Persistent Labour Precarity throughout a Century
In recent years, the term precarity has gained popularity in discussions of work and employment. There is no consensus on the precise definition of the term labour precarity. However, it is generally used to describe the vulnerability and insecurity of workers’ employment and lives.Footnote 1 In his 1925 article, Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society, Mao Zedong divided China’s labouring people into four strata and discussed their conditions of precarity: (1) the petty bourgeoisie, comprising owner-peasants, master handicraftsmen, and lower-level intellectuals; (2) the semi-proletariat, comprising semi-owner peasants, poor peasants, small handicraftsmen, shop assistants, and peddlers; (3) the proletariat; and (4) the lumpenproletariat, comprising landless peasants and jobless handicraftsmen.Footnote 2
These four strata varied in their scale and degree of precarity. The upper layer of the petty bourgeoisie lived a comfortable life, while the lower layer experienced poorer living standards. The semi-proletariat constituted the vast majority of the population at that time. They had limited means of production and had to sell their labour power to make a living. The industrial proletariat totalled roughly 2 million, forming a negligible share of the 400 million population.Footnote 3 They were subjected to ruthless treatment by imperialists, warlords, and the bourgeoisie. The agricultural proletariat worked ‘the longest hours, for the lowest wages, under the worst conditions, and with the least security of employment’.Footnote 4 The lumpenproletariat was fairly large and led the most precarious existence of all.
Mao contended that the industrial proletariat was the most progressive class, and was the leading force of the revolutionary movement in China. Concerned about these people’s sheer precarity, as early as 1922, just a year after its establishment, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) declared the introduction of labour protection laws as one of its seven goals. These laws aimed to eliminate the contract labour system (a popular arrangement of precarious employment at that time), implement an eight-hour working day, build healthcare facilities for workers, establish labour insurance schemes, and protect female and child labour and the unemployed.Footnote 5
Since its ascendance to power in 1949, the CCP has made considerable progress on labour protection. Figure 1.1 shows the employment structure of urban China between 1952 and 2019.Footnote 6 Clearly, between the mid 1950s and the mid 1990s, roughly 60 to 80 per cent of urban employees worked in state-owned units, where the majority of the workforce enjoyed permanent employment and cradle-to-grave welfare benefits (together called the ‘iron rice bowl’). Figure 1.2 takes account of rural employment and shows China’s overall employment structure between 1952 and 2019. Between 1957 and 1987, 10 to 20 per cent of labouring people worked in state-owned units, while 75 to 85 per cent were peasants with access to land and welfare services provided by communes.
Figure 1.1 Employment structure of urban China, 1952–2019.
Figure 1.1Long description
Between 1956 and 1976, urban employment consists of employment in state-owned and collective units, and the majority work in state-owned units. After 1977, employment in state-owned and collective units expands in the 1980s and early 1990s, but shrinks thereafter. Meanwhile, self-employment, and employment in private, foreign, and shareholding units increase. Other employment increases in the 1990s and 2000s, but declines after 2010. Registered urban employment has a fluctuating trend and maintains at very low levels.
Figure 1.2 Employment structure of China, 1952–2019.
Figure 1.2Long description
The figure adds rural employment on the basis of Figure 1.1. Between 1952 and the early 1990s, most people work in rural areas, and the number continues to grow. After that, rural employment decreases steadily. As of 2019, about 40% of the workforce is still employed in the countryside.
However, even the CCP under Mao’s administration failed to eliminate labour precarity. Figure 1.3 shows the proportion of non-permanent workers in state-owned units between 1957 and 1991. Compared with permanent workers, they had precarious jobs and retrenched benefits. They comprised both peasant workers and those with urban household registration status (urban hukou).
Figure 1.3 Proportion of non-permanent workers in China’s state-owned units, 1957–1991.
Figure 1.3Long description
The proportion of non-permanent workers in China’s state-owned units increases from 8.3% in 1957 to 26.0% in 1958, declines to 6.6% in 1963, increases to 13.0% in 1966, maintains around this level until 1971, decreases to 6.1% in 1972, and shows an upward trend thereafter.
Since the late 1970s, China has embarked on the Reform and Opening-up, aiming to replace the planned economy with a market economy and open up China to the world. With reference to Mao’s criteria, four similar strata of labouring people can be identified in the present workforce: (1) the petty bourgeoisie, comprising professionals and technical employees, the self-employed, and owner-peasants;Footnote 7 (2) the semi-proletariat, consisting of peasant workers with land in wage employment; (3) the proletariat, comprising other rank-and-file wage workers; and (4) the lumpenproletariat, comprising the unemployed.
The distribution of labouring people in the four strata has changed dramatically. Existing data allow only rough estimates of the size of each stratum. In 2019, with regard to the petty bourgeoisie, professionals and technical employees, the self-employed, and workers in the primary sector (mostly owner-peasants) accounted for 7.9, 22.8, and 25.1 per cent of China’s employment, respectively;Footnote 8 with regard to the semi-proletariat, peasant workers accounted for 37.5 per cent, Footnote 9 including those in wage employment and self-account non-agricultural employment, and landless peasant workers. Landless peasants totalled an estimated 40 to 50 million in 2005, and this figure was expected to grow by 2.5 to 3 million every year thereafter.Footnote 10 Thus, in 2023, landless peasants may have amounted to around 100 million. With regard to the proletariat, in 2019, those working in urban units accounted for 42 per cent of China’s employment, including the employers, professionals and technical employees, and peasant workers with land.Footnote 11 With regard to the lumpenproletariat, for most of the 1978–2022 period, registered urban unemployment made up less than 5 per cent of the urban working population.Footnote 12 This is an under-estimate of urban unemployment, since it counts only those who had urban hukou and were registered.
