Looking for Work in Post-Socialist China

Governance, Active Job Seekers and the New Chinese Labour Market

Feng Xu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136509681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica comparata

Unemployment is one of the most politically explosive issues in China and has gained further prominence as a result of the present global financial crisis. The novelty, urgency, and complexity of Chinese unemployment have compelled the government to experiment with policy initiatives that originate in the West. This book argues that although China is not a liberal democracy, it has turned to neo-liberal forms of governance to deal with unemployment, which now function alongside pre-existing Chinese modes of governance. This book examines the initiatives which represent China's attempt to institutionalize and humanize its approach to governance: these initiatives include training programmes; counselling; a web-based national labour-market information network; insurance; and using community ( shequ ) organizations as the base for new mechanisms of governance and informal job generation. Based on extensive original research including semi-structured interviews, the book discusses the ways in which the government combines the new techniques with old campaign-style policy techniques. The author argues that these multiple modes of governance make the state's power visible in the new Chinese labour market, and at the same time run the risk of policy incoherence or even failure.

1 Unemployment and ‘harmonious society’

This chapter investigates the shift in the Chinese government’s treatment of unemployment from being a political problem to being a socio-economic problem. Because unemployment is a relatively new aspect of contemporary China’s economy, the Chinese government turns to international organizations such as the ILO, World Bank and, Asian Development Bank, as well as western liberal democracies such as Australia, Canada, the US, and the EU, for best practices in addressing unemployment. These best practices are neo-liberal in nature, and are best captured conceptually by a ‘governmentality’ approach. This chapter will show that the turn to treating unemployment as socio-economic problem has led the Chinese government to adopt technocratic approach to unemployment, in order to achieve social stability. However, this technocratic vision often runs into a troubled relationship with other modes of governance. This is particularly true at the local government levels, whose officials have a critical role in carrying out the central government’s unemployment policies (This will be addressed in greater detail in Chapter 3). Later, I will analyze the shift in the government thinking about unemployment. But first, I outline the government’s overall retreat from some key spheres of Chinese life, and the accompanying emergence of the social. In the course of this outline, I consider their implications for governance.

The ‘retreat’ of the state and the emergence of the social²

In analyzing Europe’s transition to capitalism in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, Karl Polanyi famously argued that the emergence of a socially dis-embedded ‘self-regulating market’ represents just one of two great movements within a society’s transition to capitalist modernity. Polanyi added that social and political forces, acting primarily in defense of labor and land, commonly arise as a second, stabilizing counter-movement. This happens because land and labor are two goods³ – fictitious commodities – whose ongoing reproduction cannot respond to the increasingly pervasive regulatory power of market signals. The results of this so-called ‘double movement’ are social and political institutions that contain or re-imbed the market. Polanyi argues that the self-regulating market is a practical impossibility as a coherent system. Such a system would blow apart before being fully realized; a viable market society thus depends on the second of these two movements. As Polanyi wrote, ‘[N]ot until 1834 was a competitive labor market established in England; hence, industrial capitalism as a social system cannot be said to have existed before that date. Yet almost immediately the self-protection of society set in: factory laws and social legislation, and a political and industrial working class movement sprang into being’ (Polanyi 1957: 84).

Since it launched economic reform in 1979, the Chinese state has actively sought to create a market society. This does not mean that China has established a free labor market: a sharp rural-urban divide continues to exist. However, the government has increasingly intervened to commodify labor (Tomba 2002; Knight and Song 2005) and this has meant (among other things) creating a labor market virtually from scratch in a form that is compatible with a cost-competitive, flexible-accumulation development strategy (Gu 1999; Chen 2003; Webber and Zhu 2006).

