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Asian Studies Review

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Space, politics and Labour: towards a spatial genealogy

of the Chinese work‐unit
a
David Bray
a
Department of Political Science , University of Melbourne
Published online: 27 Feb 2007.

To cite this article: David Bray (1997) Space, politics and Labour: towards a spatial genealogy of the Chinese work‐unit, Asian
Studies Review, 20:3, 35-43, DOI: 10.1080/03147539708713124

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 Space, Sex and Rock'n'Roll

The following three papers were presented as part of the "Space, Sex and
Rock'n'RoW panel of the Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference held
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at La Trobe University, Melbourne, 8-11 July 1996.

Space, Politics and Labour:

Towards a Spatial Genealogy of the Chinese Work-Unit

David Bray
Department of Political Science
University of Melbourne

Addressing the question of space Foucault once commented:

A whole history remains to be written of spaces—which would at the same time

be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural)—from the great strategies
of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat, institutional architecture from the
classroom to the design of hospitals, passing by economic and political installa-
tions .... Anchorage in a space is an economico-political form which needs to be
studied in detail.1

Linkages between space, power and history were taken up by Foucault in subse-
quent work, most famously, in Discipline and Punish, with his analysis of
Bentham's panopticon.2 For Foucault the panopticon exemplified the spatial
realisation of an entirely new economy of power—the prisoner caught, through
careful architectural arrangement, within an eternal unseen gaze, signalled the
rise of a disciplinary mode of power, one in which a complex range of individu-

1 Michel Foucault, "The Eye of Power" (Colin Gordon, tr.), in Colin Gordon (ed.),
Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1990), p. 149, (originally published as
"L'Oeil du Pouvoir" in the form of a preface to Jeremy Bentham, Le Panoptique,
Paris: Belfond, 1977, a French translation of Bentham's Panopticon).
2 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Alan Sheridan, tr.),
(New York: Vintage/Random House, 1979), pp. 195-228.
 36 Asian Studies Review Vol. 20, No. 3

ating biotechnical practices were brought to bear upon human subjects.3 That
particular spatial forms play a crucial role in this new economy of power and in
the production of an individuated mode of human subjectivity is central to
Foucault's argument, yet the spatial question remains an area little developed by
most who have taken up Foucault's methodological project. The aim of this
paper, then, is to redress this absence and engage in what Edward Soja has
referred to as "the reassertion of space in critical social theory".4

The Work-Unit as Spatial Form

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While Soja has lamented the absence of the spatial question within critical social
theory, this lack has been even more pronounced within the field of Chinese
Studies. In my research into the contemporary Chinese work-unit I have found
almost no reference to its spatial form amongst the major studies of this subject.
In particular the work of scholars such as Lu Feng, Andrew Walder and Brantly
Womack,5 entirely neglect this aspect of the work-unit.
This failure to consider space appears all the more puzzling when we realise
how clearly the archetypal work-unit is marked out as a distinct spatial form.
For what is significant about the Chinese work-unit is not just that it combines
the organisation of work with various social, political, economic and cultural
functions, but that it does so within a clearly defined spatial realm. The bound-
aries of each realm are marked by the high perimeter walls which enclose most
work-units. Within the highly ordered walled compounds thus created, almost
all aspects of work-unit members' lives are organised, arranged and policed.
Viewed in this light the Chinese work-unit exemplifies Foucault's suggestion that
particular spatial forms are bound up with particular modes of disciplinary and
governmental practice.