Labour precarity has also become pervasive. Professionals and technical employees tend to work under standard employment arrangements, in the formal economy, and enjoy statutory benefits, including five kinds of social insurance for employees (against work-related injury, illness, retirement, unemployment, and childbirth costs) and the housing fund.Footnote 13 However, even their jobs are often unstable; nor are they immune to financial pressure from housing, healthcare, and education expenses. The proletariat may work in the formal or informal economy and are not necessarily covered by statutory social insurance for employees. Peasant workers tend to work under non-standard employment arrangements in the informal economy. Comparing with the proletariat with urban hukou, they tend to work longer hours but earn significantly less. When the economy slows down, they are among the first to lose their jobs. After losing their land, their conditions tend to worsen. Being poorly educated and low-skilled, many are unable to secure decent jobs.Footnote 14
Events in China are a manifestation of global trends in industrial relations. In developed economies, labour precarity was alleviated in the three decades after the Second World War. Over the same period in developing economies, labour precarity was the norm, except that some socialist countries countered it with some success. Since the late 1970s, labour precarity has surged worldwide. We now live in a world where most labouring people live in precarity. In response, research on labour precarity has grown rapidly, policy debates have been widespread and intense, and social movements to counter labour precarity have come to the fore.
Two Paradoxes concerning Persistent Labour Precarity
It is important to recognize that, despite their precarity, the four strata of labouring people now live a materially better life than their 1920s counterparts, when China was one of the poorest countries globally. In 2010, China passed Japan to become the world’s second largest economy.Footnote 15 In 2023, China’s gross national income per capita reached 13,400 US dollars, exceeding the 13,205 US dollars threshold for classification as a high-income country by the World Bank’s 2022–2023 standard.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, as shown above, most of today’s labouring people by no means enjoy job security. Moreover, the proportion of labouring people who enjoy job security is even smaller than in the Mao era.
These scenarios appear doubly paradoxical. First, according to Marxism, the official ideology of the CCP, socialism is the remedy for labour precarity. Under capitalism, the proletariat suffers from relentless exploitation by the bourgeoisie and becomes precarious, and their only way out is to unite, overthrow capitalism, and embrace socialism.Footnote 17 János Kornai argues that socialist economies guarantee full employment by forced growth.Footnote 18 Between 1953 and 1956, by collectivizing agriculture and handicrafts and nationalizing capitalist industry and commerce, the CCP transformed China into a socialist country. After over four decades of marketized reforms, the CCP still claims that China is a socialist country, albeit with Chinese characteristics, although this claim is controversial. Mao’s China (1949–1976) after 1956 was a quintessential socialist country; yet even then, the proportion of precarious workers was by no means negligible in state-owned units (Figure 1.3). So why do labouring people in a socialist country suffer from precarity?
Second, according to modernization theory, modernization is a remedy for labour precarity. In the two-sector model that lies at the core of this theory, in individual developing economies there are two sectors: a small modern sector that uses capitalist modes of production and provides stable and well-paid jobs, and a large traditional sector that retains traditional modes of production and provides precarious jobs. Modernization is a process whereby the modern sector consumes the traditional sector by absorbing its surplus labour, and thereby reduces labour precarity.Footnote 19 China has modernized extraordinarily successfully, particularly in the post-Mao era of marketized reforms. In addition, around just 10 per cent of the population lived in urban areas in the 1950s, whereas 66.2 per cent did so at the end of 2023.Footnote 20 So why do labouring people in a country that has so successfully modernized suffer from pervasive precarity?
In light of these two paradoxes, this book asks, what have been the mechanisms that caused and countered labour precarity in China since 1949? China is the largest developing country globally, and has gone through both socialist revolution and marketized reforms, representing the major economic and political dynamics that characterized the world in the twentieth century. Its experience of causing and countering labour precarity may offer lessons for countries worldwide that are struggling with labour precarity.
Examining the conditions of all kinds of precarious labouring people during this period is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, it focuses on precarious labourers in urban enterprises and examines their conditions in relation to that of other labouring people. It traces how the scale, structure, and forms of precarious urban employment have been transformed since 1949, and explores the causes of this transformation, thereby shedding light on the implications of socialist revolution and marketized reforms for labour precarity.
Two Debates about Labour Precarity
In response to the recent rise in labour precarity around the globe, two key debates have emerged from a rapidly growing body of literature on this issue. This book engages with these using the case of China.
The first debate, which has profound implications for labour movements, is on whether the trend towards greater precarity is a process of deproletarianization or proletarian unification. Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011) has reignited this debate. He argues that the precariat is a new class because its members have neither job security and welfare entitlements nor a wide range of political rights that characterize the working class.Footnote 21 Thus, the rise of labour precarity is a movement towards class decomposition and deproletarianization. This argument builds on a longstanding tradition that emphasizes heterogeneity within the working class.Footnote 22 The underlying assumptions are a dichotomous view of working people and equation of the proletariat with workers who have full-time, permanent employment with benefits. Consequently, precarious workers’ collective action is interpreted as rallying on the basis of a common experience of precarity, rather than on the basis of a common location within production relations.Footnote 23
In contrast, the counter-argument follows Karl Marx’s definition of class, and contends that the precariat is found in locations similar to the proletariat in production relations, and is thus an integral part of the proletariat.Footnote 24 Therefore, the rise of labour precarity is a process towards class consolidation and proletarian unification. It may prolong the class formation process, but will not forestall the development of class consciousness and identity.Footnote 25 Historically, under capitalism, the image of the proletariat as having secure employment and benefits applied only to white male workers in Western countries in the 1950s and 1960s, and is therefore an exception.Footnote 26
The second key debate is about the extent to which formalization is a remedy for labour precarity. With regard to employment policy, there has been a tendency towards converting informal into formal employment, or in other words to adopt formalization or regularization as a solution. At the international level, in 2015 the International Labour Organization (ILO) issued a recommendation entitled Transition from the Informal to the Formal Economy.Footnote 27 In developed economies, with nostalgia for the industrial relations of the 1950s and 1960s, some scholars propose re-establishing the social contract between organized labour and organized capital, and therefore shifting from informal to formal employment to reduce labour precarity.Footnote 28 In response to the proliferation of non-standard employment following the 1997 financial crisis, in 2007 the South Korean government introduced the Non-standard Employment Protection Act, which requires employers to convert fixed-term and agency workers (paiqian gong) into regular, direct employees after two years of service.Footnote 29 Agency workers refer to those who are employed by a labour agency and work for a third party. In China, in requiring enterprises to lower the proportion of agency workers in their workforce to a maximum of 10 per cent, the Interim Provisions on Labour Dispatch were intended to force employers to convert agency workers into formal employees.
