| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Mark Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labour Management (New York: Cambridge University Press 2002)

SOME SCHOLARS have argued that China's initiation of market-driven reforms in 1978 brought about the "second revolution" of the communist era (1949-present). In retrospect, this assessment seems only partially correct. China's decision to institute free-market reforms 25 years ago was indeed revolutionary. Yet the lingering effect of command-control institutions on market development has made the process of reform less revolutionary than evolutionary. In The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace, Mark Frazier illustrates a similar evolutionary logic can account for the development of the Chinese work unit (danwei), the chief labour management institution associated with the "first revolution" of the Communist era.

The strength of Frazier's book is its descriptive richness. Frazier has translated previously unavailable primary source documents that detail how labour management institutions developed in Shanghai and Guangzhou over a period that starts approximately in 1930 and ends approximately in 1960. Frazier's careful presentation of these archival records lends a personality and a pulse to factory life during an understudied period of Chinese history. The gathering of this evidence also suggests several important theoretical questions that are applicable to institutional developments outside the time and place featured in the book. Among the most important is: why are institutions founded in pre-revolutionary crises inclined to survive beyond the period in which they originated? If this question were addressed more systematically, the book would not only be a necessary addition to the bookshelves of China and labour studies scholars, it would be of interest to a broader cross-section of social scientists.

The historical backdrop for Frazier's study is the three decades that straddled the fall of Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist regime and the rise of Mao Zedong's Communist regime (1930–1960). While this time period frames the book, Frazier is interested in micro-political developments — specifically the development of the Chinese work unit. The work unit has long been regarded as the primary vehicle through which the Chinese Communist leadership exercised its control over society. It has also been regarded as an institutional innovation unique to the Maoist era.

Examining the history of two shipbuilding and textile factories in Shanghai and Guangzhou from the 1930s to the 1960s, Frazier demonstrates that the work unit was not as unique as previously assumed. During Nationalist rule (1927–1945), Chinese labour officials faced two dilemmas. The first involved balancing the growing influence of Western impersonal management principles with more familiar, particularistic labour management practices. The second and more daunting dilemma involved locating this balance in the midst of a Japanese invasion that induced rapid increases in the price of consumer goods.

The Nationalist response to this twin dilemma was to use the industrial workplace to formally institutionalize a system of more personalized social welfare. As the purchasing power of wages fell, Nationalist officials channeled funds to several of the largest industries (including the shipbuilding and textile factories that are highlighted in this study) and ordered them to provide employees with housing, medical services, and other non-wage benefits. The provision of goods and services not only cushioned workers from war-induced hyper-inflationary shocks, it resulted in a growing reliance of workers on their enterprises and their shop-floor managers. The worker-employer bonds that were forged during this period did not dissolve easily with the removal of the Japanese threat in the mid-1940s — and the memory of these ties faded slower still.

At the beginning of the 1950s, communist labour management officials confronted a set of challenges that rivaled those of the recently deposed Nationalist regime. On the one hand, there was a need to balance Soviet-advocated, impersonal labour management principles, with the traditionally preferred, particularistic management practices. On the other, there was a need to reinvigorate the industrial economy in the wake of the Chinese civil war. At what is the most compelling juncture of the study, Frazier illustrates that Chinese communist officials borrowed a page from the Nationalist book in responding to these labour management challenges. The industrial workplace became the focal point of the Chinese communist industrial reform program.

These similarities notwithstanding, there was a palpable difference between the objectives that the nationalists and the communists sought. While the nationalists were attempting to prevent the industrial economy from collapsing, the communists were attempting to rebuild an industrial economy that had already collapsed. This difference implied (among other things) that the use of factories to institutionalize traditional labour management practices was even more sweeping during the communist than the nationalist era. Communist commitments introduced during the First Five Year Plan (1953–1957) ranged from narrow wage differentials between skilled and unskilled labourers to recruitment policies that assigned workers from the same family to the same factory to the all-important offering of social welfare benefits.

The depth and scope of these institutional commitments made the industrial workplace into far more than just a place of work in the post-revolutionary years of communist rule. An intended consequence of these institutional commitments was that they facilitated the socialist transformation to a command-control economy. An unintended consequence of these institutional commitments was that they solidified ties between workers and their employers and sharply limited social interactions to the work unit. Subsequently, communist party officials discovered that this second consequence was not only unintended, but also undesirable. The close ties between employers and workers weakened the influence of campaigns such as the Great Leap Forward (195–1962) that intended to bring greater party control of factories. The durability of institutional commitments to institutional reform is an appropriate point to segue into a concluding evaluation of the book.

One of the more provocative themes highlighted in Frazier's book is the tension between pre-existing institutions that reflect the interests of society and institutional innovations imposed by the state. The book vividly illustrates this tension. Where the book is less fulfilling is in its analysis of the theoretical extensions of this argument. Instead of exploring these extensions, Frazier appears content to use a neo-institutional framework to elucidate how the Chinese work unit developed over the 30-year period in question. While he should be commended for demonstrating the usefulness of this theoretical framework to a region and an era where neo-institutionalism has been underutilized, readers not focusing on China or labour studies might desire more theory building and less theory application. If Frazier ventured to do so, the book's contribution would be both evolutionary and revolutionary.


Eric Zusman University of California, Los Angeles

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