Labor in China: history, institutions and contemporary conflicts

As a socialist country that has moved to a market-oriented economy without overtly abandoning institutions and principles of Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, China’s epic developmental journey appears to be a conundrum. The making of a gigantic working class employed in a “world’s factory” run by a communist party-state puts the issue of labor at the centre of the fastest economic growth ever recorded. By adopting quantitative and qualitative methods, this dissertation advances an in-depth case research analysis on labor history, institutions and contemporary conflicts in China, addressing several questions. How did the party-state turn the Chinese workers into the key gear of contemporary productive globalization without questioning socialist state-labor relations, according to which the Chinese Communist Party, as the “vanguard of the working-class”, and the workers, as the “masters of the state”, shared the same unitarian interest? When the labour unrest escalated between the GFC and the mid-2010s, what forms did it take, and what power resources allowed workers to question state-labor relations? Finally, how did the party-state manage to tame it afterwards? Combining Chinese labour studies, power resources approach and political economy, this dissertation frames three main findings. Firstly, placing China’s industrial relations in a historical perspective reconstructs how Deng’s success in creating ideological continuity and consistency, starting precisely from labor, between the path-breaking 1978 reforms and socialist principles generated a “unitarist claim” of the party-state. This Party’s constitutive and uncompromising character of being the vanguard and sole representative of the working class, which does not allow for formal recognition of conflicting interests in industrial relations, is argued to have shaped both the evolution and contemporary China’s industrial relations. Secondly, providing an empirical analysis of strikes and labor disputes in the 2010s suggests that labour unrest shifted from a “conflictual” to an “institutional” phase in the mid-2010s. The emergence and reabsorption of labor contentiousness are explained through evolving state-labor relations and the strengthening and weakening of migrant workers’ structural bargaining power. Finally, the analysis of the historical evolution of state-labor relations and contemporary labour unrest led to argue that China’s industrial relations are currently characterized by an “incomplete institutionalization” of the industrial conflict. This represents the party-state’s attempt to incorporate labour unrest within institutional channels by improving the labor dispute resolution system and deploying a top-down pro-labor redirection of the ACFTU without demonopolizing workers’ union representative sphere, thereby preventing an effective collective bargaining system and making the institutionalization of the industrial conflict substantially flawed and ultimately incomplete.