Chris K.C. Chan
Abstract
China has become a global manufucturing centre with its ‘unlimited’ supply of low cost and unorganised peasant workers. The potential of Chinese workers to change this condition has significant meaning for global labour politics. Through ethnographic case studies, this paper examines the extent of the rise of working class power in South China in recent years.
The author argues against with the dominant current in labour studies, which declares ‘the death of the working class’ and priviledges non-class identities, and argues that the expansion of global production into China has intensifed class struggle in the workplace and beyond, although workers’ class formation has been dislocated by the state strategy of labour regulation. Without class organisations, the emergence of a labour movement is unlikely, but the unstable workplace relations and labour market also present a challenge to both state and management and lead to steady improvement of general working conditions.
Introduction
Andre Gorz’s (1980) notable work Farewell to the Working-Class: an Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism declared an intellectual turn of the left and a theoretical turn in labour studies in the past three decades. His pessimistic emotion of ‘farewell’ was soon widely echoed by many social theorists, including those originally attached to the Marxist school (Aronowitz and DiFazio, 1994; Casey, 1995; Aronowitz and Culter,1998; Bauman; 1998; Beck, 2000; cited Strangleman, 2007). Another influential and controversial book with an even more radical heading, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era, was published in 1996 by Jeremy Rifkin (1996). This strand of post-Marxist works implied that the contemporary world had fundamentally departed from the pre-1970s epoch. As a result, workers and their class organizations have lost the historical role promised by Marx in social change and non-class-based identity movement are the only ‘potential subjects’ in the new age (Castells, 1997: 354, 360). These works, however, were criticized as not being empirically grounded (Strangleman, 2007). Scholars who studied the labour struggle from a historical and comparative perspective (e.g. Wood et al., 1998; Waddington, 1999; Hutchison and Brown, 2001; Silver, 2003) also showed evidence of labour movement revitalization in the newly industrized countries (NIC) like Brazil, South Korea, South Africa and Mexico. Silver (2003: 5) argued fiercely that ‘while labour has been weakened in the locations from which productive capital emigrated, new working classes have been created and strengthened in the favored new sites of investment.’
The subordination of class identity was further reinforced by the school of post-structuralism which was rooted in the ‘linguistic turn’. According to this school, the dominance of class analysis among the old generation of labour studies was a project of ‘modern discourse’ (Cannadine, 1999; Day, 2001; Skeggs, 2004; cited Thiel, 2007). While the post-industrialist theorists, Andre Gorz and Jeremy Rifkin alike, did not reject the centrality of class politics in the period of industrialism, post-structuralists reconstructed that history and argued for the centrality of local culture rather than the capitalist mode of production in the rise of class identity even in England (e.g. Fantasia, 1988; Somers, 1997). This approach to ‘class’ has exerted a profound effort on contemporary ethnographic studies of work, employment and labour. Researchers turn to study workers’ identity(ies) by their language and communication (e.g. Thiel, 2007). If not fully rejected, class was downplayed as just one of the multi-faceted identities of workers.
In this study, I attempt to challenge this trend on empirical and theoretical grounds. Empirically, I suggest that while the metropolitan West experiences deindustrialization, reindustrialization is being undertaken in NICs like China. According to the national census in 2000, the number of rural–urban migrant workers in China is as high as 120 million. Peasant migrant workers represent 57.5% of the manufacturing workforce (Lee, 2007a). This study shows that workers’ protests against global capital have become more and more radical, tactical and coordinated. Workers’ protest has posed a profound challenge to both the state authorities and global capitalists. Theoretically, I argue that identity(ies), in terms of the language workers use to identify themselves in workers’ struggle or social life, is not a reliable concept to study class consciousness and workers’ collective actions and is unable to transcend or replace the concept of class as a social relation. It is better viewed as workers’ self identification in class struggle as a base of solidarity in a specific social context. Then I suggest connecting the ‘subjective’ base of solidarity and ‘objective’ class interest in the analysis of dynamic social relations in the workplace and beyond.
This paper begins with a discussion of identity and class in previous research on migrant workers in South China. Then I provide three broader contexts to situate my case studies of workers’ protests: first, the historical development of labour relations after 1978; second, the social environment that constructs this study; third, the economic and political context from the early 1990s to 2007. Finally, I argue that the expansion of global production into China has intensifed class struggle in the workplace and streghtened workers’ strategy and confidence in collective actions, although their class consciouness was dislocated by the state strategy of labour regulation. Without class organisations, the emergence of a labour movement is unlikely, but the unstable workplace relations and labour market also present a challenge to both state and management and lead to steady improvement of general working conditions.
Migrant Workers’ Idendity and Class in China
The new current of feminism, culturalism, post-Marxism and post-structuralism in western sociology and anthopology inspired the orientation of many enthnographers in studying workplace politics in China (Lee, 2007b). Scholars paid special attention to the ‘working daughters’ in export-oriented zones. Most of the studies were conducted in froeign-invested electronics factories in Shen Zhen, China’s first and most flourishing Special Economic Zone (SEZ), or the surrounding area (e.g. Tam, 1992; Y.J.J. Lee, 1995; C.K. Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005). As their studies showed, the integration of the young woman rural workers into a modern labour regime involved coercion but also encountered resistance. S. M. M.Tam’s (1992) earliest study recorded that the young girls wrote graffiti on the backdoor of the toilet to show their frustration with working life but was perceived by the management as an act challenging their authority. According to Y. J. J. Lee (1995), the modernization project failed to change the work attitudes of the rural girls who were attached to traditional socialist culture, despite their being well integrated into a modern consumption culture. C. K. Lee (1998:135) found that both control and resistance were organized on the lines of locality and gender, and for the worker side, an identity of ‘maiden workers’ was developed to resist the ‘class domination’ of the management. Pun Ngai (2005) incorporated the issues of bodily trauma and transgression into micro workplace control and resistance. She also highlighted Dagongmei (working daughter) as a class and gender identity.
With their passion and commitment to expose and disclose the subjectivity of the young working women, these studies provided fruitful insights into working life and power relations in the workplace. However, these researches cannot fully satisfy our curiosity about the new developments in labour relations in the region. For example, how to understand and theorize the more overt and articulate forms of protest as reported in the media? To what extent are workers’ protests able to exert a class power to influence the behavior of management and state policy? These puzzles can only be answered by a study into workers’ protests in both community and workplace.
