In December 1978, the Shanghai 12th Cotton Mill, a factory with 6,720 workers, restored its Staff and Workers’ Congress (SWC), which was a collective body of representatives elected by workers to participate in the enterprise’s managerial affairs.¹ The trajectory of the SWC in this particular factory was emblematic of the fate of this workplace institution on a broader scale. The SWC was first established in the 12th Cotton Mill in 1956,² amid the nationwide push to set up this entity in public enterprises. During the tumultuous early years of the Cultural Revolution, the SWC was deactivated, as factory governance was reorganized around the newly devised Revolutionary Committees. In the immediate post-Mao years, however, as part of the policy efforts to “correct the chaos and return to normal” (boluan fanzheng), the SWCs were rapidly re-instituted in their pre-Cultural Revolution format, with their activity subject to the oversight and guidance by the enterprise-level Party committees.

During one of the quarterly meetings of the 12th Cotton Mill’s SWC in 1979, an unexpected incident happened. The SWC representatives brought forth an issue that was not on the pre-approved meeting agenda: the overcrowded and badly ventilated bathhouse for women workers. The bathhouse had been so cramped that, during peak hours, five or six workers had to squeeze themselves under one shower; workers passed out in the bathhouse every now and then. According to a report submitted by the factory, the enterprise leadership had been aware of this problem for years but failed to address it. The main reason was that the bathhouse neighbored the office of scientific research and refinement on the one side and the office of electronics examination and repair on the other, and the factory leadership, constrained by the convention of “production first, livelihood afterwards (xian shengchan, hou shenghuo)”, could not force either office to relocate.³ But the SWC representatives felt so strongly about this issue that the discussion at the SWC meeting could no longer be shut down. They ended up passing a resolution on the enlargement and repair of the women’s bathhouse, and directly called the heads of the two offices onto the stage to clarify their positions. Eventually, the factory leadership and office heads caved in – the offices were relocated and the bathhouse was expanded with the vacated space.⁴

This incident in the Shanghai 12th Cotton Mill was illustrative of some key dimensions of factory politics in China’s immediate post-Mao years (the late 1970s and early 1980s). In this period, institutions of workplace democracy such as the SWCs were renewed and strengthened. Workers seized upon these institutions to demand that their enterprises address those material issues most immediately relevant to their livelihoods: the fair distribution of housing, the allocation of job opportunities for workers’ children, wages and bonuses, safety and health, and welfare amenities.⁵ Compared to the Cultural Revolution years when workers’ attempts to democratize factory governance often got channeled into factional strife, the post-Mao emphasis on material and livelihood issues encouraged many workers to exercise shopfloor democracy in ways that felt more meaningful to them – democracy became something that directly resulted in visible improvements of living and working conditions. Many workers interviewed by Joel Andreas, for example, nostalgically remembered the late 1970s and early 1980s as the “golden age of the SWC”.⁶ And this material orientation of workplace democracy particularly benefited women workers, as workers demanded that more attention be paid to issues in the realm of social reproduction that had previously been de-prioritized.⁷

How was this material orientation of shopfloor democracy made possible in the immediate post-Mao years? How does an examination of this democracy allow for a new understanding of the historical continuities and changes in China’s class politics? This essay addresses these questions by making a three-pronged argument. First, I argue that the material orientation of shopfloor democracy was partially enabled by profound changes in China’s political economy. These changes were part of the Party leadership’s overall strategy to pacify industrial workplaces, boost economic productivity and consolidate political legitimacy in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. 

Second, even though the Party leadership intended the new configuration of policies to defang workers’ Cultural Revolution-style rebel activity, paradoxically it was a spirit of rebelliousness that workers inherited from the Cultural Revolution that sustained their institutional exercise of democracy on the ground. Third, I argue that the material orientation of workers’ democracy could be understood as a version of “economism” the Party leadership vehemently denounced in the early years of the Cultural Revolution; in this sense, there was indeed a continuity in the nature of workers’ grassroots agency across the Mao and post-Mao eras. Just like Mao and his associates feared that workers’ “economistic” struggles would derail the political agenda of the Cultural Revolution in early 1967,⁸ workers’ “economistic” exercise of SWC democracy in the early 1980s soon drew the ire of the Party bureaucracy, which sought to correct this “problem” through top-down interventions.

