The Rebellion of Temporary Workers and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Throughout the late Mao period, the official media continued to celebrate workers as "masters of the country". Less visible, but no less important, was the social transformation and expansion of the working class that took place in this period. In 1967, radical leaders had reacted to the push for improved pay and conditions by accusing "revisionist cadres" of corrupting workers with economic demands (in the reform era, the roles would be reversed, with Jiang Qing and the rest of the Gang of Four blamed for wastefully expanding the "iron rice bowl" to temporary workers).⁴²

This hostility to workers' demands began to change in 1971, when the State Council issued a decision banning work units from using temporary labour for year-round production tasks. The council also ruled that there should be no more than two and a half million temporary workers engaged, even on short-term or seasonal tasks. As a result of this decision, over eight million temporary workers were able to acquire permanent worker status (as against a total of over nine million in 1971).⁴³ The change in policy had a sharply gendered impact, because (as noted earlier), in many cases temporary workers were female relatives of existing permanent workers.

The temporary worker rebels of the early Cultural Revolution had initially seen their demands rejected by the government, but those demands were now belatedly fulfilled. By 1971, no rebel mass organizations existed to pressure the government to improve workers' conditions, but it appears that the old argument – that hiring workers without political and social rights went against the principles of socialism – was eventually persuasive. By that time, the government had no reason to fear any large-scale labour unrest, because party leadership had already been re-established on the shop floor. A direct link between the rebellion of the temporary workers in late 1966 and the government's change in policy in 1971 is difficult to prove, because no references to the early Cultural Revolution are made in relevant documents. What we can say, however, is that with only five years between the rebellion and the reforms, the temporary workers of the "People's Cultural Revolution" must at least have been in the leadership's minds.

After 1971, the great divide between people inside and outside the system of the "iron rice bowl" remained, but the number of workers in precarious temporary employment was significantly lower in urban China. It is more difficult to assess the impact of the Cultural Revolution on workers who were already in permanent, "iron rice bowl" positions at the outset. While the social prestige of workers was high throughout the last decade of the Mao era, wages were stagnant, rising once – and then only slightly – in 1971. Bonuses, an important part of the pre-1966 salary package, were decried as a "material stimulus" redolent of capitalist economics, and attacked by the rebels as part of Liu Shaoqi's "revisionist line".

At the same time, wage cuts and penalties for poor labour performance were abolished; a decision that lowered the pressure on workers, but also made it difficult to enforce discipline in some factories. Young workers who had entered the workforce after 1958 found it more and more difficult to secure promotions and wage increases, resulting in a widening gap between the young and the old. These income restrictions hardly pushed workers to the brink of starvation, but they did make covering daily expenses beyond rations more of a challenge. Workers in the lower ranks, especially those with several children or elderly dependents, had to count every penny to provide for their living expenses.

The stagnation of wages went hand in hand with another, more striking trend: a massive expansion of the urban workforce. In 1966, state-owned enterprises employed 39.3 million people, but by 1976 the figure had risen to 68.6 million. The workforce in the collectively-owned sector expanded from 12.6 to 18.1 million in the same period.⁴⁴

Table 8.2 Total number of employees in state-owned and collectively-owned enterprises, 1966–1976 (all figures in millions)

Unsurprisingly, this expansion placed the state's supply systems under renewed strain. In 1972, a year after the decision to include temporary workers in the permanent workforce, the State Council issued a report identifying problems with the grain supply and calling for a limit on the increase of the urban population and workforce. In response, the government acted to slow the urban expansion. The urban population entitled to grain rations had increased by almost ten million in 1971–1972, a figure that fell to below five million over the subsequent two years.⁴⁵ This smaller increase still represented a burden on the urban supply system and the peasantry, but stable agricultural production meant that it remained a manageable one, in contrast to the failings of the famine years.

The rise in the urban population during this period was also partly mitigated by the continued absence from the cities of millions of urban middle-school graduates, who had been "sent down" to the countryside from 1968 onwards to be educated by "poor and lower middle peasants". Many of these young people were not permitted to return home for several years, and some never returned to the cities at all.

