within and outside of NS – was becoming prosperous and buoyant. So, despite all of the struggles and pitfalls I analyzed in the proceeding section, and despite all of the confusions and discontent brought by reform and social change, for workers who worked and lived during the eighties, progress just seemed so sure and inevitable. “Golden” as it was, almost all of the nostalgic remarks made by workers today referred back to this decade.

 Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan, 211– 218.  Wage increases during this period was a national trend. From 1977 to 1983, nominal wages in state industry increased by 37 percent, real wages by 18 percent.

84

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

Paternalistic Factory Regime The earlier SOE reform characterized by decentralization in this decade changed the power relation between managers and workers in two seemingly contradictory ways. On the one hand, as I mentioned earlier, the labor reforms that sought to give factory managers more authority and introduce more flexible labor policies during this period, though largely a failure, did start to degrade the status of workers, who had been at least rhetorically been elevated to a rather high prominence earlier, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Such degradation engendered some tension between managers and workers and aroused a certain degree of worke resistance, as I will illustrate later in this chapter. On the other hand, SOE managers and workers also developed a kind of tacit alignment based on some shared interests brought about by decentralization and profit retention. As Walder rightly observed, there existed collusions between managers and workers during this period, both having an interest in retaining the highest amount of incentive funds from the state and distributing it relatively equally.³¹ From a comprehensive study of 20 large and medium Chinese SOEs in the 1980s, David Granick also claims that managers guided their decisionmaking mostly from considerations about how to maximize the average welfare of factory employees rather than profit seeking.³² Having not developed a real “market sense” that might have raised cost-sensitivity, managers chose to encourage workers’ cooperation by maximizing bonuses and other benefits, while minimizing contention and conflict by not making quotas too tight, distributing rewards relatively equally, and keeping a less-than-ironclad link between output and pay.³³ Factory documents, newspaper, and interviews with both managers and workers show that a very similar process took place in NS as well during this period. Conflict, tension, and resistance coexisted with compromise, coordination, and solidarity. Thus on the shop floor, labor control was largely based on paternalistic discipline and consent, rather than coercion. Aqiu, an electrician in his forties who went to work in Nanfang in the 1980s, described his earlier working life:

 Andrew Walder, Wage Reform and the Web of Factory Interests. The China Quarterly, 109 (1987): 22– 41.  David Granick, Chinese State Enterprise: A Regional Property Rights Analysis. The University of Chicago Press, 1990.  Ibid.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

85

I entered Nanfang in 1987 when I was 16. My parents changed my age in order for me to become a NS worker. It was the last time in NS to implement the policy of “dingti.”³⁴ So my parents asked me to drop school and grasp the last chance. You know, being a SOE worker was still an honorable thing at that time. See, they were near-sighted … Then, I started to work as a very young electrician in the factory, but extremely unhappy. I didn’t really do my job there. I merely just hung around, flirted with young female workmates, and slept everywhere I thought comfortable. If the section chief scolded me, I would definitely scold back (laugh) …

Walder, in his well regarded book, Communist neo-traditionalism, argued that Chinese SOE workers in the “communist economy” were under so-called “organized dependency,” meaning that workers were dependent economically on their enterprises, politically on the party and management, and personally on their supervisors.³⁵ While dependency and control were undoubtedly manifest, the relationship was never unidirectional. Workers of course were dependent upon their managers for pragmatic extra interests such as bonuses and promotions, but not for job tenure. The absence of a “free” labor market under the planned economy especially within the SOE sector and the sustained socialist social contract that largely guaranteed job tenure basically granted the current SOE labor force a monopoly on the supply of labor force. In this way, managers likewise had to depend on their permanent labor force for production and cooperation. Walder himself realized this later when he noted that “workers cannot leave, but neither can they be dismissed.” So, indeed, “China’s managers are uniquely dependent on their labor force.”³⁶ Such dependency largely spared the use of explicit coercion by managers against workers on the shop floor. Instead, they tended to adopt more paternalistic strategies, as Aqiu’s continued story reveals: Then, one day because of my own negligence, [an electrical] switch suddenly exploded right in front of me. The section chief was so angry that he scolded me so severely that I cried. He said, “Anyhow you have a high school degree, but you don’t even have the basic electrical knowledge! You can just fool around now, but you will be despised by others and feel ashamed of yourself in the future!” I felt so wronged. My front cloth had been all burned out during the accident and I was still so scared, but instead of soothing me, he scolded me! When he saw my tears, the section chief stopped scolding. Then, he drew out a

 The policy of Dingti had long been implemented in the SOE system in China, which granted the grown-up working-class children the right to take their parents’ jobs when their parents reached retirement age. This policy was discarded in the second half of the 1980s.  Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism.  Andrew G. Walder, Factory and Manager in an Era of Reform. The China Quarterly 118 (1989): 252.

86

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

circuit diagram and asked me to install a switch according to it. Trying to stimulate me, he told me that it was an exam question for the technicians and thus might be too hard for me. I tried my best … When I gave the successfully installed switch to him, he smiled. After that, I changed. I told myself that if other people could do it I could do it too. I didn’t want other people to look down upon me. Since then, I began to learn technical skills and work hard.

A quite similar story was told to me from another side of the relationship. Zhangbo had been a workshop director before he retired in the late 1980s. He told me that sometimes he might spank these young workers if he found out that they did something “bad” while working: One day when I went to the shop floor, I saw some young workers gathering around doing gambling. I went straight to them and spanked them. I scolded them, “Is this what your parents expect you to do here? You are workers, not gangsters!” … Later after work when I bumped into their parents in the bazaar, I told them that I spanked their kids today and why. [Question: How did their parents respond?] They all thought what I did as right. I was at these young kids’ father’s age, you know.

Such particular kinds of paternalistic labor discipline were certainly born from a more hegemonic rather than despotic labor regime under the conditions of a persistent socialist ideology of a self-claimed worker’s state and the collusive relationship between managers and workers, as I mentioned earlier. But equally importantly it was also nurtured by the corresponding development of a quite consolidated community that defined the relationships between people, including managers and workers, not as a purely economic one, but more as a social and communal one. To borrow the words of a pro-reform director of NS, “we were more like a tribe instead of a modern enterprise then.” This denigrating reference to “tribe” had many implications. In one aspect, it implied the existence of a “pre-modern” or even “primitive” community, which embedded all economic activities within a certain social context. Such embeddedness has also been noticed by other scholars who highlight that labor in socialist China is not treated as a commodity, but as “a political and economic resource”.³⁷ Such a feature was usually interpreted as a proof of the “irrational” and “less modern” socialist industrial organizations and hence their undesirability. But I would like to interpret such a feature through a different lens here. I suggest that such embeddedness, to a certain degree, preempted a too harsh “rational” or “scientific” management on the shop floor that would have laid bare any naked exploitation. Instead, the “tribalist” or “traditionalist”  Walder, Communist neo-traditionalism, 81.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

87

understanding of community diluted the impersonal labor regulations and rules and made their implementation on real life something undertaken reluctantly and even seen as unfavorable. On the other hand, it also granted managers a more “traditional” authority based on status and seniority and legitimated their imparting of patriarchal discipline on younger workers. Consciously and subconsciously, mangers employed such authority in various ways. In the first above-mentioned case of Aqiu, the manager strategically aroused the young disobedient worker’s feelings of shame and hence successfully “straightened him up.” As in other “traditional” communities, where, as Ferdinand Tönnies observed, “whoever suffers shame feels humiliated, injured, sullied; the well-being and grace of his honour and his spiritual self are no longer intact,”³⁸ the shared morality or ethics, reinforced by feelings of stigma and shame, helped to keep the labor discipline effective on the shop floor of NS in the 1980s. In the second case above, labor control came from the shared acknowledgement of a paternalistic authority within the senior manager in the eyes of working-class parents and their working-class children. In other words, the acceptance of “being disciplined” was based not necessarily on fear or force, but more on a consensus among senior managers, parents, and young workers that it was their (senior managers and parents) corporate responsibility to make “their kids” not just better workers, but also better persons. As Zhangbo explained, since gambling was not “what your parents expect you to do here,” so he, as someone “at these young kids’ father’s age,” had the right to spank them to behave not just on the basis of his authority as a senior manager but also as a kind of parent. Such patriarchal authority, of course, needed to be legitimized. On the grassroots shop floor, legitimacy could never come exclusively from the managerial status and power granted by the state; sole dependence on that could only bring rampant resistance from workers, overtly or covertly. Such authority had also to come, at least partially, from the ready acceptance by workers of such authority, which was usually based on the workers’ conviction that their managers were respectable leaders. As Daping, one worker in his fifties, described his previous managers in the 1970s and 1980s, [m]y old manager came from Shanghai to support the Third Front Construction. He was a very capable man, an expert of technology. He had a high reputation among workers and knew how to manage workers. He always called our common workers, old or young, as “master”… Even during the chaos of Culture Revolution, the rebellious workers had

 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society. Cambridge University Press, 2001, 111.

88

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

never made any trouble with him. Workers admired him a lot… He is a real communist cadre, a man with integrity and no corruption at all. He always looked very serious and rarely smiled. But if our common workers were sick, he would come to visit us in hospital and brought us these Shanghai candies and snacks that his relatives sent to him from Shanghai… So, our workers were very touched indeed.

A “rule of virtue” was always the ideal of both the “traditional” and the socialist Chinese regime. The political slogan that required party cadres to be “the first to bear hardships and the last to enjoy comforts” was of course only a political slogan and barely fitted the reality, but it at least exemplified the regime’s effort to legitimate managers’ power for production organization and labor control through moral justification and was set as the moral criteria for them. While workers might simply shrug off such a slogan as an affectation, this moral image, when stripped of its ideological veneer, is not so different from the imagined “wise and benevolent master” in “traditional” Confucian Chinese society.³⁹ The confirmation of that in a political slogan, while it could, on the one hand, be rather “hyper-normalized” and hollow,⁴⁰ on the other hand, in a quite subtle way, it could also make most common workers more ready to “be managed,” especially when their cadres happened to come up to the ideal type of being capable, honest, and caring, such as the manager described above by Daping. Meanwhile, the paternalistic care exemplified by the hospital visits and respectful addressing of workers as “masters” granted workers a certain feeling of dignity and hence also helped to create a relatively peaceful labor relation especially in the early stage of the 1980s. Besides meritocracy, clientalism was another more implicit strategy used in the labor control process. Walder highlighted such client-patron relationship between worker activists and party-member managers as a pervasive and crucial feature of the so-called “clientelist bureaucracy” in Chinese SOEs, when a minority of worker activists exchanged their loyalty and cooperation for certain benefits such as promotion, bonuses, and other privileges.⁴¹ Interviews with workers confirmed the existence of such clientalism in NS as well. Several workers expressed their contempt towards these activists who “were always eager to per Tim Wright argues that the paternalistic tendency in Chinese factory might partly derives from the Confucian ideal of benevolence toward subordinates, see Tim Wright, ‘The Spiritual Heritage of Chinese Capitalism’: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Chinese Enterprise Management. The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 19/20 (1988): 185 – 214; Walder, in his Communist Neo-traditionalism, also talked about the relation between labor management in socialist SOEs and Chinese traditions of state craft and authority, p121– 122.  Yurchak, Everything was Forever, 50.  Walder, Communist neo-traditionalism, 162– 186.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

89

form (biaoxian) in front of the cadres,” “these ass-kissers were too servile to have their bones,” and hence “were disliked by everybody,” while at the same time they complained that good things always went to them. However, despite its undoubted existence, how predominantly and efficiently such clientelist strategies were used in reality needs closer investigation. First, the general disdain toward these “ass-kissing” behaviors expressed by my worker interviewees signified that clientelism was not a widely accepted norm and that political activists were minorities instead of majorities. This observation also coincides with the one made by Alexei Yurchak about the unpopularity of the activists in late Soviet society.⁴² Even though playing clientelism or being an “ass-kisser” (in the workers’ own words) might bring some perceptible benefits, it risked violating the implicit working-class ethics and hence alienated those people from other workmates.⁴³ Another reason for majority workers’ staying away from such kind of clientelism was because they could – since the managers didn’t have the power to fire them, the biggest loss for them would just be fewer opportunities for extra benefits such as a higher bonus, the chance to be nominated as a “model worker,,” and so on; consequently, many chose to ignore these benefits in order to stay “honest” in their own ways. Meanwhile, my research also shows that most “reasonable” managers were also rather cautious towards clientelism since obvious favoritism would definitely lead to discontent and even resistance (covert or overt) from the majority of “not so active or ambitious” workers, and hence would disturb rather than promote cooperation and smooth production. That was the exact reason behind the widespread norm of the “relatively equal attribution of rewards” in SOEs during this period,⁴⁴ which was also confirmed by my worker interviewees as they all agreed that “we basically took turns [for various benefits].” In general, the labor regime in NS during this period had some features from both Burawoy’s “bureaucratic hegemony” and Walder’s “clientelist bureaucracy,” but was not the simple exemplification of either. The particular reforming process at the time, which seesawed between a “conservative” effort to preserve socialist tenets and a “liberal” eagerness to introduce more so-called market-oriented reforms, constantly complicated the power relations between managers and workers. The particular paternalistic labor regime in NS then was derived from the actual grassroots power negotiation, calculations, and compromises between these two groups, located within the larger sociopolitical context of China  Yurchak, Everything was Forever.  Walder observed the similar hostility towards model workers, Communist Neo-traditionalism, p 238 – 239.  Walder, Wage Reform, 22– 41.

90

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

at that time. Not just on the shop floor, such paternalism also played a significant role in the developmental process of the factory community at large, as I will illustrate below.

“Little Shanghai”: The Construction of “Modern” and “Urban” Industrial Community Before the Third Front Construction, Wuba, the district where NS is now located, was a remote village hidden among mountains. As such, the factory community was built from next to nothing. As noted in Chapter Two, pioneering workers came there under the slogan of “good people, good horses go to the third front,” only to find themselves standing on a barren field, with nowhere to live. Under the guideline of “first production, then living,” the construction teams’ sole task was to construct workshops, not living places. Pioneering workers had to build mud huts by themselves or were assigned to peasants’ households for temporary housing. This was very different from the claims made by some urban socialist studies that the socialist state always tried to create its working-class urban space as “a geography markedly different from the bourgeois structures of old”⁴⁵ and a distinct “urban area” both in contrast to, as well as superior to, its rural surrounding.,⁴⁶ In the earliest developmental history of NS, as well as in most Third Front factories, the state not only had no intention of developing an urban space exclusive to its rural surroundings but also had no capability of doing so. As I illustrated earlier, the policies of “combining commune and factory” and “the rotating worker system” in the earlier 1960s, and the later Design Revolution and Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and 1970s, all aimed to prevent rather than promote the formation of such an exclusive industrial community. The first workers’ dwelling apartment made of brick was only constructed in 1968, after persistent pressure from frustrated workers who incessantly urged the leadership of NS to apply to higher authorities to allocate money and land for workers’ accommodation and other infrastructure construction. After that, slowly, other “formal” residential buildings started to appear here and there; a hospital and school were also built to meet the expanding requirements of workers  Alison Stenning, Where is the Post-socialist Working Class? Working-Class Lives in the Spaces of (Post‐) Socialism. Sociology 39,5 (2005): 983 – 999, esp. 983.  Lane, D. and F. O’Dell, The Soviet Industrial Worker. Martin Robertson, 1978; Malcolm B. Hamilton and Maria Hirszowicz, Class and Inequality in Pre-industrial, Capitalist, and Communist Societies. Palgrave Macmillan 1987.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

91

as more and more of them were assigned to NS, overwhelming local facilities. When I was in the field, many now-retired workers liked to point out this building or that road to me and proudly announce that they had constructed all of them with their own hands. Nevertheless, the lack of urban experience among the planners and the extreme shortage of infrastructure investment made such developments more improvised than designed. No form or sense of an exclusive industrial community was really developed in this earliest stage: the official history of NS claimed that it was only in 1982 that peasants were prohibited from riding through the workshops astride their cattle.⁴⁷ Since then, a real-sense danwei system was slowly established in NS. As described by many other scholars, the danwei-based welfare system was underpinned by three elements: welfare housing allocation, pension, and free medical care.⁴⁸ This was meant to compensate for the generally quite low wages in most danwei units during the command economy. It was also taken as epitomizing the socialist social contract between SOE workers and the state, which promised a relatively egalitarian redistributionist order by providing job security, basic living standards and possible opportunities for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.⁴⁹ Meanwhile, many large and medium-sized danwei units also ran their own hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and canteens. Statistics show that at the end of 1985, there were about 225,000 hospitals and 3 million primary schools operated by SOEs, while only 60,000 hospitals and 0.83 million primary schools were run by local governments.⁵⁰ Instead of being “pure” economic entities, pre-restructured danwei units were therefore more like social entities that provided an enclosed working and living space for their workers, as exemplified by the development of NS during this decade. Based on the full establishment of the danwei system, a real urbanized industrial community eventually emerged in NS. Since the retained profit was not enough for reproduction anyway, the factory decided to use it largely for welfare improvement and community development. At the time, the top managers in SOEs were still expected to serve as community leaders who were responsible not only for production and financial performance of the factory, but also for enhancing employees’ income and delivering a wide range of welfare benefits and services to them. Actually, managers in the 1980s who failed to deliver higher bo-

 Nanfang History, 37.  Lu and Perry (eds.), Danwei, 3 – 12.  Wenfang Tang and William L. Parish, Chinese Urban Life Under Reform. The Changing Social Contract. Cambridge University Press, 2000, 3 – 4; 128 – 162.  S. Yue, The Reform of China’s Social Welfare system. Management World 37 (1991): 171– 176, esp. 172.

92

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

nuses and new housing units or to upgrade the quality of meal services would constantly be faced with low-grade problems such as absenteeism, breakdowns, tardiness, and high rates of lost and wasted materials.⁵¹ At NS, during this decade, workers’ general welfare improved steadily, as exemplified in their increasing wages and bonuses, various kinds of newly created subsidies, chances of factory-sponsored summer vacations, more spacious living spaces, and much more abundant material supplies from the factory. The number of workers almost doubled during this period, as more and more young offspring chose to enter the factory after high school instead of going to college, usually at their working parents’ suggestion – being an SOE worker was then still regarded as preferable and a means of guaranteeing a secure future.

Fig. 3: one of the working-class flats built during the 1980s. Source: The Factory History of Nanfang, 1965 – 1985.

These developments could be interpreted in various ways. Some declared them as the new strategies adopted by the factory – as one extended arm of state power – for more effective social control by buying workers out.⁵² Or, they might be interpreted as the forced compromise SOE managers had to

 Walder, Factory and Manager, 242– 264.  Lu and Perry, Danwei.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

93

Fig. 4: a community park built by the factory in the 1980s. Source: The Factory History of Nanfang, 1965 – 1985.

make; as Lin Yimin argued, the inflated labor compensation and diversion of funds to community consumption or housing construction during the 1980s and early 1990s “should be viewed as stemming from managers’ failure to consolidate their authority – obtrusive or otherwise – rather than from a premeditated, preferred course of action toward the maximization of average benefits for factory employees.”⁵³ Acknowledging the validity of both arguments, my research here tends to offer a complementary explanation, which highlights the developmental desire of the top managers in NS as concrete individuals who not only regarded the general improvement of the living status within “their” community as “their” achievement but also as a sign of “their” merit as benevolent and paternalistic leaders. Development, progress, and modernity were not just state propaganda, but aspirations heartily embraced by both managers and, in my case, workers, as they shared an eagerness for raising the living standard in general, as well as

 Yimin Lin, Between Government and Labor: Managerial Decision-making in Chinese Industry. Studies In Comparative Communism 4 (1992): 381– 403.

94

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

building up a more modern and prosperous urban “home” and distinguishing themselves from the “backward” rural surroundings. The ever increasing infrastructure investment drawn from factory’s retained profit, the paternalistic factory regime, and the alternative development of a consumer market, all provided a much more fertile soil for the leadership of the factory to purposefully realize these goals at last. In the following, I explore this development in three different yet connected dimensions.

Becoming Modern: “Constructing Socialist Material and Cultural Civilization” An urban and modern industrial space was consciously and steadily developed in NS during this decade: more asphalt roads were paved, flanked by trees and illuminated by road lamps, and finally formed into a decent “ten-mile steel-city avenue,” as it was so proudly called by the factory’s official media as well as by its workers; more, larger, and better residential buildings were constructed, usually forming several particular neighborhoods, each with their own central parks and recreation centers; enterprise-sponsored schools and hospital were expanded and renovated to a far better standard than local county ones. Along with the construction of infrastructure was the so-called “cultural construction.” Quite a few cultural facilities – libraries (science and technology library and literature library), theatre, swimming pool, dancing hall, basketball courts, skating rink, and so on – were built during this decade; the factory established its own night schools and technical training schools, which always received full voluntary registrations; furthermore, it constantly organized or sponsored various “cultural” activities, including, but not limiting to, various kinds of free-entry clubs (painting club, literature club, calligraphy club, photograph club, Chinese chess club, to name a few), sport games, holiday celebrations and parades, and theatrical performances. Through all these, the factory successfully encouraged a pro-cultural and pro-educational milieu. The old librarians in NS liked to remind me that there used to be so many people reading or studying in the now-empty libraries in their spare time before the mid-1990s. Such hunger for education had a material motive for sure, since “knowledge” was officially proclaimed as “the advanced productive force” after the reforms and therefore having a higher school degree or certificates from night/ technology schools would very likely open more chances of career promotion for common workers. Still, the meaning of education might go further than mere material pragmatism. The oversubscribed registration not just in technology school but also in cultural clubs that would not bring any material benefits, the passionate and sincere essays written by workers about these cultural activities and published in the factory newspapers, and the current nostalgic recollec-

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

95

tion of their learning experiences at the time by workers during my interviews all point to a shared desire for self-growth among most young workers during this period. Not just a school diploma and technical knowledge, but the pursuing of “culture” in the general sense seemed to provide these workers, many of whom were manual laborers, with a sense of fulfillment, pleasure, civility, and maybe even power, a likely elevation above the rough laboring world toward a more refined one.⁵⁴ “I was so progressive then. You know, I was always studying new technologies and reading different kinds of literatures,” Xiangzi claimed to me, then a electrician but later forced into early retirement in 1999. Being “progressive” here had nothing to do with political performances, but merely referred to personal growth and self-enrichment. Not everybody was heartily engaged in these “cultural things” for sure, yet a general embracing of education and “culture,” especially among young workers, was rather apparant. Along with these, NS created its own factory song in 1982: every weekday morning and evening, right before and after the working hours, the enterprise broadcasting station would begin to play the heroic factory song starting with “Nanfang! Ah! Nanfang! Our great Nanfang!” reaching every corner of the complex. A series of speech contests around the theme of “I am a Nanfang Ren (Nanfang-ese)” were held factory-wide in 1986. During this decade, NS also established its own television channel. People began to develop a habit of watching the enterprise news through the enterprise channel right after the national news on CCTV. All of these developments helped to create and strengthen a shared identity among the people of NS – both managers and workers – that clearly distinguished them from the locals, whose income and status were usually much lower than NS workers. The factory’s official agenda and propagandist reports claimed that all of these developments were answering the central state’s calls at the time to construct socialist material and cultural civilization nationwide in general, and to establish a “healthy, positive, and progressive enterprise culture” in SOEs in particular. When put into practice, instead of being imposing, oppressive, and hence resisted or ridiculed, they were accepted by workers in different ways. While many workers showed great distaste for political study meetings at that time and boasted to me how smart they were in avoiding these meetings as much as possible, they did welcome other institutionalized entertainments such as various cultural clubs, sport games, holiday parades, and celebrations.

 Kotlin, in his Magnetic Mountain, also talked about such desire for self-improvement among Soviet workers, p215.

96

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

They also actively transformed some political-oriented events that were supposedly imbued with ideological and moral purposes into their own “holidays.” For example, “plantation day” – one selected spring day when each workshop organized its employees to climb up mountains and plant seedlings – was basically treated as a sunny spring field trip to the mountains; or “Leifeng day” – one day selected in May when the factory would organize a public fair in the community central square to provide various kinds of free services (such as bike repairing, domestic electrical appliances maintenance, health check, and so on), as one gesture of learning from Leifeng (the famous role model who was portrayed as extremely selfless and devotional in propaganda) – was remembered by many workers as a joyful community fair with various free services and pleasant socialization. To a great extent, these developments, organized and promoted officially by the factory, did bring a sense of prosperity and security to people in NS, hence constituting precious memories of many workers as well as managers I interviewed. “We used to have so much fun,” Lu, one engineer now in her forties told me. Quite similar to the observation made by Krisztina Fehervary in the case of socialist Hungary, in NS, at least during this decade, “the everyday life of state socialism, contrary to stereotype, was experienced and is remembered in color.”⁵⁵

Fighting Against “Capitalist Spiritual Pollution” Along with these efforts to develop a “healthy socialist material and cultural civilization” was another controversial yet maybe more far-reaching trend of consumerism and liberalism that also started to emerge during this decade. The 1980s was the first decade of socialist China’s cautious and uncertain openness to the outside world. Not just those sundry and “exotic” commodities – from Japanese refrigerators to Hong Kong silk stockings, but also “capitalist” cultural products (books, music, movies, TV plays from abroad), were all brought in through different channels, with or against the central state’s will. Called by some Chinese liberal scholars as “a decade of enlightenment,” the 1980s witnessed the passionate embracing of Western literature, art, and philosophy, heated debates around traditional Chinese culture, and acute introspection regarding the past era, especially the Cultural Revolution.⁵⁶  Krisztina Fehervary, Goods and States. The Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture, in Comparative Studies in Society and History 51,2 (2009): 426 – 459.  Guochuan Ma, I and the Eighties. Shenghuo Dushu Xinzhi Press, 2011(马国川，我与八十年 代， 生活读书新知出版社).

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

97

Fig. 5: Top: field trip of younger workers; middle: basketball meet organized by the factory; bottom: science and technology library. Source: The Factory History of Nanfang, 1965 – 1985.

