China’s workers
Where to Begin: New Perspectives on Chinese Labor
By Mark W. Frazier
Studies of labor in China have taken an exciting turn in recent years with the publication of numerous rich and revealing portraits of workers, their jobs, and their place in Chinese politics and in the global economy.
As thousands of migrant workers employed in auto parts suppliers for Toyota and
Honda went on strike in May and June of 2010, some headlines heralded a
political coming of age for China¹s migrant workers.
While it¹s too early to assess the impact of these strikes, it is clear that migrant workers have
gained a level of organizational sophistication and political awareness to
make demands for higher wages, better working conditions, and in some cases,
elections for union representatives.
All of the books cited below offer readers who are new to the field of Chinese labor some perspective in which to understand the strikes of 2010 and the broader place of Chinese labor in
the contemporary politics and society of China.
A January 2010 London Review of Books article by Perry Anderson hailed Ching
Kwan Lee¹s Against the Law: Labor Protests in China¹s Rustbelt and Sunbelt
(University of California Press, 2007) with this accolade: ³Although quite different in mode and scale, in power nothing like it has appeared since
E.P. Thompson¹s Making of the English Working Class.² Thompson¹s 1966 classic on late 17th-, early 18th-century England brought to light the
cultural contestation and repertoires of resistance as the moral economy of artisans and their guilds gave way to the mass production and mechanization of industrial capitalism.
In Against the Law, C.K. Lee explores the moral
economies and resistance of Chinese workers in two domains: first among the socialist working class in the state sector of the Northeast (the
³rustbelt²), where the dismantling of the iron rice bowl brought an end to the social contract of job security and lifetime benefits, including
housing.
Lee compares the unmaking of the state socialist working class with the making of a new working class in the foreign-invested export sector of
the South (the ³sunbelt²).
Here, migrant workers invoke the state¹s new
labor legislation and pursue claims to rights protection and equal
citizenship, in the face of widespread legal and social discrimination stemming from the household registration system (hukou).
In both the sunbelt and the rustbelt, protests remain highly ³cellularized,² or confined to groups of workers from the same factory who present to employers and local governments demands that are specific to their
workplace, or their cohort within the factory (e.g., unpaid pensions, unpaid
wages, overtime violations, etc.).
This localized pattern of labor protest,
and how it varies, is a common theme found throughout the field of Chinese labor.
Scholars such as Elizabeth Perry have shown how fragmentation, rather than class formation, both facilitates labor protest and influences how the
state connects with and controls labor movements and their leadership.
William Hurst¹s The Chinese Worker After Socialism (Cambridge University
Press, 2009) offers a regional account to this story of working class
segmentation, showing how laid-off workers and their collective action is based on the political economy of different regions of China.
Like Lee, Hurst provides illuminating details from interviews and fieldwork among
laid-off workers who invoke different patterns of collective action and political symbols to press their demands.
While these accounts of the unmaking and remaking of Chinese labor in the
1990s rightly stress domestic political and economic forces, several recent books have also pursued international or external factors driving this process.
These works show how China¹s openness to foreign investment brought
institutions that replaced Maoist or socialist labor practices with labor law, employment contracts, and dispute resolution.
Just how all of this
happened, and why it wasn¹t more politically explosive, are questions addressed in Mary E. Gallagher¹s Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton University Press, 2005).
Gallagher shows that timing was everything: foreign direct investment coming to China
in the 1980s created a laboratory for the reform of labor practices, and in the 1990s the politically sensitive reforms to China¹s domestic or
state-owned enterprise sector could commence as this sector adopted the labor contracts and workplace norms found in the foreign-invested sector.
Not that the process went smoothly, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
leadership managed to prevent the formation of a broad-based opposition
movement made up of laid-off workers.
The extent to which global capitalism influences labor in China is also a theme found in The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive
Advantage (The Penguin Press, 2008) by Alexandra Harney, a Financial Times
reporter.
Among much else, Harney¹s book shows how the regime of factory inspections by NGOs and other international labor rights auditors is
hampered by the way in which factory owners take a clue from corrupt accountants by keeping ³two sets of factories²‹one for showing to the
auditors, and one for where the actual production takes place, with rampant labor violations and abuse.
The fields of labor history and labor studies have long been focused on questions of class formation, identity, and how capitalism or socialism influences workplace relations.
