Huaiyin Li. <i>The Master in Bondage. Factory Workers in China, 1949–2019</i> . Stanford University Press, Stanford (CA) 2023. x, 318 pp. $95.00. (Paper, E-book: $32.00.)

I consider Huaiyin Li's previous book, Chinese Village Under Socialism and Reform (Stanford, CA, 2009), to be the best of a genre of "village studies", which has illuminated life in rural China during and after the Mao era.This genre includes many highly informative ethnographies but Li's book, based on a careful and thorough investigation of his home county, is simply more authoritative and insightful.In The Master in Bondage, Li turns his attention to urban China, looking at life inside Chinese factories.He has, once again, produced a masterful ethnographic account.Although The Master in Bondage covers seven decades, five of the six empirical chapters are about the Mao era .Li is clearly most interested in documenting social relations during China's socialist past, before those who experienced them are gone and their firsthand knowledge is lost.There are comparatively few ethnographic accounts about industrial relations during the Mao era, but that indicates a problematic gap in the literature, not a lack of importance.The scholarship about industrial relations during the Mao era is not only comparatively sparse, but it is also less intimate than the rich corpus of village studies.Li's book reflects this to some extent: unlike his book about his rural hometown, it is not about a single factory community, and the interview data were collected not only by Li himself but also by a research team of faculty and graduate students from Chinese institutions.This highlights an unavoidable trade-off between the depth of a detailed case study and the breadth of a more comprehensive overview.Li's new book, however, gives us the benefits of a broad overview (revealing commonalities and variation among China's industrial enterprises), while also providing a careful, detailed account of life inside China's urban factories.Much of the research about industry during the Mao era has been produced by economists and business and industrial relations scholars, who have typically written at a distance from the shop floor.My own recent book, Disenfranchised (Oxford, 2019), covers some of the same territory as Li's book, but is more focused on factory politics and lacks Li's detailed attention to the labor process and relationships on the shop floor.The book that is closest to Li's in terms of its aims, Andrew Walder's widely cited Communist Neo-Traditionalism (Berkeley, CA, 1986), is a highly perceptive account, but Li's study reveals its limitations and flaws.In the first four chapters, Li develops an in-depth analysis of social relations within Chinese factories -what he calls the "work unit equilibrium" -during the Mao era.In these chapters, he systematically -and convincingly -challenges key tenets of what have become conventional understandings of industrial relations during this period.