Hukou, danwei, and status differentiation: the rise and fall of danwei community at a Cement Plant

Existing research on the danwei system has long concentrated on the ‘typical danwei system’ of Northeast China and the Third Front construction, paying insufficient attention to ‘diverse forms’ of the danwei system and to long-term change. Taking the Anqing Baiqitun Cement Plant as a case, the author draws on cross-verification across multiple sources, including fieldwork and oral interviews, internal archives, institutional documents, and news reports, to trace, from macro and micro perspectives, the trajectory of the plant’s danwei society from its establishment through its disintegration to its persistence to the present. The study finds that typical features of the danwei system, namely the communalization of the work unit, its closedness, and its administrative territorialization, were weakened in this case, and the work unit’s provision of social functions was limited. The hukou system, however, shaped unequal access to employment, welfare, housing allocation, and children’s opportunities among banbianhu and dual-worker households, with consequences that remained visible in their residential trajectories after enterprise restructuring. The article argues that formal incorporation into a work unit did not necessarily ensure equal access to its resources for workers’ families, revealing how hukou shaped the boundaries of danwei membership and the social entitlements associated with industrial citizenship.