China scholars such as Gail Hershatter,
Emily Honig, Pun Ngai, Lisa Rofel, and many others have shed light on issues
of identity and power relations within the Chinese workplace during pre- and
post-1949 China.
Many recent publications pay close attention to the way identities and interests are influenced within the micro-environment of the
workplace, with the empirical focus of the ³workplace² broadened beyond the
conventional look at the manufacturing sector.
Two recent collections
contain numerous chapters that explore workplace conflict and community (in
sites ranging from department stores to merchant marine vessels to insurance
sales agencies) and connect these issues to broader questions of power,
culture, and political economy.
Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and
Workplace Transformation (Routledge 2007; edited by Ching Kwan Lee) and How
China Works: Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Industrial Workplace
(Routledge, 2006; edited by Jacob Eyferth) contain several commendable
portraits of Chinese labor based on ethnographies and participant-observation by the authors.
In a similar vein, Calvin Chen¹s
Some Assembly Required: Work, Community, and Politics in China¹s Rural
Factories (Harvard University Press, 2008), based on his experience of
working and living at two township and village enterprises (TVEs) in
Zhejiang province, offers rewarding insights into how workers experience and
interpret multiple meanings of labor, and how these change over time.
Source: China Beat (7/2/10): http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=2285
Where is all this impressive degree of collective action and assertion of
individual autonomy shown by Chinese workers leading, and how will the
Chinese Communist Party respond?
The record of the Hu Jintao leadership
suggests that the CCP is capable of renewing its frayed ties with Chinese
labor, but the Chinese state is just as fragmented in its structure and capacities as the Chinese workforce is in making demands of the state.
Dorothy Solinger¹s States¹ Gains, Labor¹s Losses: China, France, and Mexico
Choose Global Liaisons, 1980-2000 (Cornell University Press, 2010) provides,
as its title reveals, a valuable analysis of how China¹s labor unrest and
government responses to it compares with two other countries where states
have both pulled the plug on longstanding labor policies and quickly needed
to respond with new welfare measures and increased social expenditures.
In Socialist Insecurity: Pensions and the Politics of Uneven Development in China (Cornell University Press, 2010), I show how fragmentation in the
state has facilitated rapid increases in pension spending for urban Chinese
workers but has also aligned political interests in such a way that expanding other benefits to the Chinese labor force will be difficult to
achieve.
Another signal policy response by the CCP has been to promote the spread of the party-controlled union (the All-China Federation of Trade Unions) to foreign-invested and private firms, a process of ³unionization²
that should always retain the scare quotes. While no book-length accounts of
this process have yet been published, Marc Blecher¹s 2008 article in
Critical Asian Studies (³When Wal-Mart Wimped Out²) interprets the
significance and considerable irony of the ACFTU¹s decision to compel the
world¹s largest corporation and outspoken opponent of unions to organize
ACFTU branches in its sixty stores in China.
For those looking to get a sense of the arguments of scholars of Chinese
labor in chapter-length form, and for classroom use, two fine samplers of
recent social science work on various aspects of the PRC that include
chapters on labor are Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (Routledge, 2010, Third Edition, edited by Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden) and Chinese Politics: State, Society, and the Market (Routledge 2010, edited by Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen).
In addition, several authors discussed in this column have published chapters in an edited volume focused on the plight of the unemployed: Laid-Off Workers in a Workers¹
State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics (Palgrave Macmillan 2009,
edited by Thomas B. Gold, William J. Hurst, Jaeyoun Won, and Qiang Li).
Books by journalists who have turned their focus to workers and factories in
China are also excellent sources for understanding contemporary Chinese
labor issues.
The personal portraits of the subjects found in Leslie T. Chang¹s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (Spiegel &
Grau, 2009) and in Harney¹s The China Price show how migrant workers experience the labor market of the sunbelt, and how they preserve ties to
their home communities and to one another.
The sophistication and strategic
purpose with which the migrant workers navigate through various employment
channels belies the conventional wisdom of poor, undereducated migrants
pouring into coastal export processing zones desperate for any form of work.
Readers of Chang¹s and Harney¹s books, and any of the publications mentioned
above, can find many clues to explain how and why migrant workers would
eventually take to the streets as they did in spring 2010 to make
unprecedented demands on the Chinese state.
Mark W. Frazier is the ConocoPhillips Professor of Chinese Politics and
Associate Professor of International and Area Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
China's workers protesting