C.K. Lee’s (2007a) comparative study of laid-off state workers in the North and migrant workers in South China was one of the recent works to attempt to solve these puzzles. For the part of insurgent migrant workers, Lee conducted participant observation and workers’ interviews in labour NGOs, facotries and dormitories as well as following workers in legal procudures till 2002. She observed ‘three major types of workplace grievances that often lead to labor arbitration, litigation, and protests…(1) unpaid wages, illegal wage deductions, or substandard wage rates; (2) disciplinary violence and dignity violences; and (3) industrial injuries and lack of injury compesation’ in South China (Lee, 2007a: 165). According to her, it was only after the ‘rationalization’ of the administration and arbitration procedure failed to protect workers’ legal rights, that the victims were then forced to ‘radicalisation’ by walking out onto the streets. ‘Worker solidarity peaks at the point of collective exit from the factory, occasioned by plant closure or relocation,’ Lee (2007a: 175) elaborated. Depite the higher level of solidarity workers showed in this sort of cases, the migrants would disperse to different places after the protest without proper maintenance of contacts. C. K. Lee argued that ‘Chinese workers can hardly be described as having much marketplace, workplace, or associational bargaining power’ (Lee, 2007a: 24). Alternatively, Lee (2007a: 25) borrowed ‘three potential insurgent identities’ from western labour studies, namely, ‘proletariat’, ‘citizen’ and ‘subaltern’ to analyse both laid-off state workers and migrant workers in protests: :
I have found that class identity is more muted and ambivalent among migrant workers than among rustbelt [Northern state]workers, whereas claims made on the basis of equality before the law and of citizens’ right to legal justice are impassioned and firm, as in the rustbelt [South]. Workers also identify themselves as the marginalized and the subordinate in society….
Lee (2007a; 195)
In short, Lee prividged non-class ‘citizenship’ over ‘class’ for migrant workers and implied state laid-off workers were more class-concious. It is certain that veteran state workers had better organisational resources such as the trade union, workers’ congress or a stable urban community so that they could stage a joint factory campaign, which is much more difficult for migrant workers to achieve. Nonetheless, her position on ‘class’ is unsatisfactory because she has abandoned the material and historical base in favour of an interpretation class in linguistic terms. In this regard, the theorization of Feng Chen (2000; 2003; 2006) of the class consciousness of former state workers and Ngai Pun’s (2005) imagination on class formation of migrant workers are more satisfactory.
In Chen’s (2000; 2003) early studies of protests of laid-off state workers, although the memory of Maoism and the language of ‘gong ren jie ji’ (working class) were dominant in the language and slogans of the insurgents, Chen showed high sceptism about their class consciousness. It was only his recent study of a campaign of previous state workers working in privatized factories to overule the privatization decision and take over the factory by themselves that made Chen relatively positive about the possibility of class couscioness ( Chen, 2006). The language of ‘class’, which was rooted in the historical memory of the pensioners, did not have any material base. First, they were out of the production centre. Second, they did not have any experience of capitalist relations of production. Third, their target was the state rather than the new factory owners.
Migrant workers, by contrast, were all within the production centre under a capitalist class relation. Except for some very extreme cases, their demands can only be satisfied by interest concessions from the capitalists. In spite of this, as Lee (2007a: 195; 204) described, migrant workers rarely used the term of gong ren jie ji (working class) or gong ren (workers) to describe themselves, as the state workers did. Instead, they identified themsleves as: ming gong (non-state workers), nong ming gong (peasant workers), wai lai gong (outside workers) or da gong (selling labor to the bosses). These difference should be understood in their political and cultural context. Politically, gong ren jie ji and gong ren were political rhetorics imposed in Mao’s era, while ming gong, nong ming gong and wai lai gong were the social stigma attached to the new workers after the reform. Culturally, da gong (selling labour to the bosses) is a term more attached to the Cantonese context with a very similar meaning to gong ren . Pun quoted a da gong zai (a man selling labour to the bosses) saying:
We are not treated as human beings…We work like dogs and never stop.
When the superior asks you to work, you have to work no matter when and
where…Who cares who you are? We are nobody, we are stuff….What is
dagongzai? Dagongzai is worth nothing. Dagongzai is only disposable stuff
(feiwu).”
Pun (2005:23-24)
On the basis of workers’ self understanding like this, Pun (2005) argued that migrant workers’ understanding of class relations was grounded in everyday life. Pun (2005: 24-25) suggested that ‘a new generation of migrant workers has rapidly developed a range of examples of class awareness and understanding in the workplace. ’
Although I agree with Pun’s equalization of da gong zai, or in a gender balanced term da gong zai/nu (man and woman selling the labour power), with gong ren (worker), I would put it further. Even if the migrant workers totally did not hail themselves as workers, would that mean that there is no working class and so no class struggle in the global factories of China? E. P. Thompson’s notion of ‘class struggle without classes’ comes to mind here:
…people find themselves in a society structured in determined ways (crucially but not exclusively in productive relations), they experience exploitation (or the need to maintain power over whom they exploit), they identify points of antagonistic interests, they commence to struggle around these issues and in the process of struggling discover themselves as classes.
Thompson (1978:49)
In his interpretation of Thompson, Paul Edwards put it more straightforwardly:
…classes exist as a result of the fundamental processes around the system of production, and can thus be identified independently of any beliefs among class actors; and that relations between members of classes are a form of class struggle even when people do not use the language themselves.
Edwards (2000: 142)
I prefer this approach as it highlights the importance of relations of production, but leaves leeway for studying subjectivity formation in a historical context. In her study of woman migrant workers’ activism in East China, for example, Sally Sargeson (2001) rightfully contended an education role of workers’ protest in transforming traditional affiliations to a more inclusive class awareness.
Chinese Labour Relations in Transition
Ttransformation of China from a state planned economy to a market-oriented one was driven by labour market reform. A household-based production contract system (Jia Ting Lian Chang Ze Ren Zhi) was introduced in 1978 to liberate and release a huge number of peasants from the collective and forced labour of communes. From the middle 1990s to the early 2000s, State owned enterprises were privatized and caused millions of state workers to be laid off or retire early (Cook, 2005). Some of them joined the peasant workers to compete for jobs in the coastal cities. The working conditions of migrant workers in foreign-invested firms were appalling: low pay, long working hours, despotic management and unsafe environment (Lee, 1998; Chan, 2001; Pun, 2005). Constrained by the Household Certificate System (Hu Kou), which was originated in 1958 as a mechanism to stop the peasants moving to the city, workers were denied urban citizenship and supposed to settle in the cities temporarily. Most of them settled in factory provided dormitories. The rural Hu Kou, however, guarantees them a piece of farming land in their home village.
