Grassroots officials, worker wrongdoings, and masculinity in the Nantong Municipal Steel Rolling Mill c. 1970

This article examines how competing ideals of masculinity were negotiated in the everyday life of a steel mill community in the People’s Republic of China during the early 1970s. Using the personnel dossier of a male worker from the Nantong Municipal Steel Rolling Mill, contextualised with archival sources, operational manuals, industry periodicals, textbooks, and newspapers, it explores how workshop culture, homosocial interactions, and heterosexual relationships shaped gendered norms. Within the mill, the state promoted an ideal of disciplined, self-controlled masculinity tied to productive labour and socialist values. Yet among workers, an alternative ‘rough’ manhood expressed through fighting, bravado, and sexual assertion persisted, reinforced by homosocial bonds and everyday practices. These conflicting visions of manhood were embedded in ordinary disputes, disciplinary hearings, social interactions, and everyday work culture, where official expectations frequently clashed with entrenched shop-floor norms. Because of life tenure and the ubiquity of minor infractions, the state struggled to enforce its ideals fully, making everyday transgressions powerful arenas of negotiation. By examining everyday life alongside the state’s social engineering efforts, this article sheds fresh light on how masculinities were reworked through societal and industrial practices, enriching wider comparative debates on working-class manhood under industrialisation.