Work Report (Gongzuo Zongjie): Monitoring Labor in Socialist China

This paper explores practices of labor monitoring in 1950s China. As labor constituted one of the most important dimensions of socialist life, monitoring labor became crucial for meeting productivity standards and ensuring workers’ contributions to the building of a new socialist nation. The enforcement of specific directives and work standards managed through a hierarchical organization of work units such as factories, rural cooperatives, political and cultural institutions, was accompanied by the dissemination of self-examination practices that required individuals to critically reflect on their own work. Monitoring one’s performance then became a form of labor in and of itself that profoundly impacted the constitution of working subjects and working communities. Focusing on “work report” (gongzuo zongjie) as a distinct form within a wide array of socialist genres of life writing, this paper examines the intersection between the imperatives of monitoring labor and the promotion of new writing practices. The study of official guidelines on how to write a work report will be coupled with the analysis of specific instantiations of work reports to shed light on the structural and linguistic features of the genre, as well as on its relation to the project of creating productive subjects and China’s socialist future.