A Tale of Two Deltas: Labour Politics in Jiangsu and Guangdong
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12467 |
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Manfred Elfstrom |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12467
57:2 June 2019 0007–1080 pp. 247–274
A Tale of Two Deltas: Labour Politics
in Jiangsu and Guangdong
Manfred Elfstrom
Abstract
This article examines the sources of variation in Chinese workplace governance
between otherwise similar parts of the country. Jiangsu’s portion of the Yangtze
River Delta (YRD) and Guangdong’s portion of the Pearl River Delta (PRD)
are both booming export hubs with large numbers of migrant workers. Yet, in
the former region, authorities manage conflict with orthodoxy and coaxing; in
the latter, with experimentation and coercion. Using interviews and government
yearbooks, the article conceives of the YRD and PRD as ‘regional fields’ within
the broader ‘field’ of Chinese labour politics. Greater worker militancy and
organization is pushing the PRD field o-balance, yielding more innovative
but brutal policies. Although it has become common to explain governance in
China from an elite perspective, grassroots contention is thus key. Bottom-up
pressures generatetop-down policy. This, the author contends, is true even under
Xi Jinping.
1. Introduction
Scholars have highlighted broad, regional dierences in Chinese labour
politics — between the northeast and southeast, between the coast and the
interior, between the old industrial bases of the planned economy and new
centres of foreign investment. The existence of this sort of variation in a
country so large is, of course, not by itself surprising. However, the sharply
contrasting approaches to workplacegovernance found in structurally similar
parts of China present a puzzle.They also oer a unique opportunity to clarify
the fundamental forces atplay in ‘the factory of the world’. Specifically,a close
examination of worker-state interactions in these places suggests that workers
are altering policy by challenging the state’s maintenance of social stability
and unsettling the local political order — and therefore pushing ocials to
demonstrate to their superiors and the public that they are on top of the
Manfred Elfstrom is at the Universityof Southern California.
C
2019 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.
248 British Journal of Industrial Relations
situation through newinitiatives. Overly top-downaccounts of social policy in
China and elsewhere should thus be treated with caution, and scholars ought
to focus more on labour’s considerable agency. The shifts underway in high-
unrest areas of the People’s Republic indicate, however, that mobilization can
havea profoundly contradictory eect, yielding both increased repression and
increased responsiveness.
In this article, which spans the comparatively liberal Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao
administration and the more rigid Xi Jinping administration, I use extensive
interviews with workers, labour activists, businesspeople and ocials, along
with selections from municipal and provincial government yearbooks, to
juxtapose local authorities’ approaches to managing industrial relations in
two ‘most similar’ areas. Those areas are Jiangsu Province’s portion of the
Yangtze River Delta (YRD) and Guangdong Province’s portion of the Pearl
River Delta (PRD). Both are booming export hubs with large numbers of
migrant workers. However, in the YRD, I find that authorities have adopted
an approach that I characterize as orthodoxy and coaxing, while in the PRD,
they have adopted one of experimentation and coercion. Branches of the
party-controlled trade union federation in the YRD stick to statesocialist-era
programming, focused on welfare provision, as their counterparts in the
PRD cautiously experiment with novel forms of worker representation.
Simultaneously, YRD ocials try to steer businesses and workers towards
compliance with local policy using quiet rewards and punishments, formal
and informal, whilst PRD ocials actively force recalcitrant enterprises out
of the region and crack down harshly on both labour activists and rank
and file strike participants. Why these marked policy dierences where least
expected?
Drawing on sociological field theory, existing research on cadre promotion
processes, as well as ocial labour dispute statistics and a close read and
automated content analysis of 180 yearbooks from the two deltas, I argue
that such regional contrasts demonstrate the destabilizing eect that greater
worker militancy and organization have had on the PRD’s ‘regional field’
within the greater ‘field’ of Chinese labour politics — and on the careers for
local ocials. When workers acquire the ‘social skills’ necessary to challenge
their field’s dominant actor, the state and its commitment to stability, they
throw the tangle of self-reinforcing relationships in their field o course.
This places tremendous pressure on cadres who are graded on their ability
to maintain order. The result is a gradual adjustment of the field’s rules.
Bottom-up pressures mix with state priorities and bureaucratic incentives
to yield more brutal and innovative governance at once. In support of this
argument, I show how mentions of workplace issues in the public security
sections of the PRD almanacs have gradually eclipsed those in the YRD
in tandem with the PRD’s rising number of actual labour disputes, as
ocials scramble to demonstrate grit and creativity in the face of unrest.
As contention deepens across China, I argue that we are observing similar
dynamics on a national scale, even under Xi Jinping. This has important
C
2019 John Wiley& SonsLtd.
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