Definición de envase

committee in most factories was merged into the public security department within the management system.

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watch the black-listed political dissidents.61 Normally, legal and administrative procedures have become tighter for the pressing of counter-revolutionary charges against ordinary workers. This means that although factory party cadres are still required to monitor the "abnormal actions" around them, they are not supposed to forge charges against workers at will, as they used to do in the Mao era. Here again, some of the political cadres still keep to the habit o f harassing people (zhengren), and violations of workers' political rights continue. However, the removal of the institutional framework for zhengren from the party cells has made a difference for organized oppression in terms of its effectiveness.62

The public security department's tasks have been reoriented towards safeguarding production in step with the central concerns of factory managers. Most factory managers I interviewed in China in 1991 expressed contempt for the past practice of seeing everything from a political angle. In contrast to their previous focus on class struggle, the public security people now interpret a potentially offensive act more from the perspective of law- and-order than as anti-party and state. This has reduced the political tensions in factories. Although workers often show genuine annoyance towards the security people, they agree

61 Information gathered from my field work. However, the factory security department remains the first contact of the local government’s public security bureaus. This was especially true immediately after June 4 when the police conducted the search for anti-government activists.

62 It is interesting to note that in a few dozen factories I visited in 1991 and 1992, when I asked factories cadres about how they had handled political dissidents, they all answered that there were no political dissidents in their factories. They said there were workers with backward attitudes, but when dealing with them, cadres reportedly never linked the cases of violation of work discipline to political crimes. One party cadre told me that everybody complained against some party policies and some party leaders, even in party meetings. By the standard of the Cultural Revolution, everyone could be counted as an anti-party element. But now, who cared? However, most of the party cadres I inter­ viewed agreed that the demarcation line was whether people took organized actions. Even a non­ political organized action, such as a strike for wage raises, would be interpreted as very serious, and would be immediately reported to the party and government superiors. It is in this sense that the workers' political rights were constandy violated.

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that they are politically less fearful when approached.63 Indeed, since the 14th Congress, the 1989 reversal has been reversed.

Regarding state firms as a whole, the streamlining went quite deep. According to Gao Qixiang, Beijing's deputy organization boss, since the streamlining began, 70% to 80% of state factories nationwide had been affected one way or another, with party and political cadres halved.64 Now the majority of factories have a very fragmented party structure.65 Even in big factories, what I found in 1991 and 1992 convinced me that the party structure there could no longer be compared with any time before the Dengist reform. This is not only related to what party organs a factory may have but also to what they can do.

4.2.2. The Concurrent System

What has further weakened the authority of party committees was a reform called "the concurrent system" (jianrenzhi). Under this, the post of party boss was made part-time and the secretaries' principal responsibility became nonparty, either in management or in other work. The most common form has been for managers to take the party portfolio. The concurrent system had not been uncommon throughout the history of the PRC, yet a person now takes both the party and manager portfolios, most often because he is factory or workshop manager rather than the other way round, decisively reversing the situation prevalent before the reform period.

The party posts at the factory level and workshop are filled differently. Although usually party heads at both levels are elected through ballots of ordinary party members, the election of the higher level is often a matter of formality with the major candidates decided

63 As I discovered in the interviews, most of these security people were core members of managers and they acted as body guard for their bosses. Therefore, they became the target of attack by workers whenever the labour/management relations became tense.

64 Gao Qixiang, "Cong shige fangmian tan Zhao Ziyang tongzhi gangjian guandian de cuowu" (Talk from ten directions on Zhao Ziyang's mistakes on the party building), Zhibu shenghuo (Beijing), no. 8, 1990, p. 19.

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by the factory’s superior. In terms of procedures the appointment of a manager and the election of a party secretary are very different. Yet the Chinese leadership has pushed the concurrent system regardless of this procedural confusion. This means that the appointment of a manager has to precede the party election, which by itself indicates the belittled party role.66 At the workshop level, the elected head may be either a workshop manager or just a worker. The former seems to constitute the majority in large factories while the latter is often seen in small plants where managers are often non-party members.67

The concurrent system has been carried out in a flexible manner. The party centre had some broad guidelines for it, such as those stated earlier that in principle small plants should have no full-time party organs and cadres, large ones are to deploy full-time party offices and secretaries and the medium-scale firms decide by themselves. Later on new guidelines were introduced to specify different situations. Generally factory and workshop managers were encouraged to take the party posts if they were "politically qualified" and full-tim e party secretaries were encouraged to take the deputy factory or workshop manager's position in order to assist managers better in the areas of political and ideological work.68 After June 4 1989, with renewed emphasis on party control, some qualifiers were added to the concurrent reform, although the pre-June 4 practice was not fundamentally reversed. For instance, it was stipulated that full-time party secretaries should be restored in workshops with more than 100 workers.69 Managers in large factories should in principle not assume the party post. But after Deng's South China tour the pendulum swung back again. For instance, the Hubei provincial Party Committee decreed that the concurrent system should be implemented in all state firms in the province, with factory managers

66 Information gathered from interviews with a cadre in Beijing Municipal Party Committee's Industry