One striking aspect of the late-Cultural Revolution expansion of the urban workforce was the change in demographics that accompanied it. Available data suggests that the gender and social origin profiles of urban workers underwent a radical shift in this period. The number of female workers and staff in the state-owned enterprises more than doubled; from 7.8 million in 1965 to over 20 million in 1977. Of these 20 million, 8.5 million worked in industry, 2.7 million in the trade, food and service sectors, and 3.3 million in science, education and health.⁴⁶

A survey circulated internally among the official labour unions in 1983 captures some of the major demographic shifts in the workforce during the Cultural Revolution. From a sample of 11 work units in key industrial cities, a picture emerges of a workforce that was larger, younger, more educated and populated with greater numbers of party members than was the case before 1966. The work units surveyed had a combined staff of over 183,000, of whom only three percent had joined before 1949, compared with 37.8 percent (69,395 people) during the Cultural Revolution.⁴⁷

The breakdown of the newer workers' backgrounds is particularly interesting. Of those recruited between 1966 and 1976, some 1,213 were existing workers, 3,070 were young people leaving vocational training programmes, 4,981 were peasants, 8,403 were demobilized soldiers and a full 18,039 were "sent down youths" – young people who had been allowed to return from the countryside.⁴⁸

It is noteworthy that "sent down youths" represented a plurality of the new workers. Permission to return to the cities, particularly to a job in a state-owned factory, was a highly desirable outcome for those who had been sent down, and it evidently remained an obtainable one. Demobilized soldiers, the second largest group, were likely to have been given their assignments in most cases more as a reward for service than because of any specific qualifications or education. The omission of "bad elements" – such as landlords and capitalists – from the data makes it difficult to determine how these less favoured groups fared. One other obvious point evident in the data is a significant increase in the average new workers' level of education during the Cultural Revolution, compared with the years 1956–1965. The number of new workers who were illiterate or who had only primary-school education dropped rapidly, while the proportion who had enrolled in junior high school more than tripled and the intake of workers with senior high-school degrees increased almost fivefold.⁴⁹ For the workers in these 11 sample work units, at least, the reform era narrative of a collapse in the education system during the Cultural Revolution simply does not fit.

By the time the 1983 survey had been compiled, 16.9 percent of all 149,995 workers for whom data was available were party members, of which the largest group – about 44 percent – had joined their work units between 1966 and 1976.⁵⁰ Given that less than four percent of the population at large were CCP members, 16.9 percent represented a high degree of penetration. There are two possible interpretations of the figure: either workers had a higher "political consciousness" than the general population, or alternatively the CCP had recruited too indiscriminately among this demographic, destroying the elitist "vanguard" status that had long been one of its chief strengths.

Across the 11 sample work units, 23 percent of the total workforce of 183,611 people were women. The figures show that during the Cultural Revolution, the number of women in the factories more than doubled; from 7,644 in 1965 to 16,944 in 1976. However, a gendered division of labour is still clearly visible in the data. Light industry and the services sector were dominated by women, while heavy industry, shipping and mining were almost exclusively a male preserve. To take the extreme cases, the Shanghai No. 17 Cotton Mill had the highest proportion of female workers at 64 percent, whereas the Guangzhou Ocean Shipping Company at the other end of the scale had a 99.8 percent male workforce. The Changchun First Automobile Factory, however, employed 26 percent women; an unusually high number for that industry.⁵¹

Data from the Anshan Iron and Steel Company, a well-known national entity, suggests that the division of labour inside the factories changed during the course of the Cultural Revolution, with women moving into formerly male jobs. After 1966, the first women joined its primary steel and chemical production lines. In 1976, some 26 percent of new workers were female.⁵²

Curiously, the data also shows that – not only during, but also before and after the Cultural Revolution – work units with a high percentage of women tended to have fewer party members than those dominated by men. For example, the Shanghai No. 17 Cotton Mill, Shanghai No. 1 Department Store and Nanjing Radio Factory all had very low numbers of party members, compared with heavily male units such as the Guangzhou Ocean Shipping Company, the Zhengzhou Railway Branch Bureau and the Datong Coal Mining Company.

This may be a sign that on average, the CCP considered female workers less qualified and less politically reliable as party members, or that a lack of support with childcare and other domestic labour (still considered very much a female preserve) presented a barrier to entry into political life. It is also possible that industrial workers simply enjoyed greater prestige than those in the light industry or services sectors, and that this status difference played out in the party's nomination process. The data from the 1983 survey suggests that some progress was made towards gender equality in the state sector during the Cultural Revolution. Nevertheless, to quote Mao's much-overused phrase, even with these improved figures, women hardly "held up half the sky".