States\u27 Gains, Labor\u27s Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980-2000

[Excerpt] Putting it differently, I inquire, then: why did countries that elected to act similarly globally turn out to vary so strikingly internally, at the domestic level, when it came to resultant interactions between unions and the state? That the book focuses on three very dissimilar states serves to demonstrate the wide sweep of countries that, rather comparably, were compelled to confront the global economy in new ways at a critical historical moment. By picking pioneers and an outlier, it also deals with unlikely cases. Thus, the book sets out to explain this concurrent asymmetry at different levels of analysis after 1980 in France, China, and Mexico, drawing on features of the domestic political economies of three countries that, counterintuitively—given all their apparent variation—had much in common at the outset but then diverged so much in the end. The first half of the book sets up the similarities, inspecting these states and exploring their predicaments and their leaders\u27 choices in the late-twentieth-century world economy; the second half tackles the tale of these same states at home, as they encountered their own angry workers. In short, the work takes countries that began, as of 1979, by sharing traits, experiences, and inclinations, and then pits comparison of relative behavioral sameness (an unexpected sameness) at one level, the global one, against contrast at another level, the domestic one

The new crowd of the dispossessed: factory layoffs and the informalization of the urban economy

This paper contrasts the old "crowd" of the revered urban proletariat from the days of Mao Zedong to the new "crowd" of laid-off workers. It utilizes concepts from the book, CROWDS AND POWER, by Elias Canetti, to characterize the opposed characteristics of the two crowds, and details the plight of the current crowd, as well as highlighting some continuities in the behavior and treatment of the working class by the regime. It also provides some statistics on unemployment, reemployment, benefits, and poverty among the old working class, and shows how its members have become informal workers

Manipulating China’s “Minimum Livelihood Guarantee”

In 1999, the State Council set forth an urban social assistance program aimed chiefly at pacifying protesting laid-off workers and compensating for the breakdown of the work-unit-based welfare benefits that had obtained under the planned economy. While an initial goal was to ensure the political stability that would allow enterprise reform to proceed unchallenged, over time the content of the scheme shifted in line with new regime goals. First the program spread to the countryside, as the New Socialist Countryside model was installed. In the past few years, in line with a tightening of financial commitment, leaders have demanded that the able-bodied poor should work, not be succoured, and that the program’s allowances target the desperate. Also, beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2016 there has been heavy emphasis on fighting graft and corruption in the program. The paper details five alterations that have emerged – or policy slants for which earlier, less extreme changes in implementation have intensified – since Xi Jinping ascended to power. The big message here is that the regime has repeatedly reshaped this initiative to match the changing political agenda of the Party

Kevin J. O’Brien (éd.), Popular Protest in China

Kevin J. O’Brien (éd.), Popular Protest in China, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008, 278 p. Cet excellent recueil rassemble des chroniques et des analyses d’épisodes de troubles et de contestations restés éphémères en Chine contemporaine. En analysant pourquoi ils le sont restés, il apporte un bon éclairage sur la situation actuelle. La plupart des textes – qui sont autant de petits bijoux – s’intéressent aux nouvelles caractéristiques et modalités de l’expression de la contestation...

Kevin J. O’Brien (éd.), Popular Protest in China

Kevin J. O’Brien (éd.), Popular Protest in China, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2008, 278 p. Cet excellent recueil rassemble des chroniques et des analyses d’épisodes de troubles et de contestations restés éphémères en Chine contemporaine. En analysant pourquoi ils le sont restés, il apporte un bon éclairage sur la situation actuelle. La plupart des textes – qui sont autant de petits bijoux – s’intéressent aux nouvelles caractéristiques et modalités de l’expression de la contestation...

The Dibao Recipients

After the Chinese leadership became cognizant of the negative social externalities of marketization--especially potential threats to its hallowed objectives of social stability and successful state enterprise reform--it initiated a novel welfare approach, the dibao, to handle the people most severely affected by economic restructuring. I review the state’s management of these people and the latter’s experiences. I argue that they are seen subliminally (if not explicitly) by the elite as a menace to officialdom’s modernization ambition. Hence, the dibao is structured so as to keep its targets quiet and out of view, now and into the future

Kevin J. O’Brien (ed.), Popular Protest in China

This fine collection of chronicles of what were largely short-lived episodes of disturbance and appeal, paired with analyses of what kept them so, sheds much light on the situation of protest in China today. The individual pieces, most of them drawing attention to novel aspects of expressing dissent in contemporary China, and new means of doing so, are all gems. Almost every one of them improves on work the authors published earlier on the same topics they write on here. But these new essays ..

