ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, SOE workers in China encountered a phenomenon that they had not anticipated ever having to deal with in previous generations: namely, privatization and the loss of jobs and basic social welfare benefi ts. One of the promises that the CCP made to workers in such enterprises, in exchange for such sacrifi ces, was greater workplace democracy. This was not the fi rst time such a pledge had been delivered to Chinese workers. From the earliest years of Chinese state socialism, the CCP engaged a set of concepts and policy initiatives that I categorize as workers’ democracy. A set of ideas that directly or implicitly connote workers’ democracy provided a potential terrain for battles over workplace relationships from the earliest moments of the Maoist version of state socialism in the late 1940s through to the present period of market-oriented restructuring. The purpose of this chapter is to lay out where concepts or sets of practices that refl ect one or another degree of workers’ democracy were both promoted and understood during three periods of Maoist state socialism from 1949 to roughly the mid-1970s. Such a discourse provided workers in the Maoist
period with an ideological means to both assess and resist coercive relations of production in Chinese industry, albeit with limited levels of effectiveness. I argue in later chapters that where one sees discourses of workers’ democracy present in Chinese SOE workers’ protests against privatization in the 1990s and the fi rst years of the new millennium, they borrow from ones developed in the Maoist period of state socialism.