However, some scholars note a decay in formal employment.Footnote 30 Moreover, labour precarity may be aggravated by the commodification of social reproduction resources, such as housing, education, and healthcare, which usually cannot be offset simply by formalization.Footnote 31 In addition, precarity is often embedded in discriminatory social institutions such as gender and citizenship, which are generally beyond the reach of formalization.Footnote 32
Since 1949, the labouring population of China has undergone rounds of making, unmaking, and remaking. Based on the Chinese experience, this book makes a valuable intervention in these two debates. It helps understand the future dynamics of labour movements, and the desirability and limitations of formalization as a popular policy to counter labour precarity.
Previous Scholarship
Previous scholarship on urban employment in the Mao era focuses on permanent workers, and treats precarious workers largely as the residue of the urban workforce. For example, despite their disagreement on the political implications of permanent job tenure, Andrew Walder and Joel Andreas regard it as a major feature of work units in the Mao era and cover precarious labour in this era only briefly.Footnote 33 The dominant discourse on precarious workers in the Mao era concerns status groups. In the Mao era, the state divided citizens into several status groups, granted each group exclusive access to particular jobs, social benefits, and political rights, and largely blocked cross-group mobility.Footnote 34 In urban areas, permanent workers enjoyed the iron rice bowl and a wide range of political rights, while temporary workers worked in more difficult, dangerous, and dirty positions but received lower wages and fewer benefits.Footnote 35 The latter were also largely excluded from membership of trade unions, party organizations, employee congresses, and Cultural Revolution committees, amongst other bodies, and were ineligible for nomination or election as model workers.Footnote 36 Precarious workers were dismissed and sent to the countryside in large numbers following the failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1960).Footnote 37
Why did precarious workers exist in Mao’s China? The first explanation relates to accumulation: pursuing industrialization in a poor country necessitated labour cost saving, and precarious workers were cheap.Footnote 38 In particular, peasant workers, a major source of precarious workers, were cheap because urban units devolved responsibility for their social reproduction to the countryside.Footnote 39 The second explanation refers to equality. In urban areas, precarious jobs helped the CCP to fulfil its commitment to full employment.Footnote 40 In rural areas, the peasant-worker system was deemed useful for narrowing the rural–urban gap since it reduced rural unemployment and increased the incomes of both rural households and communes.Footnote 41 The third explanation concerns flexibility. Precarious workers helped to overcome the rigidity of the system of workforce allocation, making them indispensable for enterprises with seasonal production schedules.Footnote 42
In the Mao era, the state, as the planner and enforcer of the political-economic system, played a key role in both the improvement and deterioration of labour conditions.Footnote 43 Labour protests sought to counter precarity. In 1956 and 1957, workers in Shanghai staged various strikes to decry the bureaucratism of cadres in factories, governments, the party, and unions, and to demand welfare benefits. This has been interpreted by Elizabeth Perry as an outpouring of resentment against growing disparities between permanent state employees and other workers, particularly those in newly built joint-ownership enterprises, temporary workers, and apprentices.Footnote 44 Between 1966 and 1969, disadvantaged workers rose up and fought against discrimination.Footnote 45 In addition to these waves of mass protests, mundane labour protests occurred throughout the Mao era.Footnote 46 In line with the discourse of status groups, Ching Kwan Lee argues that struggles against precarity in the Mao era pivoted around recognition, targeting the state: marginalized workers rose up to demand equal recognition, equal compensation, and equal welfare.Footnote 47
The literature on labour precarity in the post-Mao era focuses on replacement of the old labour system characterized by security and dualism, with a new labour system characterized by pervasive precarity. This has involved the unmaking and remaking of workers under the old system (hereafter old workers) and the making of workers under the new system (hereafter new workers). The literature on old workers is dominated by a discourse of anti-exclusion and commodification: the iron rice bowl was smashed because it prevented state-owned enterprises (SOEs) from competing successfully in the market economy; permanent employment in the formal economy was replaced by precarious employment in the informal economy, and even unemployment; the generous cradle-to-grave safety net was replaced by a mean one; and old workers’ protests were interpreted as Polanyi-type labour unrest, or in other words resistance to the commodification of labour power.Footnote 48
Generally, new workers are subject to highly coercive discipline, and tend to work without labour contracts or with short-term labour contracts for illegally long hours and in hazardous environments. They receive low wages, are prone to arrears and docking of both wages and social insurance, and are subject to arbitrary dismissals.Footnote 49 The vast majority of the extant literature on new workers focuses on peasant workers who have become part and parcel of the urban workforce.
