Against the State: Labor Protests in China in the 1950s (original) (raw)

Chinese Politics and Labor Movements

Palgrave, 2019

This book brings a radically new voice to the debate in the field of Chinese politics and labor movement. Using a psychological and cognitive approach, the author examines workers and activists’ everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, their prospect of labor movements, and their sense of solidarity. The project shows how workers themselves have become a part of the apparatus of state repression and argues that Chinese workers have not acquired sufficient cognitive strength to become the much hoped-for agent for political change, which hinders labor activism from developing into a sustainable social movement. Multidisciplinary in its approach, the monograph provides analysis of Chinese politics, labor studies, international political economy, social movements, and contentious politics.

Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness

2021

Strikes, protests, and riots by Chinese workers have been rising over the past decade. The state has addressed a number of grievances, yet has also come down increasingly hard on civil society groups pushing for reform. Why are these two seemingly clashing developments occurring simultaneously? Manfred Elfstrom uses extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis to examine both the causes and consequences of protest. The book adopts a holistic approach, encompassing national trends in worker–state relations, local policymaking processes and the dilemmas of individual officials and activists. Instead of taking sides in the old debate over whether non-democracies like China's are on the verge of collapse or have instead found ways of maintaining their power indefinitely, it explores the daily evolution of autocratic rule. While providing a uniquely comprehensive picture of change in China, this important study proposes a new model of bottom-up change within authoritarian systems mor...

Alienated Politics: Labor Insurgency and the Paternalistic State in China

Is there a labour movement in China? This contribution argues that China does not have a labour movement, but that contestation between workers, state and capital is best characterized as a form of 'alienated politics'. Widespread worker resistance is highly effective at the level of the firm because of its ability to inflict losses on capital and disrupt public order. But authoritarian politics in China prevent workers from formulating political demands. Despite the spectacular repressive capacity of the state, the central government has in fact responded to highly localized resistance by passing generally pro-labour legislation over the past decade. The consequence of this is that worker unrest has produced important political shifts at the national level, but these have come about without workers' direct involvement in the process. In other words, workers are alienated from the political object that they themselves have produced. As a consequence, when the state intervenes in labour politics, it appears to be doing so of its own accord, i.e. paternalistically. This framework helps us to understand how worker unrest in China has become highly antagonistic towards employers and the local state, while maintaining the stability of the system as a whole.

Deng Xiaoping's reform and the Chinese workers' participation in the protest movement of 1989

1992

This article tries to explore structural and immediate socioeconomic factors which gave rise to the Chinese workers' participation in the protest movement of 1989. At the structural plane, the author argues that the workers' involvement in the protest movement marked a turning point of changing class relations in China. Although the state socialist society claims to be a workers' state, the workers have no power by the mere virtue of being workers and can exercise power only through control over their representatives who run the state and economic machine. If this control lapses, so does their influence. In China, as in the other "existing socialist countries," hierarchies have been installed without democracy. The persistence of such undemocratic authority structures has given rise to relations of dominance and subordination. Thus, ever since the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, there have been two structurally antagonistic classes in Chinese society: Cadre class and working class. In the first thirty years of the communist rule, however, this antagonism was largely obscured by two intervening factors: class designation system and patron-client relations. In the past ten years or so, the class designation system was abolished altogether and the patron-client relations have lost much weight. As a result, the working class is becoming more solidified in confrontation with an equally consolidated cadre class which holds political, social, and economic powers. It is against this background of structural change that workers began to rise in opposition to the party/state and its associated elite. As far as more immediate socioeconomic roots of the workers' unrest are concerned, the events of 1989 may be seen as a product of the confluence of three boiling issues: rising inflation, widespread corruption, and above all, declining social status of the working class, all of which were spawned by the ten years of the building-socialism-with-capitalism-methods experiment since 1979. This article concludes that the working class in China now is no longer a pillar of continuity but a force of change.

