Rebuilding and Unraveling the Factory Moral Regime in China’s "Long 1980s"

Jiaqi Sun, Stony Brook University

Why did the political control system in factories break down during the 1989 Tiananmen movement? Beyond elite-conflict and legitimacy explanations, this paper proposes a new explanation based on historical institutionalism of morality: the political–economic crisis of the early 1980s compelled the party-state to reconstruct a moralized system of labor management, yet it failed to develop a coherent moral justification capable of reconciling political and economic objectives, ultimately leading to the implosion of this system. To make this argument, the article first shows how morality was situated at the core of the Mao-era factory regime, while also examining how the separation between “economics” and “politics” in the late Mao era constituted an underlying tension within this system. The article then examines the efforts of party-state elites in the early 1980s to revive and reconstruct the factory moral regime—a historical process often overlooked by scholars. Divergent visions among different elites on this issue gave rise to a competitive field over what should count as “Ideological and Political Work.” Third, the article shows how the moral disembedding of the economy throughout the “long 1980s” created difficulties for the functioning of this regime, turning its reform into a “whack-a-mole” game between building efficient enterprises and securing workers’ compliance. Finally, the article discusses how the radical reform of the moral regime in the late 1980s created symbolic space for bottom-up rebellion. By examining this case, the article develops a theoretical framework for a historical institutionalism of morality, shedding light on the role of morality in large-scale historical transformations such as the transition from socialism to capitalism.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 117. Morality in Economic and Political Transformations