Livelihood struggles and market reform (un)making chinese labour after state socialism

Abstract

"The surge of China as the workshop of the world has been founded on, among other things, a fundamental restructuring of the labour force. Massive unemployment in the state industrial sector is taking place simultaneously with momentous migration of peasants into global factories. Both the unmaking and the making of the Chinese working class are heavily shaped by the state. This paper traces the historical evolution of core changes in Chinese labour reform and worker entitlements: from the introduction of labour contracts to the promulgation of a national labour law, the demolition of work-unit socialism and its replacement with a national social security system. I also examine workers’ livelihood struggles in response to this epochal transformation. The central problem for Chinese workers is not the new labour and welfare systems, but the wide discrepancies between the stipulation and the implementation of these new policies. The institutional source of these gaps, this paper argues, lies in two contradictions inherent in the strategy of Chinese reform. Firstly, the imperative to rely on local accumulation to fuel marketization clashes with the imperative to maintain legitimacy by providing a basic level of justice and welfare for the most disadvantaged. Local state agents are more interested in the former than the latter, especially when they can count on central government financial intervention to maintain social stability. The second contradiction in Chinese reform that is conducive to uneven protection of labour rights has to do with the illiberal nature of the Chinese legal system. The state uses the law as a means of controlling society, while allowing itself to remain mostly unrestrained by the law. When it is not in the interest of the local officials to enforce labour regulations, there is hardly enough countervailing authority—from the judiciary, for instance—to preserve the sanctity of the law."(pg ii)