A work unit or danwei () is the name given to a place of employment in the People's Republic of China. The term danwei remains in use today, as people still use it to refer to their workplace. Prior to Deng Xiaoping's reform and opening up, a work unit acted as the first step of a multi-tiered hierarchy linking each individual with the Chinese Communist Party infrastructure. Work units were the principal method of implementing party policy. The work unit provided lifetime employment and extensive socioeconomic welfare—"a significant feature of socialism and a historic right won through the Chinese Revolution."
Background
The role of the danwei was modelled in part on the Soviet kombinat. Some scholars believe that the social, economic, and political functions of the danwei could be traced back to the pre-communist financial institutions in the 1930s, the labor movement between the 1920s and 1940s, and the rural revolutionary models of organization in the Yan'an period. To accelerate the pace of industrialization and to create a new urban working class, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) looked up to the Soviet experience and translated thousands of works of Soviet enterprise management literature. The CCP used basic principles of industrial organization and management from Soviet literature to draft its own industrial management system and create a new factory hierarchy of authority and administration. To follow the Soviet socialist economic model, which aimed to achieve full employment, the Chinese work unit system guaranteed permanent employment. This means that a factory could not easily fire its workers and the workers could not switch to another work unit unless they obtained special permissions. Among them, the heavy industrial work units, commonly viewed as the prototype of the socialist workplace, were granted priority for resources. During the Maoist era, the work unit served as multifunctional urban institutions that encompassed various aspects of urban livelihoods. Danwei contained facilities for work and daily living, including production facilities, offices, residential areas, social services, child-care facilities, dry goods stores, public toilets, bath houses, meeting rooms, clubs for retirees, and sports courts and fields. Larger danwei might have schools or in-patient healthcare clinics. Therefore, work units provided essential social resources to its members when the market economy had not yet fully developed. The industrial danwei was a state institution. In the danwei, urban Chinese lived and worked together in a collective and egalitarian environment. Thus, Danweis were themselves a product of socialist ideology but furthermore, they were "key sites" for the CCP-led government to promote their egalitarian ideology. As a result of danweis being such a socially enclosed and monitored environment, people became hyperaware of their behaviour and strived for absolute conformity which gave way for the "penetration of the Leninist state in urban society." Danweis became successful vessels for political mobilization as the encouraged relations between employees were founded upon and channelled into political participation, often against an enemy. An example of this would be the massive workers' strikes during Mao Zedong's Hundred Flowers Campaign where in the span of 6 months between 1956 and 1957, over 10,000 strikes had occurred nationwide in favour of Chairman Mao's attack on bureaucratism.
The disintegration of the danwei system
During the Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, both administrative agencies and production regulation in relation to danweis were extremely disrupted. In the years during the reform and opening up beginning in 1976 and ending in 1989, led by Deng Xiaoping, the policies surrounding the permanency of the employee to the work unit became more lax, particularly in enterprise units (qiye danwei) where there was an increasing lack of a personnel dossier (dang an) system that prevented people from transferring or quitting. In 1988, the State Council stopped issuing the construction of new housing units and instead redirected those funds to support workers buying their own housing units. The personnel files of laid off workers continued to be under the auspices of their former employer, meaning that they continued to be members of the danwei. More than 20 million people who had settled in urban areas were forced back to the countryside to work when urban food and consumer goods were strictly rationed in the socially-controlled danweis. The CCP then put into place policies that "had the effect of freezing people into their current work units."