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Encyclopedia of Modern China
VOLUME 4
U–Z, INDEX 
David Pong 
EDITOR IN CHIEF
 
U
UNIT (
DANWEI 
)
The term
unit 
(
danwei 
) commonly refers to the workplacein urban China after 1949. The unit was ubiquitous:Until the mid-1980s, government and party organizations,state-owned enterprises, financial institutions, and educa-tional establishments were all designated as units. Withfew exceptions, unit employees were entitled to lifetimeemployment. Typically, a unit provided its employees withhousing, education, health care, recreational activities,rationed goods, pensions, and so forth. For many, thedistinguishing feature of a unit was a lifetime social-welfaresystem from cradle to grave, and a network of relationshipsencompassing work, home, neighborhood, and politicalmembership. Thus, many scholars trace the origins of theunit variously to the Communist free-supply system fromthe 1930s, the heritage of labor protest, and the evolutionof labor-management institutions.
BEFORE 1949: ORIGINS
Still, the unit is best understood as a part of the prevailing administrative system embracing virtually all government,business and financial, as well as educational institutionsin urban China after 1949. Such a definition emphasizesthat these institutional entities were integral parts of theoverall state administrative structure, a character that can-not be explained by any of the above-mentioned tradi-tions or institutions.The evidence suggests that the origins of the unit in thesense of China 
’
s prevailing administrative system can betraced to the Nationalist struggle to rationalize the admin-istrative bureaucracy during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937
–
1945), when the Nationalists used the term
unit 
to designate political, economic, and administrativeorganizations. Beginning in the early 1940s, the govern-ment and state-owned enterprises routinely used the term
unit 
to identify various organizations, as well as subordinateentities,within thoseorganizations.Eventheterm
work unit 
(
 gongzuo danwei 
), which for decades has been the standardalthough erroneous translation for the term
danwei 
, wascarefully defined in 1943 to refer to the head of a depart-ment (
ke 
) within the administrative unit of a division (
chu
)and the technical personnel of various constituent parts with the rank of a department head. Thereafter the term was used regularly in Dadukou Iron and Steel Works, thelargest state-owned enterprise in Nationalist-controlledareas during the war. Shortly after that, the term
work unit 
simply referred to the department as an administra-tive unit. At the same time, the term
management unit 
(
 guanli danwei 
) was used to refer to the larger adminis-trative unit known as division.Those same units also acquired some of their defin-ing characteristics during the Sino-Japanese War, includ-ing unit provision of social services and welfare. Studieshave shown, for example, that the war witnessed theformation of self-contained enterprise-run service and welfare communities. Employees lived in factory apart-ments and dormitories, bought their daily necessities atfactory cooperatives, purchased vegetables grown at fac-tory farms, and went to factory clinics and hospitals for medical treatment. Employees
’
children received their education in factory schools. When employees died, they sometimes were buried in factory cemeteries. To put itdifferently, the unit designation of political, economic,and administrative organizations and unit provision of 
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