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This article seeks to extend the theoretical discussion of interstitial emergence to an authoritarian context. An interstitial space is a space whose relations with the dominant power structure are not yet institutionalized. In analyzing interstitial emergence in an authoritarian context, it is necessary to examine the interaction between interstitial space and the state as an institutionalizing force and recognize that 1) institutionalization is an ongoing process that spans over a period and 2) a state's intervention may induce unintended consequences. The rise and fall of labor NGO activism in China between 1996 and 2020 are used as a case to illustrate the theoretical discussion. Labor NGOs emerged out of the interstices of state control since the 1990s. Although the state started to regulate these organizations since the late 2000s, its intervention lacked consistency. Before the state finally gained the capacity to enforce rules, which was around 2015, labor NGOs had already launched a series of advocacy activism and cultivated a group of activists who identified with the value of social movement. Hence, although the activism was eventually incorporated, it had successfully thematized labor issues and produced enduring impact on the culture of public discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the term "class" has largely vanished from China's public discourse, class discourse has endured within the country's labor struggles over the last four decades. Nevertheless, class discourse has been articulated in distinct ways across three instances of labor activism: state workers' opposition to industrial restructuring, worker-initiated collective bargaining, and Marxist-inspired agitation, manifesting as nostalgia, collective rights, and labor emancipation, respectively. This article delves into the origins of these distinct articulations of class discourse by delineating three modes of their emergence: endogenous, exogenous, and symbiotic. It further elucidates how these modes materialize through the interplay of workers' experiences and the roles undertaken by labor activists from both shopfloors and civil society. The article's objective extends to evaluating the degree to which these three discursive expressions encapsulate class consciousness, while also delving into their underlying ideological implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the discriminatory, anti-women workplace culture in China's tech industry and how tech workers organise online activism in response. In August 2021, an online petition broke out to demand justice for a sexual crime victim at the Chinese e-commerce enterprise Alibaba. This is a powerful example of digital activism leaping beyond the constraints and challenges of labour organising in the global tech sector. The article shows how social media could bring new possibilities to the tech worker movement in both authoritarian and democratic countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a new analysis of Chinese labor politics. Most scholars suggest that China has no labor movement because Chinese labor protests are apolitical, cellular, and short-lived, and thus inconsistent with the properties of social movements identified in the political process model. By contrast, the author draws on Antonio Gramsci's ideas regarding movements undermining hegemony and on ethnographic and archival research to demonstrate that the activities of movement-oriented labor nongovernmental organizations (MLNGOs) coupled with associated labor protests since 2011 constitute the embryo of a counterhegemonic labor movement. MLNGOs have reworked the hegemonic labor law system to undermine the regime's legal fragmentation of workers, nurtured worker leaders who speak for and represent migrant workers to temporarily substitute for impotent workplace unions, and developed alternative organizational networks of labor organizing that challenged the union's monopoly. This incipient counterhegemonic movement persisted several years after state repression in late 2015 but was curtailed by another wave of repression in January 2019. The very severity of state repression suggests that a movement countering hegemony has been formed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An online petition, signed by more than six thousand Chinese tech workers in August 2021, is the latest example of an online labor movement in the authoritarian context of China. Combining interviews and publicly available information, this article provides a descriptive account of an activist movement, explains workers' demands, and discusses the characteristics of online labor activism. It explores how Chinese tech workers fight collectively against a gender‐discriminatory workplace culture as they strive to bring justice to a sexual crime victim without affiliating themselves with official political organizations. The research findings suggest that while rising feminist consciousness has the potential to motivate collective action by workers, such motivation is highly dependent upon individual experiences at work and tends to be event‐based and of limited continuity. It argues that rising awareness of women's rights provides a new kind of legitimacy to labor activism, and a new way to express labor concerns in a context of increased criminalization of labor organizational activities in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The CCP is motivated to maintain a cheap and docile labor force for economic development, but the discourse of Chinese workers being "the masters of country" remains in the CCP's political agenda. The leading class in revolution is not supposed to be of low quality or inferior in the official political discourse, even though it is true that when the CCP today tries to implement some of its market-oriented economic policies, the classical discourse about the working class is much less relevant. Leung has stayed in several neighborhoods where peasant workers concentrate to familiarize herself with the workers, which is admirable. