Labour as an Agent of Change: the case of China

Over the past decade, the industrial relations system in China has made the country an attractive destination for global corporations due to its low wage rates, restrictive labour laws and the nonrecognition of independent trade unions and the right to strike. This has been the result of a unique industrial legacy of a praetorian political system coupled with the astigmatic ideology of a highly centralised political system dominated by a single party. This is all changing and changing quickly.

The Pacific Review, 2016

This article explores the under-theorized subject of migrant labor and its precarious socio-economic position envisaged by Jia Zhangke in his The World (Shijie, 2004). As discussions of this film have largely been reduced to broad assertions in their handling of developmental adjustments—mainly, the country's entry into the WTO in 2001 and the reality of globalization—the specificities that mark Beijing's continuous and unfettered modernization projects under neoliberalization, are largely left untreated, leaving the study of labor incomplete. I will argue that The World transforms the concerns of the marginalized into a dialectical process by challenging the local imagery and celebrated urbanization in Beijing (commodification), while at the same time the workers in Jia's film embrace newfound consumption (dissipation). The other aim of this paper will be to view new forms of Chinese identity (suzhi) that “marks a sense and sensibility of the self's value in the market economy” (Yan 2003). Put another way, consumptive habits are indicative of a new neoliberal identity that complicates how Chinese service and industrial workers view themselves in post-social Beijing and what is fictionalized in The World.

Critique of Anthropology, 2008

Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of `neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of `market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a `floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadre-capitalist class simultaneously blur the `state'/`market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The co...

This article begins by engaging with some recent attempts to bring the study of the agency of labour into analyses of global capitalism, and argues that these approaches fail to capture the ways in which labour movements impact upon state strategies and, in turn, how this affects the spatial and temporal nature of global capitalist restructuring. Through adopting Antonio Gramsci’s concept of passive revolution, the article shows that whilst China has witnessed a significant degree of spontaneous and unorganised labour unrest, the state has been highly active in seeking to forestall the emergence of a politically conscious organised labour movement in ways that have important implications for the mode of China’s insertion into the international division of labour. In accordance with Gramsci’s framework, this ‘revolution from above’ should be understood within the framework and the specificity of the international states system. Labour struggles, class formation and the role of the state in these processes are conditioned both by geopolitical rivalry and by the demonstrative effects of earlier cases of successful industrialisation, as well as by examples of resultant labour struggles.

Socialism and Democracy, 2017

The nature of China’s development model, if there is any, continues to be the subject of debate, often divided by ideologies and theoretical lenses, both in China and the West. While the Communist Party of China (CPC) tries to fend off the capitalism label via the self-professed notion of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, mainstream media in the West and English literature on Chinese studies struggle to pin down the nature of the Chinese state, with most seeing China politically as a communist regime and economically as state-dominant capitalism. However, some Marxist thinkers, such as Amin, maintain that China is not capitalist. Citing its recent and remarkably fast economic rise, they argue that China is a viable alternative to global capitalism. In this article, we go back to the theoretical core of capitalism and socialism and use class analysis to respond to this view. We argue that post-reform China is unequivocally capitalist. A class analysis of post-reform China shows that the workers and peasants have been politically marginalized and economically re-proletarianized.

Development and Change

This article explores the relationships among neoliberalism, social policy expansion and authoritarian politics in contemporary China. It argues that in the era of neoliberalism, rising new right and authoritarian governments, the Chinese Communist Party has sought to retain power by shifting politically to the right and promoting neoliberal-looking economic policies. These policies have raised average living standards but also increased insecurity for most of the Chinese population, while new social policies have facilitated marketization. Social policy expansion includes minimal cash transfers as well as social old-age and health insurance for hitherto excluded sections of the population. These policies have begun to erode long-standing urbanrural segregation, but they have added new, underfunded, social programmes rather than widening participation in existing ones, re-segregating provision so that urban elites and formal sector workers enjoy much more generous provisions than many people working informally and those without work. These social policies' most significant dark sides thus include compounded income inequalities and the segmentation and stigmatization of the poorest. Authoritarian controls have enabled the Communist Party to avoid redistributive policies that would undermine its urban support, so that politics in China differ from the right-wing populism of new, anti-establishment authoritarian regimes. I would like to thank Andrew Fischer and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on this article. The research that underpins this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council under projects ES/J012629/1 and ES/J012688/1/.

■ Contemporary China has recently been seen as in the throes of 'neoliberal restructuring'. This claim is contested on theoretical and methodological grounds. During the period of economic liberalization since the death of Mao, China has shown a hybrid governance that has combined earlier Maoist socialist, nationalist and developmentalist practices and discourses of the Communist Party with the more recent market logic of 'market socialism'. A new cadre-capitalist class has emerged during liberalization, while large numbers of farmers, urban workers and a 'floating population' of urban migrants have been dispossessed of land, employment and political rights. Reactions by many higher-level Party cadres against dispossession show a residual commitment to socialist values. Guanxi personalist ties within the new cadrecapitalist class simultaneously blur the 'state'/'market' boundary, lead to dispossession and create conditions for accelerated capitalist growth. The conclusion is that contemporary China is not becoming 'neoliberal' in either a strong or weak sense, nor undergoing a process of neoliberalization, but instead shows the emergence of an oligarchic corporate state and Party whose legitimacy is being challenged by disenfranchised classes, but is still in control through its efforts at modernization.

Industrial Relations Journal, 2011

This article considers the relationship between Chinese and Western labour activists. It analyses this relationship in reference to ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ divisions of global power, drawing on world-systems and social movement unionism literature to illustrate this. It argues for a conceptual middle ground to develop useful engagement strategies.