Understanding contentious collective action by Chinese laid-off workers: The importance of regional political economy

Hurst, William

doi:10.1007/bf02686279

Cited by 81 publications

(42 citation statements)

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“…For one, corruption and rentseeking seem inevitable due to the absence of effective institutional arrangements against the abuse of power (Lü 2000;Sun 2004), so these problems are ubiquitous across China (Manion 2004). Collective contention, however, is distributed quite unequally across different localities (Thornton 2012;Hurst 2004). In addition, collective contention often starts from trivial events that could happen anywhere, and participants of collective contention do not always have a clear picture of the events that triggered the entire episode (Liu et al 2010).…”

Section: The Pathology Of Collective Contention In Authoritarian Counmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unlikely Friends of the Authoritarian and Atheist Ruler: Religious Groups and Collective Contention in Rural China

Tao¹

2015

Politics and Religion

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Section: The Pathology Of Collective Contention In Authoritarian Counmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unlikely Friends of the Authoritarian and Atheist Ruler: Religious Groups and Collective Contention in Rural China

Tao¹

2015

Politics and Religion

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“…First, most workers cherished the "iron rice bowl" of SOEs, which offered lifetime employment, generous benefits, and cradle-to-grave security 12 . Jobs in some SOEs, especially profitable ones, were considered to be better paid and less demanding than jobs in private enterprises 13 . Furthermore, the social welfare system in China remains inchoate, characterized by resource scarcity, low coverage, and administrative incapacity.…”

Section: Insiders' Resistance To Privatizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…21 Interview with the director of a district economic development bureau, February 16, 2006. 22 This case study is based on interviews with the former manager of the enterprise (December 13,2005) and the director of a district economic development bureau (December 17, 2005, February 16, 2006). most of its 110 workers turned into shareholders.…”

Section: Asymmetric Bargaining Power and The Prevalence Of Insider Prmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Political Compromises: The Privatization of Small- and Medium-Sized Public Enterprises in China

Zeng

2010

J OF CHIN POLIT SCI

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One important feature of China's privatization process is that insider privatization prevailed, and that outsiders could hardly gain access to buying state enterprises. Why was a majority of small-and medium-sized public enterprises sold to the firms' former managers (and workers)? How did the tightened regulatory environment affect local privatization in China? Building on insights into institutional change, I argue that the choice of a specific privatization strategy results from political compromises among local officials, workers, and managers of public enterprises under specific regulatory constraints. Local officials' incentives for privatization and their reactions to the changing regulatory environment had a great impact on the dynamics of local privatization.

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“…Although the massive upheavals that accompanied the privatization and reform of the state-owned sector (Cai 2002;Chen 2000Chen , 2003aHurst 2004Hurst , 2009Lee 2000Lee , 2002Solinger 2009) have more or less subsided,2 labor conflict in the private sector remains high. There are no official statistics on the number of strikes and reporting on such conflicts presents potentially high risks for reporters (Hassid 2008), but we do know that the number of officially reported labor disputes has increased rapidly in recent years (see Fig.…”

Section: Worker Insurgency In Chinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

Friedman

2013

Theor Soc

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Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the countermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Specifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of "appropriated representation," where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China Federation of Trade Unions. However, in drawing on two case studies of strikes in capital-intensive industries in Guangdong province, I show that the relationship between insurgency and institutionalization shifted between 2007 and 2010. Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics Eli Friedman Cornell UniversityAbstract Why is it that in the nearly 10 years since the Chinese central government began making symbolic and material moves towards class compromise that labor unrest has expanded greatly? In this article I reconfigure Karl Polanyi's theory of the coutermovement to account for recent developments in Chinese labor politics. Spe cifically, I argue that countermovements must be broken down into two constituent but intertwined "moments": the insurgent moment that consists of spontaneous resistance to the market, and the institutional moment, when class compromise is established in the economic and political spheres. In China, the transition from insurgency to institutionalization has thus far been confounded by conditions of "appropriated representation," where the only worker organizations allowed to exist are those within the state-run All China In this article, I argue that Karl Polanyi's (1944) theory of the countermovement is useful in understanding labor politics in contemporary China-but only to a point. Polanyi claims that an expansion of the self-regulating market, and in particular commodifiction of land, labor, and money, implies the pursuit of a "stark utopia." If followed to its logical conclusion, this economic program would imply the destruction of society and the biosphere. In this conceptualization of the problem, society's revolt against the self-regulating market is born of necessity, since otherwise the world would be destroyed. And such a theory seems to go a long way in explaining what has happened in China over the past 30 years. As market forces were unleashed, social upheavals resulting from the commodification of labor burst on the political scene. In what appeared to be a striking confirmation of Polanyian theory (Wang 2008), the state began to respond by slowing down market reforms and incre...

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Understanding contentious collective action by Chinese laid-off workers: The importance of regional political economy

Cited by 81 publications

References 41 publications

Unlikely Friends of the Authoritarian and Atheist Ruler: Religious Groups and Collective Contention in Rural China

Unlikely Friends of the Authoritarian and Atheist Ruler: Religious Groups and Collective Contention in Rural China

Political Compromises: The Privatization of Small- and Medium-Sized Public Enterprises in China

Insurgency and institutionalization: the Polanyian countermovement and Chinese labor politics

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