Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt / Edition 1

by Ching Kwan Lee

Overview

This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520250970
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	06/07/2007
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (UC Press) and editor of Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation and Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Contemporary China (with Guobin Yang).

Read an Excerpt

Against The Law

Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt

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By Ching Kwan Lee

University of California Press

Copyright © 2007 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25097-0

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Chapter One

Chinese Workers' Contentious Transition from State Socialism

DAYS OF RECKONING

For more than a week in mid-March 2002, tens of thousands of workers marched through the streets of Liaoyang, an old industrial town in China's northeastern rustbelt. Some carried a huge portrait of the late Mao Zedong that was mounted on four shoulder poles and accented by a red ribbon knot fastened on the top of the frame. While some people passionately sang the "Internationale," an old woman cried aloud, "Chairman Mao should not have died so soon!" Fueled by simmering anger at the corrupt local government and pressed by economic difficulties after their state-owned enterprises went bankrupt, workers from as many as twenty factories at one point demonstrated in front of the Liaoyang city government building. They demanded payment of back wages, pensions, and unemployment allowances owed them for months, even years. But most shocking to the authorities, they insisted on the removal of the head of the local legislature and former mayor whose seven-year leadership had spawned rampant corruption and wreaked havoc in the lives of the local people.Overseas human rights organizations claimed that it was the largest collective act of defiance since the bloody crackdown of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident. Only this time workers were the major social group present; no intellectuals, students, or private entrepreneurs joined their protests; and the official press censored the incident at both the municipal and national levels.

Liaoyang has the look of many an old industrial town in the northeastern province of Liaoning. A pervasive grayness and an air of morbidity beset what once was a proud and buzzing industrial center boasting a dozen major military equipment factories and a nationally renowned chemical plant built with French technological assistance in the early 1970s. No inkling of such past glory can be found today in the faces of the many unemployed workers gathering in makeshift "labor market spots," holding in their hands or hanging on their necks placards announcing their skills: plumber, electrician, nanny, seamstress, and so on. Abandoned brick workshops punctured by broken windowpanes line the main road leading into this city of 1.8 million, one of which is the Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy Factory, or Liaotie, the epicenter of the protests. For four years, the three thousand employees of this state-owned enterprise had petitioned the local government, charging the enterprise management for financial irregularities and nonpayment of wages, pensions, unemployment allowances, and medical reimbursements. The columns near the main entrance were covered with posters and open letters. One open letter, addressed to "All the People in Liaoyang," read,

We the working masses decide that we cannot tolerate such corrupt elements who imposed an illegal bankruptcy on our factory. We must take back justice and dignity. We will not give up until we get all welfare payments, unpaid wages, and compensation back.... Our respected compatriots, brothers and fathers, we are not anti-Party, antisocialism hooligans who harm people's lives and disrupt social order. Our demands are all legal under the Constitution and the laws.... Let's join forces in this action for legal rights and against corruption. Long live the spirit of Liaoyang!

Pointed and impassioned, the letters made a resounding accusation against local government corruption and collusion with enterprise management. The panoply of worker compensation specified by central government policy remained an empty but tantalizing promise. Liaotie workers' grievances were shared by many local workers throughout China's cities and especially across the northeast. Yet workers' interests were fractured. A disillusioned former Party secretary of one of the many factories participating in this protest explained to me that different groups of protesting workers participated with their own unresolved "balance books" in their heads. They came together in holding the local government responsible for their plight.

First, there were laid-off workers who did not get their 180 yuan monthly allowance. Then, there were retired workers complaining about not getting a special allowance promised by the central government two years ago. It was stipulated then that for each year of job tenure, they should be paid an additional 1.8 yuan monthly for their retirement wages. Third, there were retired cadres whose career dated back to the prerevolutionary era complaining about unequal treatment of retirees. There was a policy for military personnel who were with the CCP [the Chinese Communist Party] before 1949 to get 1,800 yuan a month as pension, but those who surrendered to the CCP at the end of the anti-Japanese War were given only half of that amount. The latter group was of course furious.... Then, there were banners saying, "We want to eat," "Return us our wages." ... People are nostalgic about the time of Chairman Mao, when everyone had jobs and society was stable and equal.... After devoting my life to political education work, I now feel my efforts have all been wasted. Since the early 1990s, after they started the director responsibility system, I as the Party secretary was sidelined, and he [the director] could rule and decide on personnel matters however he wanted, no restraint at all.

