Migrant Labor in China

Pun Ngai

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780745671758, 9780745671741
• eBook ISBN: 9781509503384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

Long known as the world's factory, China is the largest manufacturing economy ever seen, accounting for more than 10% of global exports. China is also, of course, home to the largest workforce on the planet, the crucial element behind its staggering economic success. But who are Chinas workers who keep the machine running, and how is the labor process changing under economic reform? Pun Ngai, a leading expert in factory labor in China, charts the rise of China as a world workshop and the emergence of a new labor force in the context of the post-socialist transformations of the last three decades. The book analyzes the role of the state and transnational interests in creating a new migrant workforce deprived of many rights and social protection. As China increases its output of high-value, high-tech products, particularly for its own growing domestic market of middle-class consumers, workers are increasingly voicing their discontent through strikes and protest, creating new challenges for the Party-State and the global division of labor. Blending theory, politics, and real-world examples, this book will be an invaluable guide for upper-level students and non-specialists interested in Chinas economy and Chinese politics and society.

1
China and Its Labor in the Neoliberal World

Let's enter the workshop of the world with the guidance of Chinese migrant workers who are now the protagonists of the new working class. The new working class, comprising mainly internal rural migrant subjects, is of an entirely different nature to that of Maoist China, and these subjects are the sole concern of this book. I owe this writing to the new working class as she has continuously revealed her rich, reflexive, and sometimes contradictory lived experiences to me over the past two decades. The rich and vividly lived experiences of this class in terms of work organization, dormitory labor life, feeling of class and class action are key to understanding China in the neoliberal world. Unlike most postmodern literature, which criticizes Karl Marx's ideas about class, class is still the central concept of this book, providing an effective analytical weapon with which to discern the lives of the working class under the major contradictions of contemporary capitalism.

China has developed into the workshop of the world during the last three decades. It has reshaped the global economy of the twenty-first century and the world's history of labor. This great transformation is, however, a paradox of China's Revolution, which once strived to end the imperialism and capitalism that encroached on China's ancient soil (Blecher 2010; Perry and Selden 2010). To understand this paradox, we have to make sense of the lives of the Chinese laborers who are subjected to, as well as the subjects of, the workshop of the world. The rise of China as the “workshop of the world” in the age of globalization and the accompanying new working class comprising several hundred millions provides us with a non-western perspective to understand the importance of laboring subjects and their class in shaping the transformed space of global capitalism. As E. P. Thompson said, while we cannot calculate the emergence of the working class like the rising sun every day, we are compelled to this impossible project only because we now live in the neoliberal capitalism of the twenty-first century. This century called more to the “end of history” than to the creation of new laboring subjects that could challenge this history and potentially create a new one. The struggle to create this new laboring class by itself and for itself nevertheless is reshaping the future of class relations and their struggles not only in China, but throughout the world.

Thirty years of post-socialist transformation has completely transformed China, which has hooked up into the neoliberal world. A socialist nation that was once viewed as a developing country now shapes and poses a challenge to the global economy. Little attention has been paid, however, to the making of a new working class comprising more than 270 million peasant-workers, nongmin gong or mingong, and another 100 million laid-off state-enterprise workers who have now joined the new laboring subjects in all sorts of enterprises. At the start of the new millennium, China's “world factory” inevitably constitutes and is constituted by this new laboring class, which is structurally embedded with the control of capital and workers' resistance. To understand this new class and its resistance politics, we have to situate them in the development of global capitalism and its impact on China's socialist transformation as well as the dynamics of China's reform and opening up.

The golden age of western capitalism that had boomed since the Second World War ended with a series of economic crises from the 1970s onwards. The strategic reshaping of the global economy was the result of the acceleration of the “extended reproduction” of capitalism on a global scale in order to resolve the crisis of capital accumulation in the spheres of production and circulation, which has inevitably resulted in the contradictions of capitalism. Overproduction, increase of productivity, decline of interest rates, and technological innovation have created a shift of capital flows from manufacturing industries to property and financial sectors on the one hand, but also increasingly the concentration of capital in manufacturing sectors such as electronics and car industries on the other. Within the changing manufacturing sector, a delinking of branding, design, technological innovation, and factory production was observed. This delinking was magically reconnected by a global supply and production chain under the monopoly of transnational capital and world-renowned brands (Appelbaum 2008, 2011).

The extended reproduction of contemporary capitalism has contributed to a rapid remaking of class relations in China and the rest of the world. The advance of technology and information creates hyper- mobile flows of capital, and the transnationality of new labor continues to shatter existing class relations.

A fundamental error of western hegemony is the proclamation of the end of the “working class” and class conflicts (Clark and Lipset 1991, 2001; Gorz 1997; Houtman et al. 2009). This hegemony shapes western academia in almost all areas as well as through cultural colonization, and penetrates into the intellectual circles of the rest of the world. A farewell to “class” colludes with the “end of history” (Fukuyama 2006).

Yet a farewell to “class” by western academics and mainstream media did not make class relations obsolete in western societies, which are now confronting deep class conflicts characterized by great social inequalities, high rates of unemployment and life precariousness. Instead, the issues of class and class conflicts have been carried by global capital flight into Third World societies, putting China at the forefront of the struggle. The increase in real numbers of mass workers challenges the postmodern theories which claimed that the use of new technology and new modes of production had replaced the traditional class subjects (Hardt and Negri 2005). The U-turn to neoliberal capitalism has created an impact on the world, defeating the attempts of communist revolutions of the twentieth century and the golden age of the welfare capitalist system in the West. It has attempted to destroy the fruits of the socialist goals of promoting economic equality, human emancipation, and people's democracy. This global creative destruction continued until a neoliberal world finally arrived, and the reformed China is now part of it.

