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 casualization 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 localized resistance from the Chinese working class. Up until now, the activities of labour nongovernmental 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

In this introduction to the special issue 'Changing work, labour and employment relations in China', we argue that China is taking an experimental and decentralized approach to the development of new labor relations frameworks. Particular political constraints in China prevent interest aggregation among workers, as the central state sees this as posing a risk to social stability. Firms and local governments have been given a degree of space to experiment with different arrangements, as long as the categorical ban on independent unions is not violated. The consequence has been an increasingly differentiated labor relations landscape, with significant variation by region and sector. We note some countervailing tendencies towards re-centralization, but emphasize that this phenomenon remains largely confined to the municipal level. The five articles in this special issue address different aspects of both experimentation and decentralization in labor relations.

Drawing on qualitative fieldwork in China's Guangdong and Zhejiang Provinces, the author asks how post-socialist unions respond to worker unrest and why the development of sectoral-level bargaining has been uneven in different regions of China. While Zhejiang has had relative success in establishing the organizational infrastructure for sectoral bargaining, Guangdong has had little success despite ongoing attempts by unions. The author explains variation in sectoral-level bargaining through an analysis of the different models of economic development, which are characterized as local entrepreneurialism and global integration for Zhejiang and Guangdong, respectively. Despite having different organizational forms, unions in both places suffer from a lack of credibility and capacity to enforce contracts. Given the ACFTU's ongoing focus on sectoral-level bargaining, however, experiments will likely continue in various regions and industries throughout China.

This article elucidates connections between two strategies of transnational social movements-external pressure and local mobilization-and two potential outcomes-paternalism and psychological empowerment. Application of this theoretical framework to the nascent Chinese labor movement indicates that an overreliance on an external-pressure approach results in paternalism, thereby precluding psychological empowerment for aggrieved actors and potentially inhibiting movement growth. Conversely, strategies that relegate external support to a secondary role and privilege local mobilization are more likely to result in psychological empowerment. In this study, I argue that psychological empowerment is a prerequisite for the emergence of a worker-based movement in China. Many studies of cooperation between movement actors from the global North and South have seen this relationship as essentially unproblematic. I begin to problematize the inherent power inequalities between the two sets of actors and will theorize the implications for movement emergence in Southern countries.

How do post-socialist unions respond to market crisis? And what are the implications of this response for labor representation? Drawing on literature on post-socialist labor and union democracy, I argue that economic crisis affects not just labor -capital and labor -state relations, but also the relationship between union representatives and workers. Such a dynamic is highlighted by an empirical account of the divergent activities of workers and All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) unions in China following the economic crisis of 2008. While the union responded to mass unemployment with an administrative and policy-oriented strategy, workers took to the streets in increasing numbers. This divergence led to several instances of conflict, and, by 2010, it was possible to detect small but significant shifts in the union's approach to dealing with labor unrest. While the union responded to mass unemployment with an administrative and policy-oriented strategy, workers took to the streets in increasing numbers. This divergence led to several instances of conflict, and, by 2010, it was possible to detect small but significant shifts in the union's approach to dealing with labor unrest.