In the wake of an emerging market economy, the state set up a legal regulation framework to replace the ‘socialist’ administrative regulation in the mid-1990s (Ng and Warner, 1998; Taylor et al, 2003; Clarke et al, 2004). In 1993, the ‘Enterprise Minimum Wage Regulation’ was issued by the Ministry of Labour. Under the regulation, local governments are given the autonomy to formulate their own legal minimum wage. More significantly, a Labour Law was legislated in 1994. The law laid down a foundation for workers’ legal and contractual rights, a system for solving labour disputes as well as collective contract and collective consultation between the trade union and management (Clarke et al, 2004). The right to strike has not yet been recognized by the law since it was removed from the constitution in 1982 (Taylor et al, 2003), but any action to disrupt social order is illegal under section 158 of the Penal Code.
The local authorities, nonetheless, were passive in enforcing the laws (Cook, 2005) and workers were often paid below the legal minimum (Chan, 2001). According to the law, all trade unions should be affiliated to the ACFTU which is under the leadership of the Party-state. About 30 percent of non-state enterprises have established trade unions, and the trade union presidents are typically managers (Chan, 2001; Cook, 2005). As a result, trade unions cannot fulfill their primary role as stipulated in the Labour Law (Chapter 1, No 7): to ‘…represent and protect the legal rights and interests of workers independently and autonomously…’.
The arbitration procedure, then, became the main channel to solve individual and collective disputes between migrant workers and their employers. The total number of registered labour dispute cases increased from 19,098 in 1994 to 226,391 in 2003 (State Statistics Bureau, various years). On the other hand, however, more workplace spontaneous strikes have been staged by migrant workers. According to Taylor et al (2003:175), ‘in recent years, workers [in foreign-owned enterprises] more frequently resort to strikes to express their complaints’. Previous research showed that strikes were ‘scattered, spontaneous and unorganised’ in the early 1990s (Leung, 1995: 44) and more prone to legal-based mobilization in the early 2000s (Lee, 2007a). This study sets out to investigate the development of strike patterns after the emergence of a ‘shortage of labour’ in 2004.
Research Journey into an Industrial Zone
Following previous research (Tam, 1992; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005), this research was also conducted in the city of Shen Zhen,. Selection of this city was not only because it is a ‘powerhouse’ of the “global factory” (Lee, 1998), but is also the city most prone to labour conflicts. The number of cases handled by labour dispute arbitration committees of Shen Zhen was reported as high as one tenth of the total national figure (Nan Fang Ri Bao, 28/10/2004). Departing from previous ethnographers who worked in a factory as an ordinary worker, I applied a method of community participant observation supplemented by documentary research. This approach was a result of both practical and theoretical considerations.
My personal journey to work with Chinese migrant workers began from 2003. In that year, in my capacity of a union organizer, I was invited to sit on the board of a labour NGO in Hong Kong whose main function is to help set up labour service centers in South China. I was involved in some education activities of migrant workers in a center in Bao An District of Shen Zhen. At that time strikes had not yet become a common phenomenon in the experience of workers. In 2004, I left Hong Kong to study on a postgraduate labour program in the UK. On 6th October, 2004, by reading the internet, I was particularly surprised by a report of three thousand workers from an electronics factory, who complained of low wages and long working hours and blocked a city highway for four hours (Nan Fang Ri Bao, 7/10/2004). Immediately I forwarded the reports to colleagues in Hong Kong and got a reply that workers had become more prone to strikes and collective protests. This phenomenon was parallel with a national-wide hit topic of ‘the shortage of labour’ in South China. Why and how did these changes happen? The media reports could not satisfy my curiosity. Thus I focused my research agenda on labour conflict in South China.
From May to July 2005, I returned to Hong Kong and Guang Dong to conduct a pilot study. Comparing my memory in 2003 and what I observed in 2005, I felt some significant difference. It forced me to agree with E. P. Thompson (1968)’s stress on the role of history and class struggle in the making of working class, I tried to trace back the pattern of labour conflict in the early stages of the reform. By internal documentary research of trade unions and labour NGOs in Hong Kong, interviews with some veteran workers and labour researchers, I gained an insight into the pattern of workplace conflict from 1978 to the middle 1990s and identified the first wave of migrant workers’ strikes that took place during 1993 and 1994. But the most impressive experience on this visit was my participant observation of two cross-border labour protests involving workers from Guang Dong to demand occupational disease compensation from their employers in Hong Kong. Although the experience gave me fruitful inspiration on the limitations of legal mobilization and workers’ tendency to radicalization, I decided not to rely on these cases in my research. Considerations were twofold. First, I wanted to remove the influence of the NGO in my study of labour conflict. As pointed out by Chan (2006) and Lee (2007a), NGOs in China can only contact a tiny group of migrant workers. Second, as most of the workers in the protest had left the factory, their impact on workplace relations would be limited. My aspiration was to study industrial conflict within the workplace and its implication for social relations in society.
Then I began one year’s fieldwork in an industrial zone from September 2005 to Auguest 2006. I worked in another labour service centre in Bao An District as a full-timer. The centre was located in an industrial zone and so a wide range of workers could be contacted. I developed a good rapport with them. The centre provided legal support and organised cultural functions for woman and injured workers, but did not involve itself in workers’ strike activities. During the first half year, I widely interviewed workers with strike experience to grasp the general pattern of labour conflict and strikes. Then I chose a Taiwanese invested factory for deeper investigation. A strike in this factory in 2004 had given rise to a wave of strikes in the community. In the second half year, I moved to observe the working and social life in this factory by living together with workers in a private rented room, paying visits to their shop floors and conducting in-depth interviews with some of them. After I finished the main part of the fieldwork, I maintained contact with workers. In December 2006 and August 2007, I returned to the field sites to observe the new developments. In August 2007, I encountered another wave of strikes led by a German-owned factory in the same town. For ethical consideration, I will not mention the names of informants and the factories.
Economic Growth, State Strategy and Strikes
Labour historians have implied that an economic boom can strengthen workers’ confidence and lead to proactive strikes (e.g. Franzosi, 1995). Michael Burawoy (1985) introduced a powerful concept of the ‘politics of production’ to situate labour politics in the workplace into state regulation. This notion was extended to take the global ‘forces’ into consideration in his later study (Burawoy et al, 2000). In this section, I connect the wave of strikes with broader state policy and the global economy.
