Saving Oneself Through Labor: Disabled Workers and Social Welfare Production in Southwest China, 1956–65.

This article examines the organization of social welfare production work (shehui fuli shengchan gongzuo) in China's southwest Sichuan province from 1956 to 1965, with a focus on the marginalized experience of disabled workers during and after the Great Leap Forward Campaign (1958–62). Utilizing unexamined state archives, local gazetteers, and newspaper publications, the study traces how disabled workers were incorporated into or excluded from the campaign and their survival strategies after its derailment. During the Great Leap Forward, a campaign that aimed to rapidly industrialize China and accelerate developmental timelines, disabled workers were mobilized into collective production for the first time in the People's Republic of China. When the industrial labor force needed to shrink, however, these once-mobilized disabled workers were marginalized and excluded from the state production system and instead resorted to heterodox forms of labor not officially recognized by the Communist state. The article argues that the tension between disabled workers and the Chinese Communist state, intensified by poor economic conditions, stemmed from the marginalization of disabled individuals with limited productivity in the state's idealized vision of productive labor. By uncovering the interplay between disability, labor mobilization, and state ideology, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the social and economic dynamics during the Great Leap Forward era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]