Three discourses can be distinguished in the literature. The exploitation discourse examines the predicament of peasant workers through the lens of labour–capital relations. Accordingly, exploitation is the chief culprit of peasant workers’ precarity, facilitated by their second-class citizenship.Footnote 50 New workers’ struggles are interpreted as Marx-type labour unrest, or struggles of the newly emerging working class against exploitation.Footnote 51 In contrast, the exclusion discourse views the plight of peasant workers through the lens of citizen–state relations. Accordingly, being excluded from full citizenship is the chief cause of peasant workers’ precarity. They are largely excluded from the protection of labour laws and from essential public services in cities, which are reserved for workers with urban hukou. Their insurgent identities tend to be expressed in terms of citizenship rather than class.Footnote 52 In the third discourse, scholars note massive dispossession of peasants and rampant commodification of social reproduction resources, particularly housing, healthcare, and education, as well as the financial pressures that such commodification imposes on individuals.Footnote 53
The state, capital, and workers have all played a role in modulating labour precarity in the reform era. The state aims to achieve both economic development and political legitimacy. The drive for growth tends to aggravate labour precarity, while the drive for legitimacy tends to alleviate it. To attract investment, local governments often help investors to circumvent formal rules and regulations on labour use.Footnote 54 Labour protection laws are implemented opportunistically, subject to the state’s changing economic, political, and social priorities.Footnote 55 To reconcile the tension between profitability and legitimacy, enterprises resort to workforce dualism: formal employees enjoy relatively stable jobs and statutory welfare benefits, while informal workers suffer discrimination with regard to income, welfare benefits, and job security.Footnote 56
Labour activism in China is subject to the state’s monopoly over workers’ representation and repression.Footnote 57 The discourses of exploitation and exclusion are divided on the effectiveness of labour resistance in reducing precarity. According to the exclusion discourse, owing to the fragmentation of workers’ interests across localities and work units, new workers’ struggles are largely workplace-based and localized. Apart from wage increases, such struggles have failed to make any lasting gains in job security or trade union representation.Footnote 58 However, according to the exploitation discourse, different types of employment status, lack of civil rights, and the fragmentation of workers may prolong the class formation process but will not quench their class consciousness and identity. Their collective action has won them both economic and political gains.Footnote 59
The existing literature on labour in the Mao era treats precarious labour as a sideline. It also fails to capture how the dynamics of accumulation, labour policy, and labour movements affected the scale, structure, and forms of precarious labour at different moments in that era. The literature on precarious labour in the post-Mao era appears rich; yet there has been a reductionist tendency to attribute labour precarity to a single mechanism, as the three discourses often appear in separate bodies of literature. Furthermore, most literature on this topic involves cross-sectional case studies at the workplace level, making it difficult to capture longitudinal, national-level transformation throughout the Mao and post-Mao eras and unveil the relationship between workplace dynamics and the larger political economy picture. The literature in the post-Mao era also fails to pay due attention to agency labour, which has become the dominant form of precarious labour (more precarious than formal workers) in urban enterprises since the introduction of the Labour Contract Law (LCL) in 2007.
In light of this, the first half of this book centres on precarious workers in the Mao era. It demonstrates how a hierarchy of precarious labouring people came into being against the background of economic and political dynamics, and how the hierarchy evolved following different paths of industrialization, swings in labour policy, and the rise and fall of labour resistance. The second half of the book first gives a bird’s eye view of how various factors in the post-Mao era have recalibrated surplus appropriation and exclusion and activated commodification, and how these three mechanisms have worked together to rapidly proliferate and unevenly distribute precarity among different workers. It then moves to focus on agency workers.
Empirically, by chronicling the history of precarious labour in China since 1949, this book complements existing studies of precarious labour in capitalist countries with a study of it in a socialist country. It also complements existing cross-sectional case studies at the workplace level with a longitudinal study at the country level that combines macro-analysis of the political economy with micro-analysis of working conditions. This facilitates comparison between different periods to unveil continuities and discontinuities in causing and countering labour precarity under socialist revolution and marketized reforms.
Key Concepts and an Analytical Framework
Labour precarity can arise throughout the life cycle of labour power, from the creation and replenishment of labour power in the sphere of social reproduction to the allocation and consumption of labour power to generate surplus in the sphere of production. This section first introduces the mechanisms that cause labour precarity in each sphere, including their modulators and corresponding counter-mechanisms. It then synthesizes these mechanisms to develop an analytical framework for this book.Footnote 60
Surplus Appropriation
Production is central to the functioning of society. In this sphere, those subject to surplus appropriation are prone to precarity. Surplus is the difference between what is produced and what is required for producers to live.
In class societies, surplus appropriation is called exploitation, involving the ‘appropriation of the surplus product of classes of producers by (dominant) classes of non-producers’.Footnote 61 In capitalist societies, exploitation takes the form of capitalists’ appropriation of workers’ surplus value, which is mainly reinvested to generate more surplus value, or in other words for accumulation.Footnote 62 Whenever a capitalist mode of production is established, its primary aim is to extract surplus value. Marxism regards labour power as the sole source of value. Thus, labour’s desire for decent work is constantly pressured by capital’s pursuit of surplus value, which necessarily involves hiring and firing workers according to changing production needs, making them toil hard, and paying them the lowest possible wages.
Such pursuit is enhanced by competition, which is entrenched in capitalism.Footnote 63 Those with low profitability risk being forced out of the market. Capital constantly fine-tunes its accumulation strategy, generating fluctuations in labour precarity. In recent decades, capital has increasingly resorted to globalization and financialization to enhance exploitation. The state in capitalist economies tends to stand in alliance with capital. It constantly fine-tunes labour policy to serve capital accumulation. It may introduce anti-labour policy to advance exploitation or pro-labour policy, for example acts of working time limits, to sustain capitalism.Footnote 64 The pursuit of surplus value tends to incur labour movements. Marx charges the working class with the mission of overthrowing capitalism, and anchors the hope of eliminating precarity on socialist revolution.Footnote 65 Later Marxists focus on non-revolutionary labour resistance, and argue that such resistance may significantly reduce labour precarity.Footnote 66
Capitalism is characterized by a fundamental contradiction between profitability and legitimacy. On the one hand, concessions made by capital and the state to pacify labour movements and reduce labour precarity tend to drive the capitalist system into crises of profitability. On the other hand, efforts to restore profitability by capital and the state entail the intensification of exploitation and the proliferation of labour precarity, thereby producing crises of legitimacy and labour resistance.Footnote 67 Thus, a tendency for a double movement exists in capitalist societies between phases characterized by the intensification of labour protection and phases characterized by the intensification of exploitation.