FDI into China increased from 3.5 billion US dollars in 1990 to 40.8 billion in 2000 and then 60.6 billion in 2004 (Ministry of Commerce, 2005). In 1993, when FDI was increasing at an extremely high rate of 150% and the legal minimum wage rate was first introduced (see Table I), the first wave of migrant workers’ strikes happened in Shen Zhen and Zhu Hai, another SEZ in Guang Dong (AMRC, 1995; Leung, 1995). The growth rate of FDI declined after 1994 and even experienced an 11.2% reduction in 1999 after the Asian financial crisis. The new Labour Law went into effect in 1995. According to Lin (1998), the scale and impact of the strikes were contained after 1994 as the legal framework provided a base for the resolution of workers’ grievances .
Table I: Foreign Direct Investment in China, 1990-2004
| Year | Utilized FDI (US$ in billion) | % change on Previous year |
| 1990 | 3.5 | +3 |
| 1991 | 4.4 | +26 |
| 1992 | 11.0 | +150 |
| 1993 | 27.5 | +150 |
| 1994 | 33.8 | +23 |
| 1995 | 37.5 | +11 |
| 1996 | 41.4 | +9 |
| 1997 | 45.2 | +8 |
| 1998 | 45.5 | +1 |
| 1999 | 40.4 | -11.2 |
| 2000 | 40.8 | +0.94 |
| 2001 | 46.9 | +14.9 |
| 2002 | 52.7 | +12.4 |
| 2003 | 53.5 | +1.5 |
| 2004 | 60.6 | +13.3 |
After China joined the WTO, the growth rate of inflow FDI returned to double digits in 2001 (14.9%), 2002 (12.4%) and 2004 (13.3%). The central government also issued a ‘First Document’ to call for better protection of peasant and peasant workers in 2003. Under this direction, some provincial governments began to cancel the agricultural tax or even provide agricultural subsidies. The new policy attracted some older migrant workers to return to their villages. Since the end of 2003, the media have reported the phenomenon of a ‘shortage of peasant workers’ (min gong huan), contrary to the ‘tide of peasant workers’ (min gong chao) in the early 1990s. A survey by the labour authorities of Guang Dong province revealed that the province lacked two million ‘skilled worker’ (Nan Fang Ri Bao, 10/2/2004). A new height of strikes in Shen Zhen came in 2004 and 2005 under this circumstance.
As a response to the unstable labour market and workplace relations, the Shen Zhen government dramatically increased the minimum wage rate. The city has two legal minimum rates for workers inside and outside the SEZ respectively. The outside rate, which was 419 yuan per month in 2000, raised slightly every year to only 480 in 2004. But it was boosted to 580 in July 2005 and 710 in July 2006. As a result, for two consecutive years, migrant workers in most large factories enjoyed big pay rises and expected a similar adjustment in July 2007 (Ministry of Labor and Social Security, 2007; see Table II). However, as both ‘shortage of labour’ and strike activities were milder in 2006, the city government decided to retain the rate unchanged in 2007. It provided a base for another wave of strikes in 2007. Workers demanded a reasonable wage more than the legal minimum.
Table II: The Level of Legal Minimum Wage Rate in Shen Zhen
| Year | Inside SEZ (yuan) | Outside SEZ (yuan) | ||
| Monthly Rate | Hourly Rate |
Monthly Rate | Hourly Rate |
|
| 2000-2001 | 547 | 3.14 | 419 | 2.41 |
| 2001-2002 | 574 | 3.30 | 440 | 2.53 |
| 2002-2003 | 594 | 3.41 | 460 | 2.64 |
| 2003-2004 | 600 | 3.45 | 465 | 2.67 |
| 2004-2005 | 610 | 3.51 | 480 | 2.76 |
| 2005-2006 | 690 | 3.97 | 580 | 3.33 |
| 2006-2007 | 810 | 4.66 | 700 | 4.02 |
Changing Characteristics of Strikes
As pointed out by Hyman (1989), the sociology of strikes should go beyond a structural account to disclose its complicated social organization. In this section, we will bring the workers’ subjectivity back to see how they exercised their class power over both state policy and management behavior. I will portray three strike cases. All were within a broader phenomenon which I call a ‘wave of strikes’ . By ‘wave of strikes’, I mean the capacity or tendency of a strike to spread out to the wider community or industry. This capacity, in fact, reflected a common concern over the same economic conditions in a specific historical and local context. All of the cases to be presented took place in Bao An District.
1994: Toward Labour Legislation?
Leung (1995: 38) reported ‘a momentous rise in the number of labour protests …during the years 1992-4.’ In the words of Jiang (1996: 139), it was an ‘unprecedented strike wave in FIE [foreign invested enterprises] concentrated in south China’, while Taylor et al (2003: 175) described it as ‘the third wave of strikes’ in the history of the People’s Republic . In many large scale strikes, workers demanded wage rises, responding to high inflation and the new legal minimum wage policy .
In March 1994, some workers in a shoe factory in Bao An filed a complaint to the Labour Bureau on the failure of their factory to pay the overtime wage according to the legal minimum rate. On the day they received their salary, workers surprisingly found the factory had deducted 150 yuan of meal and living fees from their salary . The next day, a strike was fomented by male workers in one workshop where work was most intensified and lowest paid. On the third morning, a notice was posted to call for a strike in the name of a ‘temporary trade union’. Over 3,000 workers followed. The strike lasted for three days. As their dormitory and factory were separated by a wall, during daytime, the police were patrolling within the factory and so workers stayed in the dormitory quietly. In the nights, however, workers created a roar, struck objects and threw sundries down to the ground or towards the factory. An ‘agreement’ was reached between the management and the Labour Bureau officials without involvement or consultation with the workers. The factory returned the deducted 150 yuan to workers, but workers were requested to sign new contracts with the factory to formalise the deduction policy. The ‘concession’ from the management in exchange was that the overtime wage rate would be increased from 1 yuan per hour to 2.1 yuan, the minimum legal standard. That new policy meant that workers had to work very long overtime hours if they wanted to get a higher salary. According to a worker, officials from the Labour Bureau also announced that the ‘temporary trade union’ was an illegal organisation. Some of the leaders quit their jobs in fear of punishment. Most of the workers did not know who the initiators of the ‘temporary trade union’ were, but all the over ten interviewed workers expressed that they wanted a trade union, but the problem was the management did not allow them to do so..