The Changing Political Economy in the Wake of the Cultural Revolution 

In the early and mid-1970s, China’s industrial enterprises were fraught with problems of labor discipline. Elizabeth Perry and Xun Li note that in this period “party networks in work units were reestablished, but not without a marked deterioration in discipline. The irreverent style of the rebels was fertile soil for the growth of a general disrespect for party authority.”⁹ The situation was so severe that “in October 1972, the People’s Daily published three articles on the same day criticizing ‘anarchism’” among Chinese workers.¹⁰ Towards the end of the Mao era, Chinese labor remained unruly, as waves of work stoppages, slowdowns, and absenteeism repeatedly paralyzed industrial production in 1974-1976.¹¹

The post-Mao Party leadership, therefore, was confronted with the twin challenges of delegitimizing the radical Maoist program and factional politics associated with the ousted “Gang of Four” and devising ways to incentivize workers to be hardworking and obedient. This required a slew of policy interventions. One crucial element was the series of policy attempts to readjust the balance between accumulation and consumption in China’s political economy. Over much of the Mao era, the official ideology valorized the prioritization of accumulation over consumption as a revolutionary ethic. With the radical Maoists taking charge of ideological affairs in the late 1960s and early 1970s, providing workers with “material incentives” was further denounced as “economistic” and politically reactionary. What ensued therefore was a period of revolutionary austerity in which China’s urban workers experienced a decade of wage freeze and little improvement in living standards – with the only exception being that millions of temporary workers were granted permanent status in the early 1970s.¹²

After 1976, China’s post-Mao leadership almost immediately decided to reverse course, devoting more resources to addressing the population’s consumption needs. In cities, workers’ take-home pay was increased as a series of large-scale wage upgrades were rolled out in 1977 and 1979-1980 and the bonus system was restored in 1978. Public enterprises were allowed to spend more money on “livelihood and welfare” improvements. They were often encouraged – or at least not disincentivized – to earmark specific funds to spend on housing and collective welfare. The official discourse was also altered somewhat. The relentless pushes for “production first, livelihood afterwards” and to resist “material incentives” were de-emphasized. Instead, the official discourse acknowledged that an extensive backlog of unaddressed living-standard issues had accumulated. It insisted that efforts be made now to accommodate the masses’ demands on improving the standards of living to the degree feasible.

These policy changes were probably motivated by the post-Mao leadership’s urge to secure mass consent as well as to elicit better work performance from industrial workers. On the ground, they created the condition of possibility for workers to utilize their newly restored SWCs to demand material improvements in living and working conditions. The welfare-related issues that enterprises would not otherwise have had the material resources to address were now placed within the realm of the possible. The changes in the official discourse granted political legitimacy to workers’ material demands, which became harder for enterprise leaders to dismiss. The aforementioned incident in Shanghai’s 12th Cotton Mill is a case in point. In the past, the ideology of “production first, livelihood afterwards” had provided a powerful excuse to sideline grievances about a poorly maintained bathhouse. But in 1979, the discursive shield was no longer as strong when the recently restored SWC demanded the issue be addressed.

Meanwhile, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed an initial reform drive to make public enterprises more autonomous from the overseeing Party-state.¹³ Enterprises were selected to experiment with a new model of management: they were allowed to retain a portion of their earned profits and independently decide on the uses of these retained funds without the Party-state’s interference. These enterprises, numbering 6,600 by September 1980, were additionally granted decision-making powers in such realms as production planning, product marketing, internal organizational management, and personnel management. Enterprises not selected to undertake these experiments were also granted marginally greater powers to manage their own affairs – for example, greater latitude in deciding on how to dispense their collective welfare and bonus funds. 

These policy measures to enlarge enterprise autonomy were supposed to provide much stronger incentives for workers to deliver better performance: the more profits an enterprise returned, the greater was the pool of funds an enterprise could freely spend on wage supplements, housing, and welfare amenities. One consequence beyond such policy intention, however, was that these initiatives facilitated the material orientation of workplace democracy. As there were more things left for the enterprises to independently decide on, workers could practically demand a say – through their SWCs – in a much wider spectrum of issues. This was particularly the case when it came to the spending of enterprises’ welfare funds and allocation of hiring opportunities.

Therefore, the material orientation of workplace democracy in the immediate post-Mao years was importantly enabled by these two changes in China’s political economy: a rebalancing of the relationship between accumulation and consumption and increased financial autonomy of public enterprises. These changes, in turn, formed part of a policy package for the post-Mao leadership to deal with labor indiscipline and slackness. In addition to these endeavors to strengthen material incentives, the package also included much more repressive measures such as the campaign to root out “factionalism” – a code word for the Cultural Revolution-style rebel activity – in factories and the systematic efforts to demote and prosecute former rebels. Through this web of undertakings, the Party-state leadership hoped to restabilize China’s industrial and social order in the wake of the Cultural Revolution.

