Chinese workers confront capitalist labour relations.(Against the Law: Labour Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt; Creating

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 driving force behind this collective mobilization is to resist the commodification of labour brought by the privatization policy and to reject their abandonment by the state. Lee argues that the basis of this kind of labour activism still rests upon the notion of "social contract" formed in the socialist system. Workers thus see the state as the holder of moral responsibility to take care of its people, especially the working class that was once the core constituency of the socialist regime. These workers have a strong sense of social entitlement even though historical conditions have changed. In their struggles, laid-off workers often invoke Maoist notions of working-class status and social entitlements, and rarely make use of the legal system to solve their problems. Lee's book provides a detailed account of three types of protests: nonpayment protests involving unpaid pensions and wages, neighbourhood protests involving substandard community services and forced relocation, and bankruptcy protests involving disputes over compensation and corruption. What makes her account powerful and convincing are the rich personal narratives by factory workers who delineate their struggle, plight, and interpretation of the changing situation and their fate. Lee further explores what kinds of insurgent identities or subjectivities are created in this process. Her analysis suggests that workers do not rely on a single form of identity but draw from a repertoire of multiple subject positions, which includes class, citizens, and the masses. They make claims based on their workers' position that assumed a master status in society under socialism, or as citizens (gongmin) with basic rights, or as the disadvantaged working masses (gongren qunzhong). The co-existence of multiple positions allows workers to use different strategies depending on the specific situations facing them.

Turning to the Sunbelt in the south, we witness another wave of labour protests staged by younger migrant workers in global sweatshops. Lee terms this kind of labour unrest "protests against discrimination." Here the social contract sanctioned by socialism has been largely replaced by the legal contract between labour and capital. The primary goal of workers' struggles is to resist harsh conditions of capitalist production and labour exploitation, rather than to claim social entitlements. Pun Ngai's ethnography, Made in China, echoes this account by providing another in-depth account of the subjective experiences of labour discipline among young migrant women (dagong mei) working in capitalist factories of the south. In contrast with laid-off workers in the north, migrant workers frequently seek legal mobilization to settle their problems by turning to the labour bureau and the court. Petitions and lawsuits become a preferred weapon of the weak against their powerful employers and corporations. Lee has identified three types of common grievance among migrant workers. The most prominent problem is centred on unpaid wages or illegal deduction of payment. The second is harsh labour discipline and physical violence imposed on workers' bodies. The last type involves work-related injuries and the lack of compensation. One of the most interesting findings in this book is contrary to the experience of veteran workers in the north, class consciousness is almost muted among migrant workers because they rarely view themselves as a unified class with shared interests and solidarity. Rather, they tend to see themselves as second-class citizens (outsiders in the city) and subalterns (ruoshi qunti). Lee's account demonstrates that while "the rule of law" has become a dominant official discourse, migrant workers are able to appropriate this language for their own struggle. It is in this context that the notion of "against the law" becomes a common idiom for workers to demand social justice and contest unfair treatment.

Despite the above differences, Lee notes that there are some important commonalities in labour mobilization between the two groups of workers. First of all, these are localized, dispersed, cellularized mobilizations that seldom evolve into large-scale, lateral, cross-locality rebellion. Second, discontented workers usually target local government and corrupt managers rather than the higher levels of government. When necessary they call for the intervention of the central government while confronting a corrupt officialdom and an illiberal legal system. In other words, their action is not targeted at the reform regime itself, but at certain officials and firm leaders deemed responsible for their plight. These two features are based on a realistic reading of what is taking place on the ground, rather than a wishful thinking about what "should" happen according to a teleological view of post-socialist transformations.

A common question raised by many China observers and scholars is: Why doesn't such insurgent labour activism develop into large-scale workers' rebellion that threatens the political regime? Others wonder how Chinese workers actually survive during unemployment and nonpayment. State repression is often cited as the main answer for the first question. Lee argues that in addition to state repression we must also look into the way in which labour power is reproduced and the lingering form of living shaped by the socialist danwei system. Chapter Four ("Life after Danwei") and Chapter Six ("Dagong as a Way of Life") therefore are more than a descriptive account of workers' survival strategies, and shed new light on the question of why no rebellion occurs. One of the crucial factors for laid-off workers' relatively tamed action is the nearly universal housing provision by their work units. Laid-off workers are still entitled to the housing provided by their danwei and maintain social ties with former co-workers who share the residential space. Many have already purchased the apartment they live in at a heavily state-subsidized rate during the privatization of public housing. This is why massive lay-off does not necessarily lead to the rise of homelessness in China. At the same time, rural migrants exist between the two worlds-the city where they come to sell their labour and the countryside that serves as the flexible site of labour reserve and maintenance. Rural land serves as an informal social insurance to which migrants can fall back on during difficult periods of unemployment, sickness, and nonpayment. Because of these reasons, contemporary Chinese labour insurgency has not developed into a militant confrontation with the regime, nor does it demand a fundamental restructuring of the social and economic system. It remains a localized, cellularized form of activism aimed at solving immediate problems.

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