Thanks to its cross-factory participation and its explicit political demands, the Liaoyang protest received intense international journalistic attention. Despite the rapid collapse of inter-workplace rebellion, its short-lived existence signaled to the regime the possibility of an escalated working-class rebellion beyond the predominant pattern of localized, single-factory mobilizations, spurred by economic and livelihood grievances related to wages, pensions, health benefits, and bankruptcy compensation. In terms of sociological significance, it is this latter type of "cellular activism" that has become paradigmatic in the Chinese reform era. Police statistics on demonstrations, startling as they are, capture only a small part of the phenomenon. In Liaoning province alone, between 2000 and 2002, more than 830,000 people were involved in 9,559 "mass incidents," or an average of ten incidents each involving ninety people every day for nearly three years. Nationwide, the Ministry of Public Security recorded 8,700 such incidents in 1993, rising to 11,000, 15,000, and 32,000 in 1995, 1997, and 1999, respectively. In 2003, some 58,000 incidents were staged by three million people, including farmers, workers, teachers, and students. Among them, the largest group consisted of 1.66 million laid-off, retired, and active workers, accounting for 46.9 percent of the total number of participants that year. The surge in social unrest continued from 2004 to 2005, as the Ministry of Public Security announced a hike from a total of 74,000 to 87,000 cases of riots and demonstrations during these two years.

Rampant nonpayment of wages, pension defaults, and the general collapse of the enterprise welfare system has triggered this trend of increasing labor strife among China's massive laid-off and retired proletariats. The total number of workers in state and collective enterprises who were owed unpaid wages increased from 2.6 million in 1993 to 14 million in 2000, according to official trade unions statistics. In Shenyang, the provincial capital of Liaoning, a survey showed that between 1996 and 2000, more than one-quarter of retired workers were owed pensions, and one-quarter of employed workers were owed wages. Adding insult to injury, the Chinese government has begun experimenting with a one-time severance compensation scheme that translates each year of job tenure into 470 yuan in Shenyang (in 2002). The rates are lower for smaller cities and they vary across industries. Many workers simply reject the idea that "job tenure" can be up for sale; many others find it repugnant that their labor for socialism is now reduced to a pittance, while the state permanently relinquishes responsibility for its workers. With glaring gaps in the new safety net, the estimated twenty-seven to forty million workers shed from their work units in the state and collective sector since 1995 are plagued by a profound sense of insecurity. Across the country, in rage and desperation, workers are wrestling with explosive questions: Who should be held responsible for the collapse of enterprises the regime had for years touted as worker-owned? How much should workers' lifelong contribution to socialism be worth now? Who should be paying? How much for every year of job tenure? Why are pension regulations and bankruptcy laws not implemented? In short, workers are contesting the value of their labor in the broadest sense, not just the amount of severance compensation but also, as this book shows, the meaning of labor, the basis of legitimate government, and the principles of a just society. The 1990s was a time of reckoning between workers who had come of age under Maoist socialism and the post-Mao reform regime.

NEW LABOR BLUES

Veteran state workers are not alone in asserting labor claims. After two decades of market reform, a new generation of industrial laborers has established a solid foothold in all kinds of industries. Hailing from China's vast countryside and toiling mostly in private, joint-venture, and foreign enterprises, the hundred-million-strong migrant population now accounts for 57.5 percent of China's industrial workforce and 37 percent of its service sector employees. In the garment, textile, and construction industries, these migrant workers constitute 70-80 percent of the total workforce. Since the 1990s, these young workers have registered marked increases in protests and strikes, or what the Chinese authorities vaguely refer to as "spontaneous incidents." The overwhelming majority of these conflicts are about wages and working conditions, rather than collective consumption (that is, goods and services that are consumed by the community as a whole). In Shenzhen, China's most developed global export city in the south with some seven million migrant workers, the Labor Bureau officially registered about six hundred such incidents each year during 1998-2001. The annual total of officially mediated and arbitrated labor disputes soared from 54 in 1986 to 13,280 in 1999. Of these disputes, 65 percent were related to wage arrears and illegal wage rates. In Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, the Public Security Bureau reported a total of 863 protests involving some 50,000 people between January and October 2004. For Guangdong province as a whole, the number of arbitrated labor disputes rose from 24,700 in 1998 to 45,790 in 2002. An official survey in 2003 revealed that about 75 percent of migrant workers had experienced wage nonpayment (of varying durations and amounts).