In socialist economies, the means of production are either nationalized or collectivized. However, the imperative of accumulation remains. In reality, socialist revolutions first occurred in the weakest link of the capitalist chain. Thus, when socialist revolutionists took power, they faced economies with massive impoverishment, to which they responded by extracting the surplus of peasants and the proletariat to fuel modernization. In this book, surplus appropriation in socialist economies is referred to as socialist surplus appropriation, which necessarily entails reducing labour costs and thereby generating labour grievances.
Therefore, the contradiction between accumulation and legitimacy also exists in socialist economies, but in a less pronounced way. In contrast to capitalism, which is organized to serve capitalists’ accumulation interests, socialism is fundamentally committed to labour welfare, imposing insurmountable constraints on the drive for socialist surplus appropriation. Moreover, among enterprises, competition under capitalism is replaced by co-operation under socialism, further tempering the compulsion for socialist surplus appropriation. Nevertheless, to redress their grievances, workers in socialist economies also resist, in mundane or epic manners.
In socialist economies, the state determines and adjusts accumulation strategies and labour policy, weighing on workers’ conditions. Karl Polanyi’s analysis of premodern economies and idea of the double movement (discussed later) is enlightening for analysing socialist economies. According to Polanyi, premodern societies ran on three principles: reciprocity, redistribution, and householding (production taking place primarily in individual households).Footnote 68 Similar to premodern economies, non-market exchange principles, redistribution in particular, predominate in socialist economies.
Socialist economies are characterized by centralized redistribution by state authorities. However, there is a contradiction between centralization and legitimacy in socialist economies. On the one hand, centralization of redistribution tends to render the grassroots powerless and thereby discourage them from constructing socialism proactively and disable them from holding political elites accountable, thus driving the systems into crises of legitimacy. On the other hand, decentralization of redistribution, which empowers the grassroots, tends to cause disproportions or chaos in the national economy, thus leading to crises of central planning. Therefore, a double movement between centralization and decentralization of redistribution characterizes socialist economies.
Exclusion
Exclusion mainly takes the form of segmentation in job placement and discriminatory distribution of economic, political, and social resources.Footnote 69 It guarantees some workers’ relative security while leading to others’ precarity. Exclusion may be imposed by capital, workers, and the state. These three forms of exclusion are interconnected.
Marxist scholars elaborate on exclusion imposed by capital in capitalist economies. Marxist exclusion is a consequence of capital accumulation. First, according to the general law of capital accumulation, as production expands with advances in productivity, the additional capital employs fewer labourers than the old capital in proportion to its magnitude, resulting in a relative surplus population or industrial reserve army.Footnote 70 Second, to mitigate the contradiction between profitability and legitimacy, capital draws boundaries within the working class at the firm, inter-firm, and international levels.Footnote 71 In practice, employers often draw on institutions of Weberian exclusion (discussed later), such as gender, race, religion, and citizenship, to facilitate a divide-and-rule strategy.Footnote 72 Given the tension between accumulation and legitimacy in socialist economies, Marxist exclusion also operates there because the state draws boundaries among labouring people. Marxist exclusion is affected by accumulation strategies and can be countered by labour policy and resistance.
Weberian scholars elaborate on exclusion imposed by workers and the state. Weberian exclusion is a consequence of insiders’ preservation of self-interests. It means being excluded from resources monopolized by closed social groups. Social relationships may be open or closed. They are likely to be closed if they are achieved through co-operative action or compromise between the interests of different actors, or if such closure consolidates group members’ prestige and economic interests.Footnote 73 Common social institutions of Weberian exclusion are gender, race, religion, citizenship, ethnicity, and place of origin. Weberian exclusion pursued by workers operates through workers’ organizations, such as trade unions, professional associations, and parties, possessing the resources and power necessary to influence conditions of different workers. Weberian exclusion imposed by the state takes the form of citizenship, often drawing on boundaries created by workers.Footnote 74 Weberian exclusion operates in both capitalist and socialist economies.
In the transition from traditional to modern societies, Weberian exclusion is recalibrated by market expansion, which breaks down old status groups and gives rise to new ones.Footnote 75 Similar scenarios can be observed in economies undergoing the transition from socialism to capitalism. Weberian exclusion can also be adjusted by the state through discrimination-related policies. In particular, the state can counter Weberian exclusion by introducing anti-discrimination laws and by fine-tuning the inclusiveness of citizenship. Mass movements for recognition of equal status across diverse groups can counter Weberian exclusion and reduce the labour precarity of the excluded. For example, feminist and gay movements’ agendas often include countering gender-based discrimination in the workplace.Footnote 76
Commodification
In the sphere of social reproduction, those suffering from the commodification of labour power are prone to precarity. Commodification operates in market economies. Both Marxism and Polanyianism have contributed to commodification theory.
In Marx’s view, generalization of the capitalist mode of production presupposes the existence of large-scale, doubly free labour, meaning workers both free from all means of production, most importantly land, and free to sell their labour power. Marx terms the process of creating doubly free labour ‘primitive accumulation’, which in essence means the commodification of labour power.Footnote 77 Without any means of production, the proletariat is born precarious. Later Marxists find that semi-proletarianized wage labourers, who have meagre means of production, are compatible with and persist under capitalism. Semi-proletarianized wage labourers’ means of production often depress their wages.Footnote 78
Moreover, rather than being a one-shot process, as suggested by Marx, primitive accumulation is, in reality, an ongoing process that David Harvey calls ‘accumulation by dispossession’.Footnote 79 Accumulation by dispossession helps alleviate the over-accumulation crisis of capitalism by releasing assets, including labour power, at very low costs, which can be seized by over-accumulated capital for profitable use. It proceeds not only by displacing peasants but also, for example, by privatizing natural resources (such as land, water, and forests) and public utilities (such as social housing, telecommunications, and transportation), or devaluing existing capital assets and labour power through state-administered austerity programmes.Footnote 80 Marxist commodification can be countered by mass movements and collective welfare policy. By eliminating the capitalist mode of production and reconnecting labour with means of production, socialism fundamentally decommodifies labour.
