Paper Affairs: Discipline by the Dossier in a Mao-Era Work Unit

Abstract This article examines how dossier files informed the handling of personnel misconduct in Chinese work units using an investigation of adultery as a case study. By the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), the disciplinary functions of the dossier system were an embedded feature of social control in the work unit, partially shifting responsibility for policing petty crime to local administrators. In this case, the revelation of an extramarital relationship in 1974 set off a bureaucratic operation to produce documentary proof of the alleged wrongdoing. The thick case file prepared by the work unit investigators grew to include a tranche of seized love letters, a series of dubious confessions, and detailed bureaucratic reports. The preparation of evidence bound for the dossier demonstrates the extent to which the demands of documentation formed a distinct end of the investigative process, while revealing how people and paper were mobilized to deal with a minor administrative affair.

The content of Lin's dossier file shows bureaucratic research at its most exhaustive, but the case reflects more than the travails of a social troublemaker. In this case study, the production of the file itself is also an object of inquiry, insofar as the dossier sheds light on how bureaucratic approaches to local justice and public order were conditioned and enacted through As dossiers were extended to the urban masses under high socialism, dossier management was absorbed into the human resources operations of the work unit (danwei) as both institutional employer and basic division of socialist governance. 9 Within the multipurpose structure of the work unit, the dossier was broadened into a general-use record with practical applications in workplace investigation and discipline.
Dossier access was restricted to supervisors, and the files themselves were classified as ›state secrets‹. The array of ›evidentiary materials‹ (zhengming cailiao) compiled by the dossier -including self-criticisms, witness affidavits, and third-party complaints -informed personnel decisions on positive and negative political labels, as well as rewards and punishments.
Administrative discipline by the work unit was not narrowly concerned with workplace or criminal behavior, but was instead responsible for policing a long list of potential ›problems‹, including theft, malingering, ›hooliganism‹, and various moral offenses that did not rise to a full legal definition of crime. In such cases, dossiers could be used to validate demotion, relabeling, detention, or curtailing benefits and pay. Dossiers also provided a permanent reserve of evidence if and when the need for disciplinary action against a person arose in the future. ›Black marks‹ or negative evidence in a dossier severely damaged an individual's livelihood and prospects, and the threat of their inclusion served as a potent mechanism of control. 10 This implicit disciplinary role makes the dossier an indispensable historical source for understanding crime and punishment in the Mao era, where historically a wide discrepancy existed between the formal prescriptions of the law and the reality of how discipline was handled by local authorities. 11 Dossiers address an empirical gap by attesting to administrative discipline in action, revealing what crimes were subject to investigation, how crimes were investigated, and who was doing the investigating. But if dossiers are crucial to understanding these marginal practices, they also require the use of a distinct historical methodology with its own conditions and limitations. The seized letters constituted about half of the file and had been processed into a documentary exhibit in their own section. It was on the basis of this evidence that the

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Both were living with their spouses and separated by a six-mile bike ride, but they wrote letters to one another regularly. These letters later became bureaucratic facts when all of their personal correspondence was seized by the authorities. Lin and Xu's love letters were gathered, organized, mined for information, and eventually filed into Lin's dossier as proof of the affair. For a number of years as Lin's case worked its way through the work unit's disciplinary channels, his love letters circulated as a bureaucratic display.   Lin's last confession is such a departure in tone and content that it reads as though it was written by another person. Yet this example, like the previous six, was written in his own handwriting with the same paper and pen. The auto-ethnographic tendencies of his first confession had been entirely expunged, and the matter   A few of the materials purged in this fashion, including Lin Zhongshu's supplemental file, eventually found an afterlife as grassroots sources, where they gained a new and different readership (Fig. 4).
With respect to the discarded materials, their dramatic fall from ›state secret‹ to worthless pulp would have seemed inconceivable to much of the population, but less so to the administrators who had handled the files and were familiar with their content. Since the establishment of the dossier system, mass surveillance had been

Decision: This material cannot be approved!
We require: 1) A self-examination for all crimes, with acknowledgement of their severity and contrition; 2) Evidence for hooligan behavior, cheating and stealing; 3  an investigation group leader during the Sufan and the Socialist Education Campaigns, remarked in his memoirs that specialized investigation teams were told »not to bother« with incidents of adultery or other mature relationships »unfit for civil conversation.« At most, such matters were to be dealt with by summoning the involved parties for a polite chat and »dispensing a bit of moral education«. Zeng Yanxiu: Shengan Zatan [A Discussion of Cadre Examinations], Changsha 1986, p. 10. 24 The bicycle became a major point of contention in the aftermath of the affair. Lin himself had a coupon which gave him the right to purchase a ›Red Flag Heavyweight‹. The bicycle supply company, however, recommended that Lin hold out in order to purchase a ›Flying Pigeon‹, or a ›Forever Bicycle‹. Ultimately, Lin fronted the money for the Red Flag on Xu's behalf, but the cost of the bike was greater than the sum of money