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The restructuring of SOEs has been met with varying degrees of resistance by an urban working class that has seen the relative security of ‘command economy’ jobs disappear into the insecurities of a more profit-orientated labour market. The workers involved in some of these struggles have been mobilised by a growing awareness, at times restrained by an initial disbelief, that they are the targets of national policy – or rather local governments’ interpretation of national policy. Beginning in the late nineties, city X in mid-China saw a major wave of restructuring that often involved private capital buying up the factories of SOEs and sacking workers in the new production arrangements that emerged. Privatisation (siyouhua) remains a profoundly politically sensitive term in China but this is what the workers in city X were facing. Indeed the workers’ resistance made great use of the ideological sensitivities of the term following decades of official propaganda in which private capital had been designated as a vicious form of exploitation. Workers at some factories facing privatisation employed anti-capitalist language:

“Our factory was bought up by a capitalist. They got everything and paid next to nothing for it. They said that government policy allows it. They got the lot! They promised capital infusions, higher wages, new products, new projects – but none materialised. The police protected the capitalists! But the capitalists are the ones with all the power…workers only have their fists…hundreds of migrants were hired at 50 yuan a day to beat up the workers.”[3]

These words and events are not specific to city X. For that matter they are not specific to China and are often echoed by workers facing privatisation in many countries. Some labour specialists have argued that the privatisation of profitable working factories has led to an increase in class consciousness that goes way beyond the despairing nostalgia for the Mao period that has accompanied workers resistance against downsizing – arguably the main political ‘event’ in China during the nineties. (See article on xiagang on page ?).

“Demands for back wages, unpaid livelihood allowances and pensions, for example, can be made through collective petitions or ‘contentious gatherings’ before government buildings. Such action may need to be coordinated…but they usually do not take a clear organisational format and many of them can be easily defused by a government promise of a couple of yuan as compensation…However resistance to privatisation involves a complicated process of claim making that entails more coordinated and organised action over a relatively sustained period.”[4]

Research at a factory referred to as ZZPM demonstrates how workers were able to legitimise their struggle by first organising for elections to a new staff and workers congress – the original congress was deemed to be rigged by management – and then organising a new trade union, presumably affiliated to the official trade union.[5] The process involved the violent ending of an occupation, arrests, a trial, and indeed outstanding courage and leadership by two workers’ leaders in particular. It ended in a victory of sorts with a worker buyout of the factory.[6]

The six-week strike in the city of Xianyang during the late autumn of 2004 was a highly significant action. Six weeks is a long time to sustain solidarity strong enough to run a 24-hour revolving picket line in very cold weather especially when such actions can be deemed subversive by the authorities. Up to 7,000 SOE workers at the Tianwang Textile Factory struck in an attempt to protect their seniority, wages, and conditions in the face of pressure from a new majority shareholder, China Resources. On more than one occasion the pickets successfully stopped police from using water cannon to break the strike. The strikers had chosen a strategy of organising within the parameters of China’s trade union laws and took the initiative to organise their own branch of the official All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) via a shop-based election. The ACFTU refused to recognise the workers’ efforts and the authorities – after a six-week standoff – detained more than 20 of the workers’ representatives. What made Xianyang different from previous large-scale protests in Daqing and Liaoyang in 2002 for example is the fact that workers were taking strike action and actually stopping production i.e. they struck before the introduction of new and inferior working arrangements or lay-offs became effective. While not all the workers’ demands were met, the new owners did compromise on the issue of contracts and all the detained workers were eventually released.

Although the mass protests in Liaoyang took place four years ago, in the spring of 2002, they remain an important yardstick for measuring both the collective challenge of workers and the authorities’ response. The CPC is profoundly aware that working class resistance has the potential to challenge their legitimacy as a party ruling in the name of the working class. It appears that the authorities are prepared to tolerate short-term factory-based disputes that do not go further than the immediate physical vicinity. In 2001, the central government instructed local authorities to avoid mass arrests and serious violence against worker protests in an attempt to prevent disputes spreading across factories and offices. For sure, if roads are blocked by workers the police will move in quickly and clashes may or may not occur. But it is also true that if a dispute stays limited to one factory, the authorities prefer negotiation to confrontation. The line is drawn at ‘secondary’ solidarity with workers in struggle i.e. when workers not directly involved in a dispute offer support to those who are. A carrot and stick policy has evolved with the aim of maintaining public order and giving the authorities’ time to identify and detain organisers should a dispute be sustained.

The policy was successfully deployed to deal with the massive outburst of discontent among laid off workers in north east China in 2002. In the city of Liaoyang in particular, large demonstrations of up to 30,000 workers from 18 different SOEs took place in support of workers at the Liaoyang Ferroalloy Factory. The city government, alarmed by the fact that workers from many separate enterprises had joined the demonstration, moved to arrest four of the chief organisers and later imprisoned two of them for up to seven years. It is notable that the dispute around corruption at the ferroalloy factory had been going on for four years prior to the mass demonstration. Although the workers had previously organised fairly large public protests, it was when workers from other factories took solidarity action that the authorities moved in. It might be argued that the class consciousness displayed by the workers was matched by that of the authorities!

The struggles described above have been centered on SOE workers who have challenged the restructuring of their enterprises and have done so collectively. I have noted that there is a qualitative difference between those struggles involving workers already laid off, and those involving workers still in work. This is an important difference. While the actual economic conditions of the former are generally worse, they no longer possess the economic power to stop production and this seriously weakens their capacity to have an impact on those who control their lives, namely enterprise directors and government officials. During the mass sustained protests by up to 80,000 oil workers in the north east city of Daqing in 2002, the oil company at the centre of the dispute went out of its way to make sure that laid off workers did not make common cause with still employed oil workers, some of whom were family members:

“Right now the oil company is concentrating on public opinion and sowing discord among current and former employees. As of writing, the March bonus has not been issued and the company’s explanation to all employees has been that “this is a direct result of the demonstrations. Go ask the protesters.” [7]

In struggles against privatisation that involve workers still at work, it appears that Chinese workers take a much more active class-orientated standpoint that sometimes borrows rhetoric from pre-reform days.[8] While some have argued that in doing so workers are trapping themselves in the past,[9] it is perhaps more pertinent to note that what is really preventing workers from moving beyond Maoist norms of class consciousness – which I agree are well past their sell by date – is the CPC’s refusal to allow workers to organise independently and develop ideas that will not necessarily conform with past, or present, dominant ideology. I believe this is one of the principle obstacles confronting the development of a labour movement.

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[3] Transcript of an interview carried out by a journalist researching poverty and privatisation in Asia (unpublished, on file at AMRC).

[4] Feng Chen, March 2006, Privatisation and its Discontents in Chinese Factories, China Quarterly, Volume 185.

[5] The staff and workers congress is a formal institution of SOEs and collectively owned enterprises aimed at allowing worker participation in the monitoring of management decisions. In practice, it has not to date been an effective check on management authority. However, the congress has often become a focal point for workers’ protests against various forms of restructuring.

[6] Feng Chen, op.cit.

[7] Lin Jin, 2002 “Laizi Daqing de baogao” (“Report from Daqing”), Xianqu Jikan (Pioneer Quarterly), Issue 63, Spring 2002, p. 14.

[8] This is not to say that the laid off oil workers of Daqing did not take a stand based on notions of class – they did. I am pointing out that the fact that they were no longer in a labour relationship with their former employer seriously weakened their industrial muscle and consequently the class rhetoric tends to be more nostalgic than current.

[9] See Feng Chen, op.cit.