98

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

For many common Chinese, the swarming images and imagination of a totally new “bourgeois” world that contrasted so sharply with the harsh and meager era they had just experienced, shocked, confused, and excited them.⁵⁷ Like many others, people in NS responded to these changes with confusion, eagerness, and anxiety. Even though the factory is located in the mountainous inner land of Sichuan province, it was not an isolated community. Its top managers, with their official ranks up to that of vice governor of Sichuan province, were always proud of their “wider” version. Common workers, or their parents, who had been transferred from “first/second front” “mother factories” retained their intense networks there and always brought back and spread news, information, knowledge, and exotic commodities. Keeping up with the dazzling changes and embracing the novelties was generally considered as being “modern,” especially among younger workers. This kind of modernity, however, was different from the socialist one promoted by the state. Borrowed from the coastal areas that had already been relatively more open to the “capitalist” world, it was a complex mixture of consumerism, materialism, individualism, liberalism, as well as sensualism, embraced by people with enthusiasm, awkwardness, and hesitance. It was against these immense and bewildering changes that the central government launched various campaigns nationwide. As early as 1983, Deng Xiaoping called for a “battle against the spiritual pollution.” According to him, “the essence of spiritual pollution is to spread out the diverse decadent thoughts of capitalists and other exploiters, as well as the sentiment of mistrust towards socialism, communism, and the leadership of the Communist Party.”⁵⁸ Later on in 1986, again, he called for another campaign against “Bourgeois Liberalization.” Nevertheless, how persuasive and effective these campaigns were when applied to the grassroots was hard to tell. In NS, while long and tedious official documents and reports promoting these campaigns predominated on paper, interviews with both managers and workers suggested a tendency of “hyper-normalization”⁵⁹ of these political campaigns when relevant policy-study meetings carried on as usual, but more or less only in a rhetorical or merely performative manner. Even the attitudes of the top NS leaders toward such “pro-capitalist” tendencies were rather ambiguous and clumsy. As the abstract representatives

 Such shock, confusion, and excitement experienced by Chinese people during the 1980s was best illustrated by Jia Zhangke’s movies, such as, Platform and Xiaowu.  Xiaoping Deng, The Party’s Urgent Tasks on the Organizational and Ideological Fronts (12 Oct. 1983) (邓小平：党在组织战线和思想战线上的迫切任务). URL: http://www.people.com. cn/GB/channel1/10/20000529/80786.html (12 May. 2018)  Yurchak, Everything was Forever, 50

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

99

of the state, they were supposed to play the role of gatekeeper, promoting the “good socialist culture” and suppressing the “bad capitalist” ones. However, as concrete individual witnesses and participants of this historical drama, they also seemed prone to being carried away by the widespread confusion, excitement, and dizziness. One interesting instance was that in the middle of the 1980s, erotic movies exported from Hong Kong were publicly played on the internal official TV channel of the factory, right after the NS News, surely with the permission of the top NS leaders. Many previous taboos seemed to be broken, tentatively but adventurously. To some extent, managers in the factory, like bureaucrats nationwide, were actually the biggest beneficiaries of the so-called “spiritual pollution” or “Bourgeois Liberalization,” especially regarding aspects related to consumerism, materialism, and sensualism (in the sense of easier access to pornography, for example). Managerial corruption also became rather manifest when some managers tried to grasp the opportunities offered by reform and openness in order to fatten their own pockets. No wonder, then, at the “hyper-normal” attitude of the grassroots bureaucrats towards these anti-bourgeois campaigns. Gradually, in the second half of the decade, the hitherto relatively peaceful, austere, and orderly community was slowly replaced by a much more prosperous, dynamic, and chaotic one. Mushrooming dance halls and stores, as well as an increasing number of crimes and divorces, stood side by side with libraries, night schools, and cultural clubs in the industrial community.

Communal Solidarity Besides these external forces that either came from the state or the “capitalist world,” there was also another innate trend of communal consolidation deriving from decades of shared working and living experiences of workers. Working side by side on the shop floor nurtured a sense of fraternity among most workmates. Living in the same or nearby residential neighborhoods, where 10 to 20 apartment buildings were usually congregated together to form a relatively enclosed residential area with its own park and public space, fostered a sometimes inescapable or even oppressive (in the sense of lacking private space), but other times supportive intimacy among people. Furthermore, going to the same local food markets as part of every adult’s daily activities, walking along the surrounding countryside trails or community avenues after dinner as part of people’s daily routine, chatting/gossiping with acquaintances at every possible chance, watching movies in the open-air cinema or the later indoor ones, celebrating holidays together in the community square, all of these activities as shared life routines encouraged intensive interactions

100

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

among NS people, who, with a rural past not so far away, had always been used to and strongly cherished this kind of intimate culture from a ‘traditional’ acquaintance society. Additionally, the likelihood of several family members all working in the factory also greatly contributed to an even thicker and interwoven social network. As I will illustrate later in this chapter, such a “deeper” sense of solidarity developed from the inner grassroots society and played a great role in the contentious movements organized by workers during this period. On the other hand, divisions did exist in spite of a relatively consolidated community. Among workers there were at least two most palpable types of division. The first one originated from the aforementioned clientelism that alienated a minority of politically active workers from the majority. The antagonisms were usually aroused over issues like job arrangements, wage increases, as well as bonuses and new-flat distribution, whereby workers complained that “ass-kissers” always tried to bypass the legitimacy rule that was based largely on seniority and skill-rank, via unfair backdoor deals with cadres in power. The second one was the so-called “politics of place” defined by Elizabeth Perry as “a quest for social and cultural status entailing a desire to elude rather than to embrace, the ranks of the proletariat.”⁶⁰ The implication here is that native place origin, like race, ethnicities, or gender, weakens instead of strengthens a solid working-class consciousness. Such “politics of place” could also be observed in NS, where most pioneering workers were migrant workers, and hence brought with them distinctive dialects, customs, cuisines, and life styles. These differences, especially upon people’s first arrival at NS in the early stage, saw the formation of relatively exclusive social circles based on and bonded by the same fellowship; they also created a sort of hierarchical distinction and discrimination based on people’s places of origin, thanks to the uneven developmental levels among different regions, especially between urban and rural places, as a result of the dual economic structure in China.⁶¹ For instance, workers who were relocated to NS from other urban areas like Shanghai tended to look down on workers recruited from the local countryside. Meanwhile, the tableau of several Shanghai-nese chatting with each other in a Shanghai dialect rather than in a Mandarin or Sichuan dialect always annoyed other people.

 Elizabeth Perry, Putting Class in Its Place. Worker Identities in East Asia. University of California Berkeley 1996, 3.  Emily Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity. Subei People in Shanghai, 1850 – 1980. Yale University Press, 1992; For dual-economic structure in China, see Martin King Whyte, One country, Two Societies. Rural-urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Harvard University Press, 2010.

Working and Living in the “Golden Decade”

101

However, with the passage of time, and in a very similar manner to Arif Dirlik’s observation that “while places of departure may persist in their effect into places of arrival, they may also vanish or be reconfigured in the new place, or even be transformed by its counter effects,”⁶² the role of this “politics of place” did attenuate in my case, even though it never quite totally disappeared. Many other factors, particularly the shared working and living spaces and experiences under the paternalistic labor regime, eased the earliest feelings of strangeness, alienation, and insecurity upon people first arriving. This slowly broke down the wall of a “politics of locality” and helped to form a certain kind of solidarity among people with various native place origins. In general, by the late 1980s and early 1990s, an exclusive and privileged urban “island” – “little Shanghai” as it was first called by outside visitors and quickly adopted with great pride by NS workers – was formed side by side with the factory’s industrial production areas, both in sharp contrast with its rural surroundings. All of these above-mentioned developments (materially and culturally), combined with the invaluable permanent urban residence registration held by NS workers and managers, helped to create a strong sense of superiority and sophistication that was eagerly embraced by people in NS as they intentionally distanced themselves from their local peasant “brothers” and saw themselves as part of a more civilized, urban, and modern world beyond the mountainous “backward” hinterland in which they physically resided. In contrast to the earliest era, the 1980s hence saw an intentionally designed process of “social closure,” defined by Frank Parkin as “the process by which social collectives seek to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of eligible,” with its purpose of “the closure of social and economic opportunities to outsiders.”⁶³ This intentional closure helped the establishment of an enclosed industrial community, and along with it, a sense of belonging for most workers. It also strengthened solidarity in certain ways, which, as I will illustrate below, provided a crucial foundation for NS workers, especially its pensioners, to organize their contentious movements against the power of managers that steadily increased during this decade.

 Arif Dirlik, Workers, Class, and the Socialist Revolution in Modern China. In Jan Lucassen (ed.). Global Labour History. A State of the Art. Peter Lang 2008, 373 – 396, esp. 384.  Frank Parkin, Marxism and Class Theory. A Bourgeois Critique. Tavistock 1979, 44; for the effects of social closure to the Chinese society, see Whyte, One country.

102

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

“We are Still the Biggest Brother”: Resistance in the Early Stage of Reform To a great extent, Chinese socialist workers had never been the submissive victims subjected to the so-called “communist neo-traditionalism” generalized by Walder.⁶⁴ As Sheehan rightly observes, before the reform, various political movements, especially the proceeding Proletarian Cultural Revolution that tended to smash up bureaucracies everywhere, not only led more or less to anarchism in most SOEs, but also nurtured a quite militant and rebellious working class in the name of mass democracy.⁶⁵ Such a tradition continued into the early 1980s, though to a much lesser degree. After 1978, along with the strengthened bureaucratic institutionalization of the SOEs, the State Council issued a “Report on the Pioneering Program on Expansion of Enterprise Autonomy and Plans for the Future,” requiring that the Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress (SWRC) system be established in all enterprises in order to grant workers some leverage vis-à-vis management.⁶⁶ Although the SWRC was granted by the state and tended to be formalistic, it did become “an institutionalized channel for expression of employees’ interests,” the power of which existed primarily in co-determining with management issues related to welfare, housing, wages, and bonus distribution.⁶⁷ For example, the first SWRC held in NS in August 1979 received more than 1,000 proposals from the worker’s representatives. The later housing distribution system and many other welfare issues were worked out based on these proposals. Towards the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s, at the request of workers, there also developed some forms of democratic election for team leaders and even section chiefs at the shop floor of NS. Nanfang News, the official newspaper of the enterprise, reported such democratic elections continuously from 1979 to 1980 in a highly encouraging tone. It was also during this period that a special column named “Mirroring” was opened in Nanfang News. By publishing short  Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism.  Sheehan, Chinese workers, 103 – 155; Wang Shaoguang, From a pillar of continuity to a force for change. Chinese workers in the movement. In R V Des Forges, Luo Ning and Wu Yenbo (eds.). Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989. State University of New York Press, 1993, 177– 190; Andres Walder, The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Factories. Party-state Structures and Patterns of Conflict’. In E J Perry (ed.). Putting Class in its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia. University of California Press, 1996, 167– 198.  Xiaoyang Zhu and Anita Chan, Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress. An Institutionalized Channel for Expression of Employees’ Interests?. Chinese Sociology & Anthropology 37: 4 (2005): 6 – 33; Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan.  Zhu and Chan, Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress, 6 – 33.

“We are Still the Biggest Brother”: Resistance in the Early Stage of Reform

103

essays written by workers to disclose and criticize officialdom and the unfairness that usually occurred on the shop floor, during the welfare distribution processes or within their political lives, the “Mirroring” column offered an open and democratic outlet for workers’ voices to be heard, as well as an effective way to openly supervise the behavior of cadres. However, such sporadic democratic sparks slowly disappeared from the factory’s agenda from 1982 onward. With the initiation of SOE reforms, the main task of the factory switched to mass production. From then, as noted earlier, two competing trends emerged, as the general betterment of living standards was accompanied by a slow degradation of the working class and the rise of a more powerful management, which immediately aroused discontent and resistance, especially from the pioneering generation of workers who were retired one by one during this period. Cuiye is a retired worker activist in his eighties who was transferred from another factory to NS in 1971. He was always called “old revolutionary” by other workers because of his adamant hold on socialist ideology and his never-hesitant readiness to put up a fight against the cadres. Bold but also shrewd, he was one of the core figures among these pensioners and always played the crucial role in almost every collective action. During my interviews with him, he told one particularly vivid and bold story about a victorious fight he and his comradepensioners had waged against the cadres in NS during the 1980s: That was in 1983 or 1984. I had already retired. I was not convinced by some behaviors of the cadres … Their only concerns then were production; they didn’t care for workers’ welfare, and they did not implement the mass line … So I posted small posters everywhere. These small posters were copies of a government document about anti-corruption.

Different from official historiography, which identifies the threshold of the “new era” as either 1976 when the Cultural Revolution is said to have officially ended, or 1978, the so-called first year of Reform, many pensioners like Cuiye would refer to the years 1982– 83 as the real turning point of NS’ history. Such a feeling is justified by both factory documents and reports from the time and the major contents of the factory official daily newspaper, NS News, where, from 1982 onward, issues like fulfilling production quotas, increasing enterprise autonomy, strengthening labor discipline, wage raising, and bonus distribution replaced the earlier issues of politics and class struggle. Moreover, it was during 1983 when the management of NS was restructured in response to the state’s call for a “younger and more educated leadership” in SOEs. For the first time in NS’ history, intellectuals with college degrees rather than senior workers composed the main body of its management. That some cru-

104

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

cial changes began to occur around this period were keenly perceived by workers like Cuiye. His complaint about cadres caring more for production than workers’ welfare and hence not implementing the mass line may be understood against this background. In protest he thus put up remonstrative posters and soon got himself into trouble: he was caught and taken to the security department. Yet, he boasted to me that he feared nothing then: The department chief there asked me why I pasted small posters. I replied to him that it was my freedom and right to paste them. The chief said that what I was doing was destroying the production. I told him that was shit. Then, after only five minutes, all the other retired workers heard about this incident. They soon gathered and surrounded the security department building. When the chief saw so many people, he became afraid. He begged me to go home. He said, “We did something wrong, so we apologize to you. Please go home.” I said, “Arresting people without reason is illegal. So now you have to tell me what illegal things I did. Or pasting small posters for anti-corruption is illegal? Is that your logic?” I did not leave. I stayed in their office, and all the retired workers stayed outside to support me. I was afraid of nothing (laugh). I stayed there for three days. They had to bring me good food during the daytime, set up a bed for me during the night and take turns serving me (laugh). The retired workers took their daytime and nighttime shifts too, always staying outside to support me … I know how to deal with these bureaucrats. I am not afraid of them at all. There were so many people behind me.

“There were so many people behind me” – that was the greatest strength behind Cuiye’s “fearless” and cunning behavior. It was also the reason the cadres were so ready to cave in. Such mass solidarity within this generation of workers, as I mentioned earlier, came both from their shared working and living experiences and the communal public spaces they occupied. Most had come to NS during the earliest period of Third Front construction and had spent their lives together in this factory community. Before retirement, they had worked together; after retirement, they went to the same farmers’ market, exercised in the same parks, and played cards or Majiang in the same teahouses. My interviews show that while never forming any formal organization like an administrative or functional structure in the strict sense, these pensioners had their own networks and behaved in quite effective and prompt ways: they distributed information in the farmers’ market, teahouses, and parks; sometimes, when there was something really important, notes would be posted on the public notice boards in different residential areas, calling for a meeting; other times, urgent issues would be passed around by phone. In these ways, information could be distributed very quickly and, most of the time, pensioners responded promptly. Exactly this is reflected in Cuiye’s triumphant declaration that within five minutes of his arrest, his loyal comrades had appeared to back him up. These sorts of “dense informal social networks and rich, historically deep, sub-

“We are Still the Biggest Brother”: Resistance in the Early Stage of Reform

105

cultures of resistance to outside claims” in Scott’s sense,⁶⁸ were also observed by other scholars in Chinese SOEs, especially during the 1980s when the industrial communities were steadily growing, along with the strong bargaining power that workers obtained from their dense informal social ties against management.⁶⁹ Another typical victorious resistance organized by the pensioners during this period, as repeatedly recounted to me during the interviews, involved a protest against house distribution in 1986. In that year, NS built two residential apartments with larger living areas than normal. According to the initial plan, these two larger residential apartments would be assigned to cadres. However, when pensioners heard this news, they immediately gathered and surrounded the administration building. Cuiye recounted the event: We had about seven hundred pensioners surrounding the administration building. The enterprise said that these flats were for cadres. We asked why? There were still so many workers who didn’t have decent places to live. Why the cadres? What kind of contributions did the cadres make? Who contributed more to the enterprise and the country: workers or cadres? Without workers, your cadres were just shit! We told them that the working class was still the greatest; the working class was still the biggest brother; and your “dangguande” (cadres) were as small as ants. We told them that if they dared to give these flats to cadres, we would smash their offices. I said that at that time. I said you could try to see who were more fearless, you or us. They became scared. Later, the factory decided to assign all these flats to the pensioners as we asked in the beginning. We told them that these flats had to be given to the pensioners because they were becoming old and they should enjoy their old age, according to our socialist country’s policies.

Up to the second half of the 1980s, under the more and more explicitly developmental and reformist agenda, intellectual cadres (usually managers) now unquestionably consolidated their power against workers not only in the production process but also within the redistribution sphere. In both legal and illegal ways, more and more benefits flew into managers’ pockets. Managerial privileges or even corruption that had been temporarily suppressed by harsh political movements in the past quickly reemerged, especially after the mid-1980s, as power and structural change within the Chinese industrial field became prevalent and normalized. In a 1986 survey of 640,000 workers in 519 Chinese SOEs conducted by the Federation of Labor Unions, more than half of workers believed that their status had declined since the reforms. They complained, first,  James Scott, Everyday Forms of Resistance. The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 4,1 (1989): 33 – 62, esp. 52.  Yanjie Bian, Bringing Strong Ties Back in. Indirect Ties, Network Bridges, and Job Searches in China. American sociological review 62,3 (1997): 366 – 385; Tang and Parish, Chinese Urban Life under Reform, 131– 132.

106

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

that their political status had declined, since recruitment for party membership now favored intellectuals, not workers; second, that current income and welfare policies no longer favored workers, but intellectuals, cadres, veterans, and peasants; third, that discipline against workers had become too harsh, whereas the supposed “servants” under the socialist regime – managers and bureaucrats – were now penalizing the “masters” – workers; and fourth, that workers now had no say in enterprise decision-making, with democracy at the workplace only an empty slogan.⁷⁰ Such discontent was widespread, but might be felt more intensely among pensioners who still harbored a fresh memory of a revolutionary past and a strong skepticism towards managerial authority and legitimacy. Meanwhile, by then, slogans like “the working class is the biggest brother” were not yet openly challenged, not even by the managers, and the pride of being a socialist worker was still cherished by this generation of workers. The “fearless” image of the working class that had been portrayed by the socialist state and strengthened during the rebellious era of the Cultural Revolution persisted among these pensioners.⁷¹ In addition, they had so little to lose anyway: they had already retired, so the promise of or threat to job tenure no longer applied to them, and their pensions were guaranteed by the regime, so that it seemed that no real harm could be inflicted on them. Therefore, they could confidently claim that it was still the working class, not the managers, who created wealth for the country, and hence deserved reward (such as the larger-size flats). Another victory. What part did on-the-job younger workers play in these protests? Significantly, my research finds that no collective protest ever took place among the younger workers, although different kinds of “everyday resistance” might widely occur. The two trends I described earlier – a paternalistic factory regime accompanied by improved living standard and an emerging flexible labor management system – had a far more effective role as “carrot and stick” upon the presently employed workers than the pensioners, and seemed to have successfully, if only ostensibly, bought them out; so much so that many then-employed workers actually regarded this decade as the “golden age” of the factory. Similarly, they might also recoil more at potential penalties, like wage/bonus deductions or even dismissal under the more flexible labor policies, usually aimed at labor activists. Another reason for their absence from these protests would be their relatively tenuous identification with the socialist ideology and a lack of the kinds of rebellious experiences that the pensioners had lived through. Distinct from the

 Sheehan, Chinese Workers, 139.  Chan, Revolution or corporatism, 50.

Conclusion

107

older generation who had spent most of their working lives in the Maoist era and thus had the most vivid memories of the socialist past as a lived historical alternative to the current society, especially the Cultural Revolution (1967– 1969), this younger generation who entered the factory from the 1970s and 1980s when the political environment stopped encouraging radicalism and militancy, didn’t have that experience as part of their “known repertoire of contention.”⁷² These constraints, on the contrary, did not apply to the pensioners, whose abundant “repertoire of contention” provided them with more confidence and resources to fight for their interests. In part due to the ideological “cage” of this early stage of reform that supported the persistence of the socialist social contract, managers were always primed to cave in, and pensioners were always positioned as tending to win. Having spaces to fight and having possibilities to win, no matter how limited, this characterized another feature of this “golden decade.”

Conclusion Many Chinese scholars refer to the decade of the 1980s as “the decade of reform consensus,” implying the legitimacy of reform accepted by the majority based on the general betterment of common people’s living standards.⁷³ On the one hand, such a description seems to be confirmed by my interviewees’ nostalgic remembrance of the 1980s as both theirs and the factory’s “golden time.” SOE reform in this early stage, as still bounded by the socialist ideology of the “workers’ state,” was cautious. For SOE workers, as well as NS workers, their gradually declining political status was largely compensated by economic improvements. More importantly, the persistent socialist social contract still provided workers with a certain degree of security and belonging, which, especially in retrospect and in comparison to their precarious and despairing situation nowadays, seemed too precious to be reachable again. On the other hand, as exemplified by my detailed illustration of the actual reforming process in NS during this period, there never was a “consensus” – the central government, local governments, enterprise management, and workers all had their various and often conflicting interests. On both the enterprise  Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement. Social Movements and Contentious Politics Cambridge University Press, 2011, 2.  Yang Gan, The Chinese Road. Three Decades and Six Decades. Du Shu 6 (2007) (甘阳. “中国 道路: 三十年与六十年.” 读书 ); Wu, Jinglian and Keping Yu, Reform Consensus and China’s Future Beijing, 2014 ( 吴敬链,俞可平. “改革共识与中国未来.” 北京).

108

3 The Long 1980s: “That Was the Best Time We Have Ever Had”

and national levels, decentralization, the major theme of reform at this stage, brought dynamism as well as new forms of corruption, injustice, and inequality by reshuffling the power and interest structure among different social groups. These pitfalls – originally masked by a seeming “win-win game” slogan – accumulated with time, became more and more patent, generated wider and wider social tensions and discontent, and finally led to a serious legitimacy crisis of the state, particularly from the second half of the decade.⁷⁴ When a crucial price reform in 1988 failed and led to severe inflation nationwide, this immediately trigged the widest social movement in 1989.⁷⁵ Different from the most popular interpretation of the 1989 movement as a mere call for political democracy and freedom by students and intellectuals, the reasons for this eruption were much more complicated. As Wang rightly pointed out, it was indeed a spontaneous protest against both the authoritarian political structure and the uneven process of reformative decentralization that nurtured great corruption and spawned proliferating inequalities.⁷⁶ The violent suppression of the movement was followed by a tight, two-year financial policy adopted by the state to cool down the overheated economy: banks curtailed their loans to state enterprises; steel prices were cut; the ostensible prosperity of SOEs disappeared. Through 1992, NS was still profitable on its balance sheet, albeit harboring enormous latent losses. It was also in 1992 that a much more comprehensive and liberal reform agenda was re-adopted by the state. From that moment forward, both the factory and its workers began sliding into an unpredictable and turbulent new era.

 Wu, The Turbulent Three Decades, 67.  Wang, The 1989 Social Movement, 211– 223.  Ibid.

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002 … an avalanche of social dislocation … that this catastrophe was the accompaniment of a vast movement of economic improvement. But it also hints at the tragic necessity by which the poor man clings to his hovel doomed by the rich man’s desire for a public improvement which profits him privately. – Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation

The two years following the suppression in 1989 was a seemingly hushed “rectification” period while fierce struggles and debates went on within the ruling party.¹ Then, in 1992, Deng Xiaoping launched his famous and far-reaching South-Tour Speech, triumphantly sending a strong signal to the whole country as well as the rest of the world that China’s economic reforms would continue. The reforms did not just continue; they actually made a huge jump: China began to steadfastly embrace neoliberal capitalism by abandoning the ideological concerns in the economic field that had “fettered” the reforms before. A whole package of radical marketization, including the so-called “SOE restructuring,” which the state had been so reluctant to launch in the earlier stage, was now pushed forward daringly and decisively. In November 1993, the Third Plenum of the Fourteenth Party Congress adopted the “Decision on Issues Concerning the Establishment of a Socialist Market Economic Structure.” Privatization and bankruptcy of SOEs and huge-layoffs began in that year and were promoted on a much larger scale from 1997 onwards.² Trying to understand such a radical turn, Wang Hui once argued that it was exactly the threat of state violence demonstrated during the 1989 suppression that successfully paved the way for the final establishment of neoliberalism in China. By using the example of price reform that was completed only three months after 4 June 1989, largely because the violence of 1989 silenced the social upheaval that had been caused by the same price reform previously initiated but unsuccessfully followed through, Wang claimed that the establishment of the new neoliberal market system in China since the 1990s was decidedly not a spontaneous and independently emerging phenomenon; rather, it was the product of a political intervention and arrangement established upon the threat of

 Willy Wo-Lap Lam, China after Deng Xiaoping. The Power Struggle in Beijing Since Tiananmen. John Wiley & Sons 1995.  Justin Yifu Lin, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li, State-owned Enterprise Reform in China. Chinese University Press, 2001. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-006

110

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

state violence.³ Such analysis echoes Karl Polanyi’s observation made in the last century that a market society has never been a naturally occurring phenomenon but is a political and social construct.⁴ David Harvey also declared that neoliberalism in our current time is not “a utopian project to realize a theoretical design for the reorganization of international capitalism,” but “a political project to re-establish the conditions for capital accumulation and to restore the power of economic elites”⁵ – or, in the Chinese context, not to re-establish and restore, but to create those conditions and power – and hence “authoritarian, forceful and anti-democratic.”⁶ The Chinese version of neoliberalism that emerged since 1992 could only be more authoritarian, exactly due to the strong hand of the state and its decisively imposed policies. Actually, even before the 1989 events, quite a few influential figures from the official thinktank had already called for a much closer collusion between state and capital in China. For instance, in the middle of 1989, Wu Jiaxiang, an important researcher from the General Office of the CPC Central Committee, published an article in the journal Internal Manuscript, one of the principal official journals of the Central Committee. In this article, he directly proposed the so-called new authoritarianism for China’s successful transition to a market economy: The guiding principle of new authoritarianism is to establish a market economy. The process of marketization could not be realized without new authoritarianism. And without such full realization of marketization, we could never have the true democratic politics … Thus, all the democratic movements before the full marketization should only be judged by the fact that if they can promote marketization or not. Good movements are those movements that could promote the establishment of a new authoritarian government that will speed up the process of marketization. Bad movements are those movements that would destroy or even interrupt the process of marketization. These bad movements would impede the historical development unexceptionally, no matter how heroic they might be.⁷

By using the term “new authoritarianism” borrowed from the so-called “Singapore Experience,”⁸ Wu advocated a “full marketization” process in China through strong and if necessarily coercive political power. The eruption and the following suppression of the 1989 events provided an excellent opportunity  Wang Hui, The 1989 Social Movement, 211– 223.  Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation. The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time. Beacon Press, 1957.  Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 19.  Ibid. 37– 38.  Wu Jiaxiang, The New Authoritarianism. Internal Manuscript 7 (1989).  Meredith Woo-Cumings, The New Authoritarianism in East Asia. Current History 93,587 (1994): 413.

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

111

for such a process to be finally launched. As Wang incisively pointed out, by strategically reinterpreting the protest as a mere call for a more “complete” and liberal market reform, while ignoring its other more important appeals such as social justice as well as political reform, the state and its allied elites legitimated the subsequent radical market reforms as the only way out.⁹ Certainly, the successful imposition of neoliberal tenets since 1992 was not just because a repercussion of state terror, as demonstrated earlier, silenced potential social unrest, but also because it created the conditions for capital accumulation and restoration, as well as creating the old/new power for economic/ political elites who supported the regime. As a result, the already formed interest groups were strengthened rather than challenged; corruption became more rampant and institutionalized; and inequality increased more stunningly. All of this, however, was sidelined by China’s “economic miracle” with its dazzling GDP figures. What happened in NS since 1992 needs to be understood within this general emergence of neoliberalism in China, not merely as part of the economic restructuring, but also as part of the series of political impositions – “political movements” as one NS manager complained to me. This chapter thus aims to re-politicize the radical neoliberal reforming process in NS from the early 1990s to the early 2000s, by revealing how these measures constituted the strong intervention of the state that imposed various, radical reforming agendas on the factory in the name of the market, in highly lumpy, arbitrary, inexperienced, and improvised ways. Yet, quite meaningfully, they were also always based on the very practical interest considerations and calculations of people in power, for their own benefits, whether they were government bureaucrats or, to a lesser extent, managers in NS, above all by scarifying the interests of common workers and making them (the workers) the only party responsible for shouldering all the costs of failure caused largely by the preceding reform policies. It was a game of the haves against the have nots. This series of radical market movements not only broke up workers’ life order, security, and expectancy, but also their belief in a promise of endless progress established in the earlier decade. It threw common workers’ lives into a dazing turbulence, uncertainty, and poverty, and ground up the concrete, prosperous, and consolidated working-class community into loose sand.

