What Lenin said of Russian workers highlights an important but understudied problem of many states that seek to jump-start industrialization through the rapid mobilization of capital and labor: building new factories also requires new norms and rules governing the employment relationship of the people who are to work in factories. These norms and rules can be imposed by fiat, but they are almost always subject to informal negotiation among state officials, managers, and workers. Such informal negotiations take place internally within the firm, especially when unions and other independent associations are repressed or lack the authority to represent workers’ interests. In many cases of state-led industrialization, it is within public enterprises that workers come face-to-face with officials of the regime.

This book examines how officials, workers, and managers created institutions of labor management to cope with the transformation of China's industrial sector, from the early stages of industrial development to the imposition of a centrally planned economy in the 1950s. Labor management institutions can be defined as the formal and informal rules and structures that regulate how workers are hired, paid, organized, and supervised.