The Chinese Work Unit and Transient Labor in the Transition from Socialism

With the coming of economic reform in China, migrant peasant labor has entered industry in large numbers. Unlike such workers in the past-who served as temporaries from the communes contracted to produce in urban state firms, or who remained in the rural areas, toiling for their units in small industries (see Walder, 1986: 48-56)-this section of today's floating population' is working full-time, and in large numbers, as wage-compensated, individually contracted employees in factories.2 Neither the hiring of these peasants by state firms nor their employment by enterprises in the countryside is new, but today the scale is far larger and the procedures more regularized than before the economic reforms; moreover, there is one element that is altogether novel in the People's Republic of China (PRC): people from the fields are now also finding jobs in the foreign-funded firms (FFFs) that began to appear in China in the 1980s.3 So today we find once(and sometime-)4 farmers in factories of two gross types: those within the state sector, in the old urban state-owned industrial factories, called the danwei (or work unit),5 with its well-known panoply of welfare benefits; and those in several types of units outside it: the so-called collective town and village enterprises