Political Control in the Workplace: How Autocrats Use Firms to Discipline Citizens

How do authoritarian regimes maintain control as their private sectors grow? While existing research emphasizes control mechanisms outside the private sector such as security forces and surveillance, this paper examines how control extends from within firms. Focusing on China, I study the expansion of Communist Party cells inside private enterprises and their effects on firms and employees. An original panel of 1,208 publicly listed private enterprises (2012-2022) shows that while party cells have expanded rapidly, they exert little influence on firm behavior. Yet employee-level evidence tells a different story. Using original surveys, survey experiments, and fieldwork, I find that even weak and ritualized party cells heighten the visibility of the regime inside the workplace, increase perceived political risks, and induce self-censorship and conformity. Survey experiments show that merely priming the presence of a party cell suppresses dissent in workplace discussions. These findings highlight a market-compatible form of authoritarian control: targeting individuals, not business, and ruling through presence, not punishment.