 Wang, The 1989 social movement, 211– 223.

112

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

The “Political Movement” of Restructuring in NS While the bankruptcy and privatization of small- and medium-sized SOEs started almost immediately after 1992, the radical reforming agenda was not imposed on NS until 1997. Reform processes in China have always been uneven, with various factors interacting constantly and bringing about a certain degree of contingency and tentativeness.¹⁰ As one of the biggest SOEs in Sichuan province that employed more than 30,000 workers at the time, NS always needed to be treated more carefully, as the governments’ neoliberal impulses had to be constrained by their concerns about potential social instability caused by policies that were too harsh. Besides that, there was also another seemingly trivial but actually crucial factor for such a delay, i. e. the close personal network set up annually between the then provincial governor and the top managers in NS, which made it emotionally rather difficult for the government to “operate” the factory; actually, the radical “operation” only came in 1997, right after the preceding governor was transferred out of the province. Before that, the extractive “tradition” was carried on as previously, albeit in a more messy, corrupt, and impatient way. In 1991, the provincial government demanded NS sign another so-called “input-output” contract with it. The declared objective, similar to the earlier version, was to “grant the enterprise more autonomy, deepen reform, push the enterprise onto the internal and international market and, thus, propel NS to move to a new developmental stage.”¹¹ The main provision was that NS should invest about 70 million Yuan for its basic construction and technological upgrading before 1995, while the governments at the provincial, prefecture and county levels together would invest 10 million Yuan, not as a free investment but in the form of share purchasing. At the same time, the governments would allow NS to “restructure” itself into a stan-

 Among many, see C. Cindy Fan, Uneven Development and Beyond. Regional Development Theory in Post‐Mao China. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21,4 (1997): 620 – 639; Shaoguang Wang and Angang Hu, The Political Economy of Uneven Development. The case of China. ME Sharpe, 1999; Shubham Chaudhuri and Martin Ravallion: Partially Awakened Giants. Uneven Growth in China and India. World Bank Publications 2006; Mark W. Frazier, Socialist Insecurity. Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China. Cornell University Press, 2010.  “NS signed the ‘input-output’ contract with Sichuan government,” from the enterprise newspaper, 1992, 5, 22 and 1992, 6, 23 (“我公司率先在全省实行投入产出总承包—承包合同签字仪式 隆重举行”，1992，5，22; “长城特殊钢公司投入产出总承包及股份制试点方案”，长钢报， 1992，6，23)

The “Political Movement” of Restructuring in NS

113

dard joint-stock company.¹² To pay back these “favors,” NS would have to increase the profit and tax it turned over at an incremental rate of 7 % each year, which meant that by 2000, the profit and tax it handed to the governments would be 1.5 times what it had been in 1991.¹³ By the time the contract was to be signed, NS was already in great crisis: the stringent fiscal policy adopted after 1989 made it much harder to get unconditional loans from the state banks; the earlier overheated economy that had guaranteed the high steel price was gone; and, at the same time, the factory remained plagued by high taxes from the governments, high interest from the banks, high prices of raw materials and energy, huge chain debts, and limited money for technological upgrading. Furthermore, it also faced fierce competition from township enterprises that had much cheaper peasant workers without welfare provision, more flexible labor processes, less legal and moral norms to comply with, and more support from the local bureaucrats. As such, NS desperately needed money through shareholding reform, even at the cost of an extremely extractive contract imposed by the provincial government. At the beginning of the 1990s, when the shareholding reform was promoted in the SOEs, economists expected that it would put SOEs under the supervision of shareholders, force them to deepen restructuring, and hence become more responsible economic entities. However, the actual process went astray. Many SOEs, including NS, merely treated the shareholding reform as an urgent fund-raising tool, another crash program to fill the hole of circulation capital once getting loans from the state bank became more difficult under the stringent state macro-economic policies.¹⁴ Meanwhile, because of the heavy involvement of the local governments in the process and the non-transparency of the procedure, the shareholding reform to a certain degree turned into a large-scale rentseeking feast for people in power.¹⁵ In the case of NS, through granting the socalled “internal stock” or “initial public offering” to government bureaucrats and high-level factory managers for free or at an extremely low price, a substantial amount of money was diverted to the private pockets of people in power.

 The shareholding reform in NS was initiated in 1988, stopped by the protest events of 1989 and the uncertainty of the state policy pursued immediately afterwards, and then resumed in 1991.  “NS signed the ‘input-output’ contract.”  Ying Zhong, The Marcro-economic Policies in China since 1990s. Contemporary History in China 5 (2015): 111– 120. (钟瑛. “20 世纪 90 年代中国经济改革与发展若干理论研讨综述.” 当 代中国史研究 .)  He, The Pitfalls of Modernization.

114

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

Exactly because of such short-term and manipulative motivation and behavior, any alleviating effect from fund-raising brought about by the shareholding reform dissipated very quickly. Into the second half of 1992, the shortage of capital once again threatened the survival of NS and forced the enterprise to issue corporate bonds at a very high interest rate (21 %), hoping to attract workers to purchase them. Laowu, one of the then senior managers of NS, interpreted this action as “pooling money from the workers’ pockets in order to fill the hole of the enterprise.” Yet, quite ironically, it was also during this year, encouraged by the South Tour Speech of Deng Xiaoping, that the top managers of NS decided to invest a large amount of money into the coastal area real estate market in the name of “invigorating various economies.” Rumors were that most of these investments were later mystically transformed into private capital. The wind rose higher and darker before the storm’s final coming. Another policy of macro-regulation and control initiated by the central state in 1993 pushed NS and many other SOEs further toward the ledge.¹⁶ In 1996, NS again had to collect money from its employees (both workers and managers) for its circulating funds by mobilizing them to turn in a certain amount of money to the enterprise in the name of a risk-deposit.¹⁷ By this time, the factory, with its higher and higher debts, had long stopped being the “cash cow” of the local governments and had instead become a huge burden they were eager to shake off. Meanwhile, as mentioned earlier, the provincial governor, who maintained a very close relationship with the director of NS at the time, was transferred away in 1996; the newcomer was almost a complete stranger. This personnel change proved crucial for NS’ fate, as it finally opened and sped up the radical restructuring process there. In 1997, the Fifteenth Party Congress called for a more determined SOE reform. A variety of market-oriented means were encouraged by the central state to reform the so-called “inefficient” SOEs, which included bankruptcies, mergers, layoff, selling of shares, foreign-joint ventures, and privatizations. Local bureaucrats who actively pushed these strategies were highly praised by their superiors as “enterprising reformers” and thus had better chances of promotion than their “milder” colleagues. Mostly based on this political calculation, the newly assigned leading group in Sichuan province picked NS as their bet. On 15 October, without any advance notice, the provincial government suddenly sent a working team, including the  The strict “contraction” polices initiated by the central state aimed to cool down the overheated investment that was evoked by Deng Xiaoping’s South Speech in 1992. See Zhong, The Marcro-Economic Policies, 111– 120.  “Measures of implementing risk-deposit within employees”, Nanfang News, 1996, 3, 26(“关于 在全体职工中实行风险抵押承包的实施办法”, 长钢报，1996，3，26).

The “Political Movement” of Restructuring in NS

115

governor and the general secretary of the party, to NS. Upon their arrival, they immediately dismissed all the top managers, including the factory party secretary, from their duties. As the news spread, NS was nonetheless cornered. “It was devastating. The market reputation of NS was all ruined in one night,” remembered Laowu, one senior manager. Soon afterwards, banks totally stopped their loans; the stock price of NS dropped to almost nothing; buyers cancelled their contracts; creditor companies rushed to NS and pressed for payment; one desperate private creditor even committed suicide upon hearing the news, believing that he would never get his money back. The blow was fatal. From that time, NS entered into its most turbulent restructuring era. Very similar to the pushing-forward of the price reform right after the violent suppression of the social movements in 1989, as Wang Hui illustrated,¹⁸ numerous radical reforming packages were immediately imposed on NS following this drama under the dictates of the provincial government. Laodu, then one of the senior managers, described the intense reform during this period as another series of “movements”: During these years [from 1996–-2006] when I was in the position, I experienced ten different directors appointed by the governments. Can you imagine that? It seemed that every year or even every half a year, we had a new director sent by the province! One of them used to be the director of a meat-processing factory and was transferred to our Steel factory. How ridiculous was that! Every director talked about the market reform and adopted various kinds of measures or programs, such as adjusting the production structure, labor reform, management reform, distribution reform, and etc., etc. Then after one year the higher authority dismissed this particular director and sent a new one. Then, the new guy started a totally different new package! Each of them did these reforms, this way or that way. Never ended reforms! Numerous mergers, numerous changes! People were always in the situation of indeterminacy. It has become another kind of movement! An enterprise should ensure a stable production status and that is important. How could it always be in frequent movements?

It was indeed a series of movements, yet very lumpy ones. The unusually frequent change of the factory leadership implied that the governments not only lost their patience but also their wits. Exposing NS to the whole society and hence cutting off all the trust networks it had previously nurtured trapped both NS and the local governments in a dead end. The action of 1997, though initially intending to show how daring and reformative the newly appointed governor could be, turned out to be an immature, ill-judged, and imprudent mistake. One retired senior manager told me that the governor himself expressed

 Wang, The 1989 social movement, 211– 223.

116

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

his regret about the action later in a private conversation. One of the governors in the municipal government admitted openly in 1998, “[w]hat would happen if NS collapses? Where should all these 20,000 workers go? What would be the effects to the local economy then? Whenever I thought of these questions, I could hardly sleep.”¹⁹ Such fear was highly conceivable: from 1997 to 1998, under the banner of optimizing the capital structure, the municipal government had already forced around 20 small SOEs into bankruptcy, which had already aroused several smallscale protests. As the biggest employer in the municipal region, the bankruptcy of NS might bring about a much wider and more destructive turbulence. In other words, the bankruptcy of NS could threaten the political stability of local society and, worse, the positions of the bureaucrats who were in charge. It was in light of this dilemma that the governments’ attitude towards NS became more and more desperate and impatient. An arbitrary merger was imposed, yet immediately failed. Then, in 1998, the provincial government had to merge NS with the Investment Group Co. Ltd that was under its own charge, simply to avoid it going bankrupt. After that the governments’ prescriptions toward the factory became more and more imprudent, expedient, and lumpy. Besides the frantic change of its leadership, several abortive attempts to partially privatize NS were also attempted during this period. One of them was to sell it to a much smaller private company in Hong Kong, whose fixed assets were less than one tenth that of NS – a typical instance of the so-called “Let the snake swallow the elephant” policy that was quite common during this period under the desperate and frenetic illusion of the magic role private capital and privatization could play.²⁰ None of these measures succeeded; on the contrary, together, they dragged NS into its greatest period of turbulence ever.

Uprooting and Turbulence Along with these aforementioned lumpy reform efforts by the local governments born of various interest calculations, expediencies, and desperation at the factory, a so-called “internal reconstruction program” that directly targeted common workers was pushed forward in a much more determined and unequivocal way after 1997. The sudden dismissal of the old leading group, most of whom had  “The speech of Yang, Haiqing, the mayor of Mianyang, at the cadres’ conference”, the enterprise newspaper, 1998, 2, 7 (“中共绵阳市委副书记，市长杨海清在三级干部大会上的讲话”， 1998，2，7).  Wei Li, Let the Snake Swallow the Elephant: One Key to Deal with the Red State-owned Enterprises. Decisions 2 (1995): 14– 15 (李炜. “启动困难国企的一把钥匙: 蛇吞象计划.” 决策 )

Uprooting and Turbulence

117

worked in NS for decades and had been promoted from within, and their replacement by a new group co-opted from outside, cleared away any possible reservations about or resistance to these internal reforms. Within three years, from 1997 to 2000, almost half of the workers were laid off at NS, while most workshops stopped production or only operated at half-production. Among the neoliberal reforming package, downsizing for efficiency and burden alleviation were the two major measures that brought the most turbulence and effectively shattered the fundamentals of the factory community.

Downsizing for Efficiency Over-manning in SOEs has always been prescribed as one of the “fundamental burdens and diseases” inherited from the past, as declared by one Chinese scholar: “the factor of over-manning alone can explain to a great extent why the competitive capacity of SOEs has been getting worse and worse over the past decade, compared with that of non-state-owned enterprises.”²¹ Layoffs in SOEs started in 1992. Statistics show approximately 5.5 million SOE workers were laid off in 1995 and about 8 million in 1996.²² Then, when the state was about to call for an even larger scale layoff in SOEs in 1997, several academic articles were published, declaring that there were still at least 15 million redundant workers in SOEs, amounting to one-third of the total number of SOE employees.²³ These claims were used to provide legitimacy for the huge layoff in SOEs that year: about 11.5 million workers were laid off.²⁴ In NS, the so-called downsizing movement occurred during the same year. Right after the power-change action in 1997, the provincial government issued a document demanding NS downsize its total number of registered workers from about 30,000 to 10,000; otherwise, the government would not grant the fac-

 Edward Gu, From Permanent Employment to Massive Lay-offs. The Political Economy of ‘Transitional Unemployment’ in Urban China, 1993 – 8. Economy and Society 28,2 (1999): 281– 299, esp. 284.  China Labour Statistical Yearbook 1996, 409.  Yiyong Yang, The Shock Wave of Unemployment: A Report of China’s Employment Development. Today’s China Press, 1998, 123 (杨宜勇：失业冲击波：中国就业发展报告); Lin Yongsan, The Present Situation of the Re-employment Programme and the Proposed Further Measures. Herald of Economic Work 10 (1997): 6 – 8. (林用三，再就业工程的现状与拟采取的措施, 经济工 作导刊).  Shunfeng Song, Policy Issues of China’s Urban Unemployment. Contemporary Economic Policy 21,2 (2003): 258 – 269, esp. 258.

118

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

tory the preferential policies that would be necessary for it to get loans from the state banks.²⁵ To meet this layoff quota, NS adopted several means. The first was a socalled “bottom-out” policy. This refers to a particular kind of quota-distribution: the higher authorities issued a mandated proportion of layoffs to secondary production workshops; the workshops then distributed this proportion to sections; and each section then distributed it to each working team. Since the quota was fixed, there had to be someone out in each team. During this process, female workers were always the first targets. Aqiu, then a team leader told me, [t]here were three female workers in my team. You know, in our factory, especially in posts like ours, the female workers were always unwanted. Our work was mainly physical work. Really, these females didn’t have the physical strength or outstanding skills. So they were targeted to be laid off in the first place, especially those female workers in their 30s or 40s. Why? Because they had to take care of their kids and families. You see here: if they couldn’t do the physical jobs, then could they just take the night shift? No, they had families and kids to take care of … Two out of three female workers in my team were around this age. When the big laid-off began, one of them came to me. She told me how difficult her family was and she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Another one asked her husband to talk to me. They all knew that they were the most possible targets.

About two thirds of the laid-off workers were female, according to one upperlevel manager. Just as Aqiu said, females in their thirties and forties were the most likely victims and hence were the most worried. One middle-age female worker complained to me directly, “I am not young, not pretty. I don’t have any college degree. Where could I go? Even these college students couldn’t find jobs now. Ask me to compete with them? That is ridiculous.” Sporadic rumors of sex exchange between female workers at risk of being laid-off and their managers were heard from time to time. For some women, protection from a man in power was their last straw. Meanwhile, by transferring the pressure and confrontation down to the lowest team level, this measure effectively fragmented workers – most of them only tried desperately to avoid the fate of becoming “the losers” at the “bottom” instead of forming a united resistance force. Both archival materials and interviews showed no collective resistance during this “bottom-out” process. However, fierce conflicts did emerge between managers and workers, though only in an atomized way. Managers were sometimes berated or beaten by workers. Some workers even threatened to kill their managers if their jobs were taken away. I heard of at least two episodes where would-be-laid-off workers beat up their  “Detailed strategies of downsizing”, Archival materials from NS.

Uprooting and Turbulence

119

section chiefs and forced them to withdraw their decision. Sayings like “you needed to be a gangster to preserve your job” or “the fiercer you were, the more timid [managers] became” were widely accepted wisdom then. Partially because of these violent confrontations, in 2000 another milder policy called the “buying-out offer” or “severance compensation” was implemented in NS, as well as in other SOEs in China. It meant that the enterprise would pay workers a certain amount of money all at once based on his or her years of service in the enterprise. After that, there would be no relationship between this worker and the enterprise. The worker would become a “free” laborer in a “free” market. At NS, this was implemented largely based on workers’ “voluntary” choice. Even though the compensation was rather small,²⁶ many workers, especially young ones, at least in the beginning, readily accepted this compensatory offer – three years had already passed since the initiation of radical restructuring in 1997, and NS was really dying: only partial production was going on; wages were kept very low and always delayed; bankruptcy perpetually loomed in the near future. Meanwhile, during the second part of the 1990s, numerous heroic stories of becoming rich and successful in the outside “free” market were circulating in the official mass media and successfully convincing many common Chinese that as long as you were brave and diligent enough you could have a better life or even become rich by “jumping into the sea.”²⁷ Many young workers, in fear but also in hope, decided to try their luck in the outside world, only to find out the bitter truth later (as illustrated in the next section). The third strategy for downsizing was “early retirement.” This meant that all workers would have to leave their posts five years earlier than the legal retirement age, during which period they would have 60 percent of their original wages. Workers’ responses to this policy were divided and complicated. Most of them accepted it calmly, regarding it as a not-so-bad tradeoff and a possibility for finding other ways of making money; but others, especially those who were more devoted to their jobs, thought it insulting and a betrayal. Ma Ruixin, the female engineer, told me that she almost cried when she was suddenly told that she didn’t need to come back to work the next day, “that broke my heart … I had thought that I could have retired in a more decent and honored way. But now it just ended in one sentence.”

 In NS, for a common worker, one year equals 1700 Yuan.  “Jumping into the sea” was a metaphor widely used in China in the 1990s. It usually refers to the behavior of leaving the state-owned Danwei system and joining the non-state entities, such as private and foreign companies/enterprises.

120

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

By the end of 2000, more than 10,000 workers were cut under the aforementioned strategies. Even though the required quota from the provincial government was still not reached, grassroots managers in NS refused to move further. “We couldn’t cut more. It has already been so awful. We were really backed to the wall,” remembered Laowang, one workshop director. The top managers of NS were then forced to negotiate with the provincial government and a compromise was finally reached: the “movement” of downsizing stopped in 2001.

Burden Alleviation: Welfare Cut Before the radical market reforms, most welfare provisions in China were delivered by individual workplace units, usually called danwei, rather than by any specific government or private agencies. The danwei-based welfare system was underpinned by three elements: welfare housing allocation, pension, and free medical care.²⁸ This was meant to compensate for the generally quite low wages in most danwei units during the command economy. It was also taken as epitomizing the socialist social contract between SOE workers and the state, which promised a relatively egalitarian redistributionist order by providing job security, basic living standards and possible opportunities for those from disadvantaged backgrounds.²⁹ Meanwhile, many large and medium-sized danwei units also ran their own hospitals, schools, kindergartens, and canteens. Statistics show that at the end of 1985 there were about 225,000 hospitals and 3 million primary schools operated by SOEs, while only 60,000 hospitals and 830,000 primary schools were run by local governments.³⁰ Instead of being “pure” economic entities, pre-restructured danwei units were therefore more like social entities that provided an enclosed working and living space for their workers, exemplified by the cases at NS I illustrated in chapter three. All of these welfare provisions became more and more burdensome after the reforms, since now the SOEs were required to operate in a market instead of a production society. Besides over-manning, welfare burden was then declared as another “disease” that led to SOE malfunction.³¹ Starting in the mid-1990s, the state launched a nationwide social welfare reform. At SOEs, this was speci-

 Lu and Perry, Danwei, 3 – 12.  Tang and Parish, Chinese Urban Life Under Reform, 3 – 4; 128 – 162.  Songdong Yue, The Reform of China’s Social Welfare system. Management World 4 (1991): 171– 176, esp.172. (岳颂东, 中国社会福利体制的改革，管理世界).  Edward Gu, Beyond the Property Rights Approach. Welfare Policy and the Reform of Stateowned Enterprises in China. Development and Change 32,1 (2001): 129 – 150.

Uprooting and Turbulence

121

fied as the “burden alleviation” reform. In principle, it aimed to peel off the unproductive, ancillary entities at SOEs including hospitals, schools, and utility supplies, which had long been shouldered by enterprises, and transfer them to the local municipal governments. The basic idea here was to ask local governments to carry some of the costs of the SOE reforms. The actual implementation process, however, was much messier than the central government’s documents made it sound, since the reform constantly encountered both passive and active resistance from the local municipal governments. Laowu, then one of the top managers at NS, complained to me, “[y]es, there were policies and requirements from the above. But it was so difficult to implement them down here. The local governments just didn’t want to take things over.” Take the example of the NS school system. The system was developed in the 1970s, when more and more school-year children followed their parents to NS and the numbers greatly overwhelmed the local schools. Under great pressure from workers, the factory decided to build its own elementary, middle, and high schools. Significant investment from the factory during the 1980s and the early 1990s accelerated its growth. Before the radical reconstruction started in 1997, the school system in NS had developed into one of the best within the whole province, having the highest college-entrance rate each year. Under the “burden alleviation,” however, all of the schools were to be transferred to the local government. While the central government thought this a crucial way to make SOEs into more efficient economic entities, and the directors of NS agreed and were eager to shed this economically unproductive part, the local governments didn’t like it. In their eyes, this was not “burden alleviation,” but “burden transfer”: who, for instance, was going to pay for the education budget? Since the central state and the provincial government who issued the requirements didn’t want to push too hard, the battlefield was left to the factory and the local municipal government to settle. Du Shu, the preceding Education Minister of NS, sharply criticized the irresponsibility of the governments at different levels during the transfer process of the school system from 1998 to 1999: The local government just kept on bargaining … What they really wanted is to maximize their own interest … What was the role of the central government here? I didn’t know … I think that the central government was absent in this process … So we had to keep on begging the local bureaucrats, “please, please take over our schools.” I was so angry deep in my heart. All these good schools developed from nothing! How much efforts our teachers had put into them! Who wanted to hand them over?! I always wanted to cry…

The schools were finally transferred to the local governments by the second half of 1999, yet under the condition that NS would have to keep on investing in the school system at a proportionately decreasing rate to zero in the fourth year.

122

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

Not all transferring processes went the same way. Local governments had their own calculations about different entities. For example, they were quite happy to acquire assets like hospitals, which could bring in substantial profits and taxes due to the current healthcare reform that tried to commercialize the medical system. But they steadfastly refused to take over other nonprofit entities such as water plants. In their calculations, water plants, as part of the welfare projects, would not bring in any taxes; they would only “eat away” their revenue. As of 2013 when I was there, the water plants had still not been taken over, while the factory as well, out of frustration, had basically given up its maintenance long time ago. Water coming from the faucets in NS was brown; everybody I knew there bought water filters for cooking water and bottled water to drink, and they all cursed. For the factory, these two neoliberal movements did cut down the cost, yet they nevertheless failed to solve NS’ problems: the factory remains in the red today. For workers, these two internal reforms, which broke up the old social contract between workers and the factory and uprooted virtually all of the previous institutions, effectively un-embedded them from their recognizable social milieu. The impact was much more far-reaching than the merely economic calculations. If the blow from the provincial government’s action in 1997 cut off all external resources for NS, the subsequent internal neoliberal reforms destroyed the inner cohesion of NS and shattered workers’ sense of identity within the enterprise and the community that had developed over the previous decade. This identification was still clung onto in 1996 when NS began to delay wage payment to workers. In some respects, the sense of belonging may even have increased during those earlier difficult years under the ethic of “being in the same boat” and “going through thick and thin together.” For example, when NS tried to collect a risk-deposit from its workers and managers in 1996, almost everybody did so voluntarily.³² Mei Chen, a female worker in her forties who was forced into early retirement only one year later in 1997, still remembered how touched she was when she saw the then director sobbing on the enterprise TV news, appealing to employees for the risk-deposit in order to “save our factory”: “I turned in the money the next day.” The radical neoliberal restructuring that followed right after, which started with the removal of the old “paternalists” and subsequently by huge layoffs and burden alleviation, made many workers feel betrayed. Even some senior managers who had always been at NS and survived the 1997 action were

 “NS started to collect Risk-deposit,” Nanfang News, 6, 8, 1996.

The Curse of Market and the “Freedom” It Brought

123

angry. Lao Wang, the then top senior manager who took charge of the downsizing movement, regarded the whole process as a total failure: In my opinion, the movement of downsizing for productivity was a failure. Actually the whole SOE-reform was a failure. Did NS work out of the predicament after so many workers being laid off? No! Furthermore, this movement seriously dampened workers’ enthusiasm and shook some fundamental things, such as the enterprise’s cohesiveness, the sense of belonging from workers and workers’ affection towards the party.

Du Shu, who took charge of the school-transfer, also complained: Who wanted to get rid of our schools? Not the teachers, not the students nor the parents. But the director of the enterprise wanted it to happen. He always thought that schools were burdens … Yes, maybe economically it was a burden, but how about the stability of workers? Well, the current leaders didn’t really care the stability of workers. They even thought that instability would be better since it could make it easier to lay off more workers …

This might be the secret of neoliberal restructuring anyway: not necessarily to rescue the factory, but definitely to dis-embed it from any social bond and turn it into a “pure” economic entity where one can pretend that capital-labor relationships alone exist. Laoma, one previous senior manager of NS and later a government officer (retired when I interviewed him), belittled the pre-reform factory by equating it to a primitive tribe: “Think of it, a tribe! How could it be a modern enterprise with a structure of tribe?” Liu Shu, one senior manager still in his position, pointed out to me that only by cutting down the psychological ties between workers and the enterprise that the reforms, especially the labor reforms including lay-offs, could be carried out: “We were trying to educate workers that holding the sense of ‘Nanfang-ese’ is ridiculous and outdated now.” They succeeded. The series of restructuring movements during this period successfully broke up the old social contract between workers and their SOEs, disintegrated the previously consolidated industrial community, and finally pushed workers off toward the new brave world of the “market.”

