Workplace Democratization and the Dilemma between Production and Social Reproduction in China’s Early Reform Era

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a wave of policy efforts was launched to advance urban industrial workers’ democratic management of their enterprises beyond what had emerged in the Mao era, framing the early market-oriented enterprise reform as a project to deepen workplace democracy. Part of what explained the party leadership’s openness to proposals to promote workplace democracy was their belief that, by making workers identify with their enterprises more, workplace democracy would incentivize workers to work harder and proactively solve production issues. What actually happened on the ground, however, contradicted the party leadership’s productivist expectations. As workplace democratization was implemented on the shop floor, workers primarily exercised their newly gained democratic power to make demands on “livelihood” and “welfare” issues they cared most about - such as the distribution of bonuses, healthcare, housing, canteens, nurseries, bathrooms, transportation, etc. Whereas this focus on livelihood issues made workplace democracy imminently and materially meaningful to workers, it disappointed the party leadership’s hope that workplace democratization would visibly increase workers’ productivity. Instead, workplace democratization was increasingly seen in the policymaking world as a factor exacerbating tendencies of overconsumption and inflation. Consequently, party leaders, as well as many economic policymakers, began to view workplace democracy as economically harmful, leading to a more conservative policy turn in late 1983 and early 1984. Afterwards, the party leadership called for a thorough reorientation of workplace democracy towards issues that were directly related to production and productivity. Such dynamics paved the way for more drastic dismantling of workplace democracy towards the late 1980s. The history of workplace democracy in the early post-Mao years, therefore, was closely intertwined with a core dilemma of socialist political economy: the contested relationship between accumulation and consumption, between production and reproduction, between “producing” (shengchan) and “living” (shenghuo).