Globalization, Structural Reform and Labour Politics in China

Abstract

To analyze the relationship between globalization and labour protest, this paper compares labour politics in three regions: the highly globalized southeast 'sunbelt', the relatively less 'reformed', barely globalized, and decaying Manchurian rustbelt, and the broadly 'reformed' but only partially globalized and still largely domestically-oriented areas that make up most of the rest of the country, represented in this chapter by the city of Tianjin, the site of the author's field research. For each, we will identify key dimensions of labour politics. This political configuration forms our explanandum, which is fleshed out region by region. The paper then seeks the explanans of these salient similarities and differences, focusing on the key question of resistance.

A Tale of Two Deltas: Labour Politics in Jiangsu and Guangdong

“…Hurst (), restricting his analysis to the late 1990s struggles of laid off SOE workers, describes four regional political economies, each with a different capacity for responding to labour's needs: the Northeast, North‐Central, Central Coast and Upper Changjiang (provincial capitals form a fifth category of sorts). Blecher (), building off of Lee (), distinguishes between a ‘highly globalized’ southeastern ‘sunbelt’, a ‘barely globalized’ northeastern ‘rustbelt’ and a ‘broadly ‘reformed’ but only partially globalized and still largely domestically‐oriented’ class of areas such as the city of Tianjin. Lüthje () offers five regionally bound regimes of production: state‐bureaucratic, corporate‐bureaucratic, corporate high‐performance, flexible mass production and low‐wage classic.…”

“…Examples of such fields include areas identified in the literature reviewed above, such as the ‘northeastern rustbelt’ or the ‘partially globalized coast’ (Blecher ; Lee ).…”

Legitimating exclusion and inclusion: ‘culture’, education and entitlement to local urban citizenship in Tianjin and Lanzhou

“…Both cities have historically been dominated by the state-owned sector, Tianjin due in part to its previous history as a colonial treaty port (Blecher 2009), and Lanzhou as a centre for production of petrochemicals in the early PRC period and beyond. They are magnets for migrants within the regions in which they are situated, and contain enclaves of previous waves of migration, but given Lanzhou's location in the interior and Tianjin's coastal location not far from Beijing, the pool of potential migrants for both cities is quite different.…”

The Changing Nature of Labor Unrest in China

“…Along with adopting a generally "defensive" posture, Chinese workers are described as varying in their activism by region, by their relationships with local authorities, by the different managerial regimes under which they labor, and by their own networks and connections (Perry 2002). Lee (2007), Hurst (2009), and Blecher (2010) all map broad regional differences, particularly between the northeast and southeast, inland and coast. Su and He (2010: 162) highlighted variation in activism based on the reaction of local authorities "who maintain a close, if not downright collusive, relationship with employers and thus will often take their side."…”