The Curse of Market and the “Freedom” It Brought Like other former socialist countries, the “market” used to be (or is still for some) a magic word in reformist China. In some quite mythical and ambivalent ways, it was meaningfully linked to prosperity, money, abundance, freedom, the West, the developed, and democracy, and stood against shortage, austerity, poverty, misery, command economy, corruption, and suppression. For individuals, it implied success and wealth as long as you dared to work hard – those were the sto-

124

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

ries that flooded the mass media, including the internal newspaper of NS from the mid-1990s onward. However, for many common people, the real experience of market society betrayed these illusions. Legitimated by the neoliberal ideology and entangled with bureaucratic power and corruption, the market society that emerged in China during this decade might reward certain social groups (especially those already with political, economic, and cultural capital) with its “promises,” but it undoubtedly dislocated and marginalized the have nots and subjugated them to a subaltern and precarious life. For most workers around China, as well as for workers in NS, when they entered the unregulated “free” labor market or faced the emerging consumer market, the market – along with the “freedom” it brought – turned out to be more of a curse than a blessing. First, let’s consider the labor market that developed during this period, which was highly fragmented and unregulated. Even though the National Labor Law started to take effect in 1995 and stipulated exactly the requirement for written contracts and social insurance contributions for all employees (regardless of residency status) in all types of enterprises and sectors, along with other labor standards (such as working hours, overtime, holiday pay, and severance compensations, etc.), it was implemented at the grassroots level perfunctorily and unevenly. While the various governmental entities, as well as a small section of highly monopolistic and privileged central-level SOEs, continued to provide their formal employees with highly prestigious welfare programs, and the other remaining SOEs became more and more austere but nevertheless hung on to some of them, most non-state entities provided their employees with essentially no welfare at all.³³ In these non-state entities, as Lee analyzed, the pro-capital interest of the regime, the strong impulse for capital accumulation and “developmentalism” by local bureaucrats, and accordingly the flexible and convenient interpretations and implementations of the labor law, made the law itself largely something that existed on paper only.³⁴ For most former SOE workers, when they left their factories after being laid off, forced into early retirement, bought off with a small amount of money, or sent on a long and unpaid vacation due to the closure of workshops, their only choice was these non-state entities, which included not just non-state companies/enterprises but also the non-state sectors within the governmental or other state entities. This meant that they could only enter into the segment of the labor market that  Edward Gu, Dismantling the Chinese Mini-welfare State? Marketization and the Politics of Institutional Transformation, 1979 – 1999. Communist and Post-communist Studies 34,1 (2001): 91– 111.  Lee, Against the Law.

The Curse of Market and the “Freedom” It Brought

125

was highly unregulated and non-protective, with minimal legal regulation and underdeveloped or non-existent social safety nets.³⁵ This was also the labor market faced by almost all peasant workers.³⁶ Quite a few workers I interviewed in NS had worked outside the factory during this period, either in the township and village enterprises (TVEs) or in private enterprises. Very frequently, they didn’t like to speak about that experience. When they did, it was always full of frustration. Qin Jie, one female worker in her late forties who worked for a private employer as a bookkeeper after been retired early, said she quit her job after one year: I believed that my boss must have been a criminal previously. He was so cruel and uncivilized. But he must have had a very strong background and official network. You can’t know how badly he treated his workers, like they were animals! Really, he didn’t treat them like human beings. So, one day after a big fight with him, I quit.

Such denigrating descriptions of private “bosses” reappeared often in my interviews. As in other transitioning societies, the Chinese parvenus who emerged from the late 1980s were typically the most daring and/or callous. Their often complicated and manipulative relationship with government bureaucrats also implied bribery, corruption, and other illegal businesses.³⁷ Enviable, but also despicable, private entrepreneurs in China, especially during this “wild” period, always aroused widespread suspicion among the common people. But this was not just rumor; workers’ who described their experiences seemed to confirm this common image. Hao, a worker in his thirties, complained to me that he didn’t get paid after working in an export-oriented factory in Dongguan for half a year, because the boss simply disappeared one day: My workmates and I were all so angry. We wanted to destroy the instruments. But the factory door was locked so we couldn’t enter … Then we went to the local government. The government said that they would try to find our boss and recover our wages. But that never happened … After that, I realized that once I left the state-owned factory, I was no different than those peasant migrant workers …

 Idid.  Ju Li, From ‘Out-of-plan Worker’ to the ‘Floating Mass’. Informality under Various Forms of Capital Accumulation in the History of the PRC. In Mahua Sarkar (ed.). Work Out of Place: Historical Legacies, Present Predicaments and Future Trends. Walter de Gruyter 2017, 173 – 196.  John Osburg, Anxious Wealth. Money and Morality among China’s New Rich. Stanford University Press, 2013.

126

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

Numerous scholars have revealed the misery of Chinese peasant migrant workers in those export-oriented enterprises.³⁸ Hao’s lament at being “no different” should not be interpreted here as a condescending regret over losing the previous prestige of being a SOE worker and sinking to the level of a peasant worker, but as a simple realization of the extreme vulnerability of workers confronted with the tremendous exploitation and criminalization of capital once the state chose to turn a blind eye to it and refused to protect workers. Another worker, Yong, also took advantage of the unpaid vacation and worked as a steelmaker in a private factory. Yet, after only three months, he returned to NS because his retired parents there insisted he do so: “They threatened to cut off the relationship with me if I didn’t listen.” Later, his mother explained to me: He is just a steelmaker, without higher education or advanced skills. Now he has strength, but soon the strength will go. And then those private bosses will simply kick him out. Besides, who knows how long these private little factories could survive? Numerous have already bankrupted. No matter how bad NS is now, at least relatively it is more secure.

His mother’s concern is not unjustified. Most workers in NS, like Yong, when they found jobs outside of the factory, could only work as manual or low-skilled laborers and thus were highly disposable. Yong himself admitted that one of his friends, who had worked in another private steel factory, was fired without any compensation after breaking one of his arms there. Such highly unregulated and precarious external labor markets made many workers finally recoil and return to NS when they had the chance: radical restructuring stopped and production normalized somewhat from 2003. Even though NS was declining and “bad,” the outside world seemed worse, especially for the most disadvantaged and vulnerable.

 Among many, see Dorothy J. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. University of California Press, 1999; Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants. Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham, NC 2008; Leslie T Chang, Factory Girls. Voices from the Heart of Modern China. Pan Macmillan 2010; Anita Chan, China’s Workers Under Assault. The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. ME Sharpe 2001; Keung Wong, Daniel Fu, Chang Ying Li, and et al., Rural Migrant Workers in Urban China. Living a Marginalised Life. International Journal of Social Welfare 1 (2007): 32– 40; Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, On the Move. Women and Rural-toUrban Migration in Contemporary China. Columbia University Press, 2004; Chris King-Chi Chan and Pun Ngai, The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China. The China Quarterly 198 (2009): 287– 303.

The Curse of Market and the “Freedom” It Brought

127

Retreating to their old factory was not a phenomenon particular just to NS. Studies find a similar trend among other SOE workers.³⁹ A survey conducted in March 1997 in Beijing observed that 86.4 percent of laid-off workers demanded job assignments in SOEs or other state work units by the government, and 47 percent of these workers hoped that they would be re-employed by their own work units.⁴⁰ Mainstream scholars interpreted this as a sign of an irrational “aristocratic mentality” amongst laid-off workers.⁴¹ However, this interpretation misses the real rationale behind such a choice, namely that the unregulated and vicious labor market outside of the state factor was far from a “free heaven” where you could get rich as long as you worked hard, but was instead a cruel one that did not just reject these SOE workers but also forced some peasant migrant workers to commit suicide.⁴² To be sure, not everybody had the choice of “coming back”: for those who were already severed from the factory either through “bottom-out” campaigns or “buy-out offers,” they generally had to stay in the “free” labor market and compete with migrant workers from the destitute countryside, other laid-off workers from bankrupted SOEs, and/or freshly-graduated students from colleges, always finding themselves trapped in the most disadvantaged positions.⁴³ One staff member from the human resource office in NS told me that many “bought-out” workers later became very regretful about their earlier decision and begged to come back, but they were refused. For those who did manage to return, the “failed” experiences in the external labor market brought them great shame and hence further strengthened their subjugation on the shop floor (detailed in chapter five). It was also during this period that the central government pushed forward the so-called urban social welfare reforms nationwide, by either gradually “socializing” welfare services to the municipal level or completely commercializing

 Gu, From Permanent Employment, 281– 299.  Deng, Meifang and Zhang, Yanjiang, Who Can Help Laid-off Workers Break Their Psychological Barriers?. Voice of China, 24 March 1998. (邓梅芳,张彦江，下岗职工心结，谁来解？华声报)  Yang, The Shock Wave of Unemployment.  The most notorious case among many others would be the series Foxconn suicides in 2010.  A sample survey conducted in 55 cities in 1997 shows that 13 persent of laid-off workers were illiterate or only having primary education; 45.5 percent attended junior middle-school; 35.8 percent attended Senior middle-school. See, the Research Group on the Reemployment of Laid-off Workers in Urban Enterprises: The Predicament and the Ways Out. A Survey of the Re-employment of Laid-off Workers in Urban Chinese Enterprises. Sociological Studies 6 (1997): 24– 34. (困 境与出路：关于我国城镇企业下岗职工再就业状况调查, 社会学研究).

128

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

them.⁴⁴ “Burden alleviation” in SOEs, as I illustrated earlier in the case of NS, was part of this welfare reform. Going hand in hand with other neoliberal programs, such as housing reform, healthcare reform, pension reform, and education reform, it largely smashed the safety net that workers could rely on before. Even though the welfare reform promised to replace the work-unit welfare system with a new “pluralist/mixed” one, it turned out that this new one was highly underdeveloped, ambiguous, malfunctioning, profit-oriented, and considerably more austere. Its particular contents and interpretations also kept on morphing and hence became so arbitrary that they left most workers bewildered and frustrated. For common workers, only one thing was clear: they have indubitably become more and more marginalized and precarious. Already impoverished, now they were forced to purchase many of these welfare goods and services from the market. The effects of such change was far-reaching in the long run: it deliberately broke up the relatively egalitarian redistributionist order promised by an earlier regime and locked poor workers at the bottom of a new consumption hierarchy in contemporary China. As such, when the factory seemingly stabilized in 2003, workers who had stayed in or finally returned to NS found that they could only afford housing in a segregated and dilapidated working class slum, education with the least resources, and everything else at the lowest stratum – a permanent curse from the market. I will further explore this process in chapter five. Walder used to argue that when workers no longer depended on the market, but on their SOEs (as the embodiment of state) for health insurance, housing, education, alternative job opportunities, and other welfare services, they were deprived of freedom and autonomy.⁴⁵ To a certain extent, this is true. However, once the state withdrew its protection and decided to develop a consumer instead of a production society, workers found out that they simply became the most vulnerable and disadvantaged victims of the market’s rule of the jungle. While the market did create many millionaires, and even billionaires, in post-reform China – especially due to the tight entanglement of political capital and economic capital – it also created vastly more “losers” whose only resources was their labor and their years of working experience, which were now worth little, if not nothing. For these people, the freedom granted by the market was only

 Mark Selden and Laiyin You, The Reform of Social Welfare in China. World Development 25,10 (1997): 1657– 1668; David Blumenthal and William Hsiao, Privatization and Its Discontents—the Evolving Chinese Health Care System. New England Journal of Medicine 353,11 (2005): 1165 – 1170; James Lee and Ya-peng Zhu, Urban Governance, Neoliberalism and Housing Reform in China. The Pacific Review 19.1 (2006): 39 – 61.  Walder, Communist Neo-traditionalism, 14– 17.

Conclusion

129

the freedom to be exploited and marginalized – the “evil freedom” in Polanyi’s understanding;⁴⁶ or, to borrow the claim made by one of the protagonists of Svetlana Alexievich’s book, “Freedom is money; money is freedom.”⁴⁷

Conclusion Mainstream liberal economists tended to interpret the neoliberal restructuring process in SOEs during this period merely as economic agendas aiming to establish “proper” market-oriented economic entities in a “proper” market economy. Such de-politicization hence obliterated the essence of the neoliberal SOE reform as a radical political project to redistribute wealth in a highly unjustified way by enriching a few elites while depriving and degrading the majority workers. It also excused the Party’s wholesale withdrawal from its ideologically inscribed protective role toward workers during the process. Instead, declaring SOE Restructuring as a national policy, the Party committee of the factory actually collaborated with management to push forward the radical reforms on the spot, while leaving workers basically on their own. This chapter investigated the essences of neoliberal restructuring in NS during the period 1992– 2002 from two angles. First, it moved beyond the abstract concept of so-called “market reform” and re-politicized the whole reforming process by revealing how the concrete power struggles at the grassroots of NS were largely based on various interest calculations by powerful social actors, calculations that actually defined the real meaning and shape of reform itself. Second, it investigated how neoliberal reform in NS effectively broke the old social contract between workers and the factory, disintegrating nearly all of the former institutions, uprooted all of the previous social bonds, dis-embedding workers from their “home,” and pushing them into a market society that constantly defeated and took advantage of them. Aside from the Cultural Revolution, the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s was the most turbulent period in the history of NS, replete with a painful degree of fantasy, destruction, uncertainty, and desperation. None of these neoliberal movements pulled NS out of trouble. By 2002, stripped of all of its social obligations and transformed into a “purer” economic entity, the factory became nothing but a miserable pain for everybody, surrounded by suddenly impoverished and desperate workers, a rapidly disintegrating com-

 Polanyi, The Great Transformation.  Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time. The last of the Soviets. New York 2016, 52.

130

4 The “Restructuring Movement” and The Great Turbulence: 1992 – 2002

munity, and an ever increasing loss that constantly required government bailouts. At that time bankruptcy was still seen as too risky, actually even riskier than it would have been in 1997, since labor unrest from bankrupted or privatized SOEs had grown dramatically from that period. With the steadily accentuated social tension, maintaining stability slowly became a more urgent task than anything else.⁴⁸ The factory seemed to fall into a deadlock.

 Among many, see, for example, Marc J. Blecher, Hegemony and Workers’ Politics in China. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 283 – 303; Yongshun Cai, The Resistance of Chinese Laid-Off Workers in the Reform Period. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 327– 344; Yongshun Cai, State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China. The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched. Routledge 2006; Feng Chen, Privatization and Its Discontents in Chinese Factories. The China Quarterly 185 (2006): 42– 60; Gallagher, Contagious Capitalism; Ching kwan Lee, Pathways of Labor Insurgency. In Elizabeth J Perry and Mark Selden (ed.). Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance. Routledge 2003, 87– 109; Pei, M. (2003) ‘Rights and Resistance: The Changing Contexts of the Dissident Movement’, in Perry and Selden (eds.), Chinese Society, 23 – 46; Beverly Silver and Lu Zhang, China as an Emerging Epicenter of World labor Unrest. In Ho-fung Hung (ed.). China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009, 174– 187.

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”: Post-neoliberalism, Erosive Deindustrialization, and Institutionalized Subaltern What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. – Walden, Henry David Thoreau

The course of history seemed to make another turn with the coming of the new millennium, and along with it, the fate of NS and its workers. In December 2001, China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO), with far-reaching consequences. In a certain way it forced China to be more open to the global market and capital, which brought not just opportunities but also challenges, especially for China’s core state industries, most of them being too weak to compete with foreign corporations. Channeling state resources into strengthening the global competitiveness of Chinese pillar state companies thus became crucial for the state to curtail the growing role of foreign interests in its economic structures. Accordingly, state policy made another shift in order to make selective SOEs “bigger, stronger, and superior” (“zuoda, zuoqiang, zuoyou”) to “form an optimal structure [of the SOE sector], strengthen national innovative capacity and international competitiveness, and help develop other forms of capital alongside it”.¹ The establishment of the State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) in 2003 largely served this role. By declaring itself owner of all SOEs, the SASAC performs the responsibility of investor on behalf of the state, supervises and manages the state-owned assets of enterprises, and guides and pushes forward the reform and restructuring of SOEs.² The stated aim was to reduce the number of SOEs to 30 to 50 globally competitive companies and put them under the state’s absolute control and protection. The most likely candidates to form the core of these future Chinese statecontrolled mega-companies should be those operating within industries defined as strategic or pillar industries.³ Such a “less is more” strategy had its effect. By

 Liang Jun, System of Super-sized State Enterprise. A New Way of Thinking on Supervising State Assets (27. Dec. 2012). Southern Daily. URL: http://www.sasac.gov.cn/n1180/n1271/n20515/ n2697175/15042645.html (19 Sep. 2015).  For the main functions of SASAC, see www.sasac.gov.cn/n2963340/n2963393/2965120.html.  Fang Ren and Liu Bin, Essay on “SASAC: The State Economy Should Maintain Its Absolute Control of Seven Industries” (18. Sep. 2006) (任芳,刘兵: 国资委：国有经济应保持对七个行业 的绝对控制力), URL: http://www.gov.cn/ztzl/2006 -12/18/content_472256.htm (14 May. 2018). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-007

132

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

2012, there have been 45 corporations on the Global Fortune 500 list owned by SASAC, with combined assets worth 4.5 trillion US dollars.⁴ It was against this new trend that some scholars declared 2003 the crucial turning point for Chinese economic reform, moving from neoliberal market reform to so-called post-reform state-capitalism, when the state managed to maintain disproportionate control over significant part of profits, investments and the national economy. Meanwhile, since all the SASAC-listed companies were now under the protection of the state, it was also said that with numerous SOEs already having gone bankrupt, the dramatic and turbulent state-sector downsizing finally ended and subsequently the state sector entered a new stage of stabilization.⁵ However, despite this grand narrative – whether it is “becoming larger, stronger, and superior” in ambitious official statements or the abstract (and superficial) generalization as state capitalism in its western interpretation – this new policy trend, just like other state policies when put into practice, rather ironically yet unsurprisingly created new spaces and opportunities for grassroot entities to employ and manipulate. For example, many large-scale, loss-making SOEs tried rather desperately to become so-called “subsidiaries” of the SASAClisted companies at the central or provincial level, usually through mergers, in order to avoid their final bankruptcy. Even though most of these mergers actually went against the official goal of “becoming larger, stronger and superior” since the loss-making SOEs were usually financial burdens to the acquirers, they were generally promoted or encouraged by the state (especially local governments) out of political concerns for social stability threatened by dramatically rising labor unrest due to the huge numbers of layoffs in SOEs from the mid-1990s.⁶ These “subsidiary” SOEs then sought to turn themselves into appendages of the state, welcomed or not, and came to compose a crucial part of the gigantic “zombie/ghost factories” now visible in contemporary China.⁷ For these SOEs,

 Barry Naughton, The Transformation of the State Sector. SASAC, the Market Economy, and the New National Champions. In Barry Naughton and Kellee S. Tsai (ed.). State capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle. Cambridge University Press, 2015, 46 – 72.  Ibid.  About 30 million SOE workers were laid off in the period 1995 – 2002, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.  For reports about “zombie factories” in contemporary China, see, for example, Michael Schumanaug, Zombie Factories Stalk the Sputtering Chinese Economy” (28. Aug. 2015). The New York Times. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/30/business/international/zombie-factoriesstalk-the-sputtering-chinese-economy.html (14 May 2018); Mark Magnier, China Begins to Tackle Its ‘Zombie’ Factory Problem. Leaders will use National People’s Congress to Push Overhaul of State Industries—But Pace of Reform is Questioned” (3. Mar, 2016). The Wall Street Journal. URL:

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

133

the end of radical neoliberal restructuring only meant a slower death, a disgraceful “erosive deindustrialization,” though for those administratively monopolistic central-level SOEs (a little more than 100 out of a total of nearly 120,000 SOEs), it did mean protection and privilege.⁸ In a similar vein, Nanfang Steel also managed to grasp this last straw. Despite its ever increasing losses that constantly demanded government bailouts, the potential labor unrest caused by possible bankruptcy was a higher political risk. Squeezing into the program of SASAC seemed the only way out. In 2003, after tremendous efforts and negotiations, under the dictate of the governments, NS was merged with South Iron and Steel, one of the huge central-level steel companies in China.⁹ From that time, NS became simply one sector within a big central-level enterprise, “included” instead of “excluded,” albeit as an unwelcomed appendage. From that point the turbulence brought about by the earlier radical neoliberal “movements” at NS finally calmed down: huge debts were liquidated through the Equity-for-Debt swap (EDS) scheme;¹⁰ large-scale lay-offs were stopped and the enterprise even began to recruit some new workers. Furthermore, the factory had seemingly already transformed itself into a streamlined, profitoriented, and “pure” economic entity after shedding almost all of its social functions and ancillary entities. Only about half of its workers remained, most of them young, strong, and male. Yet the factory never recovered again; instead, along with the destruction brought by the neoliberal reforms from the previous decade, the current status of being an unwelcomed “appendage” that had been formed out of improvised political consideration cast a shameful and apathetic shadow across NS and dragged it into yet another decade of “erosive deindustrialization”: its continuous loss could only be counterbalanced by various subsidies from both the ac-

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-readies-plan-to-confront-its-zombie-problem-1457024868 (14 May. 2018).  Yong Guo and Angang Hu, The Administrative Monopoly in China’s economic transition. Communist and Post-Communist Studies 37,2 (2004): 265 – 280.  In May 2010, South Iron & Steel Group Corporation was again merged with the Zhongyuan Iron and Steel Group Corporation.  The equity-for-debt swap (EDS) scheme was introduced by the central state in 2000 to clear up the bad loans of the state-owned banks and thus prevent SOEs and the state-owned banks in China from general bankruptcy. For more information about the EDS, See, for example, Russell Smyth and Zhai Qingguo, ‘Equity for Debt Swaps’ in China’s State-Owned Enterprises. A Property Rights Perspective. China Information 16, 1 (2002): 1– 24; Russell Smyth, Junli Wang, and Xin Deng, Equity-for-debt Swaps in Chinese Big Business. A Case Study of Restructuring in One Large State-owned Enterprise. Asia Pacific business review 10,3 (2004): 382– 401.

134

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

quirer and the state; its imminent bankruptcy loomed forever in the near but unseen future; and its present survival was comprised of a merely lingering and painful death as a “zombie factory.” This chapter explores the working and living experiences of NS workers during the “erosive deindustrialization” of this post-reform era. In of the aftermath of the preceding turbulent neoliberal reform, I witnessed the emergence of an alienated, despotic, and cynical labor process on the shop floor, a ghettoized and shrinking working-class community, and widespread poverty and precariousness. Responding to such general degradation, NS pensioners organized the largest and most militant, yet ultimately unsuccessful, labor movement lasting from 2002 to 2006. In contrast, the then employed younger workers never organized a single collective action. Instead, they adopted a pragmatic and hidden strategy of “everyday resistance” (at most) beneath an ostensible resignation, a strategy that disempowered rather than empowered them. All of this, this chapter argues, helped to generate a new working-class cultural identity beset with stigma, shame, and pain, which, together with the economic degradation, signified workers’ irreversible slide into the subaltern through a perpetuated and class-divided social reality prevalent not just in NS, but across contemporary China as well.

“Nobody Cares”: Apathetic Coercion in the Post-reform Labor Process E.P. Thompson used to describe the “classic exploitive relationship of the Industrial Revolution” as “depersonalized, in the sense that no lingering obligations of mutuality – of paternalism or deference, or of the interests of the ‘the Trade’ – are admitted.” Yet, “in fact,” he continued, “no complex industrial enterprise could be conducted according to such a philosophy. The need for industrial peace, for a stable labor-force, and for a body of skilled and experienced workers, necessitated the modification of managerial techniques – and, indeed, the growth of new forms of paternalism – in the cotton-mills by the 1830s.”¹¹ On the post-reform shop floor of NS, however, such a philosophy has indeed been retained. After the neoliberal movements, whatever consent had existed earlier – whether based on the socialist ideology before the reform or the shared benefits between managers and workers in the early stage of reform – were now gone.

 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class. Open Road Media 2016, 203 – 204.

“Nobody Cares”: Apathetic Coercion in the Post-reform Labor Process

135

Managers had nothing but coercion to rely on to organize production on the shop floor. Ching Kwan Lee once described the transformed labor regimes in her cases of Chinese SOEs since the late 1990s as “disorganized despotism,” with a dismantled paternalism and coercive labor control.¹² To a great extent, such “disorganized despotism” also applies to today’s NS, as workers are constantly put under pressure by meager wages, the imposition of strict economic penalties, a deteriorating and sometimes even dangerous working environment, an intense working rhythm, and a strong sense of labor alienation. Meanwhile, there was also another equally important element that was more subtle and less visible and hence unrealized by Lee. The marginalization and victimization of the factory itself in the whole reforming process, including the most recent reluctant preservation of the factory – largely out of political considerations – and the ever-haunting threat of upcoming bankruptcy, added a specific additional feature to the coercive labor process in NS’ shop floor, i. e. apathy, which applies to both managers and workers. Such apathy was best illustrated by the most common expression I heard in the field: “nobody cares.”

Apathetic Coercion from the Management Unlike the new-leftists in China who believed that the dismay and degradation of workers originated from the newly emergent class struggle between the corrupt and prosperous managerial class and the working class, my research in Nanfang indicates that even though managers there did see some material gains due to the wage reform and the leeway granted by the particular reforming processes, to a certain degree they were also the victims in the game, as the marginalizing policies adopted by the state did not simply exclude them from the favored “orbit” of the state but also deliberately scapegoated them as the origins of NS’ failure. All the managers I interviewed, from the lowest to the highest, were insecure, dismayed, and alienated. Employed by a feeble Third Front enterprise, the survival of which has been granted by the government solely out of political calculation, the managers’ capability for labor control had to be curtailed by their own feelings of insecurity and illegitimacy. The sense of insecurity came from worries about the future both for the factory and their own positions. The turbulence during the earlier years had brought about a strong sense of uncertainty not just in workers, but also in managers,

 Lee, From Organized Dependence.

