Privatization and its discontents in Chinese factories

China Quarterly

Volumn , Issue 185, 2006, Pages 42-60

  Chen, Feng ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LABOR RELATIONS; PRIVATIZATION; SOCIALISM;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 33645308807     PISSN: 03057410     EISSN: 14682648     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S030574100600004X     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. For analyses of worker protests at different moments of PRC history, see Elizabeth Perry, "Shanghai's strike wave of 1957," The China Quarterly, No. 137 (March 1994), pp. 1-27
2. Elizabeth Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder: Westview, 1997)
3. Andrew Walder, "Workers, managers and the state: The reform era and the political crisis of 1989," The China Quarterly, No. 127 (September 1991), pp. 467-492
4. Andrew Walder, Popular Protest in the 1989 Democracy Movement: The Pattern of Grass-Roots Organization (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies, 1992)
5. Andrew Walder and Gong Xiaoxia, "Workers in the Tiananmen protests: The politics of Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation," The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, No. 29 (January 1993).
6. For an overview of labour activism in the PRC, see Jackie Sheehan, Chinese Workers: A New History (London: Routledge, 1998).
7. Wang Shaoguang, "From a pillar of continuity to a force for change: Chinese workers in the movement," in Roger Des Forges, Ning Luo and Yen-bo Wu (eds.), Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflection (New York: State University of New York Press, 1993).
8. Feng Chen, "Subsistence crisis, managerial corruption, and labor protests in China," The China Journal, No. 44 (July 2000), pp. 41-66
9. William Hurst and Kevin J. O'Brien, "China's contentious pensioners," The China Quarterly, No. 170 (June 2002), pp. 345-360
10. Yongshun Cai, "The resistance of Chinese laid-off workers in the reform period," The China Quarterly, No. 170 (June 2002), pp. 327-344.
11. James Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasants (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), p. 7.
12. Elizabeth Perry, Challenging the Mandate of Heaven (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2002), p. xiii
13. and Hurst and O'Brien, "China's contentious pensioners."
14. Ching Kwan Lee, "The revenge of history: Collective memories and labor protests in Northeastern China," Ethnography, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2000), pp. 217-237
15. Feng Chen, "Industrial restructuring and workers' resistance in China," Modern China, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 237-262.
16. Sidney Tarrow defines social movements as "collective challenges, based on common purpose and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents, and authorities." Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 4.
17. Neil Smelser (ed.), Handbook of Sociology (California: Sage Publications, 1988), p. 7.
18. Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1978), p. 275.
19. See W. K. Lau, "The 15th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party: milestone in China's privatization," Capital & Class, No. 68 (Summer 1999), pp. 51-87.
20. For discussions on spontaneous privatization, see, for example, Simon Johns, Heidi Kroll and Santiago Eder, "Strategy, structure, and spontaneous privatization in Russia and Ukraine," in Vedate Milor (ed.), Changing Political Economy (Boulder: Lynne Rinner, 1994), pp. 147-173
21. Anders Aslund, Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
22. For a discussion on de facto privatization in China, see X. L. Ding, "The illicit asset stripping in China," The China Journal, No. 43 (January 2000), pp. 1-28.
23. A social movement begins with an issue in contentions. This creates "constituencies," forms a basis for some collective identity and provides the starting point for action frames. However, in the social movement literature, which is chiefly based on Western experience, issues per se seem to be less important in explaining movement emergence than the factors that translate issues into movements. Indeed, in democracies where civil society thrives, any issue that gains access to arenas of public discourse can spark protests and social movements, though some may be more powerful than others in attracting popular participation. Movement emergence therefore depends on such factors as political opportunities, mobilizing structure and framing process. See, for example, Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)
24. Doug McAdam, John McCarthy and Mayer Zald (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
25. and Aldon Morris and Carol McChurg Mueller (eds.), Frontiers in Social Movement Theory (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1992).
26. Speech to the workshop on the SOE reform in northern and north-east China.
27. The working class formation theory suggests that class consciousness emerged as a result of workers' lived experience with capitalist production and collective actions. See, for example, Iran Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg (eds.), Working Class Formation (New Jersey: Princeton University, 1986).
28. See for example, E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1963)
29. and Wilham Sewell's Work and Revolution in France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
30. E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), p. 10.
31. Interview, 25 January 2004.
32. Ibid.
33. See Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class
34. and Ira Katznelson and Aristide Zolberg, Working Class Formation (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1986).
35. Interview, 25 January 2004.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. This account of the story is based on my interviews in the factory and hundreds of pages of leaflets that appeared during the protest activities.
40. For trade unions' role in industrial restructuring, see Feng Chen, "Between the state and labour: The conflict of Chinese trade unions' double identity in the market reform," The China Quarterly, No. 176 (December 2003), pp. 1006-28.
41. Open letter to the representatives of the Sixth Staff and Workers' Council, 25 October 1999.
42. Transgressive contention involves means that are either unprecedented or forbidden within the regime in question. See See Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
43. Interview, 24 January 2004.
44. The original date for the action was 4 June, and it was put off for two days as some activists realized that that date was just too sensitive and would give the government an excuse to suppress.
45. Li was actually kidnapped: He was dragged into a van when he was repairing his bike in a shop in a street near his home.
46. The group was first called the Zhongliu Study Group. Members regularly read and discussed the well-known leftist magazine Zhongliu (Midstream). After the magazine was shut down at the order of Jiang Zemin, the group was renamed the Mao Zedong Thought Study Group.
47. Smelser, Handbook of Sociology.
48. The scholars of social movements distinguish between them by terming the former "contained contention" and the latter "transgressive contention." See McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention.
49. It is true that this power has been often ignored by management in factories.
50. For how workers used SWCs in their struggle, see Feng Chen, "Industrial restructuring and workers' resistance in China," Modern China, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 2003), pp. 237-262.
51. McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, pp. 3-4.
52. Though the government insisted that that SWC was illegal.
53. On the limitations of labour struggles at present, see Ching Kwan Lee, "Pathways of labor insurgency," in Elizabeth Perry and Mark Selden (eds.), Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance (London & New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 41-60.
54. Popular actions by other social groups in contemporary China are also framed by Maoist notions. See Kevin J. O'Brien and Lianjiang Li, "Campaign nostaligia in the Chinese countryside," Asian Survey, Vol. 39, No. 2 (March-April, 1999), pp. 375-393,
55. and Elizabeth Perry, "To rebel is justified - Cultural Revolution influences on contemporary Chinese political protest," in Kaw-Yee Law (ed.), The Chinese Cultural Revolution Reconsidered: Beyond Purge and Holocaust (Palgrave, 2003), pp. 262-281.