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This article examines how management-labor relations and labor legislation have evolved in China since Deng Xiaoping's “Open Door” reforms were introduced in 1979 and how they have changed over the two decades since then. We reconsider the role of Chinese trade unions, enterprises and the state agencies involved, as they move from an employment system that was once called the “iron rice bowl” to a new one based on market forces. This change raises serious dilemmas and issues: are there contradictions between preserving workers' rights and at the same time, enhancing productivity? Does such a transition constitute the onset of “collective bargaining” and a labor-market in the Western sense? How are such shifts likely to be affected by China's entry into the WTO in late 2001? These and other related questions are analysed in the article.

(2002). Psychic Distance and Internationalization: Evidence from Hong Kong Firms. International Studies of Management & Organization: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 36-56.

This paper attempts to sketch a longitudinal profile on the evolution of a working class in Hong Kong context in light of the thesis of embourgeoisement. The increasing economic affluence in the 1980s and early 1990s appeared to have bred an optimism in society that the members of the working class were converging in life-style and consumption behaviour with the middle class in a process of embourgeoisement. However, the thesis of embourgeoisement comes under question again around the turn of the millennium in the advent of globalisation and the successive waves of recession that afflict Hong Kong. The vicissitudes of capitalistic competition, leading to business restructuring, corporate down-sizing and other austerity prescriptions of labour cost-saving, popularise the practices of flexi-hiring, atypical employment, outsourcing, labour shedding and retrenchment. The upshot of these austerity exercises has been the re-casualisation of the labour market and the emasculation of the employment and income security of a growing fringe of peripheral workers vulnerable to industrial deprivation and exploitation. As a consequence we now see a new industrial proletariat or urban sub-class emerging in post-industrial Hong Kong. Its “embrace” as a hybrid working class transcends a spectrum of blue-collar and service occupations. Because of the diversity in its composition, the prospects for a solidaristic working class to emerge are again remote. And the role of the trade unions in providing an effective leverage for uplifting and protecting their position is limited, as illustrated by the “impasse” now still looming over the proposed enactments to prescribe a minimum wage level and standard work hours.