Statement on political prisoners in South East Asia

This article reports a part of the field research carried out in Shanghai in 1991, dealing with worker's culture. Specifically, it examines the factory's role in shaping the worker's sense of future and meaningful life. In this particular aspect, factory identity among workers appears to be very weak, while those whose factory identity is strongest tend to be cadres and party members. This article argues that such lack of factory identity partially explains why lifetime employment yields such dramatically divergent results in China and Japan. Finally, this article looks into the notion of activism vs passivism and confirms, with qualification, previous studies on authority in the Chinese work place.