According to Polanyi, traditional societies are based on non-market exchange principles. However, owing to market expansion since the late eighteenth century, natural and human substance has been transformed into commodities, including labour, land, and money, which are not produced for sale. Polanyian commodification contributes to labour precarity in the following ways. First, establishing a labour market means eliminating the protection provided by cultural institutions such as kinship for individuals, and applying the principle of freedom of contract between employees and employers. Consequently, workers ‘would die as the victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation’.Footnote 81 Second, workers’ lives are affected not only by wage levels but also by other factors such as natural and domestic surroundings and the quality and prices of consumer goods, the commodification of which also aggravates labour precarity.
Polanyi sees the rise of counter-movements against market expansion as inevitable. Counter-movements aim at social protection of humans and nature. He further argues that the history of modern society has been characterized by dynamic, cyclical double movements of market expansion and social protection: at one moment, the harms caused by marketization lead to counter-movements to protect society, while, at the next moment, the problems (including declining profits) caused by waves of social protection lead to counter-movements to restore profit rates.Footnote 82 Clearly, the core of both Marxist and Polanyian commodification is to subject workers’ lives to the law of the market. Given its purpose, no distinction is made between the two in this book.
Towards an Analytical Framework
As mentioned earlier, surplus appropriation, exclusion, and commodification create labour precarity at different stages of the life cycle of labour power. They are thus complementary. They are also closely intertwined, with combined effects irreducible to the arithmetical sum of each mechanism. Surplus appropriation and exclusion reinforce each other. On the one hand, the contradiction between surplus appropriation and legitimacy in both capitalist and socialist economies leads to boundary-drawing among workers. On the other hand, exclusion facilitates surplus appropriation of not only the excluded but also the included.Footnote 83
Surplus appropriation and commodification are also closely intertwined. On the one hand, the desire for relentless exploitation propels commodification, which dispossesses labour. On the other hand, commodification enables and intensifies exploitation. When labourers are dispossessed, they must sell their labour power to make a living. The greater the pressure to maintain social reproduction is, the greater is the exploitation labourers tend to endure. Exclusion and commodification are also connected. Decommodification arrangements often operate on a discriminatory basis. In addition, the corresponding counter-mechanisms of surplus appropriation, exclusion, and commodification also complement each other in reducing labour precarity.
In light of this, to reach a comprehensive understanding of labour precarity, the three mechanisms that generate it and their corresponding counter-mechanisms must be analysed together. Against this stance, the dichotomous conceptualization of labour precarity that is popular in the existing literature appears problematic. It distinguishes between the haves and the have-nots, and identifies precarious workers with the latter. Employment arrangements (standard versus non-standard) and job quality (good versus bad) are the most common criteria used in the extant literature to distinguish between secure and precarious workers.Footnote 84 This conceptualization captures the reality that, in contrast to secure workers, precarious workers tend to work under non-standard employment arrangements and have bad jobs, but fails to explain why. It also downplays how exploitation and commodification contribute to labour precarity.
In contrast, this book defines labour precarity as a situation in which labouring people are subject to three interactive mechanisms that generate labour precarity, namely surplus appropriation, exclusion, and commodification, rendering them vulnerable to economic insecurity. The relevance of these three mechanisms varies with workers, time, and space. This definition implies that, in the real world, most labouring people are likely to be somewhat precarious. Therefore, precarious labour must be treated as a spectrum, rather than as a reified group of people with certain characteristics.
Thus, to understand labour precarity at a national level, one must first gain a panoramic view of the hierarchy of labouring people, rather than focus on a specific layer of precarious workers, and then examine how this hierarchy changes. One must interpret the expansion of a specific layer of precarious labour in the context of a recalibration of the hierarchy. Otherwise, it would be easy, for example, to interpret the dramatic rise of temporary workers in the late 1950s (Figure 1.3) as an increase in labour precarity, which is not entirely true, since this rise was accompanied by the upgrading of collective enterprises into SOEs, and thereby the transformation of workers in collective enterprises into SOE workers, and the enlargement of permanent workers in previous SOEs (for more detail, see Chapter 4).
In this book, the term ‘labour tenure regime’ is coined to refer to the system that causes and counters labour precarity. The regime determines who is rendered precarious, on what scale, and why. Each labour tenure regime consists of a distinct portfolio of interactive mechanisms that generate labour precarity – surplus appropriation, exclusion, and commodification – and their corresponding counter-mechanisms. Changes among mechanisms that generate labour precarity will result in alteration to the labour tenure regime that defines workers’ basic conditions. Changes within individual mechanisms will result in variations in the scale, structure, and forms of precarious labour within one labour tenure regime. This book identifies two labour tenure regimes: (1) the regime of marginal labour precarity in the Mao era, which generated small strata of precarious workers and large strata of secure workers; and (2) the regime of general labour precarity in the post-Mao era, which generated large strata of precarious workers.
As an analytical framework, ‘labour tenure regime’ overcomes the popular reductionist tendency of the extant literature to blame labour precarity on a single mechanism. It accentuates the need to investigate the combined effects of surplus appropriation, exclusion, and commodification and their corresponding counter-mechanisms to generate a comprehensive understanding of labour precarity. By using this framework to explain the ebbs and flows of labour precarity in China since 1949, this book offers a practical example of how to use this framework productively.
Moreover, ‘labour tenure regime’ provides a powerful tool for comparative dynamic studies of labour precarity in the Mao and post-Mao eras, and between China and other countries, since the relevance of each of its three mechanisms varies with different workers in different places and periods. In addition, it extends the application of the theories of Marx, Weber, and Polanyi, which are traditionally used to analyse capitalist economies, to socialist economies.
Research Strategy
As mentioned above, the existing literature on precarious labour in the Mao era is scarce, whereas that on the post-Mao era is rich but consists mainly of cross-sectional case studies at the workplace level and downplays agency labour. To complement the extant literature and avoid repetition, a research strategy is required that (1) fills the knowledge gap on precarious labour in the Mao era; (2) captures longitudinal transformation of labour precarity after 1949; and (3) fills the knowledge gap on agency workers in the post-Mao era.
