Power and its Constraint under Globalization: Interaction and Interdependency among the Chinese Labor, State and the US Market Actors through International Political Economic Connections.

This article studies the relationship between the changing political economy of labor in China and its potential influence over the US market economy through the production and financial connections between the two jurisdictions across the Pacific. At the macro level from the aspect of international political economy, it is argued that globalization has aroused further social changes in China by encouraging internal labor migration, foreign investment and the rule of law, while retrenchment of the party-state faces development from the entrenchment of a globalized civil society movement, along with the internationalized corporate governance and its production structure, which introduces international social and production norms to China, while also delivering the Chinese labor reality to the external world. Meantime, at the enterprise level, widely ignorance of the Chinese labor law and the coalition between the capital and local governments sustain the labor rights violation activities, ranging from employment discrimination against labor migrants, gender inequity at workplace, to deliberate neglects on occupational safety and health. Bad labor treatments partly sponsor the cost subsidies on the global production chain and keep the US inflation at a low level. However, the evolution of the rule of law in China bears the potential to raise the rights consciousness among workers and initiate more industrial actions against the employers. Moreover, joint efforts from the Sino-US civil society and legal practitioners tend to bring the information of law and rights violation in China to the US through shareholder litigation, which targets at MNCs by working with union-controlled pension funds, the media and other stakeholders, so that the US shareholders and consumer movement can realize the labor practices of MNCs and their subcontractors in China and add downward pressure to the stock prices of the listed companies in the US. Therefore, a positive linkage among labor rights in China, union practices and the financial market performance of the MNCs is about to be established, and it can not only influence bad labor treatments under the global production chain, but also contain the power of a decentralized Chinese predatory state over its working population by holding the state behaviors responsible economically, through international financial and product markets. As globalization creates new channels of exploitation, it also offers innovative leverage power over such practices. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]