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Labor Problems and Workers Strikes in 20th Century China, 2019

Nowadays people all around the world talk about China’s rising power and its economic miracle. Hundreds of discussions rose up questioning if China can beat the USA and become the World‘s leading country. Former director of Harvard’s Belfer Center and political scientist Graham Allison in his recent performance on the TED Conference stage was discussing actually a hot topic - “Is war between China and US inevitable?”. Saying how China is powerful, he mentioned one interesting comparison case of building Sanyuan Bridge in Beijing and Harvard Anderson Memorial Bridge in Boston. He was amazed by the fact that the bridge in China was totally renewed by hardworking men in 46 hours, while the same amount of work in Boston has been done in 48 months. Also following my interest in China, I talk to many people from different backgrounds asking what the reason for China’s rapid developing might be in their opinion. Mostly they do mention hard-working Chinese labor, telling about the cheap working class and how fast are they in a working process. That made me to choose this topic as my final paper and deepen into it further. Thus, doing my research, I have realized that Chinese labor has been influential in the developing of the country since the ​early 20th century.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Chinese State Reactions to Labour Unrest

China Quarterly, 2019

What impact is the current rise in workplace conflict having on governance in China? This article argues that, over time, protests are driving the state in two directions at once: towards greater repression and greater responsiveness. Using an original dataset of strikes, protests and riots by Chinese workers between 2003 and 2012, along with government budgetary and judicial statistics, the article demonstrates that significant, positive correlations exist at the provincial level between increased unrest on the one hand and both increased spending on the People's Armed Police (repression) and increasing numbers of pro-worker and split decisions in mediation, arbitration and court cases (responsiveness) on the other. Feedback effects exist with regard to responsiveness, though: more cases in which workers win something in turn seem to spur greater unrest. The article closes by noting the changes since Xi Jinping took office and examining the implications of the findings for China's political development.

The Chinese Labour Movement And Political Change in 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.

Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China

Excerpt] This book, then, seeks to address a problem of the political economy of early twenty-first-century China: Why is it that in the more than ten years since the central government began to shift away from fullfledged marketization, migrant worker unrest has continued to grow apace? Why have the efforts of certain segments of the state to promote class compromise largely failed? Perhaps one might assume that the answer is simply that there has been collusion between the local state and capital, unions are weak, and therefore worker interests continue to be violated. Indeed, there is strong evidence that even if migrant workers' nominal wages increased in this period, the workers did not experience significant increases in real wages, and their wages relative to those of urban workers steadily declined (Golley and Meng 2011). But if this is the case, a second question immediately arises: Why is it that labor is strong enough to win concessions at the national and sometimes provincial or municipal level but not strong enough to allow migrant workers to significantly benefit from these victories or gain their recognition? In broad terms, I am interested in identifying what is particular about the labor politics of capitalist industrialization in a postsocialist political environment. In order to answer these questions, I focus on the state-controlled unions under the umbrella of the ACFTU and their relationship to migrant workers, capital, and other state agencies.

Between State-Led Unions and Self-Organization: Chinese Workers in the Global Crisis

2016

Stefano Agnoletto, Brian J Griffith, and Cristina Palmieri, eds. "The Origins of the Welfare State: Global and Comparative Approaches" Zapruder World: An International Journal for the History of Social Conflict 3 (2016) ISSN: 2385-1171 View Volume: http://www.zapruderworld.org/volume-3/ "The aim of this article is to identify patterns of industrial conflict in China in recent years. In particular, I will focus on whether the global crisis, which began in 2007-2008, changed industrial conflict and how industrial conflict influenced the State. In doing so, the article attempts to blend together academic, journalistic, and militant source materials. The first section of the paper briefly explains contemporary Chinese labour legislation. The second section examines the role of the official state-sponsored trade union, the All China Federations of Trade Unions, (ACFTU). The third and final section discusses changings in social composition of Chinese workers involved in industrial conflict as well as aims and methods of industrial conflict itself."