This book pursues a multilayered research strategy that integrates the all-of-China-field-site approach, one-case multi-field-site approach, and one-site-case-study approach. The all-of-China-field-site approach refers to a research design relying on secondary materials, such as news articles, government reports, and research publications, to provide a nationwide picture of an issue. Its strength lies in providing an overview and a sense of the pervasiveness of a particular phenomenon. The one-case multi-field-site approach refers to a research design that involves going to multiple fieldwork sites to study a single phenomenon in depth, rather than studying variations across different sites. This approach is appropriate for uncovering general mechanisms and generating new empirical findings.Footnote 85 The combination of these two approaches facilitates cross-checking of information collected from different sources. The one-site-case-study approach, as the name indicates, adds depth and nuance to the one-case multi-field-site approach.
To unveil the labour tenure regime in the Mao era and the longitudinal transformation of the regimes after 1949, this book combines the all-of-China-field-site approach with the one-case multi-field-site approach, which are based on underexploited Chinese-language archives and interviews. Since original archives on precarious labour at the national level are inaccessible to non-official scholars, this study relies primarily on the published multivolume collections of central-government archives co-compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) and the Central Archives of China (CAC). This compilation is ongoing, and as of 2023 covered the period 1949–1965. These archives are supplemented by flagship periodicals of the Ministry of Labour between 1949 and the late 1990s, statistical yearbooks and collections, newspapers, and research publications.Footnote 86
In addition, the author interviewed nineteen people, most of whom once worked as temporary workers or cadres in state-owned units in China between the 1950s and the 1970s. They were reached through personal ties and interviewed via phone in 2023. They were by no means representative of temporary workers or cadres in that period. However, they provided first-hand information about temporary workers’ experience and labour management in their units during the Mao era. Detail of these interviewees and their time of being interviewed can be found in the appendix.
To cross-check information at the national level and dig into complexities pertinent to precarious labour at the local level, the study draws heavily on original archives on precarious labour in the Beijing Municipal Archives (BMA) and the Shanghai Municipal Archives (SMA). Beijing and Shanghai are not typical of Chinese cities. However, both have been prominent industrial cities since 1949. Their archives are likely to provide the most comprehensive accounts of precarious workers in Mao’s China. The BMA and SMA house local archives at the municipal, district, and enterprise levels. In 2017, keywords relating to precarious labour were used to locate relevant archives in the archives’ retrieval systems, and the author read the resulting documents.
At the BMA, the retrieval returned 140 volumes of documents, each consisting of multiple files. At the SMA, the retrieval returned nearly 7,000 files. The time frame of these archives spanned from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. Other documentary materials include local annals, memoirs of labour leaders during the Cultural Revolution, newspapers by workers’ rebellion organizations, scholarly works, mainly concerning Beijing and Shanghai and, to a lesser extent, other parts of China, and unpublished sources made accessible through personal connections. These materials include those available in mainland China and at the Universities Service Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. When reconstructing historical events, the author carefully compared data from different sources and at different administrative levels.
To understand the working conditions of agency workers, the one-case multi-field-site approach was combined with the one-site-case-study approach. To collect data on the general conditions of agency workers and the effects of regulations against the abuse of agency workers, in 2016 a research team consisting of the author, an official from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MOHRSS), workers from non-governmental labour organizations, and university students visited Shanghai, Guangzhou, Suzhou, Dongguan, Jinan, and several other cities representative of China’s top- and second-tier economic powerhouses to conduct semi-structured interviews (Figure 1.4). Individual interviews by the team involved fifty-two agency workers who worked in seven SOEs, nineteen foreign enterprises, and three private enterprises. Group interviews by the team involved provincial labour officials in Guangdong and Shandong, their municipal counterparts in Suzhou and Shanghai, HR managers of eleven SOEs, seven foreign enterprises, and two private enterprises, and managers of nineteen labour dispatch agencies.Footnote 87
Figure 1.4 Multi-site fieldwork.Footnote 88
Note: GI: group interviews with managers or officials; II: individual interviews with workers; O: labour officials; A: managers of labour dispatch agencies; S: interviewees from SOEs; P: interviewees from private enterprises; F: interviewees from foreign enterprises.
Figure 1.4Long description
Interviews are conducted in Beijing, Tianjin, Jinan, Shanghai, Suzhou, Changsha, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan. In Beijing, individual interviews are conducted with workers in stated-owned enterprises. In Tianjin, individual interviews are conducted with workers in stated-owned and foreign enterprises. In Jinan, group interviews are conducted with labour officials and managers of labour dispatch agencies and stated-owned enterprises. In Shanghai, group interviews are conducted with labour officials and managers of labour dispatch agencies and stated-owned, private, and foreign enterprises, and individual interviews are conducted with workers in stated-owned enterprises. In Suzhou, group interviews are conducted with labour officials and managers of labour dispatch agencies and stated-owned, private, and foreign enterprises. In Changsha, individual interviews are conducted with workers in stated-owned, private, and foreign enterprises. In Guangzhou, group interviews are conducted with labour officials and managers of labour dispatch agencies and stated-owned enterprises, and individual interviews are conducted with workers in stated-owned, private, and foreign enterprises. In Shenzhen, individual interviews are conducted with workers in foreign enterprises. In Dongguan, group interviews are conducted with labour officials and managers of labour dispatch agencies, and individual interviews are conducted with workers in private and foreign enterprises.
To gain a nuanced understanding of the conditions of agency workers at the workplace level, the author conducted participant observation and interviewed thirty current and former agency workers at an SOE called Oriental Express (pseudonym) between July and December 2016. According to a report released by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in 2012, among enterprises with different types of ownership, SOEs had the highest proportion of agency workers in their workforce.Footnote 89 Thanks to personal connections, in the summer of 2016 the author also worked for a month as an intern at a labour dispatch agency called Talent Pool (pseudonym), which provided agency workers for the Oriental Express, and interviewed thirteen of its staff. In addition, in 2016 and 2017 the author interviewed several scholars and labour officials to gain information about certain labour issues. In 2019, the author revisited several field sites and found that the situation remained fundamentally unchanged. A list of interviewees and their place and time of being interviewed can be found in the appendix.
