No abstract

Since the 1990s, the Chinese apparel industry in Prato has developed from a few stitching workshops into full‐fledged production networks. However, persistent disparity between the Chinese and Italian labor has triggered widespread social tensions. Drawing upon the recent literature of critical labor studies, this paper offers a different perspective to see the disparity in terms of the multiplication of labor across scales. The Chinese labor in Prato is made cheap and flexible by the proliferation of institutional and social borders, which were in turn inadvertently produced by Italian immigration policies, Chinese social norms, and local and regional economic conditions. In particular, the Chinese migrant workers have played an active role in producing social borders and in their own exploitation. Therefore, the labor polarization in Prato can hardly be solved by local institutional arrangements, and Italian trade unions have failed to organize the Chinese migrant labor in Prato.

In 2007/2008 the Labour Contract Law was introduced and enacted in China.Responses to the law have varied enormously. For many, it represented a major change in the conditions under which workers and employers can enter into contracts and, as a result, it has been seen as an important step in empowering workers to shape their conditions of work. For others, the law lacked teeth and was not implemented. In practice, the law has had different effects within and among different types of firms depending on their ownership structure, product mix, market orientation, size and geographical location. The differences are particularly clear among private sector firms and between and among private and public sector enterprises. This article outlines the conditions and terms of the 1995 Labour Law and how the 2008 Labour Contract Law changes these, particularly for global buyers sourcing from China and for workers and enterprises in China. In particular, it assesses the differential impacts of the new law on permanent and temporary workers in state-owned and private enterprises, and between private-and public-sector employees, with an emphasis in the latter case on the liberalisation, not enhanced protection, of workers' rights.

In 2007/2008, the new Labour Contract Law was enacted in China. This law has substantially changed the conditions under which workers and employers can enter into contracts and has had important effects on the ability of workers to shape their conditions of work. This paper outlines the conditions and terms of the 1995 Labour Law and how the new law changes these. It details the legal requirements of the new law and then assesses the consequences of these changes for global buyers sourcing from China and for workers and enterprises in China. In particular, it assesses the differential impacts of the new law on permanent and temporary workers in state-owned and private enterprises, and between private-and public-sector employees..

This article joins interdisciplinary efforts to problematize dichotomous thinking (i.e. state vs. market, East vs. West, and new vs. old) in existing discourses concerning state capitalism. Focusing on the New Whole State System in relation to tech companies owned by Tsinghua University, we analyze the actually existing state capitalism in China as a spatiotemporally specific and conjuncturally situated assemblage of discourses, policies, and practices. We show that under both the Old Whole State System (1950s–1970s) and New Whole State System (mid-2000s onward) eras, the Chinese state, reacting to foreign economic and geopolitical pressures, attempted to graft a centralized innovation system onto preexisting decentralized governance structures, concentrating resources to promote selected strategic industries. Unlike the Old Whole State System, the New Whole State System relies on new policy tools characterized by state-led financialization and state–private fusion. The evolution of New Whole State System as an assemblage reveals that, contrary to the dominant geo-imaginary, the Chinese state is not monolithic, unchanging, and culturally essentialist. Rather, it is actively engaged in global debates about, and in contested experiments with expanding the state's role in the economy in response to global, conjunctural crises of overproduction and financialization. By foregrounding this non-Western country/region’s internal debate about its own development trajectory, its uneven success in overcoming uneven development, and its interaction with the rest of the world, we propose an alternative perspective that contributes both theoretically and methodologically to the epistemologically Euro-American centric literature of state capitalism.