Persistent Rebelliousness on the Shop Floor

Even though the post-Mao leadership called for the restoration of SWCs in their pre-Cultural Revolution format and issued a set of policies that made it possible for workers to demand material improvements through their SWCs, this top-down policy program could not automatically translate into SWCs’ actual power inside China’s factories. What made many factory leaders willing to concede to workers’ material demands made through the SWCs or even hand over the decision-making power on “livelihood and welfare” issues to the SWCs? It is hard to imagine that a large number of enterprise managers would agree to the SWCs’ empowerment simply out of their “democratic spirit”, as some official reports dubiously claimed. What compelled factory management to listen to the SWCs?

A careful reading of those primary sources that were meant for internal circulation yields the following conclusion: bottom-up pressures generated by workers’ overt and covert rebelliousness played a key role in motivating factory management to listen to the SWCs. For example, the Wuhan Federation of Trade Unions reported in 1982 that, in the Wuhan Machine Tool Appliances Factory, “the extremely unreasonable distribution of housing greatly irritated workers, resulting in a week of complete production halt and a month of semi-halt.”¹⁴ The report went on to clarify that this incident was by no means exceptional. At least six more factories in Wuhan also “saw disputes to grab housing or production halt or semi-halt because workers held no power over housing distribution”.¹⁵ In other words, the lack of democracy over key distributional issues – particularly housing – caused workers to actually go on strike. This is what many factory leaders had to deal with if they did not empower the SWCs. Indeed, Wuhan’s Bureau of Mechanic Industry similarly acknowledged in 1982 that “incidents in which factory directors arbitrarily vetoed or altered resolutions passed by the SWCs have happened in several work units; some of these cases even caused strong grievances among workers and production halts”.¹⁶ 

Openly rebellious actions like striking were only one of many ways for workers to put pressure on factory management. Even when workers did not go on strike, they could still make trouble for their enterprise leaders in a more quotidian and everyday manner. A report by Wuhan’s First Bricks Factory revealed that, when the factory leadership handled a round of housing distribution without involving the SWC representatives, the resultant grievances led many workers to “complaining to the deputy factory director in charge of livelihood affairs day by day, depriving him of any peace even during mealtime and sleep time”.¹⁷ Some workers making housing-related appeals to the factory management were so impassioned that the factory leaders feared that, if their handling of housing distribution continued to be perceived as biased and undemocratic, “violent conflicts or even deaths” could result.¹⁸ 

In other words, the failure to engage and respect the SWCs on the part of the enterprise leadership entailed real risks. These risks included both significant nuisance in the leaders’ personal lives and openly rebellious activity that shut down production. When material grievances went unanswered and SWC demands got dismissed, many workers did not hesitate to go on strike, idle on the job, march on the street, petition the supervising government agencies, or at the very least confront and harass the factory leaders. Given these very real possibilities of workers’ backlash in myriad forms, it is not surprising that many Party-state leaders and officials explicitly called on enterprises to let the SWCs exercise more powers over decision-making. For example, Yu Yichuan, the Party secretary of Henan Province, warned at a provincial conference that “if democratic management is not practiced well […] your enterprise could witness work slowdowns, with workers showing up to the posts without putting in the effort, letting the lathes merely make empty runs”.¹⁹

At the grassroots level, therefore, workers secured a level of functional workplace democracy for themselves largely because of their audacity to challenge factory management in overt and covert ways. This audacity was crucially fomented during the Cultural Revolution, when workers learned (for a period of time) that all structures of authority and power hierarchy could be questioned and challenged.²⁰ A spirit of labor unruliness continued to permeate China’s industrial shop floor in the immediate post-Mao years and undergirded the revitalized institutions of factory democracy. Even though the Party leadership hoped that the new configuration of policies could guide China’s factories out of the “chaos” of the Cultural Revolution, workers’ lingering Cultural Revolution-style rebelliousness was precisely what empowered their more “orderly”, institutional exercise of workplace democracy to carry real weight. In a sense, the “golden age of the SWC” spoke to how the tumultuous agitations during the Cultural Revolution exerted a lasting impact on workers’ self-understanding and the balance of power inside China’s factories.

