The origins of the "iron rice bowl" of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment in Chinese factories is traced in this book. It suggests that, in some ways, the Chinese revolution in 1949 was not as revolutionary as most have thought. This is one of a very few books to look comparatively at the Chinese industrial workplace in pre-1949 China and post-1949 China. Frazier has mined sources that were unavailable to previous generations of researchers on China.