The next chapter will deal with the emergence of that labor market and thus with the emergence of the unemployed as a social category and a social reality. But quite briefly, one of the prominent features of China’s emergent labor market is the rapid increase in internal migrant workers, especially in coastal areas. Rural to urban migration was made possible by de-collectivization of rural land holdings and by the loosening up of the household registration system. Both of these features of the Maoist period had greatly limited people’s freedom of movement. Second, SOEs, which had operated as both economic and social institutions, are being dismantled or entirely re-organized as purely economic institutions. The introduction of the contract labor system to SOEs in 1986 was one of the first steps to replace the Maoist ‘iron rice bowl’. It was followed ultimately by the widespread privatization of SOEs announced in 1997.

These changes have not gone unanswered by labor, and it is therefore appropriate to speak of a kind of double movement that parallels Polanyi. Even though workers are not allowed to form independent trade unions, workers’ resistance is widespread in China, both in less visible, everyday forms and in localized protests and strikes (Lee 2007a; Chan and Pun 2009; China Labour Bulletin 2009). (Migrant workers’ strike in the Honda plant and the subsequent wave of strikes in other Honda Plants in China in May 2010 are the latest example of a well-organized and large scale protests). Protests and strikes are especially prominent in the northeastern China and China’s interior, where SOEs and heavy industries previously predominated (Lee 2007a; Blecher 2010).

As the state ‘retreats’ from providing for social welfare to its employees through the SOEs, ‘society’/‘the social’ (shehui 社会) has emerged as part of hegemonic discourse in policy and academic circles. Before I discuss what ‘society/the social’ means to the Chinese state, let me look at how the social was understood in the West by the turn of the 20^th century. As WilliamWalters points out, “the social” has been a sort of a priori of programmes and strategies of government. Across the “western” nations, whatever their differences, conservatives, socialist, liberals, social-democrats, and even certain fascists were agreed that to govern well, one had to govern in terms of the social’ (Walters 2000: 7). As Walters quotes Pat O’Malley,

The principal objects of rule and the way of engaging with them were constituted in terms of a collective entity with emergent properties that could not be reduced to the individual constituents, that could not be tackled adequately at the level of individuals, and that for these reasons required the intervention of the state. Social services, social insurance, social security, the social wage were constituted to deal with social problems, social forces, social injustices and social pathologies through various forms of social intervention, social work, social medicine and social engineering.

(Walters 2000: 8)

The term ‘society’, understood as people united in one organic social body, was introduced to China via Japan at the turn of the 20^th century (Tsin 1999: 3). The very idea of society was intimately linked to modernity: social integration was an integral part of the new idea of national rather than imperial unity (Tsin 1999: 3–4). Since its introduction to China, the idea of society has come to be taken for granted and seen as natural. But as Tsin argues, expert knowledge (especially sociology) and new modes of governance had to be mobilized in the early 20^th century to turn ‘society’ into a Chinese reality (Tsin 1999: 7–8). On this transformation depended the whole approach of modern Chinese governance. ‘This modern government would operate on the basis that the masses of people under its jurisdiction, however, diverse, were nonetheless a knowable entity, a potentially ordered society of citizens that could be rationally arranged and organized as a discrete collective through governmental means’ (Tsin 1999: 8).

But in the present Chinese context, what is ‘society’ and what counts as ‘the social’? At this moment in history, society/the social is an abstract and reified vessel, a kind of conceptual black hole in Chinese official and academic discourse. It often appears to mean whatever market and government organizations deem not to be economic or political. Society is therefore whatever lies outside the primary responsibilities of either market or government. Whether among government officials or among scholarly observers, however, there is often an implicit assumption that this ‘society’ exists as a simple matter of fact. This is hard to sustain in the Chinese context. Unlike the ‘societies’ of the West, ‘the social’/society in post-Mao China has emerged in the living memory of most of the adult population. Its emergence has meant a retreat of the state from spheres of people’s lives. The ‘retreat’ of the once-omnipresent Maoist state from certain areas of the economy and ‘private life’ does not weaken the state: instead, it means ‘regrouping’ the state. That is, the state has been re-organizing, so as to continue intervening in areas it deems essential, but it leaves areas that now belong to ‘society’ to be handled by ‘society’ (Edin 2003a; Yang 2004).