Both Leung’s (1988) and Tam’s (1992) studies of workplace relations in She Kou, the first export processing zone in Shen Zhen, showed that the traditional role of socialist trade union still prevailed in the 1980s. Leung (1988) portrayed a ‘worst’ case of a strike in the city, involving 21 migrant workers who stopped work for ten hours and union and party officials followed them day and night. However, upon the sudden inflow of both foreign capital and inland migrant workers after 1992, the official trade union was unable to maintain its position in workplace. After the Tiananmen democratic movement, some student activists tried to organize and establish independent trade unions. Yet they were all mercilessly suppressed (Leung, 1995; Lee, 2007a). The temporary trade union in the above case was yet one of the examples of migrant workers’ self efforts to form a trade union (AMRC, 1995). Responding to these new challenges, a new version of the Trade Union law was announced in 1992 to consolidate trade union collective consultation rights, but meanwhile heighten control of higher-level trade unions over their affiliates. In 1994 alone, 17, 293 trade unions were set up in FIEs, nearly double the total figure of the previous ten years. Yet, as many researchers pointed out (Jiang, 1996; Chan, 2001; Cook, 2005), most of them were controlled by the management and were not even able to perform the socialist ‘transmission-belt’ role. Without consent from the management, the higher level trade union would not approve an application from workers to register a trade union (AMRC, 1995). Labour Bureau then replaced the trade union in mediating between workers and management.
While the state’s attitude to independent trade unions was very strict, the central government responded to this wave of strikes by labour rights legislation. Li Bo Yong, the head of the Ministry of Labour, expressed this:
This year’s labour and employment condition is very bad, and the labour conflict cases have a trend of rapid increase; last year the number of strikes, work stoppages, collective administrative complaints (Shang Fan), petitions, marches and demonstrations was not lower than 10 thousand, among them the foreign invested enterprises were most evident. …The Ministry of Labour is actively preparing for legislation and setting up related policies. There will be a series of regulations and policies to be announced. It is hopeful that the above problems can be controlled or regulated to a large extent.
(Kuai Pao, 14/03/1994)
2004: Law as a Weapon
From 2004 to 2005, another wave of strikes broke out. The main demand in this wave was for full enforcement of the law, especially the wage and social insurance regulations. One of the strikes happened in a Taiwanese household appliance factory with 9000 workers. It was set up in 1992 with only 20 to 30 workers. In 2004, workers had to work seven days a week 12 hours per day. In 2004, the minimum wage was 480 yuan per month with a 40 hour working week. The legal weekday overtime pay was 1.5 time, and weekend overtime was 2 times the normal rate. But workers were paid below the standard. As an ordinary worker, one’s basic salary was 450 yuan covering eight hours a day work from Monday to Saturday. Overtime work out of the eight hours and on Sunday was paid at an hourly rate of 2.4 yuan. Physical conflict between male workers from different provincial origins prevailed in the workplace and the community. Workers distinguished themselves and others in place terms, e.g. ‘Si Chuan ren’ (Si Chuan people), ‘wai sheng ren’ (other provinces people) or ‘ben di ren’ (local people).
In April, 2004, the factory began a new policy to request workers to punch attendance cards during the half hour lunch break twice, in and out. The policy was to prevent the technicians and auxiliary workers who did not work on the production line from staying outside after lunch. The new policy yet brought troubles to some workers. It took those who worked on the upper floors 10 minutes or more to wait for the punching. The strike then began in the lacquering department which was situated on the 5th floor. The strike spread to the whole factory the next day. Workers requested that their salary be increased from 450 to 480 yuan, and hourly overtime pay from 2.4 to 3.5 yuan, in line with the legal minimum rate. In the morning, a notice calling for a strike was stuck up in every department. However, most of the workers continued their work. More than 100 workers from the lacquering department then walked out from the factory to block a highway. However, the group was either persuaded back by their managers or driven off by the police.
A group of young male workers from the lacquering department then ran off to different departments and turned off the electricity switches. As a result, most workers walked out from the factory. Thousands of workers stood outside the factory. The town officials and police showed up soon. The factory requested the workers to elect representatives. There was no formal election, but ten male workers stood out voluntarily to be representatives. The negotiation was held in the afternoon. However, at the end of the meeting, the ten disappeared. Workers said they were sent out by a van from the police station. There were different rumors, but the most reliable information was that they were threatened and dismissed with huge compensation.
In the evening, some of the workers were annoyed enough to rush into the administrative office and they drove the Taiwanese general manager and local factory director off to the entrance of the factory, where thousands of workers gathered. A witness described the scene:
There were 2000 to 3000 workers on the scene of the factory entrance, and also a certain number within the factory complex, who requested the Taiwanese Lao (Taiwanese guy) [the general manager] to come out and explain. The Taiwanese Lao finally came out at 9:00pm. As soon as he appeared, those standing out of the entrance pushed inwards, while those inside crowded out, all were screaming with a “wow, wow” sound. Someone shouted, “kill him! kill him!” …The Taiwanese Lao was then beaten by somebody. Four or five security guards promptly dragged the Taiwanese Lao and the director into the factory, and closed the gate of the factory. …some angry workers managed to climb over the more than one meter high iron gate. Others flung out cigarette butts, water bottles, and rubbish onto the body of the Taiwanese Lao. Half a bottle of water was just thrown down on the head of the Taiwanese Lao. The Taiwanese did not lose his temper; by contrast, he said, “don’t throw this stuff, don’t throw stuff. Wages can be raised. ”One of the workers cursed, “you the Taiwanese guys did not treat us as human”….Around 100 workers stayed on overnight to block the factory and stop the factory sending goods off.’
On the third day, two to three thousand workers walked from their factory to the highway again. Some began to raise funds for a long-term struggle. They were stopped after they had walked 10 minutes along the highway by hundreds of police, military police, and security guards. The labour bureau officials persuaded them to return to their factory: ‘as long as you go back, we can talk about any conditions on the table.’ Workers, then, walked back to the factory. When workers came back to the factory, the Taiwanese managers all escaped, said by some workers, to a neighboring Taiwanese factory. The gate of the factory was locked. Some militant workers threatened to attack the security guards and the guards were then forced to let them out. Discontent was widespread among workers all over the factory. In the evening, a bigger mobilization was fomented. With the money raised from workers, the organisers, skilled workers and supervisory staff, made two big banners. Some workers spontaneously prepared their own slogan cardboards.
In the early morning of the fourth day, a message was widely spread out among ordinary workers. ‘In dormitories, private buildings, and even street corners, there were people asking others “go to the city government”, ’ a worker recalled. Two big banners stated slogans: ‘return our ten workers’ representatives’ and ‘factory XX violates the labour law, doesn’t raise wage!’ At 8:00am, 4000 to 5000 workers then departed the village to the highway. The protest was better organized, planned and coordinated than the previous days. This time the police were also well prepared to block demonstrators at the highway entrance. Instead of confrontation with police at the first junction, workers flooded onto the pavement. Firstly, the police used body chain to fence all of the entrances into the main road. Then, hundreds of policemen and security guards tried to stop workers from further moving forward on the pavement. Workers were then surrounded by the police, local village militia, security guards, and military police. But the latter was severely resisted by the workers who threw bricks, stones and grass over. In one of the battles, two guards’ heads were broken. More security guards were dispatched from other towns to provide support.
