Redwood City: Stanford University Press, 2023. US$32.00, paper. ISBN 9781503635289.
The Master in Bondage is a fine, well-documented presentation of the position of state-owned factory workers in China, especially during the Mao years (1949–1976). Author Huaiyin Li grounds his account in multiple interviews with subjects who worked in the factories during that time, and the text is rich with direct quotations, which do much to enrich the story. Li’s interpretation contrasts with other accounts of the topic, significantly refining both the official narrative as well as what is commonly understood. Thus, Li maintains, his picture “differs from the conventional wisdom that accentuates inefficiency and worker dependency on cadres.” He also counters the belief that a so-styled failure of China’s industrial economy can be traced to a lack of material incentives that created shirking and slacking (4). Li points to the rapid expansion of the state sector and its remarkably high rate of growth under Mao to counter such views.
Li also attacks the judgement that clientelism and patronage prevailed in worker-cadre connections (as made in Andrew G. Walder’s Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). What Li does concede is that clientelism-cum-paternalism/patronage did indeed hold in the late 1970s and early 1980s, as economic reforms undermined the place of workers in the plants and greatly enhanced the authority of cadres. He admits that it is likely that those he interviewed drew on memories from their experiences before the Cultural Revolution, while Walder spoke with refugees who had recently exited factories that had changed as economic reforms refashioned working relations (9, 130). What Li found instead was “substantive governance,” or “substantive [as opposed to ideological] Maoism,” which was neither radical nor ideological. There is also a noteworthy, new insight about the motives behind the introduction of market reforms in the late 1970s. According to Li, the cause had to do with the fiscal plight of the state at the time, and the attack on prior missteps was the regime’s means of legitimizing its reform agenda.
Further, Li challenges the notion that any meaningful degree of democracy was ever really held for the workers (as discussed in Joel Andreas’ Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). He writes, “the workers, as the leading class in the socialist society, were supposed to be the masters of the factories, [but] their masterhood was limited to the discursive level and rarely institutionalized in practice” (99).
The book’s chief argument is that there was an equilibrium of power relations and a symmetrical relationship in terms of dominance between workers and cadres in state-owned enterprises during that era. This was possible because of the reliable state institutions that undergirded labourers’ lives at the firm by proving support such as: lifetime job security; welfare benefits; roughly egalitarian and stable wages; an inability to switch jobs; a strong identity toward, attachment to, and pride in the firm; a privileged status in society; workers’ ability to serve as a check on cadre behaviour; and the regime’s use of political honours as incentives. There were, too, the staff and workers’ conference (SWC), trade unions, and channels for appeal for workers, as well as informal norms among the workforce in a unit (danwei), such as group solidarity and peer pressure to perform.
Cadres, on their side, relied on discipline, worker cooperation, and diligent labour to achieve timely completion of the tasks assigned to the factory. And the supervision of the cadres by higher officials and their inability to alter wage levels or to disperse goods and rewards without approval also limited their power. Accordingly, no notable imbalance was obtained among the principals in the plants. Overall, this is a new analysis that merits serious attention.
The book is well structured and organized to construct this argument effectively. Chapter 1 details how regime propaganda, education, “political study” sessions, and honorific, morally-based rewards bolstered workers’ attachment to their firm and, usually for most workers, buoyed up their commitment to perform as instructed. Chapter 2 explains the extent to which labour could exert some minimal influence in a factory, mainly by voicing criticisms of cadres and requesting improvement in their own personal well-being, even though they “had little or no autonomy in shaping the proceedings” of the SWC (73) and could not affect the firm’s management. Chapter 3 depicts the nature of ordinary power relations in state firms, followed by chapter 4 which elucidates the style of and reasons behind production behaviour. Chapter 5 discusses workers’ involvement in the Cultural Revolution, and chapter 6 presents what happened to workers during the economic reforms, and how these reforms fundamentally destroyed the motivations that had inspired the workers previously, subverted their legal and social status, and destroyed the equilibrium that had characterized boss-employee connections under the planned economy.
My objections are not strongly critical, but I do have a few: first, there is a great deal of repetition of the main argument and its component parts; second, the chapter on the Cultural Revolution sits uncomfortably within the overall structure of the book and even seems to contradict some of the earlier narrative. It should have been written only in light of the framework that is featured in the rest of the text. Instead, it appears to try to retell the events and personalities that made up the campaign, diverting the reader from understanding how the workers’ position was altered several times over the years 1966–1976.
There are also some typographical errors and incorrect pinyin (as, cang should be chang; sazi for shazi), plus some of the terms are difficult to find because of being incorrectly alphabetized. A few other terms were omitted from the glossary. Sometimes remarks are not dated, and occasionally the material is not presented entirely chronologically.
Nonetheless, the big picture is that this is a landmark study critical for everyone interested in the working class, and which should be of interest to all scholars and students of the politics and society of China.
Author
University of California, Irvine