ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns railway work units and the workers who belonged to them at a “liminal” time in the early 1990s, when the policies of reform and opening were assured of neither durability through time nor diffusion through geographical or structural space. In 1991, reform policies had loosened many people from their fixed moorings in rural settings where their labor was redundant, but in urban China, and particularly in state sector China, work units and their employees remained relatively stable. Reform policies seemed unlikely to penetrate such strongholds of socialist conservatism as railway work units or to transform the social actions of the workers who belonged to them.1
