State Management of Careers, Workplace Conflict, and Regime Legitimacy in Socialist China

Abstract

Recent research indicates that career mobility under Chinese Communist rule has been shaped by state political screening and shifts in official ideology. Drawing on Weber's concept of modern bureaucracy and a study of schoolteachers in the Mao era , this article suggests that within the workplace official control of careers engendered an inferior and heterogeneous corps of management personnel, a deep schism between management and the staff, and a fractured division of labor. The antitheses of the rational features of modern bureaucracy, these arrangements fostered workplace friction and political resentment that precipitated post-Mao reforms. Primary evidence comes from recently declassified government documents and firsthand interviews with retired teachers.