136

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

who, though always having to take up the role of downsizing and burden-alleviation under pressure from higher authorities, nonetheless shared with workers a strong feeling of drifting in an unknown sea. The final preservation of the factory since 2003 seemed to exempt it from possible bankruptcy, but very probably only temporarily: the policy could in any case change at any moment, and who knew, really, what would happen to the factory in the future. Additionally, every time a new director was appointed at the factory by the provincial government, the composition of management would also be reshuffled. Such power changes at NS were extremely frequent from 1997 onwards due to the increasing impatience and desperation of the governments, which meant that the posts of these managers were quite unstable and fungible. To a certain degree, this strong feeling of insecurity, though definitely not the only reason, helped strengthen any inclination towards managerial corruption. Laowu, one retired senior manager in NS, admitted to me that even though it was hard to estimate how extensive state asset losses were due to corruption, corruption among the high-level managers – via channels of circulation, contract systems, and most recently the restructuring process – was rampant. Quite a few private factories were established in the suburb of NS, owned by the family members of these corrupt top-level managers. These people have become the “rich abbots” in the “poor temple” (穷庙富方丈). For the middle or lower-level managers, the most popular way to grasp money was to establish a nominal trading company “under the table,” by retaining for his or her own company some contracts from the factory while using materials, equipment, and workers from NS. Several middle/low-level managers I interviewed expressed a similar logic behind their behavior, e. g., “I might lose my position if a new director is appointed or a new merger happens. What if Nanfang even goes bankrupt? I might even lose my job. I’d better take advantage now”; or, in a more unabashed way, “[i]t’s not a big deal and people should maximize their interests through any way in this market economy in order to not become a loser.” Here, the main anxieties of these managers tended to focus on how long they could remain in their posts and how they could make more money, whether through legal or illegal means. All of these tricks were clearly recognized by workers, and the managers involved also knew that the workers knew. Even though corruption has become such a “popular” and even “institutionalized” mode of behavior in contemporary Chinese society, it still brought uneasiness and qualms to managers, especially when they faced workers. Occasionally, managers struggled hard to “naturalize” their behavior, as Awei, one lower-level manager, said to me:

“Nobody Cares”: Apathetic Coercion in the Post-reform Labor Process

137

My colleagues are very nice. They all have their own ways of making money and nobody is jealous of you or blocks your way of making money. So, we have very good relationship with each other. A lot of my colleagues [all managers, author’s note] have bought cars. I am thinking of buying a car too. (Paused for a while) You know, we are all cutting the ground of state-owned enterprises. (Very uncomfortable) Last year NS lost another 400 million. Nobody knows what will happen next, so I have to take advantage of the present to make more money, just in case, right? [Question: Don’t you worry?] I don’t think that much. No use. Anyway there are so many people in NS (Paused for a while). Sometimes I am worried. You know, what could I do if NS really goes bankruptcy? (Shaking his head) Well, forget it. You know, I am thinking of buying a bigger car for my family …

Awei’s annual wage was around 30 thousand Yuan, but he told me that his actual income could reach 100 thousand Yuan in some “good” years, two thirds of which came from the so-called “special ways.” He had meant to boast to me and to convey that, even though he still stayed in NS, a bad place in other people’s eyes, he was not a loser. Yet, during our conversation, he soon became unsettled about the topic, even though he chose to emphasize the “normality” of such behavior in the beginning by referring to his colleagues who were also making money in their own “special ways.” “Cutting the ground of state-owned enterprises” actually means stealing workers’ labor. Realizing this could bring a lot of uneasiness and a strong feeling of illegitimacy to these managers that they would not feel comfortable confronting workers when faced with non-cooperation and other forms of silent resistance on the shop floor (further discussed below), except in cases where the managers’ interests were seriously damaged. Most of the time, instead, they adopted a strategy of avoidance and apathy, merely relying on the numerous written rules and economic penalties for labor control. Many workers I interviewed believed that their managers (the sector chiefs and above) were distanced from them, didn’t really care about the production, and only followed their own interests. Once, two workers, Dahua and Dali, described this kind of managerial apathy for me vividly: Dali: You can argue with them, but they just ignore you. It is different from before. Before, if you argued with them too much, they would become angry and ask you to write a self-criticizing note. Now you can curse; they just pretend to be deaf. Dahua: They know that our workers are resentful, so when you blow off your repressed emotion, they would just avoid you. They could bear these, since they don’t have to work. Dali: It doesn’t relate to their interests. You can yell, cry, even bump your head against the wall––they don’t care. Dahua: Ignore, just ignore …

138

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

Dali: There are two layers, separated from each other. Your business has nothing to do with theirs. You take your money, and they take their money. Dahua: No matter how difficult the situation you are in, they will never help. They ignore you, since anyway your workers have to work to survive.

Dahua was a female worker in her late 40s. She had been forced into early retirement several years ago. Her younger brother, Dali, was a current team leader, as well as an excellent electrician. Both of them were depressed and angry during the whole interview. The complete disembeddedness of the labor process from the social/cultural institutions exposed workers to extremely alienated and depersonalized labor relations. This was very much like the “classic exploitive relationship of the Industrial Revolution” Thompson described, “in the sense that no lingering obligations of mutuality – of paternalism or deference, or of the interests of the ‘the Trade’ – are admitted.” Part of the reason why the management didn’t care if such depersonalized labor relations would harm the factory in the long run derived from their strong sense of insecurity and illegitimacy. Aqiu, an electrician, illustrated this managerial apathy and indifference: From our analysis, these managers also don’t really care. These machines are not theirs. For our workers, it is the same. These machines and tools are not ours. It is not our factory, not mine, not yours. Sometimes we talk directly to the managers, “why did your manager care that much? The factory is not mine, not yours, so how does it matter to you”? They know this. That’s why they don’t seriously discipline you; neither do they seriously make trouble to you.

On the surface, such indifference seemed to stem from the problem of ownership, as many neoliberal economists insist, and as Aqiu suggests here. But, in fact, such a performance of indifference masked all kinds of anxieties and insecurities among both workers and managers in NS. Public ownership only becomes a problem when it ceases to grant dignity and security to people. With the workers’ and the managers’ identification with the enterprise alike destroyed by previous neoliberal market reform, as a result, “nobody cares.”

Apathetic Compliance from Workers When confronting the apathetic coercion of the management, workers adopted another kind of apathy, which demonstrated itself in two dimensions: an apathetic compliance that was based on the strong sense of powerlessness and res-

“Nobody Cares”: Apathetic Coercion in the Post-reform Labor Process

139

ignation, and an apathetic “everyday resistance” that arose from hidden anger and frustration (discussed further in a later section). Apathetic compliance could be witnessed in many ways. For example, once economic penalties became the most widely used remedy for labor control and were more and more strict and arbitrary, most workers I interviewed chose to “not care.” Dayong, a male locksmith in his thirties, said to me, “there are so many rules now in the shop floor that we don’t even bother to remember them … Sometimes we even don’t know when and why they (managers) took our money away. They can always find reasons, so we don’t care.” Such apathetic compliance embodied the strong feeling of powerlessness of workers when faced with the arbitrary power of management. When I asked Yaping, a female worker in her late thirties, at what age she would have to retire, she hesitated, and then replied, “40? Or 45? I am not sure. Well, who cares? They ask me to stay, I stay; they ask me to go, I can’t say no. What is the use of knowing it earlier? So long as one remains a monk, one goes on tolling the bell. That is happier.” In this sense, such apathy actually provided workers some self-deluding autonarcosis that exempted them, at least temporarily, from their anxiety and worry about a future that was out of their own control. My observation on the shop floor also found that workers rarely confronted their immediate managers. Usually, workers were obedient, with a small number of them even being apparently deferential or adulatory, and most others passively compliant. One day when Aqiu, the electrician in his late thirties, took me with him to his shift, we met his section chief at the entrance of the workshop. The section chief didn’t say a word about my presence there, but scolded Aqiu very sternly for not wearing a safety hat. Aqiu just stood there and listened, with his head hanging down. Later, when I asked him whether he felt humiliated at that moment, he replied: Not really. It was good that he didn’t deduct my money … You have to think in this way: as long as you are eating from their bowl, you have to obey their rule. Only if I don’t want this job, I can yell back at you when I feel unhappy …

I said nothing. Yet, this episode unsettled me. I knew Aqiu too well. He had been that rebellious and proud teenager worker who would yell back at his manager in the 1980s, as I described in chapter three. But now in his middle age, Aqiu suppressed his possible anger because of anxiety about losing his job. He also needed to convince himself that this was, indeed, part of the game one had to play in order to get over the feeling of inadequacy and humiliation. He had to admit that it was he, Aqiu, who “had to eat from their bowl” as if he was a beg-

140

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

gar, instead of a worker who was honorably exchanging his labor for a deserved wage. Very similar submissive responses can be found in different situations. For example, when workers are subjected to work overload, asked to work longer, or even to work under perilous conditions, most workers rarely or only slightly resisted. Dagang, another electrician in his early forties, related a typical incident that happened at his work: In the past, two electricians were always required to do the job together, with one working and another one overseeing to assure the safety. Now with the downsizing of workers, we have to work by ourselves, which increases the risk of accidents to a great extent. One time, I was on my duty by myself when the heavy rain damaged the circuits and the master switch was tripped. The production had to stop. So the manager asked me to turn on the switch. I told the manager that since the switch tripped because of the short circuit, it was very dangerous to forcefully turn it on. He said that he couldn’t stop the production and I had to go. Then I asked for an assistant to help me. The switch was near the top roof. Even if I climbed into the overhead traveling crane, I couldn’t reach it. From there, I still had to climb up a ladder to reach the switch. I needed another worker to at least hold up the ladder for me. Later he found out another electrician from other sector for me. I told that electrician, “We should not take the risk of doing this, but the manager is forcing us. What should we do”? He replied, “What should we do? Maybe bet our lives for good luck”. (Laugh) At last, we decided to turn off all the switches in the workshop first, then turn on the master switch, then turn on the other small switches one by one. Luckily, we adopted this strategy, since when we turned on the last small switch it exploded. It was a small one, so we were fine; but if we had turned on the master switch first without turning off all other switches as the manager demanded, it would definitely have exploded and most probably we would have died. There are so many accidents these years, here or there. So I have to be very careful.

Since the incomes of workshop managers were now directly related to output, production was always prioritized over safety. In the instance described by Dagang, as in many other cases, production output outweighed workers’ safety without any hesitation on a manager’s part. Industrial accident rates have skyrocketed in NS recently, since the factory was reluctant to spend money on the safety measures it had maintained before, and managers, under the pressure of the production quota, were more likely to neglect such measures. Most workers, when confronting the coercive dictates from managers, even in matters with life-or-death consequences, simply “bet their lives for good luck” and obeyed. “You have to do your job, nothing there to be argued” was just the cruel reality forced upon NS workers and they clearly realized it. The reasons behind such compliance and resignation were quite simple: workers feared losing their jobs out of a clear recognition of their easy disposa-

“Nobody Cares”: Apathetic Coercion in the Post-reform Labor Process

141

Fig. 6: A worker repairing a machine. Photo taken by Ju Li, 6 Nov. 2008.

bility. Zhangyong, a steel worker in his early thirties, explained it in his own words: Who needs our workers? Now there are so many peasant workers rushing into the cities. There is nobody to do the job? Just go to the labor market and yell, “I have some jobs here, want to come?” People will surely rush to you like a swarm of bees. So our workers are just shit.

The fear of being fired came from workers’ memory of the large-scale layoffs in the late 1990s, when around one half of them were laid off in different ways. Even though these huge layoffs ceased in 2002 and the process of firing now had to comply with the labor contract signed between the enterprise and workers and thus couldn’t be too arbitrary, the fear of losing their jobs still haunted the minds of currently-employed workers. At the end of 2008, when the so-called global financial crisis brought another economic downturn nationwide – as well as in NS where losses that year reached 39.3 million Yuan (NS Annual Report 2008), rumors quickly spread among workers that all workers would be laid-off, and then only a very small proportion of them would be chosen and

142

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

re-employed. Almost everybody I talked to around that time expressed the same pessimistic concern, such as “we are in the same situation as we were in 1997 (when the large-scale laid-off happened).” The purported huge lay-off did not really happen, but the threat seemed to loom forever in the future. On the other hand, the prospect of finding a suitable job outside NS was dim. When competing with the large labor reserve army that included migrant workers from the destitute countryside, laid-off workers from bankrupted SOEs, and freshly graduated students from colleges, these currently employed workers, many of whom possessed only manual or limited skills, were at a severe disadvantage. As illustrated by the outside working experiences of some workers that I described in chapter four, the unregulated outside labor market did not bring the “better life” promised by the “free market”; instead, it further strengthened the subjugation of workers, locked them into the most disadvantaged positions within the labor market, and thus excluded them from it to a certain extent. In this sense, the preservation of NS actually saved NS workers from becoming members of the millions upon millions of dislocated laborers swarming in the export-oriented sweatshops in the South or from becoming simply unemployed. But on the other hand, it also created a permanent possible threat to workers, constantly reminding them of the fragility of their jobs and how easily and sometimes arbitrarily they could be taken away. Based on this understanding, we can see that workers’ compliance was far from being due to their “backwardness” or “cowardice,” but was quite self-protective and pragmatic: it was against the threat of job deprivation. As James Scott puts it, “his effort and his achievement, in one sense, have been to swallow his anger lest it endanger his livelihood.”¹³ Yet, still, this could be a rather hard thing to swallow. Lacking other eligible outlets, a particular kind of “everyday resistance,” beneath such apathetic compliance, also developed among these currently employed workers, which I will explore later in this chapter. As “nobody cares,” both the managers and workers I interviewed described their jobs as “Hun” (“loitering over”). Managers loitered over their jobs in order to grasp money as much as possible; workers loitered over their jobs but to stay away from hunger as long as possible – yet all were waiting for the final death of the factory. Such double apathy hence greatly crippled the whole production process, doomed NS to its chronic losses, and confirmed the nevertheless actual failure of reform in NS, as well as in other numerous “zombie factories” around the country.

 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak. Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press, 2008, 279.

The Emergent Segregation of Working Class Slum

143

Fig. 7: A group of workers taking a break outside the workshop. Author: Ju Li. Dec. 2008.

“All the Civilized People Have Moved Out”: The Emergent Segregation of Working Class Slum As I illustrated earlier, the turbulent neoliberal reform in NS from 1997 to 2002 had completely destroyed the previously hierarchical yet consolidated and prosperous industrial community: the downsizing movement had cut down about half of its workers, while the burden alleviation movement had demolished all of the previous welfare institutions. These together quickly led to a disintegration of the old industrial community. Meanwhile, with the overall commercialization of accommodation, medicalcare, and education that was promoted by the state during the same period, the market soon replaced the state/factory as the major player for resource allocation. It accordingly generated new forms of social polarization and a dramatic intensification of uneven development at all spatial dimensions, particularly

144

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

in terms of housing-related social divisions.¹⁴ So, when the radical reforms stopped and production seemingly normalized in NS from 2003 onwards, out of the ruins of the collapsed industrial community emerged a segregated working-class slum, where only workers and some pensioners stayed, while almost all of the managers moved out to the nearby city. Segregation was derived from the ever-widening income disparities between managers and workers especially after the mid-1990s. The so-called “post wage system” initiated in 2002 in NS further widened this gap. The new wage system meant that employees’ wages were primarily based on their posts, rather than on their seniorities and performances. Under this system, the average wage of common technical engineers was three to five times that of workers; for managers, it could reach up to ten to thirty times. If we include the so-called “gray income”¹⁵ available to members of management, the gap would be even wider. With such huge income disparities, the “invisible hand” of the free market had totally different meanings for workers and managers: it effectively shoveled each group into different spaces based on their different purchasing capability in the market. For example, the average wage for NS workers in 2009 was 10,000 Yuan, which was far below the average wage of 23,191 Yuan in Sichuan Province that year.¹⁶ With this meager income, workers soon found that the only options available to them were the lowest-grade ones offered by the market. That meant that they could only afford the rundown but relatively cheaper apartments built up by the factory mostly in the 1980s in the old working-class community.¹⁷ By staying in the old community, they then could only obtain medical services from the pre-

 For more illustrations of the relation between housing commercialization and social polarization in contemporary China, see, for example, James Lee and Ya-peng Zhu, Urban Governance, Neoliberalism and Housing Reform in China. The Pacific Review 19.1 (2006): 39 – 61; Yaping Wang, Urban Poverty, Housing and Social Change in China. Routledge 2004; Deborah S Davis, From Welfare Benefit to Capitalized Asset. The Re-commodification of Residential Space in Urban China. In Ray Forrest and James Lee (ed.). Housing and social change: East-West perspectives. Routledge 2003, 183 – 198.  “Gray income” means the income that comes at least partially from illegal activity.  Sichuan Statistic Bureau, The Announcement of the Average Wage of Sichuan Province in 2010 (四川省统计局关于发布2010年职工平均工资的公告) (27. Apri. 2011). URL: http://www.sc. stats.gov.cn/tjxx/zxfb/201105/t20110511_709.html (4 May. 2018).  Housing reform started earlier than other welfare reforms in NS. As early as 1995, the factory initiated the program of house commercialization by selling the previously factory-allotted flats to their residents at highly discounted prices. Most people accepted the program in a relatively calm manner, since the prices were much lower than market prices and basically affordable to almost everybody.

The Emergent Segregation of Working Class Slum

145

viously enterprise-sponsored, but now stripped-down hospital with poor medical equipment and services due to investment shortages. Similarly, they could only send their kids to the schools within the old community, which again once had been high quality under the sponsorship of the factory but had now quickly degenerated to a low rank due to the scarce funds from the local government and the flight of qualified teachers. Luxurious stores and restaurants had long moved out of the old community, leaving only shabby ones behind. Even the brightness of the “ten-mile steel-city avenue” was gone: two-thirds of the streetlights were broken due to a lack of maintenance.

Fig. 8: One part of the dilapidated working-class community. Author: Ju Li Dec. 2008.

Yaping, one female worker in her thirties, took the example of education and expressed her despair: Everything now is going back to how it was before the Liberation [1949]. Before, kids from the poor family couldn’t afford to go to school. Now, poor kids can’t afford to go to school again. All the sacrifices and efforts our martyrs made for this country are betrayed.

146

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

When Yaping bewailed that “kids from the poor family couldn’t afford to go to school,” she did not really mean that working-class children could not go to school at all; rather, she was lamenting that they could only afford to go to the low-quality local public schools, thus risking their future because their parents could not afford the dwellings in the nearby city, where public schools, health care, and other basic infrastructure were far better, and where, not incidentally, all of the NS managers had chosen to live. For those workers who had experienced a past era when workers and managers lived in the same buildings or neighborhoods, went to the same hospital and stores, celebrated holidays in the same hall, and their kids went to the same schools, these stunning inequalities created by the market were still relatively new. In that sense, it was not so much the absolute poverty – the starvation, malnutrition, or homelessness per se – that distressed NS workers, but the strong sense of being marginalized and excluded from other more promising, decent, and prosperous options that were saved for richer people, including NS managers. Dilapidation was everywhere. Most parks that were built during the earlier period were abandoned, with weeds as high as people. Almost all cultural and entertainment facilities – the recreation center, dancing hall, skating rink, swimming pool, theater, basketball courts and so on – were closed. Now gambling (playing Mahjong) was the most popular activity. It was a way to entertain and numb people, kill otherwise boring time, and seek stimulus through possible good luck. Workers played Mahjong everywhere, in teahouses, Mahjong houses, parks, people’s homes, or even the night-duty rooms of the workshop (see Figure 5). When I asked Xiaoxia, a steelworker in his early thirties, why he spent so much time on the Mahjong table, he smiled shyly, “you have nothing to do here. Playing Mahjong makes me happy; otherwise, I might go crazy.” Pausing for a while, he added uneasily, “I am hopeless.” Xiangzi, the male team leader, sharply pointed out: Gambling is one way to numb us. Everybody plays Mahjong – the workers play, as well as the managers. I also play. People don’t have any inner strength to support themselves. They never stay home and read some technology and science books to get self-improvement like before, never.

Xiangzi was an excellent electrician who had won technical awards many times for his outstanding skills in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was he who told me that he used to spend most of his free time reading all kinds of technology and science books in the libraries. When I asked him if he still read those books now, he shook his head and said, “Everything is becoming meaningless.”

The Emergent Segregation of Working Class Slum

147

Dayong, the steel worker, expressed a similar logic: “My father [a retired worker in Nanfang] always criticizes me for being backward and not making an effort to become more progressive, but I told him, ‘what is the use for me to make efforts and progress? The whole society is like this, so what could a small worker like me do?’”

Fig. 9: Workers playing Mahjong in an outdoor shabby teahouse. By Ju Li. Dec. 2008.

Backward/progressive had been the typical dichotomy to judge workers in socialist China – being progressive meant working hard, being eager to improve one’s performances, and being loyal to the Party. Now, the word “progress” has nothing to do with workers. It doesn’t matter whether you are a good or bad worker. Being a worker itself is a failure and implies being “backward,” or in a more frequently used term now, a loser. Xiangzi’s claim was also confirmed by my visit to the Science and Technology Library in Nanfang. I went there three times and never saw a single soul besides the two librarians. The librarians felt my surprise and laughed: We will have someone here sometimes, say one person one month (laughs). You know, these kids who just graduated from colleges came here in the beginning. Then even they

148

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

stopped coming very soon. People go to play Majiang now. I like playing Majiang too. Well, not like before. We were much busier before. Say, we really should be laid off – nothing to do here, just muddling around (laughs).

It was not just workers who lost their initiative to learn, so did engineers and managers. Job insecurity, the depressing future of the factory, the anxieties of survival or making money, strong feelings of humiliation or illegitimacy – all of these have brought people to the gambling table. At least by cheering or arguing every small gain or loss, they could escape from the unhappy reality, even if only briefly. The deteriorating community also forced many retirees, who had migrated to Nanfang decades ago and already developed a strong sense of “home” after working and living there for many years, to reconsider their life of retirement. With the “burden alleviation” reform, all previous welfares were gone, including the former senior nursing services. Meanwhile, the sense of solidarity and bonding developed among people in the earlier time had vanished with social fragmentation and mobility, as work patterns and social networks shifted. Many pensioners chose to leave if possible. They followed their children who found jobs elsewhere. Or they simply returned to their earliest hometown before they had migrated to NS in the first place. For most of them, however, the earliest hometown had already become completely unfamiliar after being away for so many years; neither was the deteriorated factory the same home as it had been before. To a great degree, these pioneer workers who went to NS under the call of “good people and good horses go to the Third Front” in the 1960s became rootless. It was this rootless feeling that drove these old people who were now scattering everywhere in China to come back to visit Nanfang from time to time, by merely walking around the factory, hoping to bump into old friends and colleagues, but often feeling more dejected afterwards. “Everything is gone. Now it is like a big trash can”, they told me. Meanwhile, along with the formation of a working-class slum in the old community there developed a contemptuous disparagement toward it. One evening, some of my friends, all of them now engineers or managers who bought new apartments in the nearby city and lived there, wanted to invite me out for dinner. When I suggested finding a place in the old town, they rejected the idea immediately, by claiming “there is nothing elegant and interesting there!” At last, they insisted on picking me up from the old town and driving approximately 30 minutes to the nearby city. There, we spent around 1,000 Yuan in an “elegant” restaurant for dinner and another 1,000 Yuan in another “interesting” club singing Karaoke. When I asked them why they moved here – though it would have been easy to point to the school systems or the living conditions – one of them smiled

The Emergent Segregation of Working Class Slum

149

at me and explained instead: “All the civilized people have moved out of that damn place, haven’t they? You know who are still staying there, right?” People still staying in “that damn place” were of course those now apparently “uncivilized” workers who could afford nowhere else. They were now considered by others as well as themselves as losers. Young working-class parents now demanded that their children study hard by threatening them: “If you don’t study hard, when you grow up, you can only be a poor and good-for-nothing worker! You will be stuck in Nanfang forever!” With education as the only possible hope for common people’s upward class mobility in contemporary Chinese society, the low-ranked school system and limited resources in the old community diminish that hope to the largest extent. The thought of imprisonment, not just for themselves but also for their children, within Nanfang – or within the status of “working-class” – scared many working-class parents. In order to escape from such a dreadful situation, some workers I know chose to take a second job beside their one in the factory and save as much as they could in order to afford a small apartment in the nearby city, so their kids could go to the better schools there. “We are hopeless already, but I want my kid to have his future,” Xiaowang, a female worker in her thirties, told me. She and her husband opened a small grocery store in the neighborhood in 2006 and took turns taking care of it by trying to stagger their respective shifts at the workshops. She hoped that she could buy a small flat in the nearby city by 2012 when her son would enter middle school; “Schools here are so bad. We have already sacrificed my son for his elementary school here. We couldn’t sacrifice him anymore.” The sense of guilt around not being able to provide a better upbringing and educational environment for their children drove these young working-class parents to high degrees of self-exploitation so as to compensate for “the sacrifices” their children had to make due to their own “incapability.” During my stay in Nanfang, I heard of at least one industrial accident due to the extreme exhaustion brought about by such self-exploitation due to having multiple jobs. The old community was not just being disparaged, it was also pushed intentionally into oblivion. As evidenced by my managerial friends’ complete refusal to go back to or even talk about the old community where they had spent over 30 years of their lives, these segregated places, with the triumphant stride of state capitalism in China, have slowly become forgettable and then invisible, fading away from the grand narrative of the so-called “China miracle.” In the future, they might also grow into sites of condemnation – labeled as sources of poverty, laziness, as uncivilized, violent and crime-ridden, and depicted as a tumor on modernity and development, as has happened for a long time to many urban slums around the world.

150

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

This phenomenon of segregation was nothing new, of course. While the consolidated and prosperous working-class community of NS had been set up against the segregation of the modern industrial complex from the surrounding rural society during the state socialist era, the currently developed segregated working-class slum effectively mingled workers and peasants, and together they formed the subalterns of today’s class society in China, both groups kept equally separate from the “winning” elites. As Lynsey Hanley put it, this was hence how “class is built into the physical landscape of the country.”¹⁸

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance in the Aftermath of Neoliberal Reform As illustrated by many scholarly works, the SOE workers in China did resist when faced by the great transformation that shattered their lives.¹⁹ Similarly, NS workers did not just accept the general degradation in their working and living spaces passively. However, as I will illustrate below, they usually did so in rather pragmatic ways, as their forms of resistance were always constrained within a highly pressurized and constrained space. In NS, while pensioners adopted a particular form of remembrance as one way to resist, they also organized one of the most desperate and militant yet secluded labor contentious movement, while the then-currently employed workers merely fought silently by employing the so-called “weapons of the weak.”²⁰ Though quite different in their forms, all of these strategies were the products of not just anger but also powerlessness.

 Lynsey Hanley, Estates. An Intimate History. Granta Books 2007, 18.  Among many, see, for example, Marc J. Blecher, Hegemony and Workers’ Politics in China. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 283 – 303; Cai, Y. (2002) ‘The Resistance of Chinese Laid-Off Workers in the Reform Period’, The China Quarterly 2002(170): 327– 344; Yongshun Cai, State and LaidOff Workers in Reform China. The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched. Routledge 2006; Feng Chen, Privatization and Its Discontents in Chinese Factories. The China Quarterly (185) 2006, 42– 60; Gallagher, M. E. (2005) Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China. Princeton University Press; Lee, Pathways of Labor Insurgency, 41– 46; Pei, Rights and Resistance, 23 – 46; Silver and Zhang, China as an Emerging Epicenter, 174– 87.  Scott, Weapons of the Weak.

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

151

Remembrance as a Weapon: Pensioners’ Memory In chapter two, I argued that the oral histories of the pioneering workers (now pensioners), and their particular way of remembering their past working lives, composes a crucial subjective dimension of the earliest labor history in NS. I have also mentioned that such remembrance does not just point to the past but also to the present, when workers used it as a weapon of resistance to challenge the contemporary great transformation. This section analyzes this resistance in a more detailed way. First, I interpret workers’ popular memory as a spontaneous strategy to defend both their part in a history that has been neglected or derided by contemporary historiography, and the deserved but often lost respect and dignity they should have earned as devoted and hardworking socialist workers. The once glorified and patriotic TFC was now interpreted either as a highly irrational behavior,²¹ or as an anachronistic and doomed “industrial heritage,”²² both intending to justify its contemporary destruction.²³ Such denigration of the TFC has not just erased workers’ past contribution to the project and the country but also taken a significant source of life meaning from them. Furthermore, since the 1990s, the heroic and muscular image of socialist workers has slowly been replaced by an inefficient, lazy, and incapable one, deserving of nothing but pity and in need of enlightenment. The workers I interviewed, especially the pensioners, strived hard to defy such denigration. Their eagerness to restore the meaning of their work and, hence, their dignity, was illustrated most explicitly by my interaction and interview with Zhiyu Bo. Now in his eighties, Zhiyu Bo had been a steelmaker before his retirement in the early 1980s. When I first asked him for the interview, he was surprised: “What do you want to hear from me?” After I briefly explained my project, he agreed quite happily. We met the next day in a community park that was built by the factory during the 1980s. Zhiyu Bo brought a draft entitled “My Memory” with him.  Naughton, The Third Front, 351– 386; John Frankenstein and Bates Gill: Current and Future Challenges Facing Chinese Defence Industries. The China Quarterly 146 (1996): 394– 427; Huang Zhipei, Discussing Some Problems in the Construction of Industry in Inland Areas. Economic Management, 5 (1979): 14– 24; Chen Donghsheng, An Exploration of the Theories and Methods of Industrial Location. Exploration of Economic Problems 2 (1980): 7– 17.  Donglin Chen and Jiagang Chen, The Third-Front Construction. The Closest Industrial Heritage. Chinese National Geography 6 (2006): 99; Haoju He and Jiagui Xiang (eds.). The Construction of the Third Front and the Campaign of Western Development. Dangdai Publisher, 2003.  For a more detailed analysis of such a process, see Ju Li, How It Was/Is Told, Recorded and Remembered. The Discontinued History of the Third Front Construction. Journal of Historical Sociology 28, 3 (2015): 314– 341.