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the case of the Yantian International Container Terminal (YICT) to consider under what conditions unions can provide effective workplace representation in China. The authors draw on semi-structured interviews to analyze how and why the union was effective, despite rigid prohibitions against organizing outside of the Party-led All-China Federation of Trade Unions. The authors argue that the YICT union developed a system of annual collective bargaining that tamed the power of militant dockworkers and helped prevent strikes. This outcome required an effective enterprise-level trade union that was nevertheless able to influence and manage members' somewhat ambiguous acceptance of its role. Ultimately, workers' interests were partially represented and their acquisition of associational power--in the form of trade unions--increased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of two recent labor disputes in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, this article asks: Why has a broad-based labor movement failed to emerge in contemporary China? Both pro-labor legislation and the existence of movement-oriented labor NGOs appear to provide opportunities and resources for workers to engage in organized action to expand workers' rights. Two political mechanisms, however, help explain why a strong labor movement has not developed: 1) legislation and courtroom procedures and 2) official institutions that monopolize the space for representation-- specifically the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). We call these two mechanisms "political fixes" and discuss how they interact to engender a feedback between the fragmentation of collective action during labor conflict and the continuous uptick in labor insurgency. This article contributes to labor movement theory: It puts greater emphasis on the institutional mechanisms that constrain labor, as opposed to sheer repression or economic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some previous studies have depicted the law in China as a weapon of resistance for the weak and recent apparently pro-labour national statutes are seen as empowering workers. The law governing the practices of labour relations has, however, become a tool for employers to counter rising labour activism. In this article, a detailed case study illustrates how factory managers used the law to control labour since the strike wave of 2010. The legal framework for labour relations and China's strong state made this new management strategy possible. The law is a combination of labour-related laws, including criminal regulations beyond the labour acts, redolent with inconsistent interpretations and applications. This mixture allows some employers to flexibly deploy the law to discipline workers and constrain collective labour. Consequently, when applied in workplaces, the law is not as labour-friendly as it may appear, but it is so malleable that it may be both the worker's weapon of resistance and the employer's tool of control. This study enriches the understanding of labour relations in China by including employers' strategies and behaviours, which are often neglected in labour studies, and also explores how the macro-level political-legal context shapes workplace dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 1977, a tiny group of U.S. glove makers—most of whom were African American and Latina women—launched a petition before the U.S. International Trade Commission calling for protection from rising imports. Their target was China. Represented by the Work Glove Manufacturers Association, their petition called for quotas on a particular kind of glove entering the United States from China: cotton work gloves. This was a watershed moment. For the first time since the Communist Party came to power in 1949, U.S. workers singled out Chinese goods in pursuit of import relief. Because they were such a small group taking on a country as large as China, their supporters championed the cause as one of David versus Goliath. Yet the case has been forgotten, partly because the glove workers lost. Here I uncover their story, bringing the history of 1970s deindustrialization in the United States into conversation with U.S.-China rapprochement, one of the most significant political transformations of the Cold War. The case, and indeed the loss itself, reveals the tensions between the interests of U.S. workers, corporations, and diplomats. Yet the case does not provide a simple narrative of U.S. workers’ interests being suppressed by diplomats and policymakers nurturing globalized trade ties. Instead, it also underscored the conflicting interests within the U.S. labor movement at a time when manufacturing companies were moving their production jobs to East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The authors investigate the relationship between market transition and work hours in urban China. Regression analysis of data from the 2006 Chinese General Social Survey reveals a negative relationship between economic marketization, measured at the province level, and the likelihood that an employee works standard hours. Standard hours are less common among those working for smaller employers, which are less subject to outside scrutiny. This relationship between employer size and standard hours is stronger in more marketized regions. These findings support the authors’ argument that standard work hours are deinstitutionalized as employers strive for low cost and flexibility in China’s increasingly marketized but poorly regulated economy. Comparisons of the Chinese experience with recent trends in the United States reveal remarkable similarities in the weakening of social employment contracts precipitated by the ascendency of markets and the systematic disempowering of labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indeed, Leung suggests this has been the case with the legally oriented Guangdong NGOs that helped arrange some of the book's worker interviews. Her argument is buttressed by a review of Chinese labour history from the early 20th century up to present and interviews conducted between 2011 and 2014 with 74 workers in six cities in China, including both those workers who have joined in collective actions and those who have not. The book posits an unbroken pattern of state control over Chinese workers' minds, from imperial China through the Mao era to today. [Extracted from the article]