3 "They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone,
perfectly individualized and constantly visible", ibid., p. 200. According to Foucault
the principle applies far beyond the prison -- the school, the factory, the hospital and
the asylum are among the other kinds of institutions where these new arrangements of
spatio-power have become present. See also Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow,
Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (New York: Harvester
Press, 1982), pp. 188-97.
4 Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies (London: Verso, 1989), p. 23.
5 See Lu Feng, "Danwei: Yizhong Teshude Shehui Zuzhi Xingshi" ("The Unit: A Unique
Form of Social Organisation"), Zhongguo Shehui Kexue (Chinese Social Science)
(1989/1), 71-88; Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority
in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Brantly
Womack, "Transfigured Community: Neo-Traditionalism and Work Unit Socialism in
China", China Quarterly 126 (July 1991), 313-32.
 April 1997 Space, Sex and Rock'n'Roll 37

Towards a History of the Work-Unit's Spatial Form

But before exploring the contemporary spatial form in detail, indeed, in order to
understand it more fully, it is crucial to situate it historically. The origins of the
modem work-unit have been traced by Lu Feng to the formative Yan'an period
of the Chinese Communist Party.6 Others, however, have suggested that aspects
of its spatial form have a much longer history.
Yang Dongping, for instance, points out that the walled compound structure
of the modern work-unit strangely echoes the walled compound formation of the
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traditional China's courtyard houses.7 Yang suggests that this is more than
coincidental and in fact indicates a continuity in spatial practice from traditional
to contemporary China. This continuity in "wall culture", as Yang terms it, is
by no means superficial, for "enclosing walls demarcate the space of power".8
That is, walled compounds mark out spaces within which certain forms of power
and certain modes of social and political practice hold sway. But what are these
forms of power and how do they relate to the spatial form of the courtyard
homes of the past?

The Traditional House

Traditionally Chinese houses were built according to a standardised walled court-

yard form which, with minor regional variations, was ubiquitous to much of Han
influenced China.9 The widespread uniformity of this architectural form
suggests that a plausible link can be established between traditional spatial and
social practices. It is well known that the Confucian moral order of traditional
China turned upon rigid differentiation between social roles. What is perhaps
less well known is that this social order is itself reproduced architecturally in the
layout of the traditional house. The house was designed according to a spatial
hierarchy: different rooms within the house were accorded different status.
Rooms were distributed according to this hierarchy such that status within the
hierarchical family order was mirrored by the spatial positioning of each family

6 Lu Feng, ibid., p. 72. Yan'an in China's northwestern Shaanxi province was the
revolutionary base of the CCP in the years 1936-47. It holds an important historical
as well as symbolic position in the revolutionary heritage of contemporary China.
7 Yang Dongping, Chengshi jifeng: Beijing he Shanghai de wenhua jingshen (City
Monsoon: The Cultural Spirit of Beijing and Shanghai) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe
(The East Press), 1994), p. 254.
8 Ibid., (my translation).
9 Ronald G. Knapp, The Chinese House: Craft, Symbol and Folk Tradition (Hong Kong:
Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 1.
 38 Asian Studies Review Vol. 20, No. 3

member within the home.10 In this manner the standardised traditional house
was a physical grid upon which Confucian social/moral relationships were played
out. Spatial form, thus, played a very important role in bolstering the norms of
Confucian social order.
The most obvious example of this spatial hierarchy was the positioning of
the family patriarch. As head of the household he always occupied the central
hall which not only dominated the compound physically, being the largest room,
but also commanded a position such that all that occurred within the central
courtyard was transparent to his gaze.11 Lesser members of the family occu-
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pied side rooms according to rank, thus making clearly visible their individual
status as well as ensuring that their individual activities were open to the scrutiny
of the family head. Put simply, the traditional compound house was an architec-
tural machine for the reproduction of Confucian morality and social order.
Spatial order reproduced a form of collective subjectivity in which individual
family members were each ascribed specific roles within the hierarchical family
order.

