Garden Factories: The Expansion of State-Owned Factories at the Twilight of Socialism

During the height of socialism under Mao (1949-1976), industrial production drives called on workers to sacrifice their quality of life and leap toward mass-scale industrialization. As a result, living conditions within state-owned enterprises were poor, and housing shortages were rampant. SOE (state-owned enterprise) life during the socialist years resembled little of the material privileges commonly associated with life in state factories in popular memory. It was not until the economic reform period, starting in 1978, that SOEs began to make significant investments in housing and life services for their employees. These changes were driven by an explosion of revenue as the state permitted the selling of products on a private market and new governmental directives emphasizing the modernization of factory space. State-owned factories built movie theaters, workers’ clubs, sports arenas, multiple kindergartens, and hospitals with impressive medical technologies, creating the kind of comfortable and exclusive dwelling that has colored an anachronistic cultural perception of socialist-era SOEs to this day.

Focused on a steel tube factory in the southwestern city of Chengdu, this paper considers the perplexing phenomenon that it was the end of socialism that enabled a golden age in infrastructural expansion for SOEs. It examines how factory officials implemented new state policies to clean up SOEs and realize a new vision of “garden factories.” Furthermore, it explores how such ideologies of the clean, well-provisioned factory community were connected to notions of science, modernization, and environmental protection. This paper argues that new space-making projects of SOEs during the 1980s taught factory workers a new set of language about hygiene and modernity that became central to their understanding of themselves as urban, industrial citizens.