One "spontaneous incident" that has become an everyday phenomenon in Shenzhen involved a court case filed by construction workers. On a balmy morning in the spring of 2002, 188 migrant workers of Jiancheng, a big name in the local construction industry, gathered at the gate of the Shenzhen Municipal Intermediate People's Court. Spirited and hopeful, they were waiting to enter the courtroom for the second hearing of their lawsuit against their employer for illegal deduction of wages and nonpayment of its pension insurance contributions for more than a decade. There were lively exchanges in Sichuanese; 70 percent of the workers came from Sichuan province. At about 8:15 am, fifteen minutes before the scheduled opening of their case, the judge's clerk came out from the main building to make a surprising and unsavory announcement: the hearing would be postponed until further notice because the court investigators had not yet been able to obtain evidence from the Labor Bureau. The clerk also told one of the five worker representatives that they should be the only ones appearing at the next court date, not all the workers, despite the fact that all of them were plaintiffs. Disbelief quickly gave way to anger, as many workers cried foul, while others cursed the corrupt court system. One man suggested, "Let's go to Beijing, to the National People's Congress!" and others seconded enthusiastically. Their unflappable, shrewd, but gentle leader, Liu Junyuan, tried to assuage the intense indignation of his fellow workers, saying that "the court is working on our case, but it needs more time to gather evidence. Let's go back to the dormitory first." After another twenty minutes of milling and complaining among themselves, and a brief appearance of the Sichuan government representative in Shenzhen to "understand the situation," workers went home, discouraged and disappointed, but, as Liu insisted, also even more determined to fight for their cause, whatever it took. Since the beginning of this labor dispute in March 2001, these workers had tried negotiation and mediation with management, collective petitions to the city People's Congress and Labor Bureau, and writing open letters to the official union, the city government, and the Public Security Bureau. They also initiated formal dispute arbitration and finally lawsuits, trying every administrative and legal means to assert their demands. Despite their scathing critique of discrimination against migrants, they still believed in the integrity of nonlocal state authority and the fledgling national legal regime. "It's too unjust, but we are at the end of our rope," Liu lamented, acknowledging that the legal system, no matter how flawed, might be the only realistic way to redress the blatant violations of their collective interest. What he did not expect was that three months later the court would delay giving a verdict, prompting his angry coworkers to block traffic outside the court. And when the judge eventually rejected their claims on dubious legal grounds, Liu found himself as disillusioned and bitter as his fellow workers, declaring, "The judge was paid off.... If we had to do it again, we would just protest!"

This is not an isolated case of collective action by migrant workers, nor is its tortuous course and the legal combativeness of workers involved atypical. Many cases of labor disputes in the sunbelt are characterized by workers' self-consciously law-abiding principles of action. Going to the streets is considered a last resort and usually happens only after other bureaucratic channels have been exhausted. The sentiments expressed during these incidents entail abject vulnerability and intense indignation on the part of migrants for being treated as second-class citizens by employers and officials unresponsive to their lawful demands.

But why do rustbelt workers take to the street so readily while sunbelt workers instinctively resort to the labor bureaucracy and the judicial process before staging protests?

THE PUZZLE

I compare two regional political economies where two distinct groups of workers bearing the brunt of market reform and globalization are concentrated and display both differences and similarities in their modes of activism. First, I examine the rustbelt in the northeastern province of Liaoning. Once the heartland of the socialist planned economy and home to some of China's most prominent state-owned industrial enterprises, Liaoning has decayed into a wasteland of bankruptcy and a hotbed of working-class protest by its many unemployed workers and pensioners. Unpaid pensions and wages, defaults on medical subsidies, and inadequate collective consumption are the main grievances triggering labor unrest in Liaoning. Second, I examine the sunbelt province of Guangdong, which has become a powerhouse of the country's export-oriented industrialization and one of the most popular destinations for the hundred-million-strong migrant labor force. Rampant nonpayment of wages and oppressive working conditions have prompted unrest among these young workers.

In the rustbelt, I have found "protests of desperation," in which veteran state workers, staking their claims on moral and legal grounds, primarily take their grievances to the street, leveraging a strategy of political bargaining by shaming local officials and disrupting traffic and public order, and make only occasional and individual forays into the legal system. Rhetorically, workers' insurgent claims draw on political discourses of class, Maoism, legality, and citizenship. Such protests coexist with a survival strategy that relies on the remnants of socialist entitlements, primarily allocated welfare housing, and on informal employment.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Against The Law by Ching Kwan Lee Copyright © 2007 by The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents

Preface

PART I: DECENTRALIZED LEGAL AUTHORITARIANISM
1. Chinese Workers’ Contentious Transition from State Socialism
2. Stalled Reform: Between Social Contract and Legal Contract

PART II: RUSTBELT: PROTESTS OF DESPERATION
3. The Unmaking of Mao’s Working Class in the Rustbelt
4. Life after Danwei: Surviving Enterprise Collapse

PART III: SUNBELT: PROTESTS AGAINST DISCRIMINATION
5. The Making of New Labor in the Sunbelt
6. Dagong as a Way of Life

PART IV: CONCLUSION
7. Chinese Labor Politics in Comparative Perspective

Methodological Appendix: Fieldwork in Two Provinces
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"An ethnographic and analytic masterpiece. . . . Few sociological studies have combined structural and existential, object and subjective truths so memorably as this one."—London Review of Books

"This beautifully written book will catalyse further important debates on the class dimensions of labour protest."—Labour History

Editorial Reviews

An ethnographic and analytic masterpiece. . . . Few sociological studies have combined structural and existential, object and subjective truths so memorably as this one.

London Review Of Books

This beautifully written book will catalyse further important debates on the class dimensions of labour protest.

Labour History

"An ethnographic and analytic masterpiece. . . . Few sociological studies have combined structural and existential, object and subjective truths so memorably as this one."--London Review of Books

"This beautifully written book will catalyse further important debates on the class dimensions of labour protest."--Labour History

From the Publisher