The State and Its Workers, by Yueran Zhang – 29 May 2026

China’s class politics after 1989

In April 1989, a series of explosive pro-democracy movements erupted across China. These movements and their political fate remain poorly understood today. While conventional accounts tend to depict liberal intellectuals and elite college students as the main protagonists, millions of workers and working-class urban residents also participated in the movement, especially in its final weeks. Although many joined initially out of sympathy for students on hunger strike, they soon began to articulate their own distinct visions of democracy, demanding the replacement of the bureaucratic system of enterprise management with workers’ participation and self-representation. They established independent and democratically run workplace organizations which began to publish pamphlets denouncing the “Stalinist dictatorial bureaucracy” for causing inflation to spiral. The only remedy was to place control over consumer goods in the hands of their producers. Their rhetoric blended the discourse of the Cultural Revolution with invocations of various other historical uprisings. One handbill called on the masses to “storm the Bastilles of the twentieth century.”

Between mid-May and early June, these working-class actors were on the frontlines of the unrest. As martial law was declared and military regiments marched towards Beijing, masses of ordinary people flocked to the outskirts of the city and tried to obstruct them. They erected barricades and formed human chains, they brought water and food to soldiers, imploring them to lay down their arms. They formed armed quasi-militias to monitor the whereabouts of the military and maintain critical public services. Factory workers organized shopfloor committees, strikes, and slowdowns, while rumors of a general strike abounded. Beijing almost became a self-governing territory, not all that dissimilar to Petrograd’s self-organized and self-armed soviets in the months between the February and October Revolutions of 1917. When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) launched a final crackdown on the night of June 3, 1989 to liquidate these committees, workers fought back with stones. They lit tires, Molotov cocktails, and their own bodies. Hundreds sacrificed their lives.

Reclaiming the working-class character of the 1989 movements casts recent Chinese history in a new light and reshapes our understanding of the country’s current conjuncture. The moment marked a fundamental rupture between two modes of industrial class politics in post-Mao China, particularly in terms of the relationship between the Party-state and the industrial working class. Previously, the Party-state’s nominal political commitment to upholding workers’ “masterly” social status, along with the institutional framework of socialist public property, made the working class a political-economic force to be reckoned with, capable of contesting the meaning of “socialism” in ways big and small. After 1989, however, the Party-state changed course, dismantling both these pillars of the old order. This gave rise to a new iteration of the industrial working class which evoked the classic image of the proletariat, toiling in capital’s satanic mills under the whip of the labor market and the despotism of private interests. How did this transition take place? And how might the process of class recomposition in contemporary China affect the long-term outlook of this great power?

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Yueran Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Their research focuses on the comparative political economy of socialist and capitalist systems, and the historical processes of transition between them.

The State and Its Workers, by Yueran Zhang – 29 May 2026

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