Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | L | Labour/Le Travail

Chinese workers confront capitalist labour relations.

Article Excerpt
Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labour Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press 2007)

Carolyn L. Hsu, Creating Market Socialism: How Ordinary People Are Shaping Class and Status in China (Durham: Duke University Press 2007)

Edward Friedman, Paul G. Pickowicz, and Mark Selden, Revolution, Resistance, and Reform in Village China (New Haven: Yale University Press 2007)

CHINA'S ECONOMIC REFORM initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 has engendered tremendous social, economic, and political changes on local society. In more recent years, with the deepening of privatization and commercialization, the life of ordinary people, especially working men and women, has been significantly reshaped by new policies and practices under the influence of neo-liberalism. As China has continued to display a remarkable growth in gross domestic product (GDP) annually over the past decade, however, socioeconomic polarization has also escalated and has created deeper divides among the population. One of the areas that has been affected and transformed significantly during this period is the field of work and labour. Today work is reorganized in a radically different way than in the past. There are profound trends of commodification of labour, the reconfiguration of classes, and the rise of new labour activism and popular resistance in both rural and urban areas. In this review essay, I address some of the key issues pertinent to the changing situation for working people in the recent past of the People's Republic of China by focusing on three recently published books by Ching Kwan Lee, Carolyn Hsu, and Edward Friedman et al. I give greatest attention to urban labour politics and emerging institutions of stratification while briefly discussing the changing condition of rural labour and village power dynamics brought by the early phase of post-Mao reforms.

Perhaps one of the most striking features of reform in China is the rise of widespread working-class protests staged by urban laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises and rural migrant workers trapped in capitalist production. Sociologist Ching Kwan Lee seeks to understand this new phenomenon by comparing two distinct modes of labour activism in China's northeastern region (Rustbelt) and south coastal region (Sunbelt). The former is hit the hardest by the reform of the state-owned enterprises (SOE) and symbolizes the slow death of socialism, while the latter is a prosperous region of rapid economic growth that symbolizes the rebirth of capitalism. Yet, despite the radically different social and economic conditions, both areas are confronted with intense labour protests. Drawn from in-depth fieldwork and rich narratives of Chinese workers, Lee's path-breaking research offers flesh and insightful explanations on why and how new Chinese labour activism takes place at this historical moment. Heavily influenced by Marxian and Polanyian theories, her compelling analysis helps us to make sense of the similarities and differences in the protest strategies that have been adopted in the two regions. In particular, she highlights the importance of law as a double-edged sword in mobilizing and limiting workers' action under what she characterizes as "decentralized legal authoritarianism."

Lee's inquiry begins with a puzzle she has observed in Liaoning and Guandong where she conducted her fieldwork. Both places have witnessed massive labour unrest, yet the form and content of the protests are strikingly different. In Liaoning where the socialist planned economy is dying and workers are left stranded in a wasteland of bankrupt factories, veteran workers take their grievances to the street and make moral claims for their basic survival rights. They engage in a particular form of political bargaining by shaming local corrupt officials and by disrupting traffic and public order in order to gain societal attention. She terms this type of action "protests of desperation" in a Polanyian sense because the...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!