Corporate Confucianism

But even given the common walled compound form, how could this Confucian
spatial regime be connected to the contemporary work-unit? A recent historical
study undertaken by Wen-hsin Yeh sheds some light upon this question.12 In
her study of the Bank of China in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s Yeh
uncovers a unique social form, in which traditional Confucian moral and spatial
relations have been redeployed within a modern corporate setting. Moreover,
the remarkable similarity in spatial form between the Bank's residential
compound and the work-units of contemporary China suggest that it may well be
a link, or intermediary stage, between the traditional and contemporary
compound forms. This is best illustrated through a description of the residential
compound:

10 Andrew Boyd, Chinese Architecture and Town Planning: 1500BC-AD1911 (London:

Alec Tiranti, 1962), pp. 76-82; and Frantic L.K. Hsu, Under the Ancestors Shadow:
Kinship, Personality and Social Mobility in China (California: Stanford University
Press, 1971), pp. 316-22.
11 A good example of how the traditional father dominates the courtyard house can be
found in the Confucian Analects, Bk. 16, Ch. 13, where an encounter between
Confucius and his son is described. This passage clearly illustrates how the social
"distance" between father and son within the Confucian hierarchical order is bolstered
by a spatial distance established through architectural form.
12 Wen-hsin Yeh, "Corporate Space, Communal Time: The Structure of Everyday Life in
Shanghai's Bank of China", American Historical Review (February 1995), 97-122.
 April 1997 Space, Sex and Rock'n 'Roll 39

The Bank of China's compound was a fully fenced area prominently marked by main
gates with the name and logo of the Bank on them .... Leading straight from the gates
into the centre of the landscaped compound was a long footpath that ended at the steps
of a large two-storey Western-style building, which was the residence of the branch
manager. Flanking the manager's residence, two to a side, were four more two-storey
buildings for the four associate managers, reduced in size to reflect the occupants'
comparative status. Behind these five buildings were eight units of three storeys facing
each other in two rows. Uniformly constructed in concrete, each apartment house was
partitioned into six standardised units with separate entrances, private kitchens and
bathrooms. These regular employee residences were limited to two bedrooms, so that
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each unit was only large enough for a couple with small children. Although space was
allowed in every residence for a maid, no room was made for the multi-generational
extended family, the norm for households in the Republican period.13

According to Yeh the new form of urban corporate culture this compound repre-
sented wedded a distinctly Confucian morality of personal conduct and social
interaction with the operation of a modern corporate enterprise. While
attempting to follow the latest in Western-style financial practices, internally the
Bank endeavoured to reproduce a form of Confucian moral order, through the
development of a complex set of disciplinary practices to which employees were
made subject.
This disciplinary regime was built around modelling the manager/clerk
relationship upon the father/son relationship of traditional Confucianism. As
Yeh illustrates, this involved not only the reverential deference of clerks to their
superiors but also participation in various activities aimed at moral self-
improvement. These included compulsory attendance at regular lectures given
by the management staff on ethics, moral conduct and so on,14 as well as
periodic ceremonies "analogous to the rituals traditionally observed by an
apprentice in relation to his master".15 The purpose of these institutionalised
practices was to mould the behaviour of employees to meet the norms of a new
form of communal corporate life based upon a reinterpretation of traditional
Confucian values.
The full significance of this neo-Confucian corporate world is realised when
we return to Yeh's description of the residential compound. It is now readily
apparent how spatial form was conceived in such a way as to mirror moral and
social order, much as the architectural form of the traditional compound house

13 Ibid., p. 109. The source cited by the author for this description is: Yihou,
"Gongtong shenghuo zhi yiban -- Jinzhongli" ("Communal Life in Jinzhongli"),
Zhonghang shenghuo (Life in the Bank of China), 1.4, (15 August 1932), 58-60.
14 Ibid., pp. 105-106.
15 Ibid., p. 107.
 40 Asian Studies Review Vol. 20, No. 3

