Worker Performance in State-Owned Factories in Maoist China

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews with 97 retirees in different cities, this article reexamines worker performance in state-owned enterprises during the Mao era. It disputes the conventional wisdom that assumes widespread shirking and inefficiency in state firms before the reform and attributes this problem primarily to the lack of adequate material incentives. Instead, this article investigates the issue of work incentives in the context in which multiple economic, social, and political factors worked together to motivate and constrain workers. It argues that state-firm workers were subject to not only the pressure of political conformity, disciplinary regulations, and peer-to-peer surveillance at the workplace but also the incentives embedded in their shared consciousness as a privileged group, their identity as members of a work unit, and, most important, the opportunities for upward mobility that motivated them in the absence of material stimuli. Workers’ performance, therefore, varied over time and space, depending on how the mechanisms of motivation and control operated on the shop floor.