Manipulating China’s “Minimum Livelihood Guarantee”

In 1999, the State Council set forth an urban social assistance program aimed chiefly at pacifying protesting laid-off workers and compensating for the breakdown of the work-unit-based welfare benefits that had obtained under the planned economy. While an initial goal was to ensure the political stability that would allow enterprise reform to proceed unchallenged, over time the content of the scheme shifted in line with new regime goals. First the program spread to the countryside, as the New Socialist Countryside model was installed. In the past few years, in line with a tightening of financial commitment, leaders have demanded that the able-bodied poor should work, not be succoured, and that the program’s allowances target the desperate. Also, beginning in 2014 and continuing into 2016 there has been heavy emphasis on fighting graft and corruption in the program. The paper details five alterations that have emerged – or policy slants for which earlier, less extreme changes in implementation have intensified – since Xi Jinping ascended to power. The big message here is that the regime has repeatedly reshaped this initiative to match the changing political agenda of the Party

Editorial

(...) Xi has garnered such an outpouring of journalistic attention—aptly dubbed of late “Chairman of Everything”—that he would seem to need no further scrutiny. Indeed, the man now holds a startling total of 12 top positions in leadership bodies, five of which were invented since his taking power in late 2012 (or, perhaps that were invented for him). He has placed himself (or has been placed?) in charge of the economy, in a move that eroded the authority of the Premier, the official who in the past managed this sphere of work; he has also reorganised both the military and—at the March 2018 session of the National People’s Congress—the cabinet. In the wake of that People’s Congress meeting, a number of aspects of Xi’s rule have become ubiquitous representations seen repeatedly by anyone who reads about China. These features are: an overweening reach for power and control; a now unquestioned capacity to legitimate his programs and policies by reference to an inchoate “China Dream”; and a near obsessive drive—distinguished by a high degree of repressiveness not seen in some 40 years in China—to keeping society quiescent (...). The papers in this collection challenge this boilerplate delineation in several ways. In the first place, the pieces breathe life into what have become truisms for students and observers of today’s China. They do so as they show how the several urges and objectives we encounter in writing about Xi have–or have not–become instantiated in some of the performances of officialdom. They look not at generalities but at specific areas of politics, and they document a few of the implications and the blowback (in religion) they have engendered. But secondly, and more critically, they interrogate the measure of Xi’s capacity to innovate, as opposed to his ability to intensify. Readers will find that these essays provoke some reconsideration of the role this new “helmsman” (in the mode of Mao), as Xi has been termed, has in fact been able to chisel out in his five-plus years in power so far. The authors of the papers, all political scientists, are newly-minted scholars, recent recipients of the Ph.D. But while they are up-to-date in their analyses and conversant with methodologies and approaches of the present, each of them displays a firm grasp of the history of the field of Chinese politics and of politics in China as they have transpired over the decades (...)

Éditorial

(...) Xi a recueilli une attention journalistique d’une telle ampleur – il a été récemment surnommé à raison le « président de tout » – qu’il semblerait ne pas avoir besoin d’être davantage étudié. En effet, il détient à présent un total surprenant de 12 postes de premier plan dans des entités dirigeantes, dont cinq ont été créés depuis son arrivée au pouvoir fin 2012 (ou peut-être créés pour lui). Il s’est placé (ou bien a été placé ?) aux commandes de l’économie, et cela dans un mouvement qui a érodé l’autorité du Premier ministre, auquel ce domaine de compétence revenait auparavant ; il a également réorganisé l’armée et – lors de la session de mars 2018 de l’Assemblée nationale populaire – le Conseil des affaires de l’État. Au lendemain de cette réunion de l’Assemblée, nombre d’orientations du gouvernement de Xi sont devenues des représentations omniprésentes, que quiconque s’informant sur la Chine a lues à maintes reprises. Ces caractéristiques sont les suivantes : un pouvoir et un contrôle à la portée démesurée ; une capacité maintenant incontestée à légitimer ses programmes et politiques en faisant référence à un « rêve chinois » peu cohérent ; et une inclination quasi obsessionnelle – qui se distingue par un haut niveau de répression, jamais vu en 40 années d’histoire chinoise – à vouloir maintenir la société tranquille (...). Les articles qui composent ce dossier remettent en question de différentes manières ces descriptions maintes fois plaquées sur la réalité. Tout d’abord, ils insufflent la vie dans ce qui est devenu des lapalissades chez ceux qui étudient et observent la Chine contemporaine. Ce faisant ils montrent combien les nombreuses inclinations et objectifs que l’on peut rencontrer en écrivant sur Xi sont devenus (ou non) instanciés dans certaines représentations de la bureaucratie. Ils ne regardent pas les généralités mais des domaines particuliers de la politique et ils documentent certaines des implications et le retour de bâton (dans la sphère de la religion) qu’elles ont engendré. Mais deuxièmement, et de façon plus importante encore, ils interrogent la capacité de Xi à innover, et non à intensifier. Les lecteurs trouveront que ces articles amènent à reconsidérer le rôle que ce nouveau « timonier » (à la façon de Mao) – comme Xi a été surnommé – a dans les faits été capable de se tailler durant un peu plus de cinq années au pouvoir. Les auteurs des articles, tous politistes, sont de jeunes chercheurs ayant récemment soutenu leur thèse. Mais tout en étant parfaitement à jour dans leurs analyses et tout à fait compétents dans les méthodologies et les approches actuelles, chacun d’eux fait montre d’une connaissance approfondie de l’histoire de la vie politique chinoise et de la politique en Chine telles qu’elles ont pu apparaître à travers les décennies (...)