Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective
| Author | Eli Friedman,Ching Kwan Lee |
| Published date | 01 September 2010 |
| Date | 01 September 2010 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.2010.00814.x |
Remaking the World of Chinese Labour:
A 30-Year Retrospectivebjir_814507..533
Eli Friedman and Ching Kwan Lee
Abstract
Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working-
class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In
this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casual-
ization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes
have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of
marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss of the job security and
generous benefits enjoyed by workers in the planned economy. On the other
hand, commodification and casualization have produced significant but local-
ized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of
labour non-governmental organizations and of the official trade unions have
contributed to the state’s effort of individualizing and institutionalizing labour
conflict resolution through labour law and arbitration mechanisms. Finally, we
provide a brief discussion of the impact of 2008’s Labour Contract Law and the
outbreak of the economic crisis on labour relations. We conclude that the
continual imbalance of power at the point of production presents a real dilemma
for the Chinese state as it attempts to shift away from a model of development
dependent on exports.
1. Introduction
Two historical processes have fundamentally transformed the worlds of
Chinese employment in the past three decades: commodification and casual-
ization. Both tendencies, driven by economic and political forces within and
beyond China, have spawned a precipitous decline in labour standards and a
palpable rise in labour discontent and unrest that is cellularized, localized
and unco-ordinated. Adhering to a model of economic development depen-
dent on high rates of exploitation, the Chinese leadership has sponsored a
historic overhaul of the socialist employment system since the 1980s, disem-
powering the working class at the point of production while ordaining a
Eli Friedman and Ching Kwan Lee are at the University of California.
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8543.2010.00814.x
48:3 September 2010 0007–1080 pp. 507–533
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
panoply of ‘rights’ in the legal and administrative systems. If Chinese labour
under Mao was a state-controlled and organized class, in the reform period,
a formidable alliance of interest between the Chinese state and capital, both
global and domestic, has rendered it disorganized and individualized, capable
of occasional sparkles of rebellion but without sustainable collective power.
The story of Chinese labour is hardly unique. Around the world, examples
abound about the erosion of the social contract, multiple forms of ‘flexible’
employment and dispossession of worker entitlements. Yet the enormity of
the Chinese workforce — the largest in the world at more than 800 million —
and centrality of China in the global economy, gives particular poignancy to
the condition of Chinese labour. In this overview of Chinese labour in the
post-Mao era, we wish to highlight the characteristics of the Chinese political
economy and the social composition of the labour force that shape the
peculiar processes and politics of commodification, casualization and cellu-
larization. In what follows, we will first depict the shifting nature and
structure of employment, evolving from the socialist social contract to the
market-driven, legal contract (or no contract) for labour. The second part of
the article contextualizes these shifts in employment in the configuration of
state and capital interests and power relations, as well as policies of migration
that have led to the formation of the new working class consisting mostly of
migrant labourers. This discussion of the political economy of employment
will be followed by a three-way analysis of the ‘contested terrain’ of Chinese
labour. We will see that legal reform is a strategy of the state to regulate and
contain labour resistance, while workers pursue both legal and extra-legal
means of activism, and unions and labour non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) develop as a force of political stabilization alongside an increasingly
restive work force. We conclude by examining some significant recent events
in China’s labour politics, namely the enactment of the Labour Contract Law
and the onset of the financial crisis, both occurring in 2008. They show that
while labour does not necessarily present a political challenge to the state in
the short to mid term, it does present constraints on the state’s attempt to
switch models of accumulation from one dependent on exports to one based
on domestic consumption.
2. Employment reform: from social contract to legal (or no) contract
Commodification of Labour
The commodification of labour has been the constitutive process of China’s
turn to capitalism. Like other kinds of commodities, the human capacity to
transform nature can now be alienated from one person and sold to others.
This process has been tumultuous and painful for Chinese workers, not the
least because the Chinese employment system put in place under the state
socialist period, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, was a de-commodified one.
Vividly captured by the famous Chinese expression the ‘iron rice bowl’, it was
a system in which urban workers were administratively allocated to a de facto
508 British Journal of Industrial Relations
© Blackwell Publishing Ltd/London School of Economics 2010.
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