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Chapter 2 discusses local politics at the municipal government level. It focuses on land battles in the urban core between high‐ranking state units (or “socialist land masters”) and municipal governments. It argues that while the socialist land masters occupy premium land parcels inherited from the planned economy, the municipal government's authority is reinforced by a modernist discourse, Western urban planning doctrines, and recent policies that grant authority over state‐owned urban land to the territorial government. Rather than settling the matter of power in the city, however, municipal leaders' granted authority is tested and defined by their political, regulatory, organizational, and moral authority in negotiations with those above, within, and below them. The municipal government's regulatory capacity is especially challenged by a fragmented real estate industry that includes players from state, non‐state, and hybrid sectors.

This chapter provides an outline of the administrative apparatus of the party/state in its early years, and considers the process of collectivization in terms of the actual workings of cooperative farming rather than the usual focus on the expropriation of private land. Expanding responsibilities of planning and political oversight weigh heavily on government offices, especially at the lower levels of the bureaucracy, which were ill equipped and poorly staffed to deal with the onerous workload. Attempts to promote collectivization were largely rebuffed by self-sufficient landowners, but the poorest members of village communities opt to join cooperatives to pool their meager resources. The party/state devotes extensive efforts to explaining work units to villagers, and convince them that the new system is worth adopting. Labor competitions were organized as another means of increasing labor productivity though they were largely unsuccessful in doing so. Brutal and widespread violence was unleashed on villagers in the name of the class war, a struggle the Communist Party hoped to win by teaching party members and average folk how to recognize the enemies of socialism. The chapter ends with a discussion of the clashes between government agencies over opposing agendas.

Chapter 3 describes the institutional foundations of the Chinese work unit system and the practices of worker participation in the early 1960s, after the system was fully established and before the onset of the Cultural Revolution. Participatory institutions included self-managing teams on the shop floor, technical innovation groups, factory elections, representative congresses, and other mechanisms designed to solicit suggestions from below, learn about and defuse employees’ grievances and concerns, and mobilize workers to monitor and criticize factory leaders. Despite high levels of participation, predicated on lifetime job tenure and relatively egalitarian distribution, industrial governance was democratic only in a very limited sense. The party insisted on maintaining a political monopoly and harshly suppressed any hint of independent political activity. Not only was the scope of workers’ influence restricted largely to the shop floor, but they also had little autonomy. Although participation was extensive, the system was more paternalistic than democratic.

This chapter depicts the evolution and growth of industry in Zouping from roughly 1985 to 2012. It pays particular attention to the histories of the two largest conglomerates in Zouping: the Weiqiao Group and the Xiwang Group. It analyzes these two groups as instances of “local capital,” with the term local indicating that the groups were constrained by their social embeddedness in local communities and the term capital indicating the groups’ drive to constantly seek out higher rates of profit. The pressures of capital may be seen in the histories of privatization both groups experienced, while the social embeddedness comes through, in part, in the depictions of their “work-unit culture”—cultures in which workers are treated as relatively permanent members of the firms. The workers receive a wide range of benefits in addition to their wages, including housing.

Chapter 7 looks at the impact on factory governance of the initial reforms carried out during the first decade and a half after Mao’s death in 1976. These reforms left the fundamental features of the work unit system—public ownership and permanent job tenure—in place, and institutional forms of participation, including staff and workers congresses, were revived and enhanced. During the “long 1980s” workers enjoyed substantial influence, especially with regard to the distribution of wages and bonuses, housing, and other welfare entitlements. Although the Chinese Communist Party had by then renounced its original class-leveling mission, workers effectively resisted new distribution policies that violated the egalitarian ethos that had long prevailed under the work unit system. The latter years of this period, however, also marked the beginning of the erosion of industrial citizenship as temporary employment was expanded and the power of the factory director was reinforced in the second half of the decade.

This chapter examines folk storytelling performances staged in and by various government work units or state-owned enterprises for public relations purposes, with particular emphasis on how the production of folk cultural tradition became intertwined with danwei business promotion in Yan'an. Using the case of northern Shaanxi storytelling, the chapter considers how the practice of folk tradition is linked to work-unit messages and, sometimes, national ideology promotion. It discusses the ways in which folk cultural production today concerns complicated political, commercial, and social relations with work units. It shows how the production of folk tradition is increasingly adapted to danwei public relations events and campaigns, while, at the same time, danwei events also become the spaces wherein traditional folk art forms find new developments, audiences, and visibility in the age of urbanization and marketization.

Chapter 7 presents the Maoist theory of class struggle and its manifestation in dealing with common crimes and political offenses by legal (and extralegal) and judicial (and extrajudicial) means. Such practices originated in the pre-1949 revolutionary experiences and culminated in the disastrous Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). The chapter explains the reasons why the CCP did not find it necessary to have a criminal code and a criminal procedural law, and how the mechanisms of social engineering that the CCP designed and developed helped social control and crime prevention. It traces the rationales and practices of “reform through labor” and “reeducation through labor” during the Mao era and after. It describes the political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s that reached the point of lawlessness in the Cultural Revolution.

Chapter 8 turns to the Maoist practices of resolving civil disputes through mediation by courts, workplace leaders, and residents committees, guided by the notion that such disputes were “contradictions among the people.” The focus is on the impact of the Marriage Law of 1950, since other kinds of civil disputes were rather rare under the Maoist Socialist system. The principle of gender and marital equality and the way marital disputes and divorces were handled by community and workplace leaders as well as courts were continuation of the same practices in the revolutionary years. The emphasis on mediation before adjudication in divorce cases was also similar to the earlier times, even though mediators were different.