152

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

I later realized that 82-year-old Zhiyu Bo had spent the previous night writing out that draft before he came to talk to me, even though I had told him that the interview would just be a casual one. He then recited the draft word-for-word to me. All his past achievements and all the rewards he had received were listed in the draft – they composed his “memory” and gave meaning to his life. Sentences like “because I was always very conscientious towards my work, since the first day I took the job, I had never made one single waste product out of my hand,” or “I was honored to attend the model-worker conference twice as in 1964 and 1965” were underlined. A week after the interview, we bumped into each other again in front of one residential building. When Zhiyu Bo saw me, he walked straight up to me, and formally thanked me for looking up to him. For him, the fact of being interviewed was an embodiment of respect and acknowledgement, at least from me. Such respect and acknowledgement, on the other hand, had been long forgotten in the turmoil of neoliberal reform and the resulting downfall of the TF factories, but it still clearly meant a lot to him. Second, and maybe even more urgently, pioneering workers’ popular memory should be read as an effort to defend their present lives – lives that are irreversibly sliding into poverty, decay, and instability. The so-called “market reform” has brought nothing for this generation of workers who retired in the 1980s and early 1990s. Their pension has increased very slowly over many years, thus remaining extremely low compared to ever-rising living expenses. Most of their children and even grandchildren are still working in the factory and are constantly threatened by lay-offs, coercive, and even hazardous, working environments, low wages, and worse, the seemingly unavoidable bankruptcy of the factory sooner or later. The community in which they have developed a sense of homeland and to which they have become attached over the decades is declining and disappearing, suddenly making most of them rootless. And worst of all, they could rarely do anything about any of these developments. It was against this present that these workers now remembered the past. In this way, their selective memories served as a weapon, or more precisely, as a fortress, against the tide of the so-called “historical trend.” If the contemporary hegemonic historiography of the TFC aims to legitimate the abandonment of the Third Front factories, workers, and their communities, then the workers’ popular memory sought to question such heinous efforts. By intuitively resorting to the ever-present socialist discourses that once granted them respect, cherished their work, acknowledged their contribution, and promised them a secure and decent elderly life – even if only symbolically – these veteran workers were actually reprimanding the contemporary state for betraying all its previous promises.

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

153

As Ann Stoler and Karen Kessler have noted, “idioms of the past are reworked with a differently inflected but equally active voice in the present,” so “recursive play occurs in the very terms in which memories are stated, in the possibilities of using a single phrase to ‘play different games.’”²⁴ In this case, workers have actively re-worked the socialist hegemonic discourses (that they also internalized and identified with), made them part of their remembered life experiences, and used them as weapons against the contemporary hegemonic historiography and reforming policies. But they have done so in ways that also made them quite vulnerable. The current dominant discourse is always, as argued by Mahua Sarkar, “simultaneously constitutive of and challenged by [these] oral accounts.”²⁵ For most subaltern groups, the process of narrating one’s story has always involved the eagerness to resist as well as the eagerness to be accepted. At the bottom of this struggle is the disturbing ontological insecurity that, as suggested by Tim Strangleman, has been created when discourses of modernization cast traditional practices as arcane, backward, and outmoded.²⁶ As I observe in this study, even though workers never specifically referred to contemporary hegemonic historical discourses in their testimonies, they clearly recognized the existence of more powerful, louder voices outside of their stories and out of their reach. This realization has brought pain, anxiety, and reluctance to their narrations and, ultimately, blunted their critical force. Despite the general defensive tone of the workers’ stories, I also noted the uneasy coexistence of contradictory feelings such as doubts and affirmations, anxiety and pride, throughout workers’ oral testimonies. Glorious episodes were always interrupted by almost apologetic comments, such as “we were so naïve that we were almost dull” or “you must think that we were stupid then.” Ma Yi, the respectable retired female engineer, had initially refused to talk to me about her stories, saying: People might think that my story was a fiction from the Arabian Nights and could not really happen. Or they might think that I am a fool. How could there exist such a fool in the world! Let alone for the Americans to understand. They held different values from us. My daughter studied in the USA. Once, after working extremely hard in the lab for her professor, she got the correct experimental results. Her professor praised her highly and imme-

 Ann Laura Stoler and Karen Strassler, Castings for the Colonial. Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java. Comparative Studies in Society and History 42,1 (2000): 4– 48.  Mahua Sarkar, Difference in Memory. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48,1 (2006): 139 – 168, 144.  Tim Strangleman, The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia. Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry. Sociology 33,4 (1999): 725 – 746.

154

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

diately raised her wage … Afterwards, she called me, saying that she had thought that working hard was a natural thing because she saw her mom always working in that way. She had never thought of the rewards before. She then told me, “Mom, this is America. Your working performance is closely tied to your material gains. It is not like China. In China, what you did always have to be selfless dedication, and you should never care about fame and money. This is America. Mom, have you ever felt being fooled in China?” So the American value is different from ours. If the Americans heard my story, they will think it absurd. They might deepen their bad impression about China since they would use my story as a proof to suggest that there was no human right in China or China did not respect individual values. Is that right? But to tell you, I am unregretful even today! They could not understand me? I could not understand them either! Especially those corrupt officials! Why did they need so much money? You just have one mouth to eat and one body to wear. Even if you have nine luxury houses, you only need one bed to sleep at night, right? I just could not understand them. Maybe I was a fool. Or was I insane? (Voice rose) I did not want to talk to young people about my life because they might either do not believe me or think I am a fool.

Ma’s original refusal to be interviewed came from her fear of being jeered at and misunderstood. With ongoing market reform and efforts to re-write China’s socialist history, all her previous efforts, passions, and beliefs that she had cherished and derived so much pride from, are mocked as “outdated” and “brainwashed.” The younger people, especially engineers and managers in their thirties from NS, talked about Ma Yi with respect, but always with a tinge of pity. They somehow regarded Ma as a victim of the “old era,” cheated and used by the old regime. In a society and culture that now cannot envision any other reason for working hard if not for money or some other form of material benefit, Ma could be seen as nothing but a duped fool. Ma tried to stand firmly by her own interpretation of her experience and fight against the values she believes are now being imported from the West (America) and embraced by “the young people” of China. But this has exhausted and confused her – why did she have to defend herself so strenuously? What was wrong with her life? Or really, was she insane? While listening to her indignant statement, I could not help but notice that she slid seamlessly from interrogating the “individualistic American value” to interrogating the “corrupt officials” in China. When she said, “I could not understand them either,” she used “them” to refer to “Americans,” but then she continued, “[e]specially those corrupt officials!” Why did she parallel them together? Is there any similarity between these two in her consciousness? But how could there be? Isn’t corruption always the moral target of “American values”? I forgot to ask her. But even if I had asked, she might not have been able to respond – most likely, she just made the shift subconsciously. But, as I listened to her asking, “[w]hy did they need so much money,” I realized that, for

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

155

her, there was indeed a similarity between “American values” and Chinese corruption – both could be traced to the same worship of money and perhaps also power; a form of worship that hides at the bottom of “American values” and that is now pursued unabashedly by corrupt bureaucrats (as well as common people) in China. This sort of worship as the secret of capitalism has become so justified and dominant in today’s China that it ridicules all the previous beliefs, passions, and forms of pride that senior workers such as Ma used to hold. Indeed, it ridicules the whole history of the TFC and China’s entire socialist past, and hence emasculates the force of memory.

“We Can’t Let Them Do Whatever They Want”: Pensioners’ Collective Resistance Besides the aforementioned resistance through the reinterpretation of the past, pensioners also organized another much more militant, collective resistance that lasted from 2002 to 2006. The movement was trigged by a decision made by the factory in 2002 to stop subsidizing pension payments. The root of this confrontation lay in the incomplete and confusing pension reform. As part of the state’s efforts to restructure SOEs into “modern enterprises,” pension reform had been implemented at NS from the mid-1990s. Under this new pension system, the social pension fund would be built by pooling together contributions from the local government, the enterprise, and the individual worker, rather than from the enterprise alone as previously. In addition, the funds from the enterprise were, by default, not to exceed 20 per cent of its total payroll costs. Prior to the reform, however, NS, like many other SOEs, not only paid retirees their pensions, but also offered them several kinds of enterprise subsidies as part of its welfare program. With the change, local governments refused to share the expenses with the factory. So, even after the pension reform, in addition to paying their “official” portion of pension funds the enterprise still had to raise these subsidies on its own. Enterprise management had long regarded this as a large and unfair burden. Then, in January 2002, when the central government issued a new policy to increase pensions for SOE pensioners by a rather small amount,²⁷ NS decided to use this occasion to reduce its subsidies in proportion to the increase in the pension payment. In this way, if one retiree received a 50 Yuan increase in their pen-

 The nominal increase ranged from 45 to 60 Yuan per month, while the average monthly pension was about 1,000 yuan.

156

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

sion under the state policy, then the enterprise would deduct 50 Yuan from his/ her enterprise subsidies. Although this was not a major issue at first sight, since the nominal amount in question was quite small, it nonetheless served as a final straw and triggered the largest, longest, and most militant and desperate protest in NS’ history. The same day that the pensioners were officially informed about the decision, they immediately set up an organizing committee formed from their elected representatives. The next day, several thousand retirees besieged the factory’s administration building. After getting no immediate response from the administration, angry retirees broke into and partially occupied the building. Led in a highly organized fashion by the committee mentioned above, the siege and occupation lasted almost six months. As time passed, the atmosphere grew more tense; the protest swelled in size and became more violent. Laoyin, the official union chairwoman at the time, recounted the first days after occupation in great detail: After the document was dispatched, I dared not go to my office for two days. These retired workers were everywhere in the building. Then, on the third day, the enterprise asked me to talk to these workers since I was the union chairwoman at that time. From that day on, I spent five months standing in the hall of the administration building, trying to calm down these angry workers by talking through a loudhailer. There were so many people in the building, these old people. They sat or stood everywhere, with their hair as white as snow. They demanded that I go outside and talk to more workers. They said that the hall was too small. I dared not. But they insisted. Once, two old gentlemen forcibly grabbed my arms and another old lady underneath tried to pull me down the stairs. Fortunately, there were several plainclothes policemen around me and they seized me back from these angry old people. Our policy at that time was to swallow all the beating and scolding, and never to provoke further escalation or to fight back. A lot of these old workers used to be so nice and they also knew me very well – I had always called them “aunt” or “uncle.” But now they hated me, they hated me so much that I thought they might kill me.

All of the grievances and anger that had accumulated through the years of radical reform, along with the sense of having been betrayed and abandoned, had finally erupted. In interviews, numerous retirees told me that what they had done was not for the small amount of money but for their dignity and “backbone”: “we can’t swallow the resentment anymore”; “we can’t let them do whatever they want.” The confrontation went on until, in May 2002, the enterprise’s administration finally convened an urgent meeting in the factory’s grand auditorium. The meeting was intended to facilitate a dialogue between the protesters and the most senior management of the enterprise. However, it ended in chaos and violence. Laoyin describes the event:

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

157

That day was a nightmare for me. We were in the auditorium. The police cars stayed outside in case we needed to escape … Before the meeting even had a chance to start, these old people simply pushed forward and rushed up to the stage. We all thought they were going to beat us. We were so frightened that we ran away immediately. Several managers took a shortcut corridor behind the auditorium. I ran to the police car outside the auditorium. When the workers found out that all other managers had already run away except me in the police car, they were so angry that they surrounded the car and even lifted it up. I sat inside, shaking, watching the never-ending flow of people rushing forward, their waving fists, and their fingers pointing to my nose from behind the closed car window and cursing me … I would never blame these pensioners. Everybody needs to survive. I just hoped that I could do more for them, but I didn’t have such power. What kind of cadres we were in these loss-making SOEs!

Unsurprisingly, workers’ indignation was directed at managers, not the “system.” The former were condemned as “betrayers of the enterprise,” thus becoming scapegoats for the failed market-oriented reform in NS. Many pensioners declared to me that NS’ problems had nothing to do with “planned economy vs. market economy,” but were due entirely to the corruption of managers. Workers’ strong resentment and even hatred toward managers meant an uneasy, even painful position for those among them who had seen themselves as mediators and allies of the workers. For instance, Laoyin resigned from her position shortly after this clash. Despite the militancy and fierce protests of the retirees, and despite the feelings of uneasiness and even outright sympathy among at least some high-level managers, the enterprise refused to cave in. Even though it tried to confront the pensioners with a great measure of restraint (what Laoyin referred to as “swallowing all the beating, never provoking further escalation or a fight”), the fundamental yet implicit stance was to remain steadfast. Cost-cutting (called “burden alleviation” in official discourse) had become a central state policy, and the enterprise, already on the brink of bankruptcy, saw no alternative other than to comply with this directive. It is noteworthy that, despite sharing the same reform agenda, the enterprise never received support from the local government during this long confrontation. The attitude of the latter remained very hesitant and vague. From the mid-1990s, with the rampant labor protests nationwide, the issue of laid-off state workers and pensioners confronted with cuts became such a major headache for governments at various levels that whenever possible they tended to abstain from involvement and left the enterprises to address the confrontation themselves.²⁸  Among many others, see, Yongshun Cai, The Resistance of Chinese Laid-Off Workers in the Reform Period. The China Quarterly, 170 (2002): 327– 344; Thomas Gold, William Hurst, Jaeyoun

158

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

Even when local governments were compelled to intervene, they did so largely unwillingly and cautiously. At NS, one day, when more than 3,000 pensioners staged a sit-down street protest in front of the NS administration building and blocked the traffic, local policemen arrived. Cuiye, “the old revolutionary” and one of the organizers of the protest, recounts that day: We sat there. Then the mayor came to try to persuade us to leave. We refused to listen to him. Later, he sent a fire engine in with all these policemen. I went straight to these policemen and said, “You can’t disperse these people with high-pressure water. They are all old people. If one of them dies because of this, you will be in trouble. Every person should have his own conscience. Are you guys born from your parents? If we old workers sit on the street, the only thing you can do is persuasion. You can’t suppress us. Suppressing the mass is illegal.” Then they left.

Other people involved also confirmed that there was actually no physical suppression during the course of this protest. Yet the reluctance of both the enterprise and the government to take action arose no longer from a fear of breaching the socialist principles as they would in the 1980s as I described in chapter three, but merely from the fear of triggering larger protests and causing further social instability. By that time, the socialist social contract had already long been abandoned; the image of workers as “brave” and proud proletarians who create national wealth had also long been replaced by one of “backward,” “inefficient,” and “idle” in the mass media as well as in many more intellectual publications as a way to legitimize the large-scale bankruptcy of the SOEs and the lay-off of their workers. “Working class equals zero” was a widespread expression of self-mockery among workers I interviewed. Certainly, the pensioners were well aware of this. The degradation and marginalization of the working class infuriated them and was one of the crucial reasons for their militancy,²⁹ but it was also a social reality that they now had to face. Although they still drew upon the political discourses of class, Maoism, and socialist ideology to ground their claims – much as Ching Kwan Lee has observed in her rust-belt factory pensioners’ cases³⁰ – as time passed, these claims

Won, and Qiang Li (eds.). Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State. Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics. Springer 2009; Lee, Pathways of Labor Insurgency; Lee, From the Specter of Mao; Lee, Against the Law; Silver and Zhang, China as an Emerging Epicenter, 174– 187.  William Hurst and Kevin J. O’Brien, China’s Contentious Pensioners. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 345 – 360.  Lee, Against the Law.

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

159

sounded increasingly feeble and anachronistic, no matter how militant the pensioners’ fights were. Nevertheless, the pensioners’ resistance persisted into 2004. The enterprise refused to compromise, and no real progress regarding the original pension subsidy was made. Pensioners and the enterprise seemed deadlocked. Then, in May of that year, as a senior manager tried to step onto a bus, an angry retiree in the queue behind him forcefully pulled him down. The senior manager fell and broke a rib, and the old man was immediately arrested, put in jail, and sentenced to two years. This incident brought a sudden halt to large-scale demonstrations. Yet resistance continued tenaciously. The pensioners’ committees decided to change their strategies. First, they sent representatives to Beijing to appeal directly to the central state, in the hope that the central government would “care” more about their predicament than the “corrupt” local ones. They were ignored, and Beijing simply returned the case to the local government, leaving the protesters back at square one. Then, the committee decided to turn to the law. China passed its first National Labor Law in 1994. By 1999, “ruling the country by law” was formally incorporated into Article 5 of the Constitution and has since become part of the official lexicon now widely adopted in government, legislature, and party reports. This more “rational” state ruled by law was meant to replace the old image of the “workers’ state”; and a new social contract based on the “rule of law” was put forth and was supposed to replace the old one based on the “rule of politics.” Since then, as rightly observed by Ching Kwan Lee, “legalism has become simultaneously the hegemonic ideology and the rhetoric of popular resistance.”³¹ Having lost their old weapon drawn from the previous social contract, pensioners finally decided to take up this new weapon of law, suspiciously but hopefully. In 2004, the committee managed to collect money from the pensioners and hired a lawyer to sue NS. They lost the case since the court decided that the enterprise had the right to curtail its own welfare program. Immediately afterwards, in October 2004, NS issued a public notice through its newspaper and TV channel declaring its victory and also claiming that, from now on, the enterprise would no longer respond to any such related issues. Resistance seemed finally to be dying down. Yet, two years later, in 2006, the committee made one more effort. Again, they collected money from the pensioners and hired another lawyer, who vowed to fight for their interests. After taking the money, however, this so-called lawyer disappeared forever. This incident served as the final blow. The largest

 Ibid. 238

160

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

and most militant labor protest in the history of NS ultimately ended in a great sense of embarrassment and impotence. The failure of the last attempt to commission legal help proved fatal, not just because many participants had become extremely exhausted by the frustrations of the long struggle, but also by the fact that they could be so easily cheated. The situation forced most of them, even the most active organizers, to realize their weakness and vulnerability in a quickly changing world that appeared increasingly incomprehensible to them. This was a cruel realization. Lao Zhou, one former organizer, told me sadly: “Now I feel that I am not a social individual anymore, but only a biological individual. What is happening in this society is more and more irrelevant for me; I am now living as a biological, not a social individual.” It was such feelings of irrelevance and inadequacy that finally defeated the movement. It was quite significant the pensioners’ mobilization remained determinately secluded during the whole process – none of the currently employed workers ever got involved. Given the fact that many of these younger workers were actually the children or grandchildren of the protesting pensioners, their non-involvement might seem puzzling at the first sight. However, for pensioners themselves, it was the most rational choice and the best for their kids; even the most militant organizer told me that he prohibited his son from participating, as “he still needs to stay in his job.” Such pragmatic contemplation was surely detrimental to the movement itself, since the lack of solidarity with the currently employed workers made it impossible to generate a sense of threat against what was most important to both the enterprise and the different levels of government: social stability; hence, the final lapse into disregard and failure. However, beneath the pragmatism was the clear realization of these brave yet desperate pensioners of the ultimate powerlessness of the working class in contemporary China: they just couldn’t afford to lose their jobs; otherwise they would simply go hungry. Such “commonsense” was also perfectly grasped by most younger workers, who, as I illustrated earlier in this chapter, generally adopted the strategy of apathetic compliance and were at least ostensibly acquiescent and resigned. In fact, despite being faced with a continuously degenerating social status and living and working environments that had begun in the 1990s, the currently employed workers at NS never organized any form of collective resistance, not even once. Instead, they adopted a hidden form of resistance, termed by James Scott as “everyday resistance.”

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

161

Fight Silently: Everyday Resistance of the Currently Employed Workers in NS At the very beginning of his study of Malay peasants’ resistance against agricultural capitalization, James Scott reminds us of the following: “Most subordinate classes throughout most of history have rarely been afforded the luxury of open, organized, political activity” since “such activity was dangerous, if not suicidal.”³² In the case of the currently employed workers in NS, the urgency of survival and the denial of alternative work opportunities have effectively prevented any form of collective resistance. Though there was great resentment and even hatred toward the management in their minds, the workers at NS were far from militant.³³ Rather, their resistance manifested in much more subdued, spontaneous, and individualized ways: back-stage rumors and curses, apathy, foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, pilferage, and so on – the typical “weapons of the weak.” Almost every worker I interviewed harbored strong resentment toward the factory’s management, referring to this specific group of people as “Dang Guan De” (people who hold power). They used expressions like “those people are not human” or “they are merely ghosts” to express their indignation and resentments. During the interview with Dayong, a steel worker in his early thirties, he spent one third of his time cursing the managers in NS. When he talked about a case of theft that happened in his workshop two years ago, he angrily attributed the theft to the managers in the workshop: You know, what had been stolen were tons of Ni Plates. That was a lot. How could the common workers steal them out? … We all believe that those ‘dang guan de’ did some tricks on the accounting books. When the Ni plates were claimed being ordered from outside and then stolen, our workshop was on temporary shutdown. So who knows? … When the

 Scott, Weapons of the weak, xv.  Ching Kwan Lee (1998), in her article illustrating SOE workers’ responses toward market reform in the late 1990s, chooses the term “collective inaction” to describe workers’ individualized resistance toward the regime. See, Ching Kwan Lee, The Labor Politics of Market Socialism. Collective Inaction and Class Experiences among State Workers in Guangzhou.” Modern China 24,1 (1998): 3 – 33. The term was also adopted later by Aiyu Liu (2005) and applied to her study of workers’ responses toward reform in five SOEs from four different cities (Shanghai, Shengyang, Nanning, and Taiyuan) in the middle of the 2000s. Similarly, Liu noted the general existence of collective inaction among workers in these enterprises, and went even further to claim that it was precisely this inaction on the part of workers that has guaranteed and will continue to guarantee the smooth execution of further SOE reform in China. See, Aiyu Liu, Choice. Transformation of the State-owned Enterprises and Workers’ Surviving Strategies. Beijing 2005 (刘爱玉:选 择: 国企变革与工人生存行动. 社会科学文献出版社).

162

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

cops talked to us, we all told them to investigate the case thoroughly, find out the thief (thieves), and shoot him (them) to death’.

He emphasized at least three times during the interview the point that these managers should be shot to death. Dayong was not a particularly tough or militant worker in any sense. He was a hard-worker in other people’s eyes and used to be a team leader. But he was not alone; in fact, it seems that resentment was actually hidden in every worker’s heart. During my time in NS, whenever workers gathered together, management corruption was always one of the most popular topics: which one embezzled a huge amount of money (the amount of which was always ridiculously high, and most likely, exaggerated); which one just bought another apartment in the city or a luxurious car; which one sent his/her kid to an expensive private boarding school; and so on. And the workers usually ended all these stories with curses, such as “these fuck bloodsuckers will die as dogs” or “they should be shot to death.” Very similar to the pensioners, the currently employed workers’ indignation was directed only at managers as a group, who were condemned as “betrayers of the enterprise” and “greedy bloodsuckers of workers’ labor.” Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward (1977: 20) attribute such interpretations to workers’ inability to abstract their immediate concrete experiences to the macro-level transformation, since “workers experience the factory, the speeding rhythm of the assembly line, the foremen, the spies, the guards, the owner, and the pay check. They do not experience monopoly capitalism.”³⁴ Scott (1987: 43), by quoting Piven and Cloward, reaches a similar conclusion about the Malay peasants: since they did not experience “the cash nexus or the capitalist pyramid of finance,” “the poorer strata of Sedaka see the causes of their present distress as primarily personal (that is, a result of human agency), local and largely confined to the Malay community.”³⁵ While partially true, this explanation does not cover the whole story here. In NS, workers were actually experiencing both the outside macro change and the inner micro change at the same time, but in quite contradictory ways. They learnt from the mass media and witnessed for themselves the rapidly prospering country with dazzling skyscrapers, grand projects, luxurious commodities, and newly affluent people with seemingly unlimited money. But simultaneously, they watched themselves sinking into desperation and poverty, and their

 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People’s Movements. Why They Succeed, How They Fail. Vintage, 1979, 20.  Scott, Weapons of the Weak, 181.

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

163

community sliding into incessant decline. In other words, they were experiencing the transformation in a process of “abjection,” as defined by James Ferguson as “a process of being thrown aside, expelled, or discarded”³⁶ from the track of development, progress, and modernity that China now claims. Such highly contrasting and contradictory experiences bewildered and frustrated many workers. Even though they might sense the changing attitude of the state toward the working class, workers could not confidently blame the state or the system since it was seemingly leading the country out of the status of a poor and underdeveloped third-world country previously suppressed by the West and granting “nationalist pride” to the Chinese people as members of an emerging superpower in the world. As a result, they focused all their ire on management (and sometimes themselves, as I will analyze later) for their marginalization and abjection, and directed their resentment and hatred there. Besides the backstage curses and rumors against the management, workers also strategically channeled their resentment and grievances in various negative ways on the shop floor. While absenteeism, tardiness, and resistance to discipline had been partially suppressed by strict financial penalties in recent years, foot-dragging and indifference had become the most prevalent forms of daily resistance. Almost all the workers I interviewed described their work as “muddling around in the workplace.” Many workers explained to me that “I go to work every day. Anyway that is how you get paid. But I only do the part that I have to do; never do more’ or ‘we work lazily and loosely, trying to avoid responsibilities.” Workers’ seeming resignation was of course rooted in a strong sense of powerlessness, but also accompanied by feelings of cynicism and suppressed resentment. Abin, a mechanic in his thirties, described it in this way: Before, when we were maintaining the equipment, we tried our best. If there were damages here, we would think that maybe there were damages there. So we made a total check and fixed everything; now if there are damages on this spot, the Dang Guan De (manager) would say, “You have to fix this in five minutes, otherwise …” When we bring apart the equipment, we might realize that the real reason for the damage on this spot is actually caused by problems from someplace else. But the manager doesn’t know this. He might just say, “Quick, replace this with a new one.” Our workers then say nothing too. We just do what he tells us to do and replace the bad hardware. After several hours, oh-oh, the equipment is out of order again. The manager doesn’t know what happened and becomes annoyed a lot. And our workers don’t say a word’.

 Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 236.

