JennyChan.PhDThesis.2014.FINAL

considerable extent as foreigners rather than as capitalists.” 81
Some others did not
exhibit anti-imperial sentiments. Importantly, women workers in large
foreign-owned cotton mills, instead of small family shops or Chinese-run factories,
were relatively contented with their pay and working conditions. To some, foreign
bosses provided them with a relatively stronger sense of economic and social
security compared to often more abusive labor contractors linked to local gangs. This
close attention to workers’ subjective experience and world views 82 is insightful: the
formation of a collective identity as women and as workers, the consciousness of
working-class interests, the participation in political and economic strikes, or the
lack thereof, cannot be divorced from workers’ concrete situations in their workplace,
the industry, and the larger society. 83
With the nationalization of industries during the 1950s through 1970s, the Chinese
workers were liberated from capitalist exploitations. Under central planning, new
workers, including peasant migrants settling in the city during the early years of the
establishment of the People’s Republic, were provided with an “iron rice bowl” of
permanent job tenure. The grades of wage rates were compressed to ensure a high
level of income equality across urban work units. 84 In the countryside, wealth
distinctions between individual households were also minimized as farming and
rural industries were collectivized. While urban-rural structural inequality remained,
partly due to uneven geographical endowments and partly because of government
development policies that favored workers over peasants, scholars note that the level
was relatively low when compared to other Third World countries during the same
period. 85 After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the restoration of political
stability, the central leadership under Deng Xiaoping introduced a series of rural
reforms and foreign trade policies. Inequality widens and class conflict deepens. The
set up of Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen and Shekou in South China in 1980
81 Emily Honig, 1986, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949,
Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, p. 247.
82 Charles Sabel in Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982, p. 11) gives this definition: “The set of hopes and fears, together with the map
of the social world that it establishes, is called a world view.”
83 Elizabeth J. Perry, 2002, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven: Social Protest and State Power in
China, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, ch. 5.
84 Andrew G. Walder, 1986, Communist eo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry,
Berkeley: University of California Press; Stephen Andors, 1977, China’s Industrial Revolution:
Politics, Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present, NY: Pantheon Books; Charles Hoffman,
1974, The Chinese Worker, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Gail E. Henderson, and
Myron S. Cohen, 1984, The Chinese Hospital: A Socialist Work Unit, New Haven: Yale University
Press; Mark W. Frazier, 2002, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution,
and Labor Management, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
85 See, for example, Mark Selden, 1993, The Political Economy of Chinese Development, Armonk,
NY: M. E. Sharpe.
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