The Role of the State, Labour Policy and Migrant Workers’ Struggles in Globalized China

Abstract

The financial crisis of 2008 brought many changes to the world economy with China seeming to stand out as one of the countries best able to weather the storm. There is a general belief that this is because China has a strong state which has reshaped the role of China in the new international division of labour and has the ability to resume its economic development internally. Our study of labour policy and workers' struggles tells a different story. We argue that the state-driven process of economic globalization has created a new millions-strong working class in China. A paradoxical phenomenon is that this state-driven process in economic globalization has been accompanied by a state retreat process in the areas of social reproduction and social protection. This state withdrawal process largely shapes a specific pattern of proletarianization of Chinese labour and a specific capital-labour relationship which contribute to recent, and intensifying, migrant workers' struggles in China.

To protest or not to protest? Migrant workers’ participation in protests in China

“…The advantage of leaving their native villages to work in urban areas is that rural laborers can earn significantly more income as wage laborers in urban areas than they can from farming or from what wage labor positions are available in TVEs and rural service cooperatives (Wang and Zuo, 1999; Wong et al , 2007; Chan, 2010; Pun et al , 2010). 1 These earnings are, for many, an essential supplement to what they can earn from farm production.…”

“…To date empirical research on protest in China, whether grounded in grievance or RM theories or some other framework, has involved mainly open-ended face-to-face interviews with subjects in a sample of locales (e.g., Hurst, 2004;Lee, 2007;Yan, 2008;Cho, 2009;Wang, 2011) or case studies of particular regions or particular protests (e.g., Chan and Pun, 2009;Pun et al, 2010). Going beyond the findings from the methods mentioned above, this paper uses data from a national survey to analyze the joint effects of grievances and mobilization processes that affect individual participation in those protests.…”

Transnational private regulation and the transformation of labour rights organizations in emerging markets: new markets for labour support work in China

“…For example, migrant workers from rural areas struggle not only with working and living conditions in factories but they are often confronted by political and social discriminations. The Chinese hukou (household registration system), in particular, continuous to prevent rural migrant workers from gaining citizenship status in cities, excluding them from accessing training or education, accessing, medical care or welfare assistance -a situation that reinforces worker dependency on factory-provided services (Ngai et al 2010).…”

Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers

“…Throughout the decades of rapid light industrialization, the manufacturing wages of the so-called Asian tigers rose from approximately 8 percent of U.S. wages in 1975 to over 30 percent in the 1990s through 2005; by contrast, China’s manufacturing wages over the years from 1980 to 2005 remained fairly low, at approximately 2–3 percent of U.S. wages (Hung, 2008: 162). Despite important measures to increase legal minimum wages from the mid-2000s, the Chinese state has sustained social divisions and class inequalities among the working people by the household registration ( hukou ) system, hence making possible China’s capital accumulation through private-sector industrial growth in which an abundant supply of rural labor is assured (Selden and Wu, 2011; Pun, Chan, and Chan, 2010; Chan, 2010).…”