164

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

In this way, workers expressed their indifference and even disdain toward their managers. By standing aloof, watching the machine break down again and again and cynically enjoying their managers’ inability to do anything, workers exacted revenge in their particular ways. When even grievances and a sense of resentment had to be oppressed, workers turn to their own labor and skill as the weapon of last resort by withholding or hiding them from the managers. Such lowprofile techniques avoided workers’ outright defiance of their managers, but endowed them with a secret power to counterbalance, even if only to a small degree, the arbitrary and dominant power of the management. Meanwhile, the amount of pilferage increased dramatically in recent years, according to the superintendent in the security department of NS. The workers I interviewed also admitted to me that stealing valuable alloys or any other materials from the enterprise was a very common behavior among workers. One worker estimated that about one third of workers was involved in various kinds of theft. Even though theft would be strictly penalized if discovered – the guilty worker would either be fired or even jailed – many workers still choose to take the risk. To some extent, such deeds were justified and tolerated by many workers as a desperate strategy for survival, as one worker angrily put it: “how much did we put in and how much did we get? How could we workers survive with several hundred Yuan per month in this society?” Besides poverty as a rationale, theft was definitely one form of resistance performed by workers against corrupt managers and bureaucrats, as illustrated by a common saying among workers: “people in the top steal big; people in the middle steal middle; workers in the bottom steal small.” The hidden inference here was that when compared with the large amount of money that corrupt managers embezzled from the factory, workers’ petty thefts amounted to nothing. Many workers acknowledged that they would look the other way if they happened to catch somebody in the act of theft. All these forms of everyday resistance adopted by NS workers under the camouflage of ostensible conformity – backstage rumors and curses, foot-dragging, suppressed apathy and pilferage – were actually the only means left for these workers to express their strong sense of deprivation and inadequacy, without seriously jeopardizing their and their family’s survival. On the most obvious level, everyday forms of resistance offered some safer outlets for workers to express their frustrations and grievances; to a certain extent, they curtailed managers’ controlling power in the shop floor; and presumably, they might even emit some subdued but desperate signals that were sensed by the government, and hence contributed to measures that helped to delay their final unemployment.

Fighting in Different ways: Two Generations of Workers’ Resistance

165

Yet beyond all these, my ethnographic research also revealed another more hidden effect these particular forms of resistance imposed on workers: the psychologically detrimental effect on them. As far as I observed, workers’ everyday resistance, expressed as it was in quite passive and negative ways, actually went against the moralities generally held by most NS workers, distanced them from their work, shattered their sense of honor and pride, and strengthened their feeling of inadequacy and powerlessness. Even though they were exposed to the emerging money worship and utilitarianism that has been wholeheartedly embraced by the middle and upper classes in current Chinese capitalist society, many workers I know in NS still held fast to some basic moral principles that they inherited from the older working-class generations, learnt from their school education, and possessed as part of human nature. Honesty, righteousness, and industriousness still constituted the ethical framework through which workers could claim their dignity and pride. However, all the spontaneous forms of everyday resistance adopted by currently employed workers – foot-dragging, apathy, pilferage – ran counter to these virtues. To illustrate this argument, consider again the description given earlier by Abin, of workers apathetically watching both machines and managers falling into disorder while doing nothing. Although such inaction served as a form of revenge against managers, there was also a paradox hidden in this strategy: in order to resist against the management, workers had to be antagonistic against their own jobs. That means, they had to restrain themselves from the fulfillment and pride they could have felt through their labor, for example, by successfully solving problems in this case, instead of standing aloof and hostile, not only from their managers, but also from their own labor. A similar process of self-estrangement and antagonism could also be found in foot-dragging. It actually forced workers to further doubt the meaning of their work and sometimes their own right to continued employment; as many workers said half-jokingly to me, “[w]e really should be laid off.” When I asked Abin if he felt satisfied acting in such ways, he shook his head bitterly and said, “No, I feel sad. It is just ridiculous.” Abin entered NS in the early 1980s, used to be a socalled model worker during both his and the factory’s “golden years.” Now, almost in his fifties, he asked me if there was any opportunity for him to migrate to the US as a “coolie.” A more acute paradox for workers came from the pilferage that went beyond self- estrangement and actually challenged many workers’ moral baseline. Even though many of the workers I interviewed always defended other workers’ pilferage strongly and eagerly, almost everyone would add, “[b]ut I will not do those kinds of thing.” It was always other people, not they, who stole. Such efforts to distance themselves from such behavior might not necessarily come from their

166

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

distrust toward me for fear of being reported, since a strong sense of trust had already been established between us while I was in the field, but more likely it stemmed from their deep shame at such acts. It brought humiliation and disgrace to them. Even though they, themselves, might not be involved, as they claimed to me, they must know by instinct how easily and conveniently the image of the whole working class, like any subordinate social groups, could be stereotyped and stained by such deeds, even if performed only by some. In other words, these strategies of resistance, in some ways, deprived workers of the pride and even legitimacy that they could derive from clearly claiming their rights and proudly confronting the management. What we can see from the descriptions above is that all these forms of resistance enacted by currently employed workers in NS did not empower them. Instead, they constantly contradicted and challenged the moral values they otherwise held strongly, thus further strengthening their sense of inadequacy. When I asked the workers I interviewed whether they would rebel if NS finally went into bankruptcy, almost all of them replied in a very similar way: “No, I think I will just leave to find another job somewhere else.” Unlike leftist, middle-class intellectuals, many of whom possess the privilege of contemplating the bigger world, choosing their political positions, and even putting their political proposals into meaningful action, common workers, like many other subordinate classes, have to face a much rougher reality: they have to manage to survive and feed their family first, the right of which might be constantly threatened by the regime. In that sense, the forms of resistance taken by workers have to be circumvented, veiled, distorted, and sometimes even against their morality and character. While these everyday resistances certainly damaged the regime, they also alienated, disempowered, and subordinated workers themselves, crushed the pride and dignity felt by the earlier generation of workers, and gave birth to a totally new working-class cultural identity.

Becoming “Paupers”: Cultural Dispossession of NS 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 eventu-

Becoming “Paupers”: Cultural Dispossession of NS Workers

167

ally ruined the people whom it was ostensibly designed to protect, by demoralizing them and turning them into paupers.³⁷ A similar irony emerged in the Chinese state’s efforts to preserve large-scale SOEs and protect them from the encroachments of the globalizing economy since 2002. These efforts have prevented many, including NS’ bankruptcy, at least temporarily. But the 20-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 that has 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 regarded them as “incapable,” “lazy,” “burdensome,” and “backward,” and later as “ruoshi qunti” (the weak group).³⁸ The sense of pride and dignity I encountered almost every time I talked to the pensioners 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, “[o]h that was just shit.” Then he paused for a moment and asked me, “[y]ou tell me, what is the use of being good at the jobs that we are doing?” He was definitely a good worker and had a certain technical mastery (good enough to win the contest), yet he despised his job. The contempt of this younger generation toward their own jobs contrasted 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 were just useless trash for the younger ones. Mastery and craftsmanship were now underappreciated; commitment to work was meaningless and even laughable; and unlike the SOE workers under socialist Fordism who could predict what their retired life, their pension, and their “cumulative achievement” would look like.³⁹ This younger generation of workers did not know what would happen, not only decades from now, but

 Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 81– 89.  Lee, Against the Law.  Richard Sennett. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. Norton, 2011.

168

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

five years or two years down the road, or even tomorrow. They were adrift, without an “expected life narrative,” and unable to control their fates.⁴⁰ At the same time, they also knew very clearly that the factory was operating at a continuing loss and the only reason they still had jobs was because the state both pitied and feared them. All of these developments 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!” This was not a single case. Another worker, Aqiu, confessed to me sadly that he thought that his high-school daughter despised him and his wife, who was also a NS worker: I know that she looks down on us, even though she loves us too. She once told me that she would never have a life like ours when she grows up. That might be the reason why she studies so hard now… She knows that we are at the bottom of this society (pause). Sometimes I worry about her. She is always very sullen, not like a fourteen-year-old girl who is supposed to be happy, no?

Such depreciation towards the working class might not be something new in the history of capitalist society, yet it did set up a contrast with another narrative from an older worker I interviewed. Zhang Bobo, now in his eighties, 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 summer we could only work for a while, then had to run outside and lie 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 com- plains 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 earlier working years. Instead, being able to work hard and endure all the difficulties and hard Ibid.

Becoming “Paupers”: Cultural Dispossession of NS Workers

169

ships had been a source of dignity and pride. The performance of this arduous, exhausting work had become a very meaningful and cherished part of his life that he could proudly share with and boast about to his son, no matter how outdated it sounded nowadays. Contrasting so sharply with Zhang Bobo, the little boy’s father and my friend Aqiu offered only negative examples of a failed life for their children. Not just in the eyes of others, most currently employed workers also looked down on themselves. They referred to themselves as “our small workers” and taunted themselves for being “real proletarians” with no money, no school degree, no power, and no ability. Yong, one male NS worker in his early thirties, complained to me: If I tell other people that I work in NS, they will only feel 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 spend 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 spend our money as freely 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 illustrates a key 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.⁴¹ Like most other currently employed workers, Yong was angry about this decline, which was accompanied by meager paychecks inadequate to cover 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

 Among many others, see Yanjie Bian, Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility. Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 91– 116; Yi Li, The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification. University Press of America, 2005.

170

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

reform package, most workers, like Yong, tended 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, as I mentioned earlier. 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, “[i]f they could do it, why couldn’t you?” The experiences 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 that 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 that developed within industrialized capitalist society. As exclaimed by 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?”⁴² This “bastardized version of Darwinian evolution”⁴³ imported from the West has become the most hegemonic value system in contemporary China since the market reform. The acceptance of such hegemony by most workers themselves further strengthened their feelings of inadequacy, deprived them of a sense of dignity and pride, and instead engendered in them suppressed shame and pain.⁴⁴ 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,  Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class. Norton, 1972, 72.  Ibid.  Marc J. Blecher, Hegemony and Workers’ Politics in China. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 283 – 303.

Becoming “Paupers”: Cultural Dispossession of NS Workers

171

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 did 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 was “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.”⁴⁵ This sense of powerlessness imposed 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 was 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 like 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.”⁴⁶ Such a demoralizing process, labeled by Michal Buchowski and others as “internal orientalization,” a process that blames workers (and other subaltern  Sennett and Cobb, The Hidden Injuries, 58.  Ibid. 248.

172

5 Living in the “Zombie Factory”

groups) for their own degraded circumstances under the great transformation that happened in former-socialist countries,⁴⁷ was far reaching: by destroying the confidence and self-esteem of the working class, it culturally and psychologically emasculated them. As Don Kalb argued, it “served as one of the style figures of a process of cultural dispossession that accompanied, deepened, and smoothed the material process of dispossession simultaneously taking place.”⁴⁸ Hereafter, with such double dispossessions, workers were irreversibly transformed into the subaltern, the underclass in contemporary post-reform China.

Conclusion Even though China’s launching of itself into so-called “state capitalism” from 2003 successfully granted the Chinese state more claim to, as well as control of, its immense state capital and created a few highly privileged central-level monopolistic oligarchies that greatly benefited their very own employees, it did not stop the decline of the majority of less fortunate state enterprises. After numerous SOEs had already been bankrupted or privatized, the remaining large-scale yet loss-making SOEs were eventually incorporated into the SASAC program largely because the mounting labor protests made their bankruptcy now more difficult and risky. However, in a quite paradoxical way, such reluctant inclusion merely out of political convenience only turned these SOEs into “zombie factories” that were chronically suspended in an incurable limbo, lingering forever at the edge of death. NS is merely one among many other of these “zombie factories.” The preservation of the factory since 2003 had nothing to do with “stabilization” or “normalization,” at least not in the sense of betterment as some scholars chose to imply; instead, it stumbled into a lingering process of “erosive deindustrialization” that was characterized by the development of a despotic and apathetic labor process, a destitute working-class slum, and an emasculated underclass armed with a stigma-laden cultural identity and undermined forms of resistance.

 Michal Buchowski, The specter of Orientalism in Europe. From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother. Anthropological Quarterly 79,3 (2006): 463 – 482; David Kideckel, The Unmaking of an East Central European Working Class. In Christopher M Hann (eds.). Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia. Routledge 2002, 114– 132.  Don Kalb, Conversations with a Polish Populist. Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Postsocialism (and beyond). American Ethnologist 36, 2 (2009): 207– 223, esp. 214.

Conclusion

173

Hence, if the preceding radical neoliberal movements had completely destroyed the old order and brought great turbulence and uncertainties, the socalled “stabilization” program under post-reform state capitalism slowly established, out of the ruins of the old, an “institutionalized” new order that cast Chinese workers into a permanent status as an underclass in an already solidified class structure. In that sense, we might say that transition already ended in China, since the new regime “firmly rules out, beyond a transition period, any eventual recovery of the old certainties of standardized work, standard life histories, and old-style welfare state, national economic and labour policies.”⁴⁹ Once in the field, when I was talking with several workers in their work cell, one worker leaned over to me and asked, “you come from the United States, so can you tell me, are the workers there happier than us?” All the other workers looked at me and waited for the answer eagerly. I hesitated for a while, and then said, “I cannot say on their behalf. But I guess maybe not.” All of them laughed and then the worker continued, “so can they afford apartments? Dare they go to the hospital when they are sick? Do they worry about the tuition fee for their kids?” When I told them that the working class in the United States has to face their own problems, they laughed bitterly again, yet sounded half-relieved, and one said, “so, workers everywhere are the same, small.”

 Ulrich Beck, The Brave New World of Work. Polity Press, 2000, 68.

Epilogue A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony? In the summer of 2016, I returned to Nangfang. The community seemed more destitute and decadent than I remembered. Several months prior, another huge lay-off had just been completed – thousands of workers had been let go. It was the largest “operation” since the first radical neoliberal restructuring package in 1997 that bluntly cut more than 10,000 factory workers. However, unlike the turbulence and anger aroused 20 years earlier, this time, the action didn’t cause much of a stir. The feared labor unrest did not happen. Instead, more workers than expected chose to leave voluntarily. People told me that at times whole work teams had to be dissolved because nobody stayed. Not just the common workers, many low-to-middle-level managers chose to leave this time as well. People I interviewed told me that it was because the severance package that workers received was much better than last time. The document issued by the factory stated that the package should include two components: redundancy payment and a one-off factory allowance. The redundancy payment is calculated as the product of the number of a worker’s working years times either the local average monthly wage (which was 4,100 Yuan as of 2016) or her/his average monthly wage for the past year, whichever is higher. Almost all NS workers’ average monthly wage was less than 4,100 Yuan, so the redundancy payment actually contained a kind of “bonus” for workers. Similarly, the one-off factory allowance is the product of the working years times the local minimum wage (which was 1,500 Yuan per month in 2016).¹ On average, the severance package for common workers was the working years multiplied by 5,600 Yuan, almost five times what it had been in 1997. Although the total amount was still unsatisfactory given skyrocketing living expenses over the past two decades, still, for most workers it was a much better deal. Aqiu, the electrician in his forties, decided to leave the factory and finally received 170,000 Yuan (23,000 dollars) as compensation. He did a detailed calculation for me to explain his decision, showing that the compensation he’d received was even greater than the total sum of wages he would have gotten from the factory through his formal retirement. Besides, he could also receive unem “The measures to implement the human resource reform in order to cut losses,” Nangfang News, 2015, 12, 24. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-008

Epilogue. A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony?

175

ployment benefits of 966 Yuan per month for two consecutive years; and after eight years he would be able to enjoy social security. “Also, I can always find other casual jobs if I like to make extra income since now I am free,” Aqiu smiled at me. This was the calculation and logic shared by many willingly laid-off workers I interviewed. All of them looked almost happy. Two decades have passed since the first bloody “operation” in 1997. If, by that time, the blow was almost fatal for both workers and the factory, causing tremendous pain, suffering, desperation, and violence, this time, for many workers, the huge layoff came more as a solution than a blow. There was no more resistance, except for one collective petition letter signed as “All NS Workers” to the top leaders of the factory, requiring a better compensation package. There was no more nostalgia: memory stopped being used as a weapon,² and history, rather than being selectively remembered, waned into a useless and tenuous remoteness, tinted with slight embarrassment and derision. Physically, the complex was the same place, only sliding more and more into destitution and decrepitude with each moment. Subjectively, it was a different land: the mentality of the working class had totally changed. Aqiu, who had worked in NS for about thirty years, told me, “[a]fter I signed the [contract dissolving] documents, I suddenly felt so relieved, as though a long-term shackle was lifted off from me. I was finally liberated … I used to regard NS as my home; now I hate it; I hate it so much.” He looked at me, mused a while, and continued, “[n]ow, I don’t have to die with it. You know, leaving NS was the best decision I have ever made in my life.” The most obvious explanation for this subjective change could be found in the overall buying-out policies adopted by the current Chinese government, especially during the post-neoliberal years. Cynthia Estlund, in her new book A New Deal for China’s Workers, declares that a general rise in living standards and expectations among common Chinese workers, increasing labor unrest nationwide, and the state’s determination not only to maintain social stability while legitimating its one-party “socialist” rule but also to upgrade the overall economic structure – have all contributed to slowly changing the labor landscape in China from one of a seemingly endless supply of cheap labor “racing to the bottom” into a much more complicated situation of “racing to the rising bottom.” Based on this more up-to-date observation, Estlund goes further to suggest that Chinese workers might actually get a “New Deal with Chinese Characteristics” from the Chinese state, with ongoing improvements to workers’ stan-

 Li, How It Was/Is Told.

176

Epilogue. A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony?

dard of living and modest reforms in exchange for a general labor acquiescence.³ Such emphasis on the protective (though constraining) role of the state seems applicable to my case here. It was exactly the not-too-bad severance package and the slowly developed social security system over the past few decades that successfully and peacefully bought out NS workers this time. At the same time, it must also be noted that it was exactly the same “protective” state (at different levels) that performed the “operation” and cut off workers through the hand of the factory in the first place. Significantly, the total cost that the factory/state paid as one-off compensation for laid-off workers was actually much more than the total wages it would have paid to these same workers up to retirement had they stayed – just as the workers themselves calculated. Meanwhile, the huge layoff actually occurred when NS had just received several big orders and was in need of more workers to fulfill the surging production requirements, as one top manager in NS admitted to me personally. Obviously, the buyoff does not seem like a rational action at all. So, why did it happen? What indeed was the role played by the state in this process? For one, the layoff in 2016 at NS was not an isolated event but was one episode within a nationwide reforming program called “supply-side structural reform,” which largely aimed at addressing overcapacity problems especially in the steel and coal sectors, mainly through bankruptcy, mergers, production shutdown, and redundancy. Issued in the Government Work Report 2015, it was framed as the major government task in the upcoming years.⁴ This program, at first sight, was born of a requirement for economic structure upgrading, as the official announcement constantly emphasized. A deeper investigation, however, showed that to a great extent it was actually a compromise the Chinese state made under constant pressure from the global powers, especially the United States. Surging steel production in China in recent years has long been regarded by the developed countries as a threat; as Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM), declared recently, “China’s industrial overcapacity in the steel sector may be the most daunting challenge facing manufacturing in the rest of the industrialized world today.”⁵ A report released in 2016 by

 Cynthia Estlund, A New Deal for China’s Workers?. Harvard University Press, 2017.  Li Keqiang, Premier of the State Council, “Report on the Work of the Government” (5. Mar. 2016). URL: http://www.mofcom.gov.cn/article/i/jyjl/l/201603/20160301282908.shtml (14 Sep. 2017).  “Report: Chinese Steel Overcapacity an Ongoing Problem Leading Up to G20 Summit”. Steelnet. URL: http://steelnet.org/report-chinese-steel-overcapacity-an-ongoing-problem-leading-upto-g20-summit/ (11 Sep. 2017).

Epilogue. A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony?

177

the AAM, published by Duke University’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness, directly blamed China for 19,000 steelworker layoffs in the United States and for causing a global import crisis.⁶ Penny Pritzker, US Commerce Secretary, warned on April 2016, that [u]nless China starts to take timely and concrete actions to reduce its excess production and capacity in industries including steel, and works with others to ensure that future government actions do not once again contribute to excess capacity, the fundamental structural problems in the industry will remain and affected governments – including the United States – will have no alternatives other than trade action to avoid harm to their domestic industry and workers.

Facing such pressure, China has made several commitments through the bilateral US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue (S&ED), promising to address excess production capacity in the steel sector. In February 2016, China announced that it would cut steel capacity up to 150 MT within the next five years, ban new steel projects, and eliminate “zombie” mills while, at the same time, set aside a 100 billion yuan (about 15.4 billion dollars) fund for employee compensation, social security payments, and plant closure incentives in the coal and steel sectors.⁷ In March 2017, Yin Weimin, Minister of Human Resources and Social Security, declared that China would continue to cut another 500,000 steel and coal jobs this year in order to reduce excess production capacity.⁸ Later, in July, at the first China-US Comprehensive Economic Dialogue (CED) in Washington DC, Chinese Vice Minister of Finance Zhu Guangyao again reassured the US with the resolution of the Chinese government to severely cut steel overproduction.⁹ Hence is the macro context behind the micro event (the huge layoff at NS in 2016). It explains why a severe cut in steel overcapacity, with its negative economic and social impacts, would nevertheless be funded and pushed forward. This reprises a major observation of this book, that the so-called “strong hand” of the Chinese state has always had to be externally constrained by the

 Lukas Brun, Overcapacity in Steel China’s Role in a Global Problem. Duke University 2016.  Chris Buckley and Javier C. Hernández, China Seeks to Avoid Mass Layoffs While Cutting Production (17. Mar. 2016). The New York Times. URL: https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20160317/ c17china/en-us/ (11 Sep. 2017).  “500,000 workers will be let go in Steel and Coal Sectors in 2017” (2 Mar. 2017). Sohu. URL: http://www.sohu.com/a/127681485_249929 (11 Sep. 2017).  “China, US Recognize that Steel Overcapacity Requires Global Solution,” (21 July 2017). Xinhua. URL: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2017-07/21/content_30197321.htm (11 Sep. 2017).

178

Epilogue. A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony?

larger prevailing power framework and internally compromised by the entangled conflicts of various interest groups. Highlighting the external structural constraints here also throws into sharp relief Estlund’s over optimistic assumption of the autonomic role of the Chinese state, as she declares, “China – with its skilled workforce, its gigantic and growing consumer market, and its impressive infrastructure – might have the latitude to impose on global capital conditions that other countries do not.”¹⁰ But just how exceptional can China be, really, as one of the major players in the new global capitalism is precisely the question, i. e., if China will, or even can, challenge the logic and rules of that new order. Set against this macro-structural constraint, any so-called Chinese New Deal seems more like wishful thinking than a possibly established institution. Nevertheless, calling into question the legitimacy of any “Chinese New Deal” does not aim to deny Estlund’s observation about the “racing to a rising bottom” in China’s recent labor landscape. Decades of labor struggle against degradation, in various forms, have forced the state to adopt more cautions strategies when dealing with workers, hence the 100 billion Yuan compensation fund in 2016’s sector-wide redundancy and the much more tolerable severance package for laid-off workers in NS. A sort of consensus did seem to have been reached between the state and the workers at last. Yet such consensus had to be based on the hegemonic ideology of market tenets that has slowly been formed in China over decades of marketization. This hegemony has successfully created and instilled a new “common sense” that readily succumbs to dominant, money-oriented values among average Chinese citizens. Money reigns supreme, and the capitalist unregulated jungle rule with its “winner taking it all” klaxon is, paradoxically, both resented and embraced. The suffocating anxiety of pursuing success, along with the stigmatized shame of being left behind, normalizes the widening inequality in a very subtle yet effective way: when the subalterns feel more shame than anger, hegemony is established. Constituting “a sense of reality for most people in the society, a sense of absolute because experienced reality beyond which it is very difficult for most members of the society to move, in most areas of their lives,”¹¹ it then further safely maintains and reinforces subjugation. The “voluntary” departure of NS workers hence may also be analyzed through this lens. Compared to the first wave of radical neoliberal restructuring in 1997 that had brought shock and anger, the 2016 action was largely accepted

 Estlund, A New Deal, 194.  Raymond Williams, Culture and Materialism. Selected Essays. Verso 2005, 38.

Epilogue. A Chinese New Deal or the Neoliberal Hegemony?

179

as an inevitability, or even as a normality. The choices workers made did not evolve just from a sense of powerlessness, or simply by being brought out, but also from a strong impulse to escape the “claws” of the “zombie” and move on to a more “normal” world – a riskier world but less suffocating. Two decades of erosive deindustrialization had turned home into hell, belonging into hatred, and attachment into eagerness to escape. Many workers I interviewed joined the “floating mass” of Chinese labor after leaving NS, doing various kinds of casual jobs in different places. They were all struggling hard in their daily work and life, but nobody forgot to tell me that they were now free. Being a member of the precarious, floating mass surely means belonging to the bottom of the society, but at least it is much more “normal” and less humiliating than being one of the dying and obsolete proletariats. Sector-wide layoffs are still on going, but, for most workers, it doesn’t seem to really matter anymore. With the old “proletarians” being reshaped into “precariats” under the new economic hegemony of neoliberal ideology, a new labor landscape is forming in contemporary China. Along with it, novel strategies of resistance might ultimately evolve as well, as Beverly Silver once declared when observing that wherever capital goes, labor goes, and resistance follows.¹²

 Silver, Forces of Labor.

Bibliography Akzin, Benjamin. State and Nation. Hutchinson: 1964. Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: the last of the Soviets. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2016. Andors Stephen, eds. Workers and Workplaces in Revolutionary China. London: Routledge, 2016. Arrighi, Giovanni. Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London/New York: Verso, 1994. Beck, Ulrich. The Brave New World of Work. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000. Bian, Yanjie. “Bringing Strong Ties Back in: Indirect Ties, Network Bridges, and Job Searches in China.” American sociological review 62, 3 (1997): 366 – 385. Bian, Yanjie. “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility.” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 91 – 116. Blecher, Marc J. “Hegemony and Workers’ Politics in China.” The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 283 – 303. Blumenthal, David, and William Hsiao. “Privatization and Its Discontents—the Evolving Chinese Health Care System.” New England Journal of Medicine 353,11 (2005): 1165 – 1170. Bo, Yibo. Reminiscences on Several Important Decisions and Events. Beijing: People’s Press, 1997. (薄一波, 若干重大决策与事件的回顾, 人民出版社). Böröcz, József. “Social Change with Sticky Features and the Failures of Modernizationism.” Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research 10, 2 (1997): 161 – 169. Böröcz, József. The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-economic Analysis. London/New York: Routledge, 2009. Bruner, Edward M. “Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self.” In Anthropology and Literature, edited by Paul Benson, 1 – 26. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Brzezinski, Zbigniew. The Soviet Bloc, Unity and Conflict. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967. Buchowski, Michal. “The Specter of Orientalism in Europe: From Exotic Other to Stigmatized Brother.” Anthropological Quarterly 79, 3 (2006): 463 – 482. Burawoy, Michael. The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and Socialism. London: Verso Books, 1985. Burawoy, Michael. Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000. Burawoy, Michael, and Janos Lukacs. The Radiant Past: Ideology and Reality in Hungary’s Road to Capitalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Cai, Yongshun. “The Resistance of Chinese Laid-Off Workers in the Reform Period. The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 327 – 344. Burawoy, Michael. State and Laid-off Workers in Reform China: The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched. London/New York: Routledge 2006. Chan, Anita. China’s Workers Under Assault: the Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy. Armonk: ME Sharpe 2001. Chan, Anita, Richard Madsen, and Jonathan Unger. Chen Village: Revolution to Globalization. Chicago: University of California Press, 2009 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-009

182

Bibliography

Chan, Chris King-Chi, and Pun Ngai. “The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China.” The China Quarterly 198 (2009): 287 – 303. Chang, Gordon H. Friends and Enemies: the United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948 – 1972. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Chang, Leslie T. Factory Girls: Voices from the Heart of Modern China. London: Pan Macmillan, 2010. Chaudhuri, Shubham, and Martin Ravallion. Partially Awakened Giants: Uneven Growth in China and India. World Bank Publications 2006. Chen, Donglin. “From ‘the Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities’ to ‘Preparing the War’: the Changing Process of the Third-Fifth Thoughts.” Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (1997): 65 – 75 (陈东林, “从‘吃穿用计划’到‘战备计划’—‘三五’计划指导思想的 转变过程”, 当代 中国史研究). Chen, Donglin. “Differences and Disagreement within the Decision Process of the Third Front Con- struction in 1964.” Century China, March 15 2002 (陈东林, “1964年三线建设决策中 的分歧”, 世纪中国). Chen, Feng. “Privatization and Its Discontents in Chinese Factories,” The China Quarterly (185) 2006, 42 – 60. Chen, Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Clifford, James. Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. Clissold, Tim. Mr. China. A Memoir. New York: Harper Collins, 2006. Cooper, Frederic. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. Cooper, Frederic. “African Labor History.” In Global Labour History: A State of the Art, edited by Jan Lucassen, 91 – 116. New York: Peter Lang 2008. Dai, Chaowu. The Era of Hostility and Crisis–The Sino-US Relations from 1954 to 1958. Beijing: The Social Science Documents Press, 2003 (戴超武, 敌对与危机的年代 ―1954~1958 年的中美关系, 北京:社会科学文献出版社). Deborah, A. Kaple. Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Den, Xian. The Dream of Chinese Intellectual Youth. Beijing: Writers Press, 2009 (邓贤, 中国 知青梦, 作家出版社). Deng, Peng. The Silent Group: Memories of Intellectual Youth from Daba Mountain 1964 – 1965. Chongqing: Chongqing Press, 2006 (邓鹏, 无声的群落:大巴山老知青回忆录 1964 – 1965, 重庆出版社). Dirlik, Arif and Maurice Meisner. “Politics, Scholarship and Chinese Socialism.” In Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Socialism, edited by Arif Dirlik and Maurice Meisner, 1 – 26. New York: Routledge, 2016. Dirlik, Arif. “Modernity as History: Post-revolutionary China, Globalization and the Question of Modernity.” Social History 27, 1 (2002): 16 – 39. Dirlik, Arif. Marxism in the Chinese Revolution. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005. Dirlik, Arif. “Workers, Class, and the Socialist Revolution in Modern China.” In Global Labour History: A State of the Art, edited by Jan Lucassen, 373 – 396, New York: Peter Lang 2008.