All this has direct implications for the governance of unemployment. As Chin-Kwan Lee points out, with the state’s retreat from regulating employment relations, ‘the increasing importance of the [National Labor Law] and the market frees workers from their past economic and political dependence on a particular work unit or official department. Yet the ‘freedom’ to choose and to change jobs comes at a high price’ (Lee 2007b: 4). In fact, workers are encouraged to use their new-found freedom to become active job-seekers in the market economy, rather than to cling to their old identity of state employees.

Some of the other examples that call ‘the social’/society into being include social person; social forces; social causes and social problems. ‘Social person’ (shehui ren 社会人) refers to those who were laid off from their own work unit, and thus no longer the main responsibility of either the government or the enterprises. Social forces (shehui liliang 社会力量) seem to suggest those forces that are outside government or enterprises. Social problems (shehui wenti 社会问题) are framed in contrast to political problems, for the former are considered ‘contradictions among people’; while the latter ‘contradiction between the enemy and friend’. This conceptual emptiness is a delicate problem, particularly for the government. It faces mounting social problems that it is increasingly inclined or compelled to police as sources of potential ‘social turmoil’.

To solve this conundrum, the Chinese government calls on social forces to involve themselves in addressing social causes (shehui shiye 社会事业) (Young 2001: 10–12). For example, community building is considered one way to solicit social forces to address social causes such as unemployment. In general, social conduct now properly becomes a sphere for regulation by a much more complex web of actors than before – social scientists, professional social workers, government-led non-governmental organizations and so on (Young 2001). Crucially, however, this notion of the ‘social forces’ that are to address (non-state, non-economic) ‘social’ problems does not distinguish between profit and non-profit organizations. Thus, the central dividing line in official government rhetoric about the sources of solutions has been clearly the divide between government and non-government organizations, and not between market and non-market ones (Young 2001: 12). Privatization and user fees, until recently, were considered efficient and desirable ways of delivering social services. Indeed, the profit motive constituted the first principle of this new ‘subsidiarity’: if companies were not now to deliver social services, social services are to be provided as if a company were providing them, in many instances in the sense that the for-profit form is applied to social service provision.

From the perspective of economic development policy, the logic behind this move is clear enough. Government, especially at the county and township levels, is reluctant to invest in social spending. This is seen to hurt regional economic development strategies that stress cost-competitiveness in low-end manufacturing. That China’s economic development model is based on cheap labour does not augur well for the demand for and creation of government social policies beyond the realm of the market.

From a Polanyian perspective, however, this for-profit approach to social problems has the distinct disadvantage of addressing the consequences of market rationality by extending market rationality. The logic of the Polanyian double movement suggests that the Chinese government’s distinctive appeal to for-profit ‘social’ forces to deal with ‘social problems’ would likely tend to exacerbate social polarization, rather than reduce it.

To some extent, the Chinese state realizes the danger of not dealing with social redistribution directly: rapid, market-driven social polarization has been officially discussed as a key source of large-scale social unrest. Consequently, at the Sixth Session of the 16^th Party Congress held in October 2006, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed an important decision to build a socialist harmonious society (shehuizhuyi hexieshehui 社会主义和谐社会) (Bianxiezhu 2006: 1–40). The Decision points out that the main sources of social instability include, among other things, matters that concern people’s interests such as employment, social security, income distribution, education, medical care, housing and work safety (Bianxiezhu 2006: 4). The Decision considers a harmonious society as key to the state’s strength and prosperity; national rejuvenation and people’s happiness (guojiafuqiang, minzhuzhenxing, renminxingfu 国家富强, 民族振兴, 人民幸福) (Bianxiezhu 2006: 1).

Concretely, China’s policy has not been silent on the social implications of its population’s encounter with the market system. Indeed, one can track a heightened attention to social concerns through the shifting names of highlevel government agencies. In view of the need to build social security system, for example, the Ministry of Labor was changed to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security (MoLSS) in 1998. However, the Ministry was changed again into the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security in 2007, symbolically re-asserting the language of commodification in the way it names labor itself. I will have more to say on this score in the next chapter. Further, a series of laws came into effect in the past few years, aimed specifically at building a ‘harmonious society’. They include the Labor Contract Law (2007) and most recently the Social Insurance Law (2011).

