Class and Precarity in China:A Contested Relationship

The increasing precariousness of labour forces globally has prompted some to argue that a new ‘precariat’ is emerging to challenge the privileges of the securely employed ‘salariat’. This divergence within the working class has been depicted as more significant than the traditional conflict between labour and capital. This essay examines these discussions in China, where precarity is increasingly being employed as a theoretical tool to explain the fragmentation of labour in the country

Becoming Dagongmei: Body, identity and transgression in Reform China.

My study focuses on the working lives of Chinese women in the light of China's attempt to incorporate its socialist system into the world economy in the Reform era. My cardinal concern is the formation of a new social body - dagongmei - in contemporary China. The great transformation experienced during the reform era creates significant social changes, and the lives of dagongmei are the living embodiments of such paradoxical processes and experiences. The first part of my thesis looks at how the desire of the peasant girls - the desire of moving out of rural China to the urban industrial zones - is produced to meet the demands of industrial capitalism. The second part, based on an ethnographic study of an electronic factory in Shenzhen, studies the processes of constitution of the subject - dagongmei - in the workplace. First, I look at the disciplines and techniques of the production machine deployed over the female bodies, and see how these young and rural bodies are turned into docile and productive workers. Secondly, the politics of identity and differences is analyzed, to see how the existing social relations and local cultural practices are manipulated to craft abject subjects. Thirdly, the processes of sexualizing the abject subjects in relation to cultural discourses and language politics is unfolded. The final part examines the relation of domination and resistance inside the workplace. Dream, scream and bodily pain are seen as the actual form of struggle against the enormous power of capitalist relations in Chinese society. In short, my study explores the process, the desire, the struggle of young rural girls to become dagongmei; and in the rite of their passages, unravels how these female bodies experience the politics and tension produced by a hybrid mixture of the state socialist and capitalist relations

NEOLIBERALISM, URBANISM AND THE PLIGHT OF CONSTRUCTION WORKERS IN CHINA

Thirty years after China's Reform and Opening, China has become not only the world's workshop, but also the world's largest construction site. In large and small construction sites throughout the country, 40 million "peasant workers" are building world-class metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, creating China's economic miracle of rapid growth, and making many Chinese people euphoric about "the rise of a powerful state" (daguo jueqi). From the perspective of Marxist and post-Marxist theory, we try to understand these "peasant workers" in the process of working-class formation and China's overall social transformation. Through this study, we reflect on the question of neoliberalism, urbanism and the formation of a new working class in China. </p

Action en justice ou résistance de classe ?

Cet article prend comme perspective d’étudier un problème de « double absence » dans l’industrie du bâtiment, et d’explorer la manière dont ce phénomène engendre, dans la Chine postsocialiste, des actions collectives chez les ouvriers de ce secteur industriel rapidement changeant. L’économie politique de l’industrie du bâtiment a donné forme à un système d’utilisation de la main-d’œuvre spécifique : le système de sous-traitance des ouvriers. Ce système engendre une relation capital-travail spécifique, dans laquelle l’identité légale de la main-d’œuvre et la relation de travail sont largement dominées par un employeur « absent ». Cela crée une double absence en termes légaux : l’absence d’un patron et l’absence d’une relation de travail. Cette double absence engendre un retard chronique des salaires, ainsi que diverses formes de lutte des ouvriers du bâtiment pour les obtenir, en général grâce à des actions en justice ou des actions collectives qui sortent du cadre de la loi. Les conclusions de cette enquête sont tirées d’études de cas conduites entre 2008 et 2009 dans sept villes chinoises. La lutte des ouvriers – contre le retard des paiements – a été comprise non comme une forme d’activisme légal ouvrier, mais comme une action de classe naissante dans un contexte spécifique

Action en justice ou résistance de classe ?

Cet article prend comme perspective d’étudier un problème de « double absence » dans l’industrie du bâtiment, et d’explorer la manière dont ce phénomène engendre, dans la Chine postsocialiste, des actions collectives chez les ouvriers de ce secteur industriel rapidement changeant. L’économie politique de l’industrie du bâtiment a donné forme à un système d’utilisation de la main-d’œuvre spécifique : le système de sous-traitance des ouvriers. Ce système engendre une relation capital-travail spécifique, dans laquelle l’identité légale de la main-d’œuvre et la relation de travail sont largement dominées par un employeur « absent ». Cela crée une double absence en termes légaux : l’absence d’un patron et l’absence d’une relation de travail. Cette double absence engendre un retard chronique des salaires, ainsi que diverses formes de lutte des ouvriers du bâtiment pour les obtenir, en général grâce à des actions en justice ou des actions collectives qui sortent du cadre de la loi. Les conclusions de cette enquête sont tirées d’études de cas conduites entre 2008 et 2009 dans sept villes chinoises. La lutte des ouvriers – contre le retard des paiements – a été comprise non comme une forme d’activisme légal ouvrier, mais comme une action de classe naissante dans un contexte spécifique

Legal Activism or Class Action?

This article aims to study an issue of “double absence” embedded in the rapidly changing construction industry and to explore how it induces serious collective action among construction workers in post-socialist China. The political economy of the construction industry has shaped a specific labour use system – a labour subcontracting system. The system generates a specific capital-labour relationship in which the legal labour identity and labour relationship are highly subsumed by an “absent” employer. It creates a double absence in legal terms: an “absent” boss and an “absent” labour relationship. This double absence has led to a perpetual process of wage arrears and struggles by construction workers to pursue delayed wages in various ways, usually involving legal action or non-legal collective action. The findings of this study are drawn from case studies conducted between 2008 and 2009 in seven Chinese cities. The labour struggle – the fight for delayed payment – was understood not as a form of legal labour activism, but as incipient class action in a specific context

Legal Activism or Class Action?

This article aims to study an issue of “double absence” embedded in the rapidly changing construction industry and to explore how it induces serious collective action among construction workers in post-socialist China. The political economy of the construction industry has shaped a specific labour use system – a labour subcontracting system. The system generates a specific capital-labour relationship in which the legal labour identity and labour relationship are highly subsumed by an “absent” employer. It creates a double absence in legal terms: an “absent” boss and an “absent” labour relationship. This double absence has led to a perpetual process of wage arrears and struggles by construction workers to pursue delayed wages in various ways, usually involving legal action or non-legal collective action. The findings of this study are drawn from case studies conducted between 2008 and 2009 in seven Chinese cities. The labour struggle – the fight for delayed payment – was understood not as a form of legal labour activism, but as incipient class action in a specific context

The making of a new working class? A study of collective actions of migrant workers in South China

In this study, we argue that the specific process of the proletarianization of Chinese migrant workers contributes to the recent rise of labour protests. Most of the collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in dormitories and communities. The type of living space, including workers' dormitories and migrant communities, facilitates collective actions organized not only on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also on attempts to nurture workers' solidarity in a broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and ties, sometimes even involving cross-factory strike tactics. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. By providing detailed cases of workers' strikes in 2004 and 2007, we suggest that the making of a new working class is increasingly conscious of and participating in interest-based or class-oriented labour protests