Bibliography

183

Dong, Zhikai. “The Thoughts of Mao Zedong Regarding the Reform of Economic Management in the Period of the Eighth Congress.” Contemporary Chinese History Research 1 (1994): 15 – 22 (董 志凯, “毛泽东在‘八大’前后改革经济管理体制的设想”, 当代中国史研究). Edele, Mark. “Soviet Society, Social Structure, and Everyday Life: Major Frameworks Reconsidered.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 8, 2 (2007): 349 – 373. Estlund, Cynthia. A New Deal for China’s Workers? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017. Fan, C. Cindy. “Uneven Development and Beyond. Regional Development Theory in Post‐Mao China.” In International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21,4 (1997): 620 – 639. Fehervary, Krisztina. “Goods and States: the Political Logic of State-Socialist Material Culture.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, 2 (2009): 426 – 459. Ferguson, James. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village after Collectivization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Revisionism in Soviet History.” In History and Theory 46, 4 (2007): 77 – 91. Frankenstein, John and Bates Gill. “Current and Future Challenges Facing Chinese Defence Industries.” The China Quarterly 146 (1996): 394 – 427. Frazier, Mark. The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Frazier, Mark. Strong Borders, Secure Nation: Cooperation and Conflict in China’s Territorial Disputes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008. Frazier, Mark. Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2010. Friedman, Edward, Paul G. Pickowicz, Mark Selden and Kay Ann Johnson. Chinese Village, Socialist State. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Fröbel, Folker, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye. The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Gaetano, Arianne and Tamara Jacka. On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Gallagher, Mary Elizabeth. Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gan, Yang. “The Chinese Road: Three Decades and Six Decades.” Du Shu 6 (2007) (甘阳, “中 国 道路: 三十年与六十年”, 读书 ). Gao, Mobo. Gao Village: a Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Culture. NY: Basic Books, 1973. Gold, Thomas, William Hurst, Jaeyoun Won, and Qiang Li, eds. Laid-off Workers in a Workers’ State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics. New York: Springer 2009. Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from The Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci. New York: International Publishers, 1995. Granick, David. Chinese State Enterprise: A Regional Property Rights Analysis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

184

Bibliography

Gu, Edward. “From Permanent Employment to Massive Lay-offs: The Political Economy of ‘Transitional Unemployment’ in Urban China, 1993 – 8.” In Economy and Society 28,2 (1999): 281 – 299. Gu, Edward. “Beyond the Property Rights Approach. Welfare Policy and the Reform of Stateowned Enterprises in China.” Development and Change 32,1 (2001): 129 – 150. Gu, Edward. “Dismantling the Chinese Mini-welfare State? Marketization and the Politics of Institutional Transformation, 1979 – 1999.” In Communist and Post-communist Studies 34,1 (2001): 91 – 111. Gu, Hongzhang. The History of ‘Up the Mountain Down to the Countryside. Beijing: China Procuratorate Press, 1997 (顾洪章主编, 中国知识青年上山下乡始末, 中国检察出版社, 北 京) Guha, Ranajit. Dominance without Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India. Harvard University Press, 1997. Hamilton, Malcolm B. and Maria Hirszowicz. Class and Inequality in Pre-industrial, Capitalist, and Communist Societies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987. Hamilton, Paua and Linda Shopes. “Introduction: Building Partnerships between Oral History and Memory Studies.” In Oral History and Public Memories, edited by Paua Hamilton and Linda Shopes, vii-xvii. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008. Hanley, Lynsey. Estates: An Intimate History. London: Granta Books, 2007. Haraszti, Miklos. A Worker in a Workers’ State. Universe Books, 1978. Harrison, James. Modern Chinese Nationalism. New York: Hunter College of the City University of New York, 1969. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. He, Qinglian. The Pitfalls of China’s Modernization. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Mirror, 1998. He, Shu. Fight For Chairman Mao. Recordings of Chongqing Armed Fight in Cultural Revolution. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Joint Publishing 2010 (何蜀, 为毛 主席而战: 文革重 庆大武斗实录,香港三联书店有限公司). Honig, Emily. Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850 – 1980. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Howe, Christopher. Wage Patterns and Wage Policy in Modern China: 1919 – 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Hurst, William and Kevin J. O’Brien. “China’s Contentious Pensioners.” The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 345 – 360. Hurst, William and Kevin J. O’Brien. The Chinese Worker after Socialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Janus, Boleslaw. “Labor’s Paradise: Family, Work, and Home in Nowa Huta, Poland, 1950 – 1960.” In East European Quarterly 33: 4 (1999): 453 – 474. Kalb, Don. Expanding Class: Power and Everyday Politics in Industrial Communities, the Netherlands 1850 – 1950. Durham: Duke University Press, 1997. Kalb, Don. “Conversations with a Polish Populist: Tracing Hidden Histories of Globalization, Class, and Dispossession in Postsocialism (and beyond).” In American Ethnologist 36, 2 (2009): 207 – 223. Kalb, Don. “‘Worthless Poles’ And Other Dispossessions.” In Blood and Fire: Toward a Global Anthropology of Labor, edited by Sharryn Kasmir and August Carbonella, 250 – 285, New York: Berghahn, 2014.

Bibliography

185

Kelliher, Daniel. Peasant Power in China: The Era of Rural Reform 1979 – 1989. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Kideckel, David. “The Unmaking of an East Central European Working Class.” In Postsocialism. Ideals, Ideologies and Practices in Eurasia, edited by Christopher M Hann, 114 – 132. New York: Routledge 2002. Kligman, Gail and Katherine Verdery. Peasants under Siege: The Collectivization of Romanian Agriculture, 1949 – 1962. Princeton University Press, 2011. Kornai, Janos. Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North-Holland 1980. Kotkin, Stephen. Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Lam, Willy Wo-Lap. China after Deng Xiaoping: The Power Struggle in Beijing Since Tiananmen. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 1995. Lane, David Stuart and Felicity O’Dell. The Soviet Industrial Worker: Social Class, Education and Control. Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1978. Lauren, Paul Gordon. Power and Prejudice: The Politics and Diplomacy of Racial Discrimination. Boulder: Westview Press, 1996. Leach, Edmund R. Rethinking Anthropology. London: Athlone Press, 1961. Lebow, Katherine. Unfinished Utopia. Nowa Huta, Stalinism, and Polish Society, 1949 – 56. Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2013. Lee, Ching Kwan. “From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labour Regimes in Chinese Factories.” In The China Quarterly 157 (1999): 44 – 71. Lee, Ching Kwan. “What Was Socialism to Chinese Workers? Collective Memories and Labor Politics.” In Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: the Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China, edited by Chingkwan Lee and Guobin Yang, 141 – 165. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007, Lee, Ching Kwan. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Lee, James and Ya-peng Zhu. “Urban Governance, Neoliberalism and Housing Reform in China.” In The Pacific Review 19.1 (2006): 39 – 61. Lee, Pak K. “The Political Economy of State Enterprise Relations in China’s Shaanxi Province.” In Journal of Contemporary Asia 27,3 (1997): 287 – 314. Leung, Wing-yue. Smashing the Iron Rice Pot: Workers and Unions in China’s Market Socialism. Hong Kong: Asian Monitor Resource Center, 1988. Levenson, Joseph R. Liang Ch’i-ch’ao and the Mind of Modern China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953. Li, David D. and Minsong Liang. “Causes of the Soft Budget Constraint: Evidence on Three Explanations.” In Journal of Comparative Economics 26, 1 (1998): 104 – 116. Li, Ju. “How It Was/Is Told, Recorded and Remembered: The Discontinued History of the Third Front Construction.” In Journal of Historical Sociology 28, 3 (2015): 314 – 341. Li, Ju. “From ‘Out-of-plan Worker’ to the ‘Floating Mass’: Informality under Various Forms of Capital Accumulation in the History of the PRC.” In Work Out of Place: Historical Legacies, Present Predicaments and Future Trends, edited by Mahua Sarkar, 173 – 196. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2017. Li, Xun. Big Collapse: The History of Shanghai Worker-Rebels. Taibei: Taibei Times Culture Press, 1996 (李逊, 大崩溃: 上海工人造反派兴亡史, 台北时报文化出版公司).

186

Bibliography

Li, Yi. The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification. Lanham: University Press of America, 2005. Lin, Justin Yifu, Fang Cai, and Zhou Li. State-owned Enterprise Reform in China. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001. Lin, Yimin. “Between Government and Labor: Managerial Decision-making in Chinese Industry.” In Studies In Comparative Communism 4 (1992): 381 – 403. Liu, Aiyu. Choice: Transformation of the State-owned Enterprises and Workers’ Surviving Strategies. Beijing: Social Science Archival Press 2005 (刘爱玉, 选择: 国企变革与工人生 存行动, 社会科学文献出版社). Lu, Xiaobo Lu and Elizabeth J. Perry (eds.). Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Luo, Pinghan. Big Migration: Reducing the Urban Population from 1961 to 1963, Xining: Guangxi People’s Publication 2003. (罗平汉, 大迁徙:1961 – 1963年的城镇人口精简, 广西 人民出版社). Lüthi, Lorenz M. “The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning before the Cultural Revolution, 1964 – 1966.” In Journal of Cold War Studies 10:1 (2008): 26 – 51. Lüthi, Lorenz M. The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. Maxwell, Neville. India’s China War. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (trans. Paul Kegan). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2003. Mitchell, Timothy. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Narayan, Kirin. “How Native is a ‘Native’ Anthropologist?” In American anthropologist 95, 3 (1993): 671 – 686. Naughton, Barry. “The Third Front: Defense Industrialization in the Chinese Interior.” In The China Quarterly 115 (1988): 351 – 386. Naughton, Barry. Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic Reform, 1978 – 1993. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Naughton, Barry. “The Transformation of the State Sector: SASAC, the Market Economy, and the New National Champions.” In State capitalism, Institutional Adaptation, and the Chinese Miracle, edited by Barry Naughton and Kellee S. Tsai, 46 – 72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Nell, Edward. “Economics: The Revival of Political Economy.” In Alternatives to Economic Orthodoxy: Reader in Political Economy, edited by Randy Albelda, 89 – 106. New York: Routledge, 2016. Ness, Peter Van. Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy: Peking’s Support for Wars of National Liberation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Niu, Jun. “The Border Conflicts Between China and the USSR in 1969 and the Adjustment of China’s Foreign Policies.” In Contemporary Chinese History Research 1 (1999): 69 – 70. (牛军, “1969年中苏边境冲突与中国外交战略的调整”, 当代中国史研究). Ogunsanwo, Alaba. China’s Policy in Africa, 1958 – 71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Oi, Jean Chun. “The Evolution of Local State Corporatism.” In Zouping in Transition: The Process of Reform in Rural North China, edited by Andrew Walder, 35 – 61. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Bibliography

187

Osburg, John. Anxious Wealth: Money and Morality among China’s New Rich. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013. Parkin, Frank. Marxism and Class Theory: A Bourgeois Critique. Tavistock, 1979. Passerini, Luisa. Fascism in Popular Memory: The Cultural Experience of the Turin Working Class. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Passerini, Luisa. “Discontinuity of History and Diaspora of Languages.” In New Left Review 1 (2000): 137 – 144. Passerini, Luisa. “Work Ideology and Consensus under Italian Fascism.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, 67 – 76. New York: Routledge, 2015. Pei, Jianzhang. The Diplomatic History of the People’s Republic of China (1949 – 1956). Beijing: World Knowledge Publisher 1994 (裴坚章, 中华人民共和国外交史(1949 – 1956), 北京:世界 知识出版社). Pei, Minxin. China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2009. Peng, Ming. The Infrastructure Construction of Contemporary China. Beijing: China Social Science Press, 1989 (彭敏, 当代中国的基本建设, 北京:中国社会科学出版社). Perry, Elizabeth. Putting Class in Its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia. Berkeley: University of California Berkeley, 1996. Philip, Abrams. Historical Sociology. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward. Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail. New York: Vintage, 1979. Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origin of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1957. Popular Memory Group. “Popular Memory: Theory, Politics, Method.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by In The Oral History Reader, edited by Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, 75 – 86. New York: Routledge, 2015. Prashad, Vijay. The Darker Nations: a People’s History of the Third World. New York: The New Press, 2008. Pu, Weihua. Breaking the Old World –Turbulence and Destruction in the Cultural Revolution (1966 – 1968). Hong Kong: Hong Kong Chinese University Contemporary Chinese Culture Research Center Press, 2008 (卜伟华, “砸烂旧世界”—文化大革命的动乱与浩劫(1966— 1968), 香港中文大學當代中國文化研究中心). Pye, Lucian. The Spirit of Chinese Politics: A Psychocultural Study of the Authority Crisis in Political Development. Boston: MIT University Press, 1970. Robertson, Charles L. International Politics Since World War II: A Short History. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1997. Rosenthal, Gabriele. “Biographical Research.” In Qualitative Research Practice, edited by Clive Seale, Giampietro Gobo, Jaber F. Gubrium, and David Silverman, 48 – 64. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2004. Ross, Robert and Kent Trachte. Global Capitalism: The New Leviathan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990. Roy, Denny. China’s Foreign Relations. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998. Sarkar, Mahua. “Difference in Memory.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History, 48,1 (2006): 139 – 168.

188

Bibliography

Sarkar, Mahua. “Between Craft and Method: Meaning and Inter-subjectivity in Oral History Analysis.” In The Journal of Historical Sociology 25:4 (2012): 578 – 600. Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Scott, James. “Everyday Forms of Resistance.” In The Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies 4,1 (1989): 33 – 62. Scott, James. Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. Yale University Press, 1998. Selden, Mark and Laiyin You. “The Reform of Social Welfare in China.” In World Development 25,10 (1997): 1657 – 1668. Sennett, Richard and Jonathan Cobb. The Hidden Injuries of Class. New York: Norton, 1972. Sennett, Richard. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. New York: Norton, 2011. Sheehan, Jackie. Chinese Workers: A New History. New York: Routledge, 2002. Shen, Zhigua. “The Influence of the Soviet Union in the Korean War.” In Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (2002): 28 – 39 (沈志华, “抗美援朝战争中的苏联因素”，当代 中国史研究). Solinger, Dorothy J. Contesting Citizenship in Urban China. Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Song, Shunfeng. “Policy Issues of China’s Urban Unemployment.” In Contemporary Economic Policy 21, 2 (2003): 258 – 269. Stenning, Alison. “Where is the Post-socialist Working Class? Working-Class Lives in the Spaces of (Post‐) Socialism.” In Sociology 39, 5 (2005): 983 – 999. Stites, Richard. Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Stoler, Ann Laura and Karen Strassler. “Casting for the Colonial: Memory Work in ‘New Order’ Java.” In Comparative Studies in Society and History 42:1 (2000): 4 – 48. Strangleman, Tim. “The Nostalgia of Organisations and the Organisation of Nostalgia: Past and Present in the Contemporary Railway Industry.” In Sociology 33,4 (1999): 725 – 746. Svašek, Maruška, eds. Postsocialism: Politics and Emotions in Central and Eastern Europe. New York: Berghahn, 2006. Tang, Wenfang and William L. Parish. Chinese Urban Life Under Reform: The Changing Social Contract. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, Tarrow, Sidney. Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The Dispute around the General Line of the International Communism Movement. Beijing: The People’s Publisher, 1965 (关于 国际共产主义运动总路线的论战, 北京:人民出版社). The Research Group on the Reemployment of Laid-off Workers in Urban Enterprises, “The Predicament and the Ways Out: A Survey of the Re-employment of Laid-off Workers in Urban Chinese Enterprises.” In Sociological Studies 6 (1997): 24 – 34. (“困 境与出路:关 于我国城镇企业下岗职工再就业状况调查”, 社会学研究). Thompson, Edward Palmer. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Open Road Media, 2016. Thompson, Paul. “The voice of the Past–Oral History.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, 33 – 39. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Bibliography

189

Thomson, Alistair. “Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History.” In The Oral History Reader, edited by Perks, Robert, and Alistair Thomson, 49 – 70. New York: Routledge, 2015. Tönnies, Ferdinand. Community and Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Townsend, James. “Chinese Nationalism.” In The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 27 (1992): 97 – 130. Van der Linden, Marcel, eds. Workers of the World: Essays toward a Global Labor History. Netherlands: Brill, 2008. Verdery, Katherine. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Walder, Andrew George. Communist Neo-traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Walder, Andrew George. “Factory and Manager in an Era of Reform.” In The China Quarterly 118 (1989): 242 – 264. Walder, Andrew George. “The Chinese Cultural Revolution in the Factories: Party-state Structures and Patterns of Conflict.” In Putting Class in its Place: Worker Identities in East Asia, edited by E J Perry, 167 – 198. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Wang, Hongjuan. “An Outline of the Third Front Construction during the Cultural Revolution” In Journal of Jiangxi Institute of Education 5 (2005): 111 – 113 ( 汪红娟，“文革时期三线建 设述略”， 江西教育学院学报). Wang, Hui. The Gradual Revolution: China’s Economic Reform Movement. Piscataway: Transaction Publishers, 1994. Wang, Hui. (translated by Theodore Huters) China’s New Order: Society, Politics, and Economy in Transition. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2003. Wang, Hui. “The 1989 Social Movement and the Historical Origins of Neo-liberalism in China.” In Asian Exchange 18: 2 (2003): 211 – 223. Wang, Hui. “Depoliticized Politics, from East to West.” In New Left Review 41 (2006). Wang, Shaoguang and Angang Hu. The Political Economy of Uneven Development: The case of China. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1999. Wang, Shaoguang. “From a pillar of continuity to a force for change. Chinese workers in the movement.” In Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989, edited by R V Des Forges, Luo Ning and Wu Yenbo, 177 – 190. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993. Wang, Shaoguang. “The Rise of the Regions: Fiscal Reform and the Decline of Central State Capacity in China.” In The Waning of the Communist State: Economic Origins of Political Decline in China and Hungary, edited by Andrew Walder, 87 – 113. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Wang, Zhen. “The Breakthrough of the Soviet Model during the 1950s.” In Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (1995): 15 – 24 (王真, “50年代中期我国对苏联建设模式的突 破”, 当代中国史研究). Whyte, Martin King. One country, Two Societies: Rural-urban Inequality in Contemporary China. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2010. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. New York: Verso 2005. Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997.

190

Bibliography

Wolf, Eric R. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Wong, Keung, Daniel Fu, Chang Ying Li, and Hexue Song. “Rural Migrant Workers in Urban China: Living a Marginalised Life.” In International Journal of Social Welfare 1 (2007): 32 – 40. Woo-Cumings, Meredith. “The New Authoritarianism in East Asia.” In Current History 93, 587 (1994): 413 – 423. Wright, Tim. “‘The Spiritual Heritage of Chinese Capitalism’: Recent Trends in the Historiography of Chinese Enterprise Management.” In The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 19/20 (1988): 185 – 214. Wu, Jiaxiang. “The New Authoritarianism.” In Internal Manuscript 7 (1989). Wu, Jinglian and Keping Yu. Reform Consensus and China’s Future. Beijing: Central Translation Press, 2014 (吴敬链, 俞可平, 改革共识与中国未来, 北京: 中央编译出版社). Wu, Xiaobo. The Turbulent Three Decades. Beijing: Zhongxin Press, 2008 (吴晓波，激荡三十 年, 中信出版社). Xing, Heming. “The Changing Attitude of the CCP toward the Soviet Model in 1956.” In Resources of CCP’s History 12 (2002): 30 – 37 (刑和明, “1956年中共对苏联模式认识的转 变及启示”, 党史研究资料). Yan, Hairong. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008; Yang, Guobin. The Red Guard Generation and Political Activism in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Yang, Yiyong. The Shock Wave of Unemployment: A Report of China’s Employment Development. Beijing: Today’s China Press, 1998 (杨宜勇, 失业冲击波:中国就业发展报 告). Yin, Jiaming. Stories Behind the Red Wall I: Turbulent Experiences of the PRC. Beijing: Contemporary China Press, 2010 (尹家民, 红墙知情录一:新中国的风雨历程, 当代中国出 版社). Yuan, Baohua. “The Painful Adjustment of the National Economy.” In Contemporary China History Studies 1 (2002): 6 – 17(袁宝华, “对国民经济的艰苦调整”). Yue, Songdong. “The Reform of China’s Social Welfare system.” In Management World 4 (1991): 171 – 176 (岳颂东, 中国社会福利体制的改革，管理世界). Yurchak, Alexei. Everything was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. Zhang, Shu Guang. Economic Cold War: America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949 – 1963. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001. Zhang, Zhengjia and Chen Wang. “Nuclear Explosion in the United States and China.” In Contemporary Chinese History Research 3 (1999): 28 – 34 (张振江, 王琛，“美国和中国核 爆炸”, 当代中国史研究). Zhao, Dexing. The Economic History of The People’s Republic of China, 1966 – 1976. Zhengzhou: Henan People’s Press, 1989 (赵德馨, 中华人民共和国经济史, 第三卷, 河南 人民出版社). Zhong, Ying. “The Marcro-economic Policies in China since 1990s.” In Contemporary History in China 5 (2015): 111 – 120 (钟瑛, “20 世纪 90 年代中国经济改革与发展若干理论研讨综 述.” 当代中国史研究).

Bibliography

191

Zhu, Xiaoyang and Anita Chan. “Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress: An Institutionalized Channel for Expression of Employees’ Interests?” In Chinese Sociology & Anthropology 37: 4 (2005): 6 – 33.

Index alternate worker 54 – 56 – alternate worker system 54 f. Apathetic 133, 139, 172 – Apathetic Coercion 134 f., 138 – Apathetic Compliance 138 f., 142, 160

Everyday Resistance 23, 106, 134, 139, 142, 160 f., 164 – 166 expanded labor history 14

bastardized version of Darwinian evolution 170 bottom-out policy 118 Building Socialism With Greater, Faster, Better and More Economic Results 53 burden alleviation 117, 120 – 122, 128, 143, 148, 157 bureaucratic despotic 10 f. – bureaucratic hegemonic 10 buying-out offer 119

Global Geopolitical Constraints of Development 27 government appropriation being replaced by bank loans 78, 81 Great Downsizing 49 f., 58

clientelist bureaucracy 88 f. – clientalism 88 combining factories and communes 54 f. communist neo-traditionalism 3, 11 – 13, 85 f., 88 f., 102, 128 consumption hierarchy 128 cultural construction 94 cultural dispossession 166, 172 Curse of Market 123 danwei 2, 5, 11, 13, 91 f., 119 f. decentralization 7, 9, 21, 26, 77 – 80, 82, 84, 108 – decentralized predation 7, 78 de-politicization 8, 129 – de-politicize 22 disorganized despotism 3, 11 f., 135 downsizing for efficiency 117 early retirement 95, 119, 122, 124, 138 educated urban youth 59 f. erosive deindustrialization 2, 7, 13, 19, 22 f., 131, 133 f., 172, 179 ethnographic-historical realism 10

factory director responsibility system

high modernism 25 – authoritarian high modernism hyper-normalization 98 institutionalized entertainments internal orientalization 171 internal reconstruction program new authoritarianism

25

95 116

110

oral history 70 f. organized dependence

3, 10 – 12, 135

paternalistic 22, 76, 82, 84 – 89, 93 f., 101, 106 – paternalism 90, 134 f., 138 Patriotism 56, 61, 63 f., 69 f. – culturalism 63 – Nationalism 56, 61, 63, 69 Pauperization 15 – paupers 166 f. Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities 32, 35 f., 38, 49 politics of calculation 9, 21 f., 76 politics of locality 101 Preparing against the war, preparing against the famine, and all for the people 20, 24 f., 27, 44 profit retention 79, 82, 84 reform consensus

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110630527-010

82

107

194

Index

repertoire of contention 107 re-politicize 9, 22, 111 – re-politicizing 8 Restructuring Movement 22, 109, 123 Revisionist 4, 24, 56 – post-revisionist 4 rule of virtue 88 Segregation 143 f., 150 – segregated working-class slum 144, 150 severance compensation 119, 124 shareholding reform 9, 113 f. Singapore Experience 110 social closure 101 socialist material and cultural civilization 94 – 96 socialist social contract 83, 85, 91, 107, 120, 158 social stratification and segregation 169 spiritual pollution 96, 98 f. – battle against the spiritual pollution 98 Staff and Workers’ Representative Congress 102 – SWRC 102

State Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) 22, 131 subaltern 2, 13, 22 f., 124, 131, 134, 150, 153, 171 f., 178 Third Front Construction 1, 6, 20, 24 f., 35 – 37, 43 f., 47, 58, 61, 65, 87, 90, 104, 151 – TFC 1 f., 20 f., 25 f., 29, 34, 37, 39, 41 – 49, 51 – 54, 57, 59, 65, 67, 70 f., 73, 151 f., 155 – Third Front 1 f., 7, 20, 24, 34 f., 37 f., 40 – 44, 48 f., 51 f., 54 – 59, 61 f., 64 f., 68 f., 72, 90, 135, 148, 151 f. third-world-ness 27 f. triangular debt chains 81 underclass

172 f.

vicissitudes 2, 10, 13 f., 20 – vicissitudinous 1, 10, 12 zombie factories 2, 13, 132, 142, 172 – ghost factories 132