Workers at war: Labor in the nationalist arsenals of Chongqing, 1937-1949 (China, Japan)

The War of Resistance against Japan (1937–1945) unleashed social changes that set the stage for both civil war and socialist revolution in China. This study of Chinese workers adds to the scholarship on social mobilization that brought about the Chinese revolution, a scholarship that has previously focused on the peasantry. The thesis addresses how the Nationalists lost their urban and predominantly military social base and how the Communists, as a primarily urban clandestine force, mobilized support in Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Nationalist government.; Based on archives of the Nationalist defense industry, records of the American War Production Mission in China, and interviews with former arsenal employees, this dissertation examines the process of industrial development, social transformation, and labor activism within the Chongqing arms industry. In contrast to recent labor studies of China, which have underscored class fragmentation, this thesis argues that class formation was both a historical process, whereby arsenal workers entered a wage relationship subordinate to state capitalism, and a project whereby a militant minority of activists organized workers and articulated an alternative politics. After analyzing the wartime buildup of Chongqing's arms industry, an examination of arsenal workers' social origins, material conditions, organizations, and political activities underscores the often conflictual relationship between workers and management This class dynamic underlay the attitudes of labor and propelled management to adopt elaborate social welfare policies and authoritarian methods.; As the arms industry represented a pillar of the Nationalists' military and state power, the significance of this thesis lies in showing how arsenal workers became alienated from factory officials, a stratum of the military elite, and thus contributed to the general collapse of state legitimacy. Workers and Communists held separate but often intersecting interests during the War of Resistance and the post-war labor movement. The conclusion suggests that the concerted actions, grievances, and aspirations of arsenal workers during the war period would converge with the Communist program and class-based political movements of the early 1950s.