Beijing Review: "The Workers Are the Masters," June 29, 1973 This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
This is an archive of the former website of the Maoist Internationalist Movement, which was run by the now defunct Maoist Internationalist Party - Amerika. The MIM now consists of many independent cells, many of which have their own indendendent organs both online and off. MIM(Prisons) serves these documents as a service to and reference for the anti-imperialist movement worldwide.
Maoist Internationalist Movement

Source: "The Workers Are the Masters," Beijing Review 16, no. 26, 29 June 1973, 11-13.

Transcribed by an HC, May 12, 2005


BEIJING REVIEW

June 29, 1973


Socialist Industry

The Workers Are the Masters [pt. 1]

by Our Correspondents

The first in a series of three reports on a state-owned factory: its birth, growth and system of ownership.

One hundred and two years ago in 1871, the proletarian poet Pottier wrote in The Internationale: "We have been naught, we shall be all!"

We found this lofty aim of the proletariat being realized in Shanghai, China's biggest industrial centre.

We were there just before May 1, International Labour Day. Interviewing workers and members of the leading body in a number of factories, we heard similar accounts of past want and privation, now gone for ever: of the dreaded shadow of unemployment, also a thing of the past; and of today's new life spoken of in glowing terms.

Just what is the position of the workers today in the factories? "We are the masters in our factory," was how it was often put to us. Facts substantiate it in terms of the system of ownership, leadership and management.

The Shanghai Watch Factory is one illustration.

Two Figures: 18 and 2,500,000

The very existence of this big modern factory is a tribute to the labour, ingenuity and struggle of the working class. In the spotlessly clean watch assembling workshop, worker-technician Wang Chia-teh related the story of the "Shanghai" wrist-watches' birth.

Shanghai before liberation was an international watch exposition with watches galore -- every make and description from many countries. Not one, ironically enough, was made in China.

After liberation the demand soared as the working people began buying them. Fifty-eight craftsmen from 26 clock-making or watch repair shops were formed into a team by the government to make China's first watches in 1955. With no blueprints to go by and only the most old-fashioned gear for making clocks and minor watch parts, they were sustained by an overriding desire to manufacture, for the first time, watches for their own country.

Wang Chia-teh was one of the 58. Recalling those days, he took us back to the narrow-walled repair shop where, stripped to the waist in the sultry heat of a Shanghai summer, he bent over to put the delicate mechanisms together. It was 72 hours later when he held up the first finished product with loving care. By October 1, New China's sixth birthday, Wang and his colleagues had a present ready -- a first lot of 18 watches. One of these incidentally, we saw on display in the factory reception room. Compared to the automatic calendar watches and other men's and women's watches the factory now makes, this first-born was not much to look at. Yet recalling the sweat and hopes that went into its labour pangs, we looked at it with great affection.

Of the 18 watches resulting from those initial endeavours, some developed the strange quirk of running smoothly on the table but stopping as soon as they were put on. The workers were undismayed. The first step had been taken, and they were sure to go on from there.

[A photograph]
From small beginnings: The assembling workshop today. Wang Chia-teh ( standing ), one of the makers of the first wrist-watches produced in Shanghai.

[p. 12] Preparatory to setting up the Shanghai Watch Factory, a working group went into operation the following year under the auspices of the municipal industrial department. The workshop was first housed in a run-down store, 50 metres square. Later they moved into an old apartment building (they did not get to the present site until 1960). The government allocated some equipment and personnel. After two years of trial-production, they got their final blueprints and technological process. Small-scale production then began.

The first "Shanghai" wrist-watches reached the market on July 1, 1958, the anniversary of the Party's founding. Wang and his mates, too excited to stay in bed, were up at the crack of dawn and strolled out into the streets. They were surprised to see groups of people waiting outside the shops to buy the new products, about which the papers had published news. Overwhelmed by this proof of the people's enthusiasm for Chinese-made watches, they promised themselves that they would, under the leadership of the Party and the state, help build a large watch factory.

They kept that promise. Output that first year, 1958, was 13,000; by 1972, the figure was 2.5 million. Quality was up to standard and customers flocked to buy them. The factory's staff had swelled to 3,650.

No Easy Road

The road was not an easy one. Behind those figures is a story of sharp struggle between the socialist and the capitalist lines. Vice-secretary Kung Chien-ping of the Party committee, the factory's leading organ, told us something about it.

There was a sharp clash of opinion on how the factory should develop when it was first set up in 1958. There were those who argued that big imports of machinery and equipment from abroad and setting up costly workshops and installations were imperative for operations requiring such precision. They submitted a plan -- a sluggard's plan as it turned out -- which set three years for designing, five for trial-production and ten for full production.

[A photograph]
Learning on the job: Studying an enlarged watch model.

