Leaving the land but not the village: tenancy, wage labor, and the limits of collective action among Moutai’s Distillery workers in Republican China

The labor history of Republican China has largely been written from the treaty-port factory. The handicraft workforce, which made up the great majority of the country’s workers, has received less attention. Using archival records, factory gazetteers, and oral histories, this article reconstructs the labor regime of Chengyi, Ronghe, and Hengxing, the three private distilleries that produced Moutai liquor in northern Guizhou between the 1910s and 1949. Their livelihoods rested on two footings: distillery wages and their households’ continuing access to rented land. This combination shaped seasonal hiring, wages below household subsistence, and provision that favored food over housing or medical care. It also affected the conditions under which workers could act together. In the strike of 1948, workers at Chengyi and Hengxing participated, while those at Ronghe did not. At Ronghe, seven to eight in ten workers rented land from the family that owned the distillery, so a strike could put both wages and tenancy at risk. The surviving sources do not establish what workers believed aboutout class. This article therefore examines the forms of collective action available to them and how those possibilities varied with land, skill, and employment across the three distilleries.