Dividing and conquering the shop floor: Uyghur labour export and labour segmentation in China's industrial east.

This work examines the labour export programme of south-west Xinjiang that brought Uyghur migrant workers to the Early Light Toy Factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong and places it in the context of capitalist-working class divisions emerging in contemporary China, where clashes between managers and workers have become frequent occurrences, and increasing worker solidarity and growing labour activism have become a leading concern of the Communist Party of China and an increasingly influential business class. The author suggests that labour export is primarily utilized not as a means to alleviate poverty and reduce minority-Han income gaps, as claimed by official sources, but as an instrument of business-class interests for dividing and conquering the shop floor through the ethnic diversification of the workforce, an age-old tactic of factory bosses harkening back to the manipulation of foreign-born workers in late-nineteenth-century industrial America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]