Participative Management and Worker Control in China

Abstract

While Chinese experiments with participative management practices in industry comprise perhaps the most radical and massive such effort in the modern world, they are still among the least understood in the West. The present article is an effort to define more clearly the boundaries of worker participation in China and the limits of worker control. Through brief, but strategic comparisons with forms of worker control in different political and economic settings, and through critical scrutiny of the various participative forms employed in China, this article attempts to sketch out the configuration of participation and control in Chinese collective forms, and to place them in a broader context of organizations exhibiting "collectivist-democratic" features. We offer (1) an examination of the political considerations which have shaped these experiments; (2) an account of Party organization and how its control is exercised; (3) an outline of the limits on worker control imposed by China's industrial planning system; and (4) a description and critical analysis of the major participative forms employed in Chinese industry from 1956 to the present.