“Workers Know Best about Safety”: Safe Production Movements in China in the 1950s and 1960s

This paper explores the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) management of workplace safety in the 1950s and 1960s and seeks to answer why the safe production movements featured by mass supervision did not prove effective in reducing workplace risks. Many historians have argued that the pursuit of profits and meeting production quotas often trumped accident prevention, especially during the intense pushes for rapid industrialization. In addition, some scholars have attributed the high accident rates in Chinese factories in the 1950s to the CCP’s limitation on the power of labour unions responsible for managing workplace safety.

Going beyond previous scholarship, in this paper I analyze a built-in problem of the mass-based safe production policies. I argue that the CCP’s focus on policies, agreements, and education aimed at enabling workers to manage workplace safety was built on its optimistic but false estimation of the Chinese working class. The party assumed that China’s industrial labourers were a group of people who unanimously and conscientiously adhered to work safety. In reality, however, workers’ attitudes towards safety varied according to their personalities, experiences, and, most importantly, a generational divide. It was not only the practical problems of the rapid industrialization after 1949 that drove the CCP to control workplace accidents, but also the CCP’s pledge to the working class. But precisely for this reason, given the party’s ill-founded optimism about workers’ consciousness to overcome workplace risks and its choice to downplay workers’ fault in actual accidents, the CCP’s mass-based safe production found it difficult to really “protect the life safety and bodily health” of workers as the party claimed.