HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

The Mao era saw striking changes in prc labour relations. Permanent employment, into which the new peasant workers were recruited in the 1970s, was by far the most desirable form of work. It was also growing rapidly. The workforce in the state-owned enterprises increased from 10 million in 1950 to 68.6 million in 1976, while in the collectively-owned enterprises, the rise was even more rapid; from 1.3 million in 1955 to 18.1 million in 1976. In total, about 75 million people were recruited into the socialist urban workforce during the Mao era. For most, access to the iron rice bowl would have meant a great improvement in their standard of living, especially compared with life "outside the system" or "before liberation". From their perspective, social mobility was a genuine reality.

How, then, are we to assess the hukou household registration system and the other classificatory mechanisms through which the CCP sought to channel and direct social mobility to certain groups? It seems inappropriate simply to dismiss the hukou as a form of medieval "estate", as some have done. Certainly, people unlucky enough to be classified among the "four elements" (landlords, rich peasants, and counterrevolutionary and rotten elements) were treated as outcasts, with few opportunities to improve their situation. However, they accounted for less than ten percent of the population. For the rest, mobility may not have come easily, but it was achievable – even if a person's prospects were ultimately dependent on the goodwill of the party-state.

The regulation of the centre of social mobility, urban-rural migration and access to jobs or political institutions produced many disturbing outcomes, but there was some logic to the CCP's methods, however unsavoury they undoubtedly were. On occasions when the government relaxed controls on rural-urban migration, the number of workers in the cities tended to grow at unsustainable rates, as was the case during the Great Leap and in the early 1970s. The centre was then forced to tighten control again and to "adjust" access to the cities to preserve limited resources. It seems to me that struggles around the rural-urban divide, and inclusion or exclusion based on class status – another major feature of early prc economic life – were an almost unavoidable consequence of the way the CCP tried to manage resources. In establishing the party-state as a gatekeeper, it ensured that these conflicts would become politicized.

It is ironic that the party leadership under Mao, which so thoroughly crushed the rebellion of temporary workers in 1966, eventually fulfilled most of the demands of this rebel movement in the late Cultural Revolution. However, this victory for labour was short lived. From the mid-1980s, the new leadership under Deng Xiaoping began to call not simply for a rollback of the temporary workers' 1970s gains, but for the wholesale destruction of the "iron rice bowl" to improve "economic efficiency" and to subject workers to market relations.⁵³ It took until 1998, when the central government dismantled the old state-owned industries through the closure of small units and corporatization of larger ones, for the Dengist vision to be realized. When it was, social unrest took place against privatization, layoffs and the commodification of labour. Nevertheless, in the end, it was workers who ended up on the losing side. Capitalist labour relations were – eventually – enforced.