BOOK REVIEWS

ANDREAS, Joel. 2019. Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China asks “why the twentieth-century Communist project to rule out class distinctions failed” (p. vii). By bringing together 128 interviews with people who worked in industrial enterprises, and official and unofficial written materials such as laws, regulations, and speeches, Andreas compares changing politics inside the workplace in China from 1949 to the present. He examines significant concepts drawn from the policies and institutions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (p. 19), and assesses the explanatory power of industrial citizenship and autonomy as prerequisites for industrial democracy. In his conceptual framework explained in Chapter One, industrial citizenship refers to workers becoming stakeholders in the workplace, and autonomy refers to the extent to which workers enjoy autonomous collective action and express concerns without repression. Although industrial citizenship was accomplished through permanent job tenure, Andreas argues that the actual accomplishment of democracy through autonomous participation was a fragile and contentious process (p. 17), changing over time through disruptive mass campaigns initiated by the CCP. From Chapters Two to Six, Andreas delves into mass campaigns and how they affected the autonomy of workers inside the workplace during the Mao era. After the socialist transformation of workplaces and institutionalisation of the work unit system (danwei 單位), Mao turned his attention to bureaucratic tendencies in the Party and workers’ lack of autonomy. He initiated a party rectification campaign in 1956, followed by activities related to daming dafang (大鳴大放, “big speaking out”) (p. 41), a slogan used during the campaign in which the masses were encouraged to speak out about bureaucratism and sectarianism. Andreas argues that the necessary participation in democracy was limited and determined by Party membership. As Chapter Three’s title indicates, this was participatory paternalism. Workers’ reluctance to criticise factory leaders after the suppression of daming dafang led to the launch of two other campaigns: the Four Cleans and the Cultural Revolution. In the first, Mao’s method to address reluctance was sending work teams from outside the factory to workplaces to lead workers. Although it allowed for some degree of autonomy, it could not eliminate bureaucratism. As a continuation of the former but in radical ways, the Cultural Revolution fundamentally shaped work unit systems. In Chapter Six, Andreas examines the new factory governance after the Cultural Revolution, which resulted in the creation of revolutionary committees rather than allowing the masses to form permanent autonomous organisations. The revolutionary committees were composed of veteran cadres, rebel groups, and military officials. Andreas interprets the process as “a kind of institutionalized political contention” (p. 163), meaning that both radical and administrative groups operated under Party control. One of the many strengths of the book comes from his interpretation of Mao’s flipflopping between encouraging workers to seize power and then suppressing them. Rather than commenting on Mao’s experiments as a method of first learning what was going on in the minds of the masses and then stopping them quickly, Andreas underlines the contradiction within the opposite objectives of the Party. While Mao wanted the masses to supervise Party cadres, he did not want them to diverge from the political authority of the CCP. Thus, Andreas argues that Mao’s experiments were based on his “cyclical conception of history, composed of alternating phases of unity and struggle” (p. 165). Chapters Seven and Eight focus on the post-Mao era and gradual market reforms in which industrial citizenship was annihilated slowly and workers were disenfranchised. Power relations were shaped at the expense of workers by concentrating power in the hands of factory directors through the “factory director responsibility system” (p. 186). By separating workers from the divisive politics of the Mao era, Deng institutionalised ways of workers’ participation, making them focus only on economic affairs. Thus, any remaining collectivist ethics, a relatively egalitarian distributive system, and socialist ideals diminished. Through the maiduan (買斷) system, which offered workers money to renounce their permanent status as members of the work unit, Chinese industry went from one end of the spectrum to the opposite, having one of the most precarious employment systems today. In the last chapter, Andreas concludes that China today has market despotism accomplished by eroding the political objectives of the CCP and yielding to neoliberal pressures around the world. While the lack of autonomy hindered attempts to democratise socialist industry, it also caused workers to lose their industrial citizenship rights. The book has two important strengths. Firstly, Andreas locates his research in the global context of a wave of industrial citizenship after the Second World War, and reads the CCP’s efforts and China’s place at a historical juncture. Secondly, while Andreas aims to understand industrial restructuring by comparing two eras, that of a work unit system and of a profit-oriented enterprise system, he allocates most of the chapters to the work unit system era to examine the political conditions that paved the way for restructuring. In this way, Andreas sheds light on the historical processes shaping China’s current labour system. Hence, while China is one of the countries responding to global trends, it has distinct features through which we can understand how contingent events, i.e., the CCP’s mass campaigns, shape further issues. Andreas claims the opposite of the general framework arguing that Deng’s reforms only changed economic affairs. Instead, he argues that “the damage to workers’ political status in the workplace should not be overlooked” (p. 219). Since the only way to regain industrial citizenship rights lies in how we interpret past experiences and how they “give rise to new creations in an evolving world” (p. 235), he focuses on the politics inside the workplace to learn and take lessons from the past as a means of new politics for the working class. Overall, the book will be of great interest for scholars of Chinese politics, labour studies, and historical sociology and offers a powerful addition to earlier publications on labour politics in China.

Heval Yaren Şimşek is a M.A. student in comparative studies in history and society at Koç University, Rumeli Feneri Yolu, Sarıyer, Istanbul, Turkey (hsimsek21@ku.edu.tr).