Workers also prepared at least three amplifiers, several cameras and some fund-raising boxes. The boxes wrote: ‘for our common interests, please put in your money!’ The boxes were soon full of money. The cameras were used to take pictures when workers were beaten by policemen. More and more workers from other factories joined in. At 1:00pm the protestors, whose number had reached as high as 7000 to 8000, arrived in the immigration control station . More than ten fire engines and over thirty water canons stood in front of the station. The police used the water tap to drive away the workers, while the workers lobbed stones and bricks at police. The police attempted, but failed to move in as the stones kept raining down. But later on, the police sent out plainclothes to mix into the protestors. They strongly attacked workers suddenly. After the workers in the front fell down, those standing behind screamed and others retreated. Some workers were arrested during the day, but they were soon released. Thirty workers were sent to hospital and treated well. Their medical expenses were all paid by the police. The head of the district police bureau came to visit them, and gave each patient, workers and policemen alike, 100 yuan.
On the fifth afternoon, a general meeting was held. District Labour Bureau officials and the police came to the meeting, where the general manager made an apology and reassured them that both lunch and dinner times would be extended to one hour, and promised the factory’s policy would fully comply with the law. The strike then finished, although the ten representatives did not return to the factories.
The wage concern was settled down, but workers’ discontents over the punishment system and intensive work pace continued. Some went to the Labour Bureau to make a complaint but it was not accepted because the issues were outside the law. At the end of the year, around 3000 workers resigned from the factory in order to collect the two years’ social insurance which they successfully demanded in a collective complaint to the district Labour Bureau after the strike. A trade union was established after the strike. But it remained a typical management trade union without any union activities.
After the strike, struggles to demand full implementation of the legal wage took place in all of the eight large factories (with more than 1000 workers) in the community. As soon as there was a sign of a strike, the management informed the government as soon as possible, then the main gate of the factory would be locked and the factory estate was surrounded by police. Without any negotiation, the factory owners responded positively to increase wages in line with the law.
In late 2004, the company opened a giant factory in the neighboring city of Hui Zhou. Workers’ strike experience was soon transferred to the new factory by hundreds of supervisors and skilled workers who were dispatched to help set up the new factory. The first factory-wide strike took place in Hui Zhou in December 2004. I visited the Hui Zhou factory in March 2006 and found workers there knew well the stories of the strike in Shen Zhen. Department-based stoppages then became an endemic culture in both factories. In both factories, the turnover rates were very high and the management could not recruit enough workers in 2006.
2007: Beyond the Law
In August 2007, a joint factory strike took place in two electronics factories owned by the same German owner. Both plants, which were half an hour drive from each other, were within Bao An district with a similar size, 8000 workers each. The legal minimum wage rate and social insurance, two of the key concerns for workers after 2004, were basically enforced in these two factories, although workers had to work 11 hours per day and six days per week which was much longer than the legal maximum.
In the two factories, ordinary manual workers are called ‘yuan gong’ (employees), while others, including managers, supervisors, engineers, technicians, office clerks, are called ‘zhi yuan’ (staff). The rhetoric of ‘yuan gong’ and ‘zhi yuan’ was also widely used by workers to identity themselves in their social life. After two years’ consecutive pay rises in compliance with the minimum wage rate, the company began to lower costs by increasing the work intensity of ‘yuan gong’, and containing the overtime pay of ‘zhi yuan’ from late 2006. First, the work quotas assigned for the production line were increased steadily. If workers could not finish the quota on time, their lunch time in the following days would be shortened to do the unfinished tasks. Workers worked hard to prevent it from happening. Many workers quit the factory after a few months or a year as the work was too exhausting. To tackle the problem of the high turnover rate, the factory restricts the right of workers to resign by only granting two ‘permissions’ to resign in one production line per month. For those without proper ‘permission’, the factory will keep their last salary. Second, the factory announced a policy to restrict the overtime working hours of the zhi yuan. From July 2007, the maximum overtime hours of zhi yuan were set at 72 per month. They would not get extra pay even if they had worked more than that level. Like the Taiwanese factory, in order to discipline the poor attendance of the machine repair mechanics, a new punching machine was installed in August 2007, especially for zhi yuan. The electricity supply was often suspended in the city. When there was no electricity supply, the factory operated power generators but only for the machinery. Workers had to work in an extremely high temperature or among the toxic smoke as ventilation facilities were not operated.
Workers got their pay slip on a Thursday in August. As mentioned, the city had significantly raised the minimum wage rate in July 2005 and 2006, so workers generally expected a similar pay rise in July 2007. But as the government did not increase the legal rate, workers’ salary was not raised. Moreover, technicians and supervisors found their income was reduced due to the overtime restriction. In the evening of the Friday night, a public letter was posted in all workshops in one of the two factories with a title ‘voices from employees and staff’ (zhi yuan gong xin sheng). The letter requested:
1. To adjust our current wage standard. We…well know the market wage standard now, and thus demand it to be adjusted to (yuan gong: 1500 yuan or more; second level zhi yuan: 2000 yuan or more; third level zhi yuan: 2500 yuan or more; fourth level zhi yuan: 3000 yuan or more; the above figure does not include any subsidy)
2. To raise the accommodation and food subsidy for those living outside.
3. To improve the welfare conditions, provide reasonable allowance for high temperature, toxic, outdoor and occupational disease-prone posts as well as regular occupational disease and body checks.
4. To provide night shift subsidy and snack allowance for those working on the night shift.
5. The company should buy unemployment, maternity, hospital and all of the other insurance requested by the labour law.
6. To solve the hygiene problem of drinking water.
7. To improve the reasonability of the overtime work (…normal working time has been exhausted, not only does overtime not reduce the work task, but also adds up to two persons’ work to be performed by one person, in the name of controlling overtime).
8. The trade union should function appropriately and its core members should include participation of grass roots employees and staff.
At the time, the total monthly income of an ordinary worker was from 1000 to 1400, depending on overtime hours. Workers’ whole package of demands involved several hundred yuan of monthly income increase. On Monday morning, some workers went into the control rooms and switched it off. Supervisors then told workers that a strike was going on and asked them to leave the workshop. The newly installed card-punching machines for zhi yuan were broken. Thousands of workers walked out to the highway and occupied one half of the main road.