Periodization
This book is organized largely in chronological order. To facilitate analysis of precarious labour since 1949, this book divides this period into time blocks, each with a particular labour tenure regime. Although periodization tends to disrupt historical continuity, its absence makes it difficult to distinguish periods with relatively stable characteristics. In light of this, periodization is accompanied by discussion of continuities and discontinuities between different time blocks.
Kornai divides socialism into three stages: revolutionary-transitional socialism, which grows out of capitalism and proceeds towards the completion of basic socialist apparatuses; classical socialism, which follows the trajectory of ready-made socialist apparatuses and proceeds towards sophistication of the socialist system; and reform socialism, which involves dramatic, if not fundamental, reconstruction of classical socialism.Footnote 90 Following Kornai’s classification, the author divided the post-1949 era in China into three eras: revolutionary-transitional socialism (1949–1956), classical socialism (1957–1976), and reform socialism (1977–present).
The year 1956 marked the completion of the Three Transformations: the transformation of private industrial and commercial enterprises into state-owned units, the transformation of private handicraft workshops into co-operatives, and the transformation of agriculture based on individual peasant households into agriculture based on co-operatives. The year 1978 is often regarded as a pivotal year in post-1949 China because the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP took place in this year. At this meeting, the CCP decided to discard socialist egalitarianism and embrace market-oriented developmentalism. However, a closer look at the policy of Mao’s immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, indicates that Hua and Deng Xiaoping were largely in agreement on launching the Reform and Opening-up.Footnote 91 Therefore, it seems more apt to regard 1976 as a watershed, marked by Mao’s death and the end of classical socialism. Thus, in this book, the post-1949 period is divided into the Mao era (1949–1976) and the post-Mao era (Reference Mao1977–present). They embrace different labour tenure regimes.
Outline
The author’s aim in this book is to examine the causes of and remedies for labour precarity in China since 1949. The crux of the argument is as follows. The Mao era featured a regime of marginal labour precarity. In this era, relentless socialist surplus appropriation created a tendency to increase labour precarity, which was tempered by the CCP’s commitment to labour and labour resistance. To balance legitimacy and accumulation, the state built an exclusion system that privileged some workers over others. The state also decommodified and, to some extent, socialized social reproduction on a discriminatory basis. The boundaries between different groups of labouring people were constantly redrawn, mainly through recurrent shifts of the industrialization path between centralization and decentralization, swings in labour policy between promoting permanent and temporary employment, and ebbs and flows of labour movements. The result was marginal labour precarity and general but differentiated labour security.
The post-Mao era has featured a regime of general labour precarity. In this era, socialist surplus appropriation has been overhauled and marginalized, and has given way to exploitation. The exclusion system has been greatly softened and recalibrated, and social reproduction has been recommodified. The result has been pervasive labour precarity. Agency labour has been the dominant form of precarious labour in urban enterprises since the 2010s. Between the late 1970s and the 2010s, labour dispatch gradually rose to prominence owing primarily to the contradiction between capital’s pursuit of profitability and legitimacy. Pro-labour regulations are major tools to counter labour precarity in the post-Mao era. However, they are impotent due to workers’ impotence at the local level. In the 2010s, regardless of their employment status, ordinary Chinese workers led precarious lives, because they simultaneously suffered from exploitation, exclusion, and commodification.
Chapter 2 presents a brief overview of how the three mechanisms that generate labour precarity played out for wage labourers before 1949, particularly during the Republican era, and explains the labour institutions that underpinned their functioning, and how they were countered. In doing so, it provides a starting point for explaining the emergence and evolution of labour tenure regimes since 1949. It also serves as a baseline for comparing working conditions between the pre-1949 era and periods thereafter.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 address labour precarity in the Mao era. Chapter 3 focuses on the 1949–1957 period. It begins by outlining the fundamentals of the regime of marginal labour precarity in the Mao era, which were installed in the early 1950s. It then narrows the focus to the 1949–1957 period, which witnessed the first switch between decentralized and recentralized industrialization in the Mao era, and a reorientation of labour policy, from promoting permanent employment to constraining its expansion, and to promoting the labour contract system. Chapter 4 focuses on the 1958–1965 period, which witnessed the rise and fall of the Great Leap Forward. During this period, China saw the second and most radical switch between decentralized and recentralized industrialization in the Mao era, and a further move of labour policy towards promoting temporary employment. Chapter 5 focuses on the 1966–1976 period, encompassing the rise and fall of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, China experienced a third wave of decentralized industrialization, and the fiercest protests of precarious workers in the Mao era.
Chapters 6, 7, and 8 address labour precarity since 1977. Chapter 6 delineates how the regime of marginal labour precarity was dismantled and replaced by the regime of general labour precarity. Chapter 7 advances Chapter 6 in two respects. First, it explains how the dualism between formal contract workers and agency workers emerged by examining the rise of agency workers. Second, it demonstrates why legal counter-movements in the post-Mao era are incomplete from a Polanyian perspective by examining the effects of two pro-labour regulations. Chapter 8 examines the impacts on workers of cumulative changes since 1949 by presenting a case study of the working conditions of formal and agency workers in an SOE, and accounts of the working conditions of agency workers in export-oriented factories in the 2010s.
Chapter 9 draws conclusions. It summarizes the main findings of this book, and compares the periods before and after 1949, and the Mao and post-Mao eras to unveil their continuities and discontinuities in causing and countering labour precarity. It engages with the paradoxes and debates raised in Chapter 1, and compares China with both socialist and transitional economies and traditional advanced capitalist economies in the transformation of labour precarity. It ends by acknowledging the limitations of this book, speculating on the future dynamics of labour precarity in China, and suggesting directions for future research.
