The Master in Bondage: A Conversation with Huaiyin Li

In The Master in Bondage: Factory Workers in China, 1949–2019 (Stanford University Press, 2023), Huaiyin Li reconstructs the realities of worker performance and factory governance under Mao Zedong and after. Drawing from fresh data collected through oral histories, he reassesses the extent to which Chinese workers were becoming ‘the masters’ in the People’s Republic of China. On the one hand, their position as lifetime employees in a planned economy set urban workers apart from the peasantry and other classes in Maoist China. ‘Treat the factory as home’ (以厂为家) was not merely a rhetorical device of Chinese state propaganda, Li argues; on the contrary, many workers—particularly ‘Model Labourers’ and ‘Advanced Producers’—sought to contribute to industrial production and the advancement of the socialist nation, which gave them a sense of moral superiority and political distinction that made them feel empowered as ‘masters’. Through an array of formal institutions and informal practices, rank and file workers were likewise disciplined to work diligently to achieve collective goals.

On the other hand, Li highlights how, despite the official discourse of ‘democratic’ enterprise management, workers lacked supervisory power over factory cadres and government officials during the Mao era. He also shows that the situation has become significantly worse since the onset of the reform era. From the late 1970s, when Chinese leaders introduced a series of market reforms, the socialist work ecosystem and its labour relations began to drastically change. Clientelism and patronage spread in the 1980s and 1990s as managers gained autonomy in recruitment and promotion. Demoralisation and disappointment became common among the adversely affected workers, especially as tens of millions of state-sector workers lost their jobs in the late 1990s and early 2000s. With the end of lifetime employment and the rise of a competitive job market, younger contract workers became the ‘masters of their own labour’ only.