The town party head, Labour Bureau officials and top managers persuaded strikers to elect representatives and go back to the factory for negotiation. The workers responded that they were all representatives or they had no representatives. The police then drove off the workers by force. Some young workers resisted in the front and had some physical conflict with the police. The police arrested several of them. Workers then retreated back to the pedestrian way and shouted: ‘release people!’. In the afternoon, the management called all of the staff to have a meeting. Technicians and supervisors came to the meeting. However, as the factory requested them to sign up their names, almost all of the technicians and some supervisors left. The meeting then was basically held among department heads or managers. Their meeting decided to increase basic salary by 300 to 500 for staff, dependent on position level, and only 30 for employees. The supervisory staff was mostly satisfied with this offer and went back to work from the Monday night. But no single worker followed.
On Tuesday, the strike continued. A notice was posted by the factory to announce the above salary change. Also, a 50 yuan subsidy was granted to those living outside, including all the workers. Night shift workers can have 1 yuan allowance per day. The managers and supervisors tried their best to persuade workers to go back to work. Some of them came to the dormitories. But ordinary workers began to recognize that the management had ‘betrayed’ them. Some of them posted up slogans on the wall of the dormitory: ‘strike to the last moment!’ Electronic messages were also circulated among the workers calling for the continuation of the strike.
In the evening, propaganda pamphlets were thrown down from the dormitory buildings to the ground floor. The pamphlet began by denouncing the zhi yuan (staff) and calling for unification of yuan gong (employees):
All of the yuan gong brothers and sisters,
We must be united. We don’t need to care about those shameful zhi yuan and don’t believe their lies. They have achieved their own goals. We don’t want to waste the time of both sides as well. We have very clear demands: if any of the following items can not be accepted by the factory, we will definitely not walk half a step into the workshop. Our demands are:
1. Basic salary 810 yuan. Wage during leave should also not be lower than the basic salary.
2. No deduction of fees for living in dormitory; living outside should get appropriate subsidy.
3. Night shift should have a night snack allowance of 150 yuan paid on a one month base.
4. Give those workers in toxic and detrimental conditions an appropriate subsidy and subsidize the outdoor-working staff according to the Labour Law (150 yuan)
5. The drinking water of zhi yuan should reach the hygiene standard.
If you want to be a piece of meat on a cutting board or a shameful Han traitor, then you can sell your body before we get our wage demand! We believe absolutely none of us is this kind of person. Country fellowmen (tong bao men), it is our most fragile moment as those zhi yuan have achieved their aims, and forgotten the interests of us yuan gong. The zhi yuan brothers and sisters from the whole factory, for the sake of our own interests, let’s unite together, Chairman Mao said: our revolution has not been successful, struggle should continue, should wait, insist! Insist…and insist.
From all yuan gong
Most of the ordinary workers continued to strike on the third day. A significant moment happened at noon of the fourth day. The company posted a new statement to announce that those who want to resign in three days could get back all of the compensation and wages immediately, and others should go back to work. Workers who returned to work in three days could get an extra allowance. Otherwise, they would be seen as ‘absent’ and ‘quitting by themselves’, implying workers could not get back their wage as usual.
Three thousand workers then applied to leave the factory. The divisive strategy fatally shook the confidence of the workers who still wanted to stay on the job. At the same time, the factory provided distilled water in both dormitories and workshops. They promised to install air conditioning in workshops as well as a rest room with a TV set on each floor of the dormitories. The demand for rank-and-file members to join the trade union committee did not meet with a positive response. Alternatively, the factory promised a regular meeting with the supervisors and encouraged more suggestions from the ordinary workers.
Workers returned to work in the fourth day. The factory also recruited new workers by extending the age restriction from 30 to 40 years old. Stress from the work quota remained the main problem for workers. Many of the ordinary workers interviewed said that they would quit the factory before the Chinese new year.
In spite of some material gains, most ordinary workers did not think it was a successful strike. They always compared the 300 yuan or more salary rise of the zhi yuan with their 30 yuan. Some even emotionally said they were not willing to join a strike organized by the technicians any more. Like the strike in 2004, the knock-on of this strike was very obvious. Many large factories around this factory staged short strikes to raise wage demands or prepared to do so. Management responded rapidly to satisfy their demands.
However, one of the significant features of this strike was that it also happened almost simultaneously at the two factories in different towns. Technicians, and to a lesser extent, supervisors, of the two were dispatched to each other from time to time. One of the factories was better organized than the other. The strike began and finished in both factories on the same days with common demands and results.
Comparison and Discussion
A series of commonalities was evidenced across the pattern of strikes from 1993 to 2007. First, the occurrence of strike waves had a direct relation with the expansion of global capitalism and state intervention in production and reproduction of the labour force. Second, there were discontents deeply embedded in the labour process which were hard to be solved through existing formal channels. Third, there was an immediate cause negatively affecting workers’ interests as a touching point of the strike. Third, some hidden leaders acting underground to lead the strikers were important conditions of a strike. Fourth, violence was usually used to force others to strike or show discontent. Fifth, a strike will exert a knock-on effect in other factories. However, detailed analysis shows evidence of significant development:
1. The workers’ demands were more and more radical, from within the limit of the law to beyond the law. In 1993 and 1994, when the management responded to the workers’ wage rise demand by charging or increasing food, accommodation or other fees, workers failed to resist the acts as they were legal. In 2004 and 2005, however, workers demanded real implementation of the minimum wage without any deduction. In 2007, strikers asked for a reasonable and decent wage as well as a proper working and living environment.
2. They learned from past experience and from each other and so their struggle became strategically more sophisticated over time. In 1994, the strike was contained within the complex of the factory. In 2004 and 2007, workers began to walk out to the highway to attract public attention and state intervention. For the 2004 case, workers transferred struggle experiences to the new factory in another city. In 2007, two factories under the same company coordinated with each other to stage a joint strike.
3. The ‘shortage of labour’ had increased the confidence of the workers. One of the key characteristics of the 2004 and 2007 strikes was the large scale of quitting following the strike. Workers could easily get a job soon after the strike. Edwards and Scullion’s (1982) study suggested that quitting itself is a form of industrial conflict. This study showed quitting, as an individual form, increased in parallel with the strike as a collective form of struggle. Although workers’ wages were mostly raised after the strikes, their discontent with the management could not be removed.
4. The high turnover rate exaggerated the ‘shortage of labour’ and lowered productivity. The strike further strengthened rank-and-file workers’ confidence and increased the conflict between workers and management. ‘Voice’ and then ‘quit’ or ‘voice’ again became a common way to express their discontent. This new pattern of workplace conflict brought a big challenge to the management, whose first concern is productivity, and the state, which was keen to maintain social order and a favourable investment environment.
