UC Santa Cruz

This dissertation demonstrates how industrializing policies of the Chinese socialist state and grassroots practices of industrial employees constituted a new kind of urban space in China after 1949, shaped by shifting social narratives about the differences between the rural and the urban and between the factory and the city. It considers the ways in which factory cadres promoted a gendered order of factory space, emphasizing women’s selfless contribution to production and their families and drawing women’s labor toward the developmental goals of the factory and the state. Utilizing internal factory documents, factory and local gazetteers, oral history, and ethnographic observations, this study analyzes how industrial space was regulated by state officials and formed by the needs and demands of factory employees and their families. In centering space as symbolic, concrete, and lived, this work develops a new understanding of the history of urban space in China, one that accounts for the contradictions and unevenness in how it evolved and the labor and actions of those who made it possible. My research weaves together a story about space with the making and unmaking of China’s state-owned factories and, in so doing, elucidates the intimate collective experiences of Chinese socialism and its afterlives.