Bringing Class Struggles Back: A Marxian Analysis of the State and Class Relations in China

Class and Precarity: An Unhappy Coupling in China’s Working Class Formation

“…Moving into the new millennium, a new generation of migrant workers has gradually become aware of their class position and participated in a widening series of collective actions, as reported by various recent studies (Chan, 2012;Chan and Hui, 2016;Friedman, 2014;Pringle, 2017;Zhang, 2014). Migrant workers are now experiencing a deeper sense of anger and dissatisfaction than that of the first generation, accompanied by the realization that they are increasingly cut adrift from economic activity in their home town (Pun, 2016).…”

“…Entering into the 2000s, when increasing labour strikes were recorded, Lee argued that only ‘cellular and piecemeal labour actions’ (2007: 235) were possible because under an authoritarian state and coercive production regime, the working class is incapable of developing class awareness and hence no class actions would be possible. Despite contra empirical studies, provided by Chan and Hui (2016), Leung and Pun (2009), Pringle (2017), Zhang (2014) and many others, Lee (2016) has fiercely criticized those who studied Chinese workers’ power and resistance for providing no evidence and hence these Chinese labour scholars were all trapped in ‘false optimism’ and ‘subjectivism and voluntarism’ in their studies. Lee’s argument is in fact arbitrary and subjective as the above- mentioned studies are based on solid empirical research on Chinese workers’ protests and strikes in recent years.…”

“…In the 1980s and the 1990s when China was incorporated into the global economy and turned itself into the ‘world’s workshop’, there were more precarious jobs than in the new millennium. More recent government labour legislation has moved to offer more protection, but this has been followed by greater labour resistance and collective action (Chan and Hui, 2016). Although lack of enforcement of new labour laws is widespread, alongside use of fixed-term contracts, in terms of labour disputes and collective actions, we witness a lot more in the new or second generation which is supported by numerous empirical studies (Leung and Pun, 2009; Pun and Lu, 2010a, 2010b).…”

“…Recent years have further seen increasing numbers of collective actions among migrant workers pursuing delayed wages, demanding compensation for injury or death or pressurizing enterprises to increase wages and living allowances: ‘According to the China Labour Bulletin (CLB, 2016), the number of labour strikes and protests in 2015 in China reached 2774, more double the number for 2014’ (Chan and Hui, 2016: 9–10).…”

“…Labour shortages enhances bargaining power of Chinese workers and ‘has great implications for the balance of power between capital and labour in the post-crisis period’ (Chan and Hui, 2016: 5). Worker actions include legal litigation, such as suing subcontractors or companies (Chen and Xu, 2012), as well as collective actions such as sit-ins, strikes and even suicidal behaviour (Pun et al, 2014).…”