5. The challenge from workers’ protest forced the government to improve workers’ legal protections. For the 1993-1994, strike, the speech of Li Bo Yong was very clear evidence. For 2004 to 2005, a new Labour Contract Law was legislated in 2007 to strengthen workers’ individual and collective rights, followed by ongoing legislation of Labour Arbitration Law and Employment Promotion Law. At the local level, the legal minimum wage rate was dramatically increased after the wave of strikes in 2004 and 2005.
6. It seems that the state also recognized the deficiency of an individual rights based framework and the need for a ‘collective’ instrument in the workplace to solve the conflict and stabilize the labour force. The new Labour Contract Law was legislated in 2007, under which the role of the trade union is strengthened. With strong state support, the ACFTU has launched a historical high profile campaign to unionise migrant workers in foreign invested factories since 2006 by targeting transnational corporations like Wal-mart, McDonald and KFC. Can these reforms provide workers with a collective means of bargaining? Will it pacify workers’ semi-organised efforts and weaken the existing informal ‘collectiveness’? Or it will not exert any significant impact on the workers’ activism. This is an open question pending more research but this research inclines to the last option.
Thus, the ambiguity and dilemma of the state’s policy on class organisation dislocated and obstructed working class formation. In 1994, workers tried to form an independent trade union, but it was declared ‘illegal’. In 2004, the state supported the establishment of a trade union within the structure of the ACFTU but it remained an object of management manipulation. In 2007, the workers asked for rank-and-file representatives into the union committee. But it did not get a positive response from either the ACFTU or the local state, although a national wide unionisation campaign was going on.
Without a class organisation, workers’ struggle is confined to the level of the workplace or community, so a significant labour movement is unlikely. While the state and the ACFTU do not support ‘illegal strikes’, and civil society, if any, is too weak to provide help, the leaders of strike were isolated and risked revenge from the management. This accounts for the hidden form of leadership and lack of collective bargaining in the strike. When there was not overt leadership, and law could not continue to function as a solidarity base as their demand had gone beyond that, different sections of workers were vulnerable to being divided. While the hidden leaders, who were mainly skilled or senior workers, had more imagination of the trade union as a class organisation, the younger ordinary workers had a very limited understanding of that.
Conclusion
Following these considerations, I agree with C.K. Lee (2007a) on the contradictory role of the state on maintaining legitimation and accumulation and the capacity of the state to constitute workers’ interests in ‘labour regulation and social reproduction of labour power’. What I cannot agree with Lee is her theorization of class and identity which isolates the question from the material base and history.
I have commented that she abstracted ‘class’ from capitalist relations of production. The abstraction made her equate ‘class’ with Maoism: ‘the discourse of class, Maoism, citizenship, and legality as the repertoire of standards of justice and insurgent identity claims ’(Lee, 2007a: 29). Here class is a discourse or language that workers use or don’t use, but I prefer to conceptualise class as a social relation which workers were within. Class as a language is not reliable to make a judgement of class consciousness and their behaviour. For example, in the 2004 case, workers called their boss Taiwan lao (Taiwanese guy), implied themselves as mainland Chinese; in 2007 workers called themselves tong bao (country fellow) against a German manager. In both cases, no single word of gong ren (worker) or gong ren jie ji (working class), which Lee privileged in her class notion, was used. Does it mean workers’ struggles were in the line of nationalism and place rather than class? But workers who worked for mainland Chinese bosses in the community also followed them to strike. Workers in these factories would not perceive that the strike was against Taiwanese or German so as to unite with their own bosses against the Taiwanese or German. While class as a discourse or language can not explain this spreading of the strike, class as social relations can. The purpose of studying the usage of discourses such as Si Chuan people, mainland people, tong bao (country fellow), yuan gong (employee), zhi yuan(staff) and zhi yuan gong (staff and employees) in the protest is to explore how a basis of solidarity is constructed or deconstructed in a specific context of class struggle. Yet the ‘subjective’ basis of solidarity can by no means transcend or replace ‘objective’ class interests as an analytical tool in the study of labour politics.
Lee concluded that ‘decentralization, cellular activism, and legalism’ are characteristics of not only labour protests but also collective mobilization of other social groups (Lee, 2007a: 236). This adjustment was unconfirmed by the new development presented in this study. It reminded me of the importance of the historical dimension in class struggle. First of all, legalism is just an institutional tool workers used to protest their interests. As soon as the law was basically enforced, and their interests could not be reflected within the law, workers naturally asked for more than the law as in the 2007 strike It is unambiguous that their struggle is interest based, rather than rights based. Second, the data I showed was also different from Lee who claimed that workers’ protests always began from legal procedure and it was only when the local authorities and court could not satisfy workers that the latter went to the street. Strikes and then road blockages had become a very effective form of struggle in workers’ experience. As the 2004 and 2007 cases showed, the intervention of state authorities was only after a huge number of workers appeared on the highway. Third, although workers’ protests were still within the boundary of a factory, a company or a community as explained above, it showed a historical tendency of better planning, coordination and connection. Fourth, while the migrant workers’ demand was directed to the factory owners, the peasant and laid-off state workers’ targets were the state bureaucracies. Lee concluded their community by their forms, but I saw their differences in relations.
Not all of the workplace conflict had a class nature, but as workplace conflict had exerted a bigger impact on the policy of local authorities and the legislation of the central government, which in turn help to improve the workers’ condition in general, I call it ‘a class struggle without class organisation’. As far as class consciousness is concerned, it was uneven. Mature skilled workers were more conscious of the importance of class organisation, while many young workers did not know what the trade union is. But the development of the labour movement in the West was also begun from privileged workers like artisans and mechanics (Thompson, 1968; Katzenelson and Zolberg, 1986; Berlanstein, 1992).
What is the implication of the Chinese migrant workers’ struggle for international labour study? Work, factory and working class are far from ‘ended’. Instead, they are reconstructed in different spaces in different forms. Although the locations of production and forms of employment were dramatically changed, the basic logic of accumulation of global capitalism remained unchanged (Harvey, 1990; Cohen, 1991; Wood et al, 1998). The agenda for labour studies is to understand how class struggle is unfolded in a local context, and how the pattern of the struggle is changed over time. By doing so, we should combine and connect two dimension of class struggle. One is rooted in the accumulation logic of global capitalism, which I call ‘objective’ class interest; the other is embedded in the special local and historical context, which I call the ‘subjective’ base of solidarity.
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