reflected and reproduced the differentiated social relations inherent within the
traditional Confucian family.
The implications of this neo-Confucian spatial configuration are quite clear:
social differentiation was made abundantly visible through the size and position-
ing of buildings within the compound. The whole compound was dominated by
the bank manager's home, largest and most centrally located of all the buildings,
while the subordinate positions occupied by assistant managers' homes and ordin-
ary clerks' quarters reproduced the disciplinary order of the workplace within the
spatial order of the residential compound. In addition to this, the fact that the
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housing for clerks was only big enough for a small nuclear family points to the
eclipse of the traditional extended family and its replacement by the modern
Confucian enterprise, albeit one which models itself upon the same ideal of
Confucian hierarchical relationships.
In the spatial shift from the traditional family courtyard house to the Bank of
China's residential compound we find a re-employment of traditional Confucian
values in a modernised setting. And while the "enterprise as family" has
replaced the traditional family, analogous regimes of hierarchised enclosed space
are employed to reproduce distinctly collective modes of subjectivity. Thus,
whereas in the West the rise of modernity has been seen as pre-figuring the rise
of the individual subject, we do not find this nexus repeated in the Chinese
setting. Rather, modernity is adapted to accommodate a collectivist social order.
Such, I shall argue, is also the case with the contemporary work-unit, although
in the transition from the former to the latter the Confucian family is replaced by
the socialist factory as ideal collective subject. What unites the two is the
wedding of spatial form with social practice to reproduce a collective mode of
subjectivity.

Work-Unit Subjectivity

How then is this reflected in the architecture of the work unit-compound? It is

highly significant that working space and living space are combined within the
archetypal work-unit. In the first place this signifies that life under socialism is
centred around productivity, and secondly that the productive community so
constituted is founded upon a collective rather than individual mode of existence.
To be productive is of course the first duty of a socialist worker, but beyond
that, the productive process itself is held to be constitutive of proletarian
consciousness. Labouring together not only produces economic wealth, it also
produces social and political wealth by producing politically self-conscious
 April 1997 Space, Sex andRock'n'Roll 41

proletarians.16 The work-unit compound is the space within which this

economic and political idealism is played out.
The dual nature of the factory community is reflected in the architecture of
the compound. The workshop or office dominates the space, its central position-
ing embodying the ideal that labour is the highest form of social activity and that
collective production is the central focus of all work-unit life. Moreover the fact
that there is no private space within the compound (even family apartments
afford only a conditional form of privacy) indicates that there is no place for
individuality within the collective-oriented work-unit.
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While the overall spatial arrangements bolster the collectivist nature of work-
unit life, the architectural configuration of workers' accommodation also reflects
the elevation of the communal over the individual. Students, soldiers and
apprentices live six or eight to a dormitory room, unmarried staff often two or
three together, and meals are generally taken in large dining halls. Moreover,
while married couples and families usually have their own room or flat, even
these are regularly open to collective inspection through various work-unit
organisational practices. For example, the internal "sanitation" and "spiritual
civilisation" committees make regular inspections to assess and compare (pingbi)
households for the periodic "civilised household" (wenming jiating)
competitions.17
The individual household is also open to collective scrutiny through the
household register. It is by no means coincidental that in police parlance the
register is commonly known as the "window into the household". Maintained by
the local police, it records the history and particulars of each member of each
household—such information as place of origin, gender, marital status, race,
religion, profession, family background and education level. It is constantly

16 The theory that the process of advanced collective labour would result in the
development of progressive proletarian consciousness originates with the work of the
Machist philosopher A.A. Bogdanov (see Bogdanov, A Short Course of Economic
Science (J. Fineburg, tr.), London: Labour Publishing Company, 1923). Slightly
more controversial perhaps is Vladislav Todorov's contention that the major function
of communist factories was to produce proletarians rather than commodities. "Labor
is a ceremony begetting the communal body of the working class. The worker labors
for the sake of the factory-poem, not for the sake of the market. The aim of labor in
the factory is the poetic completeness of the factory itself" (see Vladislav Todorov,
Red Square, Black Square: Organon for Revolutionary Imagination, Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1995, p. 10).
17 See Barge Bakken, "The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control and
the Dangers of Modernity in China", published as Rapport Nr. 9, Department of
Sociology, University of Oslo (1994).
 42 Asian Studies Review Vol. 20, No. 3