On the other hand, while the Chinese leadership has paid more attention to social concerns in the face of market pressures, it continues to view economic growth as the overriding national priority. Consequently, any social security schemes, such as a ‘minimum guaranteed income scheme’ (dibao 低保) and unemployment insurance, are presented as temporary measures. Although both are presented as citizens’ rights, recipients are subject to a coercive invasion of their privacy and freedom in return for these payments. This invasion is manifested in regular verification and checking of their qualifications by community workers (Leung and Wong 1999; Saunders and Shang 2001; Solinger 2008; Guo 2010; Chen and Wang 2004: chapters 2 & 6; Luo 2007; Wang 2007; Huang 2007). According to Unemployment Insurance Regulation, the maximum one can receive UI is two years. If the person is still unemployed, then s/he can apply for dibao (Wang 2007; Huang 2007). To ensure that those on dibao do not become used to government ‘dole’, dibao is set very low, lower than the locally set minimum wage and only enough to maintain basic survival (Saunders and Shang 2001; Solinger 2008; Luo 2007). The point here is not to suggest that invasive conditions are exceptional to China. Western conditions on a variety of support payments for the unemployed are also invasive, and they have also become more invasive during the same period. The conditions simply lie along a spectrum of intrusion from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Both schemes are thus aimed at helping or coercing the unemployed to find jobs as soon as possible.

Here is a key transition to active employment policies (jijidejiuyezhengce 积极的就业政策) (AEP) from what Walder calls the ‘organizational dependence’ of workers under the Mao-era work unit system. The AEP is summarized in the official document as this: ‘laborers look for jobs on their own initiative; the market regulates employment; and government promotes employment’ (laodongzhe zizhujiuye; shichang tiaojie jiuye; zhengfu cujin jiuye 劳动者自主就业; 市场调节就业; 政府促进就业) (MoLSS 2003: 87).

In summary, state initiatives such as the Labor Law (1994); the Labor Contract Law (2007); the Employment Promotion Law (2007); the Social Insurance Law (2011), ‘community building’, and government-mediated non-governmental organizations have all sought to address some key perceived sources of potential social unrest. The shift from a GDP-oriented economic development model under the Jiang/Li period to the people-centered and more scientific development model under the Hu/Wen period is derived from the Party/State’s realization that social stability is a precondition for economic growth, and that certain features of market reform have placed unintended pressures on that social stability. In its Eleventh Five-Year Plan for Social Economic Development (2006–2010), and again its Twelfth Five-Year Plan for Social Economic Development (2011–2015), one of the central government’s guiding principles is the building of a harmonious society. Expanding employment is seen as one of the keys to achieving social stability. As is mentioned, employment is now considered by the Party to be an issue of people’s livelihood, and not merely as a factor of production (Zhao 2010: 3–15). The 12^th Five-Year Plan would see China’s growth target lowered; and more emphasis is given to social welfare provisions.

This notion of ‘people’s livelihood’ can be usefully analyzed with reference to Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. For Foucault, biopolitics, as Bruce Braun (2007: 8) puts it, ‘designated those political technologies that took the biological existence of the nation as their object, understood as a “population” imbued with mechanisms of life – birth, morbidity, mortality, longevity, vitality’. Braun adds that these technologies are ‘knowable in terms of statistical norms’ (2007: 8). Bio-power is a related concept, referring to the state’s power to administer life (Foucault 1990: 140–144). For Foucault, the emergence of bio-power and bio-politics implies new mod...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Glossary
• Introduction
• 1. Unemployment and ‘harmonious society’
• 2. Creating a labor market and the making of the unemployed
• 3. Laws as governing techniques
• 4. Public Employment Services
• 5. Urban community organizations and employment assistance
• 6. University career guidance centers
• 7. Temporary staffing agencies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index