After the factory fell silent: bureaucratic time and workers’ temporal politics in China’s state-owned enterprise restructuring

This article asks why the restructuring of a Chinese state-owned factory remained unfinished for more than two decades after production had ceased. Drawing primarily on workers’ personal archives, petitioning records, government documents, and court decisions, supplemented by interviews conducted in 2024, it traces the divergent trajectories of production, managerial control, worker resettlement, and corporate liability at Guangming Factory in X City. The concept of temporal differentiation captures how relations formed within the same restructuring acquired different speeds, institutional endpoints, and capacities for later reactivation. Administrative takeover, asset transfer, and land procedures quickly produced dated institutional facts. Worker resettlement remained dependent on future projects and interdepartmental coordination; as employees retired, collective commitments fragmented into claims concerning pensions, housing, and compensation. Contracts and corporate liabilities could re-enter legal proceedings after years of dormancy, while workers’ claims remained tied to aging bodies and diminishing organizational resources. Workers responded by preserving documents, collecting signatures, petitioning, and litigating, reconnecting events that state agencies handled separately. By showing how closure itself was distributed across institutional procedures, the case extends labor history beyond the end of production and clarifies how bureaucratic time shaped the durability and enforceability of relations inherited from the socialist work unit.