This anthology put together by Joel Andreas is a gem. Selected from articles that have appeared over the past decade in the journal Open Times, one of the best and relatively more independent academic journals in China, it manages to include some of the best labour studies of the country's recent years. From different angles and perspectives, these articles attempt to understand the shifting politics of production in various kinds of enterprise (state-owned or non-state-owned) against the turbulent larger structural changes over decades of the uneven history of the PRC.
Politics of production, or, to borrow the title of the book, factory politics, has always been the product of the dynamic power relations among different social players, the most significant of which are state, capital, and labour. The dramatic transformation of the accumulation regime in China from planned economy to market economy during the past several decades has radically reconfigured the power structure on the shopfloor. In this process, old social contracts and the accompanying social protections have been dismantled while new hierarchies, divisions, and conflicts have emerged. The studies in this book, all based on intensive empirical research, have tried to grasp such power change and its meaning.
Chapters Three to Five investigate the changing labour-management strategies and labour relations on the shopfloor (and also the living space in Chapter Five) after the market restructuring of state-owned enterprises. Chapter Three, “A Simple Control Model Analysis of Labor Relations in Industrial SOEs” by Tong Xin, investigates how the marketization transformed SOEs (state-owned enterprises) from “work units” to manufacturers or service providers, and how such transformation has produced a so-called simple control model of industrial relations in four case SOEs. Labour relations within these post-reform SOEs have become highly hierarchical among managers, technicians, skilled workers, and unskilled workers, each belonging to different and hierarchical labour markets. Jia Wenjuan's “Changes in Production Models within State-Owned Enterprises under the ‘Double Transformations’: The Rise of Internal Labor Subcontracting in City A's Nanchang Factory (2001–2013)” (Chapter Four) provides a more detailed and focused study of such change. She analyses the development of the “internal labour subcontracting” system of production at one particular state-owned heavy machinery factory, as it started to cooperate with the giant German H Company, became an original equipment manufacturer, and turned itself into one link within a larger transnational production process. By subcontracting work to informal peasant migrant labourers through subcontractor–foremen, the “internal labour subcontracting” system aimed to defeat the permanent resistance of state workers, allow for greater flexibility in production, and meet global capital's requirement of “flexible accumulation”.
The market restructuring characterized by the rising power of capital has not just reconfigured class relations on the shopfloor, it has also reshaped the ethnic relations in workers’ working and living space. Liu Ming's insightful article, “Sustaining Production: Spatial Interactions between Han and Uyghur Workers at the Kashgar Cotton Mill” (Chapter Five), makes an excellent effort at bringing an ethnic perspective into labour research. He explores how the privatization of one particular mill in Xinjiang destroyed the more harmonious and trustful Uyghur–Han relationship established during the state-owned era, which was based on the paternalistic mentorship–apprenticeship system on the shopfloor; the more ethnically balanced composition of managers, skilled workers, and ordinary workers; the communal living space; and the shared factory-based rather than ethnicity-based identity. Instead, a highly hierarchical and top-down ethnic relationship has emerged on the shopfloor, as ethnicity and class have become closely intertwined. Furthermore, by atomizing workers and fragmenting their living spaces, privatization has left little room for social interaction; it has also destroyed the mutual trust and friendship that developed among workers of different ethnicities during the state-owned era. Instead, hostility and distrust now prevail, not just along class lines but also ethnic lines.
Another theme of the collection is workers’ resistance to their subjugation. Wang Jianhua and Meng Quan's article, “Patterns of Collective Resistance among the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: From the Politics of Production to the Politics of Life” (Chapter Eight), is an excellent comparative study of workers’ contentious politics in three export-oriented manufacturing factories: Honda's plant in Nanhai; Ohm in Shenzhen; and Foxconn in Taiyuan. The authors argue that the interaction of different types of production regime with the particular working and living experiences of workers led to different patterns of resistance. At Nanhai Honda, categorized by the authors as a semi-authoritarian regime, workers developed so-called offensive struggles to advance their interests based on relationships among co-workers and classmates; at Shenzhen Ohm, categorized as an authoritarian regime, workers developed atomized struggles to both defend and advance their interests; and at Taiyuan Foxconn, categorized as a semi-militarized regime, the workers rioted. The variety of types of capital, labour regime, and contentious repertoire led to a variety of types of collective action. Conflicts certainly do not just arise between private capital and workers: the strong imposition of state power upon workers also leads to resistance. Chapter One, “From Passion to Deception – Daily Life at the Grassroots under State Control of Production before and after the Great Leap Forward: An Investigation of TY Factory in Guangzhou (1956–1965)” by Jia Wenjuan, offers a historical reflection on how one of the high modernist projects initiated by socialist China – the Great Leap Forward Movement – changed SOE workers’ attitudes towards their work from an earlier enthusiasm to passivity, negativity, and fraudulent practices, typical types of “weapons of the weak”.
The last general theme of the book is the role played by interventive institutions that have been transformed or have newly emerged along with the changing power structure in industry. Chapter Two, “Research into the Implementation of the Staff and Workers Congress System in State-Owned Enterprises: A 60-Year Case Study of One Factory” by Cai He and Li Wanlian, investigates the organization and implementation of the Staff and Workers Congress (SWC) system in one particular company at different historical times. The authors argue that its uneven implementation has been determined by the tension between legitimacy and efficiency in China's shifting industrialization policies over the past six decades. Chapter Seven, “Direct Labor Union Election: Lessons from Guangdong” by Wen Xiaoyi (2014), aims to inquire into the so-called Direct Union Election in Guangdong province in 2012, an experimental act supported by the local government in order to solve the heightened labour conflicts as well as to promote industrial grading. It argues that the main structural obstacles (the manipulation of unions by enterprise management, local government's reduced close ties with capital, and worries about instability) prevented the effective implementation and promotion of direct union elections and hence made the institutionalization of enterprise-level unionism impossible. Lastly, Chapter Six, “Corporate Social Responsibility in the Global Toy Industry's Supply Chain: An Empirical Study of Walmart Supplier Factories in China” by Yu Xiaomin, aims to explore the role played by another interruptive institution in labour conditions against the larger context of global capitalism, that is, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Based on empirical studies at three of Walmart's toy-supplier factories located in Shenzhen, Yu argues that Walmart's “factory inspections”, based on its code of conduct, have done little to improve workers’ working conditions, largely due to the code's self-conflicting and self-deceiving features.
The greatest strength of this book lies in the rich empirical research conducted by the authors. Their intensive empirical research not only “puts flesh on the bones” by concretizing abstract theories, more importantly, it helps to transcend an oversimplified view of labour conditions in China and reveal a much more complicated, diversified, and variegated labour reality. Meanwhile, since all this empirical research is based on a wide selection of cases, when reading them together we encounter some unexpected yet meaningful insights. For example, one of the most interesting points in reading and comparing different studies based on different cases is that similar processes of labour subjugation, alienation, fragmentation, and hierarchicalization occurred in both state and non-state enterprises, albeit in different forms. The ownership of the enterprise makes little difference here, as long as the capitalist logic of profit-maximization dominates.
Assuredly, there are still many issues that readers might want to have seen explored and that are not covered in this book. For example, although there are studies about workers’ resistance in non-state factories (Chapter Eight), studies on the response and resistance of SOE workers to the increasingly alienated and oppressive working environment in post-reform SOEs have not been included in this collection. Nevertheless, as emphasized by the editor in the introduction, the collection does not intend to “provide a complete picture of seven decades of history”, but rather to present “a series of ‘snapshots’ (and ‘video recordings’), each of which offers acute insights into a specific aspect of this history” (p. 6). In that sense, the book is a success.
