Mark W. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution and Labor Management - Book Review

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2003 by M.K. Lee

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. $60.00 hardcover.

The work unit or danwei, had for decades been the most important institution in urban China. Every working man and woman belonged to a danwei. The danwei was, however, not just a workplace. In the pre-reform economy, the danwei was the principal channel through which the socialist state distributed income and resources to its urban residents. Danwei membership established worker's identity and entitled them to a range of state-provided benefits. These typically covered health insurance, retirement pensions, housing, nurseries, canteens, bathing facilities, various kinds of subsidies both in cash and in kind and, in large organizations, hospitals and schools. Because of these benefits and services, workers became heavily dependent on their danwei to meet a broad range of needs. Such dependence was accentuated by low wages, the lack of alternatives, and by the fact that there was no real exit option: job transfer was exceptional and employment within the same work unit was more or less for life. The danwei was therefore like a 'small society' encompassing many aspects of the lives of its members. Within their 'small societies', danwei leaders were more than managers responsible for production. Like heads of households, they were also responsible for the welfare of their workers and their dependents. Manager-worker relations were paternalistic and 'fief-like'.

Workers' dependence underpinned the danwei's control over many aspects of their lives. But because the danwei was a state organization and managers were state and party officials, such control was at once also political and ideological. The danwei served as an apparatus of political and ideological control over primary groups at the urban grass roots. Within the danwei the two politics--of political performance and paternalistic distribution--played upon and fed on each other, giving rise to a distinct pattern of authority and patron-client relations at the workplace referred to by some as 'neo-traditionalism'. At another level, the danwei was an important institution because it provided an important source of regime legitimation for pre-reform China. The security and the many benefits and services which it provided, especially in times of scarcity, vindicated the 'superiority of socialism' and its care for the well being and welfare of the workers.

These factors explain why the danwei is such a unique and important institution and why the subject has interested many a sociologist, anthropologist and policy scientist. For the danwei is packed with 'materials' and it has all the 'stuff' for an ideal case study of society and politics in pre-reform China. But how did the danwei begin and where did its features come from? There are two main approaches to explaining the origin of the danwei in the literature. One, the 'socialist experience' approach, seeks to explain the danwei in terms of such factors as socialist ideology, policies of the socialist state, war and state formation experience, and China's strategy and experience of socialist industrialization. It argues that the danwei was the creation of Chinese socialism. The second, the 'cultural' approach, explains the danwei in terms of Chinese cultural beliefs, values, preferences, and shared understandings. It argues that institutions are built up over time and there is traceable continuity in these institutions from the cultural past. Paternalism, for example, is not the creation of socialism.

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace seeks to go transcend and improve on both approaches. The author argues that the evolution of the Chinese industrial workplace unfolded against the backdrop of such broad processes as industrialization, state building and labor mobilization, and, within the firm, the process of bureaucratization, or the imposition of rules and procedures regarding hiring, work, and pay. He notes that '(t)hese processes were all well under way prior to 1949, and they accelerated dramatically during the 1950s'. In his view, instead of being a single institution, the danwei, was comprised of distinct institutions of rules and norms for how workers would be hired, organized, and compensated. 'These "labor management institutions" ... emerged at different times and exerted their influence on subsequent factory politics and the process of industrial danwei formation'. They predated its appearance. Two key perspectives inform such analysis and understanding: one, that revolutionary states operate within the societies that they seek to transform, and two, that new, formal institutions imposed by revolutionary states interact with older, 'informal institutions'. Both suggest that there are constraints on state power and limits to institutional innovations.

The book is based on archival data going back to 1927 and paired comparisons, using these data, of two industries (textile and shipbuilding) involving four factories in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Each of the chapters from Chapter 2 to 7 traces out changes in the labor management institutions within the particular factories in question, and to some degree within production units more generally in Shanghai and Guangzhou. Together they provide an account of the history of China's industrial workplace, as illustrated by these four factories, focusing on labor management and shop-floor organizations. The book ends with an epilogue reporting field observations gleaned from interviews and factory visits conducted in 1994-5.