The whole thing smacked strongly of the influence of the revisionist line in running industry advocated by Liu Shao-chi and his followers. Most of the workers, on the other hand, had but one idea and on plan: There must be a "big leap." Throughout the country the year of the Big Leap had started, inspired by the general line formulated by Chairman Mao of "going all out, aiming high and achieving greater, faster, better and more economical results in building socialism." The erroneous line was thwarted. The factory went into production that very year. The next year, 1959, saw 74,000 "Shanghai" watches being sold over shop counters.

The third year of the plant's infancy, 1960, was another year of trial. China's national economy was in temporary difficulties due to serious natural disasters and betrayal by the Soviet revisionist leading clique which withdrew all Soviet specialists and experts. Liu Shao-chi and his clique were clamouring for a drastic cut-down in industry, for retrogression, as it were, and "It'd better be a big one," they demanded. Could the watch factory survive? It not only did just that but made another leap: Production went up to 450,000 that year. This was the way the workers gave their answer.

Interference by Liu Shao-chi's revisionist line, however, had its effects in the next five years, 1961-65, and hampered the workers' initiative. Production still rose, but the rate was slow and the one-million mark remained beyond reach.

One of the effects of the erroneous line was that the factory leadership established an overly large administrative set-up and made many irrational rules and regulations. If a worker wanted to introduce an innovation, he had to go through a lot of red tape: five okays were needed before he could start -- from the technicians in charge of the technological process in his own workshop and at the factory level, from his workshop head, from the head of the technical section and, finally, from the chief engineer. The machinery was graded: the few imported lathes, Class A, could only be repaired by technicians at the factory level; Chinese-made lathes, Class B, could only be repaired by [p. 13] workshop technicians; and only workers' self-made equipment, Class C, could be repaired by the workers. Once when a worker changed a screw on a new modern lathe, he was called upon by an irate technical department to make a self-criticism.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution beginning in 1966 was a fierce blow to the revisionist line. The factory, too, thoroughly criticized its influences. The productive forces emancipated by the revolution greatly boosted output and improved quality.

Vice-secretary Kung said: "The energy and resourcefulness of the workers are inexhaustible. Do you know that our workers not only run the machines, they design and make some themselves? They've made about a third of our equipment. Actually, 88 per cent of our equipment is made in China. Our machines are pretty complicated. The smallest lathe is 30 cm. long and 10 cm. high, whereas the biggest is as tall as a two-storey building. Watch accessories are generally measured by 'the width of a silk thread' -- one-hundredth of a millimetre. What does all this boil down to? It boils down to the fact that great things can be done so long as we follow Chairman Mao's instruction to 'whole-heartedly rely on the working class.' "

Ownership by the Whole People

That the workers are "masters in their own factories" is borne out, first of all, by the fact that all the means of production in the watch factory, as in all large factories and plants in China, are owned by the socialist state. This form of ownership is ownership by the whole people, a form of public ownership in which the state under the proletarian dictatorship represents the proletariat and all other labouring people in owning the means of production and the products.

Lu Yung-chang, another vice-secretary of the Party committee, reeled off some basic facts. The factory buildings, equipment and installations as well as funds all belong to the state. The buildings, for instance, used to belong to one of Shanghai's many cigarette packing plants. As labour productivity went up, a greater quantity of cigarettes was being produced by each packing plant. In 1960, the government decided to stop one of the bigger plants and turn the buildings over to the watch factory. The cigarette packets did not lose their jobs -- they were transferred to the watch factory, where they were helped to learn the ropes.

The watch factory is directly under the Shanghai Municipal Clock and Watch Company, which is in charge of all city factories making clocks and watches and their accessories, such as the jewels. Like similar companies in other lines, the Clock and Watch Company is under the industrial department of the municipal people's government (now the Shanghai Municipal Revolutionary Committee).

As a state enterprise, all watch factory activities are included in the state plan. Its annual production plan is drawn up after full discussion by the workers in the light of the needs of the state plan for developing the national economy. The state allocates all major raw and other materials. All products are sold by state commercial departments. Even the leading comrades of the factory itself, vice-secretary Lu informed us, have to buy their "Shanghai" watches in a shop, as the factory cannot sell any.

[A photograph]
Quality first: Checking finished products.

What about profits? Lu said with quiet humour: "Oh, yes, we make quite a lot, but the profit is essentially different from that of a capitalist entperise. Every cent belongs to the state. The state treasury gets it all."

By increasing production, practising economy and reducing production costs, he said, the factory gets a sizable profit each year. This money, of course, is used by the state to expand socialist construction and raise the people's living standards.

Profits are certainly not the level of production, Comrade Lu assured us. Though the automatic calendar watches, for example, are relatively high-priced and bring in greater profit, the factory does not produce many of them but largely makes ordinary watches considering the present purchasing power of the majority of the labouring people.

With wages gradually rising, 36 per cent of the watch factory workers took home bulkier pay envelopes last year. Welfare services are increasing. The money does not come from the profits, as the watch factory has no right to dispose of them on its own. These material betterments are by and large the same in all lines and come as a result of the state's unified plan for gradually raising the people's living standards on the basis of expanding production.