updated through regular inspection and under close liaison between the police
and the work-unit administration.18
In addition to the household register, the work-unit authorities keep
personnel files {renshi dangan) on each member of the unit. These files contain
detailed records of work performance, awards, information on participation in
political organisations, political history, class background, any criminal offences
or disciplinary misdemeanours and any other information considered relevant.
The personnel file is a detailed record of a worker's life, and follows the worker
to each new workplace in the event of transfer. It is regularly updated with
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assessments of work performance and political attitude and is referred to when

decisions need to be made on matters such as promotion, transfer, reward or
punishment. Through the regime of personnel files the individual worker comes
under a form of constant surveillance. However, it differs from the form of
surveillance described by Foucault in his study of the Panopticon. The worker
in the Chinese work-unit is surveyed not in order to individuate; on the contrary,
the aim of the personnel file is to reinforce the commitment of the work-unit
subject to the norms of collective life.19
That the socio/spatial form of the work-unit produces a collective rather than
individuated subject is born out by Lisa Rofel's analysis of the disciplinary
effects of spatial organisation in the contemporary Chinese factory.20 Rofel's
work suggests that the spatial discipline of the Chinese factory does not enable an
isolating, individuating gaze such as Foucault has outlined in reference to the
panopticon. Indeed as Rofel points out, attempts to establish such individuated
disciplinary relations in order to meet the requirements of "scientific
management" and profit maximisation in reform era industry have been less than
successful. It seems apparent that spatial relations which were born out of a
long collectivist heritage are not easily adapted to serve the demands of an
individualised form of workplace discipline.

Conclusion

In a period when the state-run sector of Chinese industry is undergoing an

economic crisis which may well tear asunder the social fabric that was once the
socialist work-unit, it is timely to reconsider the origins of that social order so as
to better understand the nature of the present transformation. In suggesting the

18 Michael Dutton, From Patriarchy to the People: Policing and Punishment in China
(London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 214-22.
19 Ibid., pp. 222-36.
20 Lisa Rofel, "Rethinking Modernity: Space and Factory Discipline in China", Cultural
Anthropology 7, 1, 93-114.
 April 1997 Space, Sex and Rock'n 'Roll 43

importance of spatial formations to the emergence of particular modes of social

order, this paper has outlined a new and different way of approaching these
contemporary questions. Indeed, I have argued that the perspective afforded by
a spatial analysis demonstrates that the contemporary work-unit is informed by
socio/spatial practices substantially predating the rise of Communism. This
recognition implies that transformations currently under way within Chinese
society are far more complex than being simply the outcome of a transition from
socialist to market economy. Therefore, while it may not be the "main game",
further research into the hitherto neglected spatial question can only add to our
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understanding of the complexities at play within contemporary China.

"Dangerous Amusements":
Prostitution and Karaoke Halls in Contemporary China

Elaine Jeffreys
Department of Political Science
University of Melbourne

The term "dangerous amusements" comes from a text by Mark Connelly which
details the construction of prostitution as a socio-political problem in early
twentieth-century America.1 While it may seem somewhat odd to begin a
discussion of prostitution in present-day China by way of reference to this
particular period in American history, Connelly's work offers a useful point of
departure for three reasons. First, his use of the term "dangerous amusements"
evokes the dualism inherent in most common understandings of prostitution:
namely, that the phenomenon of prostitution constitutes both a source of individ-
ual pleasure and material gain, and also a potential threat to the values and
interests of society at large. The tensions present in this reading also help
explain why the prostitute subject has been variously constructed as a sexual
healer, a worker engaged in an inevitable or even necessary social practice, and
as a depraved and diseased figure that threatens to rot the body politic.2 The
notion of "dangerous amusements" thus highlights the fact that the term prostitu-

1 Mark Thomas Connelly, The Response to Prostitution in the Progressive Era (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).
2 For a discussion of various historical and contemporary discourses on the subject of
prostitution see Shannon Bell, Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).