The triumph of a neoliberal world has signaled the opportunity for capital to invade the dreamland of socialist China in the form of large-scale investment and off-shore production. Starting at the end of the 1970s, global capital reached the stage of rapid expansion, destroying all potential barriers erected by non-capitalist or socialist nation-states for capital flows, technology transfer, expropriation of production materials and markets, and last but not the least, the use of abundant labor. The strategy of capital concentration or monopoly was achieved by penetrating into non-capitalist countries via a multiplication of the global supply and production chain. The best examples are provided by Apple and Foxconn, ranked 5th and 30th on the Global 500 list in 2014, respectively.

Today, if China is a dreamland for global capital looking for new forms of capital accumulation on an unimaginable pace and scale, we argue that a new working class comprising rural migrants and urban poor is being created, and they now form the new political subjects for potential resistance, shape the future of the labor movement in China, and provide a quest for world labor internationalism.

The Advent of the Workshop of the World in China

In recent years the term ‘workshop of the world’ is commonly used to describe the capacity of China for global production. The concept of a workshop of the world can be understood only in the context of the extended reproduction of global capitalism to subsume the social life of non-capitalist nations. Global capitalism has won a victory in incorporating socialist regimes into its process of capital accumulation over the last century. With the opening of China and the arrival of global and private capital into the export processing zones in the early 1980s, socialist China was already being transformed into a market economy under the wave of industrial relocation from advanced capitalist countries to the global South. The Chinese state had also taken a lead in introducing pro-market initiatives and put huge effort into bringing the country into the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other world bodies. China is now well known as a “world factory,” attracting transnational corporations (TNCs) to China from all over the world, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, the USA, and Western Europe.

Western governments, from the political left to the political right, admire China's economic achievement as evidenced by the iconic skylines in Beijing and Shanghai as well as the stunning financial figures reported by the media. From 2003, China has passed the US and become the world's largest foreign direct investment (FDI) destination country. In 2005 China became the world's third-largest trading country, surpassed only by the US and Germany. In 2006, China climbed to be the fourth-largest economy in the world in terms of GDP (US$2,226 billion), and in 2010 China surpassed Japan as the second-largest economy in the world. Alongside the dramatic economic growth in quantity, the manufacturing sector was also moving into high-end goods. Exports of electric, electronic, and high-tech products amounted to US$19,258 billion in 2013, which accounted for 87 percent of the total export value.¹ Today, China has become the world's top producer of more than 200 products, including garments, color TVs, washing machines, DVD players, cameras, refrigerators, air conditioners, motorcycles, microwave ovens, PC monitors, tractors, and bicycles.²

With 29 percent of the world's workforce, labor costs in this giant “global factory” are as low as one-sixth that of Mexico and one-fortieth that of the US (Lee 2002; Robinson 2010).³ In 2013, China's GDP per capita (US$6,807) still ranked as low as 84th in the world.⁴ This contradiction of rapid growth and cheap labor cost has attracted criticism of China's role in driving a ‘race to the bottom’ in globalization from labor researchers, labor activists, and journalists (Chan 2001, 2003; Friedman and Lee 2010; Scott 2012). China is one of the targets in Western campaigns against ‘sweatshops’. Moreover, in recent years, media coverage on the rise and economic growth of China has aroused different feelings among Western workers and their organizations concerning the Chinese working class. ‘Chinese workers steal our jobs’ is one of the common myths for many. The US trade union federation, AFL-CIO, demanded that their government impose trade restrictions on China for being responsible for the disappearance of 2.5 million manufacturing jobs at home.⁵ This is the backdrop to the “China Threat.”

It has been widely recognized that workers around the world are pitted against each other in the game of “race to the bottom” production over who will accept the lowest wages and benefits, and the most miserable working and living conditions. In this game, China appears to have an impact on the wage level for the world's workers in labor-intensive export industrialization. While some Chinese specialists would argue that factory work as well as other forms of employment have largely improved the living standards of Chinese peasants, who otherwise would have to keep toiling in the rural countryside, this book looks into the actual situations of the new working class supported by solid field studies, detailed reports, and documentation. I have been involved in different research projects on migrant labor, especially ongoing studies on the lived experiences and struggles of workers in the construction, electronics, and textile and garment industries. Ethnographic data, including in-depth interviews, surveys, and semi-structured questionnaires are the most commonly used methods. Most of the field studies are conducted in multiple sites and are frequently revisited.

The rapid flight of global capital to China is nevertheless not only looking for cheap labor and low land prices, but also diligent, skilled, and well-educated Chinese internal migrant workers who are willing to work in appalling conditions, who are suitable for just-in-time production, and who are potential consumers for global products such as iPhones and iPads. The repositioning of China as a “workshop of the world” hence provides the bedrock for nurturing a new Chinese working class which is now spreading all over the country, on construction sites, in workplaces, and in companies and offices, irrespective of the nature of capital, sectors, and forms of work.

Global capital and the reformist state have jointly turned China into the “workshop of the world” over the past 30 years. This is the backdrop to the world workshop, and the new Chinese working class is now on the stage, living their working lives, and beginning their lifelong struggle. This book explores the emer...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Map
• Chronology
• Acknowledgements
• 1: China and Its Labor in the Neoliberal World
• 2: Capital Meets State: Re-emergence of the Labor Market and Changing Labor Relations
• 3: Building China: Struggle of Construction Workers
• 4: Making and Unmaking of the New Chinese Working Class
• 5: Spatial Politics: Production and Social Production of the Dormitory Labor Regime
• 6: Monopoly Capital in China: The Foxconn Experience and Chinese Workers
• 7: Radicalization and Collective Action of the New Chinese Working Class
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement