Robert Cliver, Red Silk. Class, Gender and Revolution in China’s Yangzi Delta Silk Industry.

Cambridge, Harvard University Asia Center, “Harvard East Asian Monograph”, 2020, xv, 436 p.

Robert Cliver’s work explores the working-class condition in the filatures (silk thread mills) and silk weaving factories during the first years of the communist regime, a little-known period in the social history of contemporary China. Red Silk brings together numerous individual stories to compare the status of female workers in Shanghai and Wuxi in the early 1950s, and to gauge the extent and limits of the social transformation under the new regime established after 1949. Although very few female workers in Shanghai and Jiangnan¹ were members of the Communist Party, Cliver provides a very detailed analysis of the control established by the Party’s organisations in the factories of Shanghai and Wuxi, which were two key centres of the silk industry. The old guilds, which often brought together employers and employees, were reorganised and came under the strict control of the authorities. Inter-regional professional associations were dismantled, then restructured at provincial and municipal level, using strategies that met the requirements of the political body. The unions, which had formerly been controlled by gang leaders (gong tou) were rebuilt from above, under the leadership of the Party.

The book has seven chapters, which examine the social and political context of the silk industry in the Yangzi Delta. In the 1940s (chapters 1 and 2), the implementation of the New Democracy² policy in private industry above all led to the introduction of new functions for unions. These functions, never before seen by Chinese workers, were to espouse the Party’s directives and conform to its ideology (chapter 3). Chapter clearly reveals how workers in Shanghai were able to take advantage of the new situation (restoration of the silk industry and state-contracted production), while chapter 5 concerns the transition from New Democracy to a Campaign Society. Workers’ actions (strikes and spontaneous walkouts) are examined in chapter 6, which highlights the differences between the status of women working in Shanghai’s silk filatures, which was relatively privileged compared to that of female workers in Wuxi. The final chapter studies how the working class was increasingly brought to heel, forcing workers to submit to the imperatives of state-led industrialisation.

Drawing on information from the Shanghai and Wuxi municipal archives but also from internal trade union documents (letters, petitions, meeting minutes) and from interviews with women who were workers in the 1950s, Red Silk reconstructs a multi-layered account showing the complexity of union action under the new regime. Arguably, the labour world appears heterogeneous and fragmented, as shown by literature on the matter, although these works focus more on the mid to late 1950s (Gipouloux, Hoffman, Perry, Sheehan, Walder). However, with great finesse, the author captures the individual or group strategies that accepted, rejected or distorted the Party’s initiatives.

Cliver emphasises the contrast between Shanghai’s weavers (some of whom, having become small employers or silk entrepreneurs, were Party members like their workers) and the Jiangnan filatures whose female workers had nothing in common with their employers and had no connexion with the Party. In the early 1950s, a capital-labour cooperation was set up under the leadership of the Party. This worked relatively well in Shanghai but discouraged traditional protest tactics (spontaneous actions and autonomous movements) among the women who worked in the filatures. Cliver perhaps exaggerates the division between the silk weavers (mostly men) and the female workers in the filatures. Gender-based discrimination determined their actions, just as much as professional status or the ties created by a shared geographical origin. However, it is certain that these different factors (profession, geographical origin and gender) created dividing lines that differentiated groups of workers and affected their capacity to benefit from the opportunities opened up by the new regime.

We might also ask whether, in getting as close as possible to his sources, Cliver insists too much on the breadth of the reforms effected in the silk industry by the new regime, thus underestimating the improvements made by the Guomindang, before the Japanese invasion. This area of research is only briefly addressed in the book’s first chapter (pages 40-46), when the authors examine how the nationalist regime had improved working conditions and technical procedures in the filatures of the Yangzi Delta during the Nanjing decade (1927-1937). The social terrain and the technical environment were not undeveloped when the Party came into power in 1949, contrary to its discourse. It is necessary to take a step back to analyse the new vocabulary that the Party imposed to belittle many workers demands: “economism” or “ultra-democratism”? The learning of the newspeak imposed on Shanghai’s residents depended on this repackaging of language.

Chapter 6 is undoubtedly the heart of the work and its major contribution. Cliver notes that during the two years after the Party came into power, Shanghai’s weavers obtained many privileges, more because of their status as members of a well-connected community of workers than because of their support for the Party’s policies or ideology. However, this was not the case for all groups of workers, including those in Wuxi, the centre of the initial phase of the silk industry: unwinding the silk from the cocoons. Thus, Cliver draws a contrast between a working-class aristocracy in Shanghai and a female proletariat subject to patriarchal employment relationships in Wuxi.

The key to Cliver’s interpretation is that the absence of support for the struggle of female employees in the silk filatures and their working conditions cannot be attributed to ideology alone, or to the policies of the new authorities. To understand this situation, it is essential to take into account the particularities of the industrial sector in question, the status of the business, the role of industry associations and the establishment of unions. There were no major changes to the female filature workers’ working conditions after 1949 and up until 1952, despite the state-contracted production and the presence of Party members in state-owned enterprises and semi-public companies. There were no sanitary facilities or refectories, dormitories were overcrowded and working days were long (ten and a half hours in 85% of filatures). The wage scale in Wuxi’s filatures paid men more than women for equivalent work. Based on statistics from 1951, Cliver shows that the least-qualified male workers earned 80% to 100% more than female winders. These disparities would remain greater in Wuxi than in Shanghai until 1952.

Paradoxically, the class cooperation policy that was meant to benefit both capital and labour seems to have been detrimental to the status of female workers in Wuxi, in that practices previously adopted by such women to defend their interests were now forbidden. In the context of the New Democracy policy, Cliver detects a collusion between employers and male workers to resist female workers’ demands or question the hegemony of foremen in workshops. This situation persisted until 1952. Although the capital-labour cooperation policy benefited male workers in Shanghai, it seems to have disadvantaged female workers in Wuxi.

The author describes in detail the democratic reform campaign in Wuxi, its goals and its development with the string of accusations and denunciations against what was criticised as a feudal way of management. It shows how the Party identified counter-revolutionary elements in the unions, on the pretext that these elements sometimes remained under the influence of secret societies. Cliver rightly emphasizes the modest results of the campaign and the discrepancy between the stated goals and the methods adopted. Male foremen became the target of struggle meetings and were forced to make public confessions.

This book offers a remarkable contribution to our understanding of the particular relationships between the working class and the new regime in the early 1950s, thus shedding light on the matrix underlying certain social divisions in China today.

François Gipouloux

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1. Southern Jiangsu, next to Shanghai. ↩︎
2. The “New Democracy” period lasted from 1949 to 1953. During this period, the Chinese people fought against three enemies: imperialism, feudalism and bureaucratic and comprador capitalism. ↩︎

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