Workers' resistance is crucial to understanding how the working class respond to the growing labour precarity in post-socialist China. The labour studies literature posits that inequality and volatile capital movements increase workers' precarity and lead to stronger labour resistance, such as strikes. However, workers' cognition as an integral part of resistance has been rarely studied. This article examines cognitive resistance by Chinese workers from different tier cities by looking at their social trust, class identity, understanding of policies and class solidarity. Despite capital movements and precarity causing more labour unrest, it does not necessarily lead to a stronger cognitive resistance. While inequality and precarity are greater in the more developed megacities with a shifting capital favourability, workers in megacities display a more conservative cognitive resistance than those from the lower-tier cities. This study of workers' cognitive resistance provides insight into the future of the Chinese labour movement. It argues that the working class's current cognitive non-resistance suggests that even if a window of opportunity were to appear in the wall of state oppression, workers are not cognitively prepared to coalesce into a coherent social movement that would bring about transformative changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skill is central to inequality in the workplace, as a basis of material reward and status recognition. While much research treats skill as a set of abilities possessed—or not—by a worker, scholars have yet to grasp the organizational processes whereby jobs come to be taken as rudimentary and the worker performing them unskilled and therefore deficient. To illuminate these processes, we travel to Beijing, China, where workers are loquacious about inequalities confronted in relatively new forms of labor. By juxtaposing two service workplaces where similar sets of work tasks carry contradictory value, we discover the social relations that demote workers and their jobs based on identities, femininity in one workplace, rurality in another. We argue that formulating job tasks as skilled or unskilled is itself a kind of organizational work, which recruits the efforts of managers, colleagues, and customers. Unskilled workers do not appear in the workplace already deficient, but become so through organizational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on existing studies of worker activism in formerly communist states, this paper examines the context, nature and consequences of labour protest in China’s private sector - highlighting the specific features that have emerged from China’s unique ‘communist’ political regime and partially privatized economy. As private enterprises have grown in China, private sector worker protests have been common. Three key factors have shaped this activism: (i) a disjuncture between benevolent and protective national laws and the lived experience of workers; (ii) fluctuations in the labour market; and (iii) generational shifts and learning among workers, employers and political authorities. The interplay of these factors has led protesting private sector workers to focus their ire on their employers and on occasion local political authorities, while viewing national political leaders as sources of worker support. These dynamics have had both positive and negative consequences for private sector workers and political authorities. Making comparisons with other authoritarian and communist states, this study adds to current understandings of how specific economic and political configurations engender particular characteristics of labour activism - and how these change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the mechanism driving China's soaring labor unrest from the perspective of management. It demonstrates how Foxconn adjusts in response to the dynamics of the global production network and China's labor market, and how such practices are inextricably linked to growing workplace conflicts. Foxconn's elementary management is characterized by coercion, which is reinforced by the management techniques it has forged as a contract manufacturer in the global supply chain facing the increasing costs of raw materials, labor, and so on. The widespread dissent generated in this process is aggravated by the changing composition and the worsening financial condition of its labor force -- predominantly the new generation of migrant workers. Although Foxconn has attempted to develop consent on the shop floor, its efforts have largely failed because of the power asymmetry in the global electronics industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among migrant worker NGOs conducted between 2011 and 2016, this article employs critical theories of citizenship to illustrate how migrant worker NGOs use a strategy of 'resistance through accommodation' to re-shape the citizenship regime and discourse in China. The dominant literature on labour activism tends to discount the potential for migrant worker NGOs to undertake resistance, on account of their dependency upon the state and the market. The article contends that while NGOs must engage in relations with the state and the market to ensure their own survival, their activism does not ultimately centre on either resisting or accommodating these actors directly, but rather upon a broader engagement process aimed at the strategic purpose of 'citizenship transformation'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay delineates salient tendencies of Chinese labor politics since the 2008 financial crisis when China entered a new normal of slow growth and enhanced authoritarianism. It argues that the strikes that garnered the most international attention were not as transformational as observers suggest. Instead, real innovations in labor activism had emerged away from the media limelight, among semi-underground labor NGOS. Yet taking into account the post-2008 politicaleconomic conditions, the prospect for these pockets of resistance to grow into a strengthened labor movement are faint, even as the rise of the platform economy may shift the terrains of labor struggles and bring new volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including progressive European Union (EU), universal basic income grant, and Chinese labor movement.