The Specter of “Economism”

The material orientation of workplace democracy in the immediate post-Mao years evidenced an intertwining of the political and the economic in working-class activism. For many workers, democratic power on the shop floor was meaningful and desirable exactly because it could potentially make a difference for their material livelihoods. In this case, the political and economic dimensions “merely form the two interlacing sides of the proletarian class struggle,” as Rosa Luxemburg famously argues.²¹ This dynamic was reminiscent of how, in 1966-1967, millions of workers partook in grassroots mobilizations precisely to pose concrete material demands including but not limited to wages, benefits, job protection and working conditions.²² As Yiching Wu argues, these socioeconomic demands effectively amounted to a profound political critique of the structure of power and inequality in the People’s Republic. 

But workers’ rebellions combining economic and political struggles in the early Cultural Revolution years soon came to an end. Viewing “economic demands as an unwelcome diversion from the political direction he had set for the movement,”²³ Mao and his associates denounced workers’ staging of material claims as “economism” and clarified that such economistic behavior was outside the realm of the permissible political activity.²⁴ It could perhaps be argued that this official crusade against “economism” was a major reason why grassroots mobilizations gradually exhausted their energy over the course of the Cultural Revolution. Workers in the immediate post-Mao years picked up where they “economistic” predecessors left off a decade before. Endowing their exercise of workplace democracy with much material substance, they essentially insisted that the economic and the political are inseparable. This was an important continuity in the nature of workers’ grassroots agency across the Mao and post-Mao eras.

Just like workers’ “economistic” struggle quickly made Mao uneasy, the material orientation of workplace democracy in the immediate post-Mao years was met with only limited official tolerance. Policymakers, local cadres, and enterprise leaders did acknowledge the need to dedicate some resources to accommodating workers’ material demands (see the discussion above on rebalancing the relationship between production and consumption), but they did not want such tendency to go very far. In their thinking, a focus on “livelihood and welfare” issues should by no means trump or distract from what was always more important: the mobilization of the masses to improve production performance. For the officials, the material orientation of workplace democracy betrayed workers’ lack of “advanced” political consciousness and a need for top-down political education, persuasion, and guidance. 

For example, a report by the Party committee of the Wangting Power Plant lamented in 1981 that at the SWC meetings, workers were far more enthusiastic about discussing “livelihood and welfare” issues than about discussing “production-related” issues. The Party committee posited that “we could only respect the masses’ wishes and focus on addressing workers’ livelihood and welfare issues first […] so that we could later direct and guide the SWC step-by-step to pay more attention to issues related to the management of production and operation.”²⁵ In other words, the Party committee saw the SWC’s overwhelming focus on livelihood and welfare issues as unfortunate but inevitable. Whereas the Party committee vowed to respect workers’ wishes, it emphasized the need to gradually channel the SWC’s attention towards production-related issues. This report was emblematic of a broader sentiment among Party-state cadres and factory leaders: the material orientation of workplace democracy was a necessary but suboptimal state of affairs, and political tutelage was needed to raise workers’ consciousness. 

Indeed, there were plenty of reports recounting how some enterprise leaders forcefully intervened to shift the SWCs’ agenda away from what was deemed as “livelihood and welfare issues” to proper “production-related issues.” When a SWC meeting was convened in Dalian’s Non-Staple Food Company in 1979, the enterprise leadership unilaterally imposed a meeting agenda centered on the fulfillment of the marketing plan, despite numerous proposals submitted by the SWC representatives regarding workers’ working and living conditions such as housing, long working hours, and commuting.²⁶ In Beijing’s Special Steel Factory, whereas the SWC planned to hold a session in July 1981 to discuss housing, the Party committee “persuaded” the SWC representatives to put the issue of housing aside and instead focus the SWC session on the disaggregation and assignment of profit quotas.²⁷ Even though the reports painted these incidents as positive accomplishments demonstrating the Party committees’ wise leadership and workers’ good consciousness, it seemed more likely in reality that such undemocratic impositions could substantially compromise workers’ engagement with their SWCs.

In the same way that workers’ “economistic” activism figured prominently in both the Mao and post-Mao eras, the official vigilance against and contempt for “economism” was a persistent feature in China’s industrial politics. This vigilance had practical anti-democratic implications. Workplace democracy in the immediate post-Mao era was therefore caught in a tension between workers seeking to make themselves heard and the official authorities trying to steer the SWCs’ agendas in more or less coercive ways. And as I have documented elsewhere, the perceived need to tame down workers’ “economism” was one of the key reasons why the Party-state leadership eventually made a policy shift and turned to dismantle workplace democracy in the mid-1980s.²⁸