HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The current chapter argues for a reassessment of this narrative, suggesting that although the rebellion of temporary workers did not secure an immediate change in labour relations, it did achieve what we might call a "deferred success". By 1971, the state had begun to enforce policies that allowed many temporary workers to become part of the permanent workforce, just as the rebels had demanded in 1966.

To explore the background to this change, I start by introducing the role of workers in the state socialist economy and the dual system of labour. I then examine the conflicts created by the massive reduction of the permanent urban workforce in the aftermath of the early 1960s' famine, as well as the concomitant expansion of contract labour. It was these conflicts that came to the surface so dramatically in the Shanghai worker rebellion of late 1966. I follow earlier scholars in acknowledging that the new municipal government installed by the "power seizure" of 1967 demobilized this movement, rather than fulfilling its promise.

I depart from earlier accounts, however, in stressing the massive increase of workers and staff in the urban state-owned and collective sectors of the economy in the later years of the Cultural Revolution. Statistical surveys make plain that far from continuing to shrink, the urban "iron rice bowl" expanded significantly in the late Mao era.

Source: Felix Wemheuer, https://brill.com/view/book/9789004440395/BP000009.xml
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