How does an authoritarian state govern contentious civil society and what are the effects on grassroots mobilization? This article theorizes the relationship between repression and mobilization by examining the case of informal labor organizations in South China that threaten social stability. Findings based on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork inside these organizations suggest that the central state's mandate to maintain social stability is refracted through the interests and capabilities of local agencies. This results in 'fragmented control': divergent, even conflicting, forms of state governance over civil society. Local authorities work at cross-purposes by simultaneously repressing, co-opting, and neglecting underground organizing. Fragmented control generates political uncertainty on the part of activists and induces them to engage in 'censored entrepreneurialism'-a set of tactical adaptations characterized by a mixture of self-censorship and entrepreneurial experimentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – Drawing its arguments and conclusion from a ten-year survey on workers’ experiences of labour disputes, along with anticipation of trade union reform, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the interaction between labour resistance and its potential for institutional change in the field of labour relations in China. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a longitudinal cohort study carried out between 2006 and 2015. The survey was conducted every two years, specifically in 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013 and 2015, in Guangdong Province, China. Questionnaire and interview methods were used; 2,166 valid sample questionnaires were collected, and 215 interviews were carried out over the research period. Findings – An increase in collectivized disputes in China has given rise to an escalation of labour action, characterized by wildcat strikes. Joint action has strengthened the bonds among work colleagues, and it has become more important for workers to pay attention to their rights and interests. In terms of organization, two viewpoints towards union reform were revealed: the pragmatist and the idealist perspectives. Workers with greater experience of resistance were more modest in terms of demands for union reform, while workers with some experience called for their union’s independence from the party-state. Research limitations/implications – The data contained industry bias, as too many respondents were from electronics-manufacturing and textile and apparel plants. Originality/value – This paper is original, and increases awareness of the development of the labour movement in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings from a study that has explored how the lived experience of everyday Chinese workers influenced their struggle to improve their working conditions. We argue that because the consciousness of everyday Chinese workers remains at an embryonic level, their ability to campaign and change their working conditions remains constrained. We inform this argument by engaging with Foucault’s power–knowledge framework (1980). The study draws on original interviews withn = 74 Chinese workers gathered across two phases of data collection conducted between 2011 and 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The stage of state-building in the labor sector at which a working-class movement arose is crucial for the subsequent development of state–labor relations. In contrast with the experience of western countries and authoritarian developing nations, the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC’s) strong pre-existing labor institutions pre-empted organized labor mobilization at the beginning of capitalist development. The state has since then carried out a bifurcated strategy that confers individual rights on workers but restricts their collective rights. The practice leads to a labor institution built on a hybrid of the old Leninist political structure of labor control and a one-dimensional labor rights regime, which has contributed to the lack of organized labor movements in contemporary China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China is experiencing a rapid expansion of what is termed 'collective bargaining'. The article draws on workplace and sectoral examples to assess what underlies this. Recent changes in labour policy are outlined. Four studies at establishment level describe the use of hybrid representation in response to growing worker activism and internal union reform. Two studies of sectoral bargaining shed light on decentralized decision-making on pay. Attention is drawn to the growth of employer organizations and increased articulation within the trade union. A form of collective bargaining is emerging where the union draws on state power to improve conditions of employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Western scholars have regarded union democracy and elections as affairs that are internal to trade unions and unconnected with outside forces. Going beyond the mainstream union-centred approach, this study critically assesses one significant type of union election that has been emerging in China since 2010 and that has been driven by different forces from previous elections. Previous workplace union elections had been 'top-down' - initiated by the party-state or its apparatuses, or else transnational corporation-induced - but this newer type of election has been driven by workers' strikes. This study illustrates how the dynamics among the quadripartite actors - party-state, higher-level trade unions, capital and labour - have shaped these strike-driven elections. Contrary to the claim that these elections have been 'direct' and 'democratic', our case studies show