I consider Huaiyin Li’s previous book, Chinese Village Under Socialism and Reform (Stanford, CA, 2009), to be the best of a genre of “village studies”, which has illuminated life in rural China during and after the Mao era. This genre includes many highly informative ethnographies but Li’s book, based on a careful and thorough investigation of his home county, is simply more authoritative and insightful. In The Master in Bondage, Li turns his attention to urban China, looking at life inside Chinese factories. He has, once again, produced a masterful ethnographic account.
Although The Master in Bondage covers seven decades, five of the six empirical chapters are about the Mao era (1949–1976). Li is clearly most interested in documenting social relations during China’s socialist past, before those who experienced them are gone and their firsthand knowledge is lost. There are comparatively few ethnographic accounts about industrial relations during the Mao era, but that indicates a problematic gap in the literature, not a lack of importance.
The scholarship about industrial relations during the Mao era is not only comparatively sparse, but it is also less intimate than the rich corpus of village studies. Li’s book reflects this to some extent: unlike his book about his rural hometown, it is not about a single factory community, and the interview data were collected not only by Li himself but also by a research team of faculty and graduate students from Chinese institutions. This highlights an unavoidable trade-off between the depth of a detailed case study and the breadth of a more comprehensive overview. Li’s new book, however, gives us the benefits of a broad overview (revealing commonalities and variation among China’s industrial enterprises), while also providing a careful, detailed account of life inside China’s urban factories.
Much of the research about industry during the Mao era has been produced by economists and business and industrial relations scholars, who have typically written at a distance from the shop floor. My own recent book, Disenfranchised (Oxford, 2019), covers some of the same territory as Li’s book, but is more focused on factory politics and lacks Li’s detailed attention to the labor process and relationships on the shop floor. The book that is closest to Li’s in terms of its aims, Andrew Walder’s widely cited Communist Neo-Traditionalism (Berkeley, CA, 1986), is a highly perceptive account, but Li’s study reveals its limitations and flaws.
In the first four chapters, Li develops an in-depth analysis of social relations within Chinese factories – what he calls the “work unit equilibrium” – during the Mao era. In these chapters, he systematically – and convincingly – challenges key tenets of what have become conventional understandings of industrial relations during this period. The first of these is that permanent employment and lack of material incentives led to widespread shirking in China’s state-owned factories. This understanding is at the heart of the official critique of Mao era policies by post-Mao authorities and it is also widely accepted by Chinese and Western scholars. Li finds, however, that workers and managers almost universally reported that Mao-era factories were characterized by strong collective norms that demanded diligence, discipline, and attention to quality. At the same time, he is skeptical of both contemporary Mao-era portrayals of workers as driven by ideological commitment and of the retrospective explanations offered by many of his own informants, who described their own thinking at that time as naively “simple-minded and pure” (单纯). Instead, he attributes the norms of diligence to a combination of factors: the top-down demands of party authorities; relatively egalitarian distribution; lack of alternative opportunities; the mutual pressure of fellow workers in close-knit shop floor production groups; and the loyalty, identity, and pride fostered by permanent membership in industrial work unit communities.
Li also presents a powerful critique of Walder’s argument that cadre–worker relations were based on clientelism. Walder’s main thesis was that permanent employment and work unit provision of necessities led to worker dependence on supervisors and a workplace culture based on favoritism, patronage, and subservience. Li argues that, on the contrary, during the Mao era, supervisors had very little discretion over distribution. Precisely because workers could not be fired and because wages and the basic necessities of life were guaranteed, workers were able to challenge their supervisors and regularly did so. He argues that the culture of clientelism that Walder describes emerged in the Reform era, when permanent employment was weakened and factory directors and supervisors were given greater discretion over hiring and firing, as well as wage and bonus distribution and housing and job allocation.
Finally, Li contests the idea that the official trade union and the staff and workers congress organizations in Chinese factories were simply window dressing and that they operated in a perfunctory fashion. He admits that they were hardly paragons of democratic management, despite how they were presented in contemporary Chinese accounts, and that workers had little genuine voice in decision-making (especially in a system in which the most important decisions were made above the factory level). But their actual function, he writes, was to provide a means for workers to express grievances and make suggestions, and they did this with reasonable effectiveness. His analysis of China’s letters and visits system (for filing complaints) is the best I have seen.
In each of these areas, Li makes cogent, logical arguments, largely based on interview data. His analysis reflects a familiarity with and an astute understanding of China’s social order, derived from his own experience and his previous research. He makes excellent use of this data, situating it in historical context and comparing different perspectives.
While the first four chapters develop an in-depth picture of industrial relations during the Mao era as a whole, Chapter Five presents a chronological overview of the momentous events of that era, as they were experienced in factories. Although the overview is brief, in thirty-five pages Li provides a cogent narrative of developments over these three decades, including an excellent analysis of how and why workers divided into contending factions during the Cultural Revolution (and the impact of that upheaval on work discipline and factory norms).
In Chapter Six, Li argues that it was the breakdown of the Mao era “work unit equilibrium” during the subsequent market reform era that led to the widespread slacking subsequently associated with state-owned factories (and described by Walder in his 1986 book). In the wake of the changes brought about by market reforms – the retreat of politics, the opening up of labor markets, the growth of outside opportunities, the introduction of more unequal distribution, and the dissolution of the communal nature of work unit communities – the effectiveness of work unit norms broke down. It was the elimination of communities based on permanent employment and the introduction of material incentives, he writes, that produced a new work culture that encouraged slacking (“I’ll only work when you pay me for it”).
In forty pages, this chapter packs in an overview of the profound transformation of industrial relations in China over the more than four decades since Mao died. Despite its brevity, Li provides a step-by-step account of the momentous changes that have gradually degraded the position of workers inside factories, as permanent employment norms have been eroded and industrial enterprises have been privatized and restructured along capitalist lines. As he notes, while workers have gained greater freedom of movement, they have also been subjected to much more coercive means of enforcing labor discipline.
This volume makes a worthy companion to Li’s Chinese Village Under Socialism and Reform. The two can be used in tandem for teaching and also provide a great resource for scholars and for anyone seeking to understand how the basic institutions of Chinese society functioned during the Mao era, and how they have evolved since. The Master in Bondage makes an important contribution to the literature on industrial relations in China and should help to correct persistent misconceptions about the evolution of these relations. I hope that it will be widely read beyond the China studies field, as industrial relations in China during the Mao era were in many ways distinctive, and Li does an excellent job of making this distinctive world familiar.