that they have been indirect and quasi-democratic in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strike as a confrontational form of expression of labour disputes has become an unavoidable phenomenon in China. However, knowledge about the politico-historical context of the right to strike in China remains patchy, despite growing interest in labour activism in the Chinese context. We aim to fill this gap by examining the Chinese jurisprudence of labour rights in general and the right to strike specifically. We do so by examining the policy and political stance adopted by the Chinese Communist Party on strikes; analysing the historical development of the legislation of the right to strike in Socialist China; highlighting the key features of labour disputes; and contemplating the legal foundation of, and implications for legislating for, the right to strike in China. This knowledge is essential to understanding the changing dynamics of industrial actions and workers’ activism, with wider implications for foreign direct investment and the management of labour relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author offers information on growing labor movement in China. He discusses the strike at Yue Yuen Industrial, the world's largest shoe factory, in Guangdong Province, China in April 2014, where workers of the industry demanded their pension and social insurance benefits and also mentions of strike at steelworks in Hunan Province and at textile and machine-tool plants in Shaanxi Province in 2009, where workers demanded the right to create independent watchdog groups. He states that workers in private firms such as Wal-Mart and Apple, have emerged as significant social group during the 1990s.

This paper explores Chinese multinational corporations’ responses to trade unions in host countries. Using an in-depth case study analysis of the policies on union representation and union–management relations in six Chinese multinational corporations, this paper demonstrates that Chinese multinational corporations’ responses to host country unions are primarily shaped by home and host institutions, rational choices of firms, and organizational learning. It concludes that while rational choice and institutional theory, the two dominant lenses used in existing literature, are helpful in understanding the industrial relations practices in multinational corporations, they need to be supplemented with an organizational learning perspective in an analysis of industrial relation practices in multinational corporations from emerging markets. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The relationship between contentious politics and the state building is a classic topic in the study of social movements. Through detailed analysis of a ten-year struggle of a group of state workers to defend their pensions by active engagement with state agents, this paper attempts to explore the circular feature of the state and how this circular state functions to absorb the labor contentions. From August 1998 to October 2008, a group of retired state workers in H Steel Factory carried out radical street protests, persistent legal litigations and peaceful collective petitions to fight against their factory's retention and reduction of their pensions. The trajectory of the workers' struggles delineates a gradually formed state bureaucratic field of labor governance. This state is composed of three intersecting circles--a circle between different petition offices,a circle between petition offices and courts, and a circle between the local and the center. This system full of tensions within and between different circles produces the negotiation and bargaining relation between different levels and sectors in the state, which in turn leads to the circulation mechanism of social conflicts rather than a resolution structure. The institutional configuration of this circular state includes the double bind between decentralization and marketization and the mutual reference between the petition system and the legal system. The circulation of the workers' case in this circular bureaucratic field, on one side elongates the struggles of the workers and prevents the radicalization of their resistance; on the other side, promotes the circulation and inculcation of the statist capitals among the workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using firm level data, this paper examines the link between unionisation and firm performance in China's manufacturing industries. The empirical results suggest that unionisation has not greatly benefitted workers in China's textile industry but it has contributed to much larger increase in average wages in both domestic and foreign invested firms in communication equipment, computer and other electronic equipment manufacturing industry. In the case of the general equipment manufacturing industry, unionised domestic firms pay higher average wages but there is no link between unionisation and average wage in foreign invested firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing studies of collective actions in China pay most attention to frequent but localized protests, but such protests are less likely to deeply drive China's political and social prospect. By contrast, widespread protests are more likely to affect the Chinese Communist Party's authority and policies once they emerge. The goal of this article is thus to probe the conditions under which a widespread protest can happen in China today. This article proposes four necessary conditions grounded in the political process model and tests them by explaining the successful outbreak of the 2010 labor protest. Identifying these conditions helps us understand and predict the political and social development of China. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]