Working in China

Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation

Ching Kwan Lee, Ching Kwan Lee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135988906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Labour & Industrial Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for sometwenty-nine per centof the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling under appalling sweatshop conditions for extremely low wages.

Working in China introduces the lived experiences of labour in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters of this book cover professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, domestic maids and hotel workers, and industrial workers in a variety of factories. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics and workers' voices presented in the book reflect the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace today.

Based onextraordinary and thorough field research, this book will have a wide readership at undergraduate level and beyond, appealing to students and scholars from a myriad of disciplines including Chinese studies, labour studies, sociology and political economy.

1 Mapping the Terrain of Chinese Labor Ethnography

Ching Kwan Lee

After a quarter century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labor force, accounting for some 29 percent of the world’s total labor pool, is an important contributor to the nation’s historic resurgence on the international scene.¹ But all too little is known about Chinese labor beyond the fact that some workers toil under appalling “sweatshop” conditions for extremely low wages. In reality, both the Chinese workforce and the Chinese workplace are far more diversified and heterogeneous than most existing scholarship has thus far documented. This book introduces the lived experiences of labor in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters cover professional employees, such as engineers and lawyers; service workers as sales clerks in department stores, bar hostesses, domestic maids, and hotel workers; semi-independent workers, such as insurance sales agents and itinerant construction workers; and finally, blue-collar communities. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics, and workers’ voices presented in these ethnographies reflects the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace in the current era of globalization and market transition.

From Political Sociology to Sociology of Work

This book engages conceptual and theoretical issues at the intersection of labor studies and China studies. Scholarly interests are shaped by both developments in China and contemporary global intellectual currents. All the research in this book is based on fieldwork in a rapidly changing China undertaken by a new generation of scholars. One of the most salient analytical shifts the authors in this collection embrace veers away from political sociology and toward a sociology of work. In other words, the Chinese workplace is now treated as an organizational arena, where employment relations, labor processes, occupational culture, and identities are formed, and not merely as a political site for state-sponsored clientelism and ideological and political control. With this shift in perspective, researchers now broach questions of workplace practices, alienation, and exploitation, professional autonomy, managerial strategies, workplace culture, contestation over the labor process, and the constitution of interests and identities related to class, community, ethnicity, and gender–problematics that past scholarship has neglected in favor of an overriding concern with the politics of relations between state and society. This introductory chapter tries to map this dual transformation: a changing intellectual terrain against the backdrop of political economic restructuring in China.

The Changing Political Economy of Work

The industrial workplace and factory workers have dominated the field of contemporary Chinese labor studies, which, if broadly defined, includes studies of village life, agricultural production, and township and village enterprises. Since the founding of the People’s Republic, state industrial work units, deemed the epitome of socialist modernity and a key nexus between state and society, attracted most scholarly attention. Nearly all seminal studies prior to the 1980s were concerned exclusively with the state sector, omitting the collective sector.² Andrew Walder’s formulation of Communist neo-traditionalism has been particularly influential and has spawned many empirical studies and theoretical debates.³ It holds that state control over urban society is accomplished by clientelist networks consisting of Party activists and management and ordinary workers in the workplace, and by a state-orchestrated system to keep citizens materially dependent on their work units. For several decades, the socialist work unit (danwei) has become a cornerstone of the urban social structure under Chinese socialism.⁴ Danwei’s centrality was most evident in the Tiananmen uprising and numerous labor protests in the 1990s, when the danwei manifested its subversive potential, fostering employee defiance in moments of sociopolitical crisis.

Only recently has this singular focus on state industrial organization and state workers been broadened to include the private, international and joint venture sectors. Beginning in the late 1980s, with market reform and the mushrooming of foreign-invested factories, researchers have expanded their scope of analysis to incorporate migrant workers in non-state industries. Influenced by feminist theories and cultural studies, Chinese labor and workplace politics have come to be analyzed through the multiple lenses of class, gender, urban–rural, quasi-ethnic, or regional divisions. Studies by Anita Chan, Lisa Rofel, Gail Hershatter, Emily Honig, Dorothy Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Pun Ngai, Mary Gallagher and Jacob Eyferth, among others contribute to this tradition.⁵ In these works, the world of labor is shaped by intra-class diversity based on gender, the urban–rural hierarchy, native-place-based localism, ethnicity, and the uneven effects of domestic and international market forces. Rofel’s important study of the generational differences among women workers in state factories under reform, for instance, explicitly brings in a much needed gender sensitivity to understand the experiences of female workers under socialism. Lee updates Walder’s theoretical analysis of labor dependence on the state, taking into account the recruitment of migrant workers in state factories and the gender inequality reproduced in state-owned factory reform.⁶ Many recent studies also focus on the migrant workforce in private industries and expose the pressures on working conditions generated by global capitalism in conjunction with state authoritarianism.⁷

This book builds on and enriches these past studies both analytically and empirically. The first striking theme touched on in a number of chapters is the decline of state authority in the workplace. The ethnographic accounts collected here reveal that the state, or the Party for that matter, has repositioned itself toward the workforce and the workplace. Labor legislation and labor bureaucracy regulate employment relations and conflict resolution from outside, rather than from within the workplace (Guang, Chapter 4, this book; Lee, Chapter 2, this book). In private law firms (Michelson, Chapter 9, this book), foreign and domestic insurance companies (Chan, Chapter 12, this book), multi-national hitech companies (Kessler, Chapter 11, this book; Ross, Chapter 10, this book), and international hotels (Otis, Chapter 6, this book), employees are primarily subjected to managerial domination and the market forces of supply and demand, rather than the political-ideological control previously exerted by state-sponsored patron-client networks. The collapse of micro-political control, particularly evident in former working-class neighborhoods (Liu, Chapter 3, this book), is conducive to work-unit mobilization by aggrieved workers who are facing collective problems of wage and pension arrears (Lee, Chapter 2, this book). Even in karaoke bars (Zheng, Chapter 7, this book), the target of the state’s anti-vice campaigns, government purification policies are routinely ignored by rent-seeking public security officials, who turn state regulation into a source of extralegal income. It is as shadow bar owners and patrons, not as agents of the state, that these officials exert tremendous influence on bar hostesses.

The secular decline of state political control over workers and the workplace occurs in the larger context of Chinese economic restructuring, labor and welfare reforms. First, the state sector has substantially contracted over the past 20 years. The percentage of industrial output accounted for by state-owned enterprises has dropped from a high of 75 percent in 1981 to only 28 percent in 1999.⁸ The state industrial sector accounted for only 36 percent of total industrial employment contribution in 2003.⁹ Moreover, the reform period also witnessed the rise of the service – tertiary – sector, which by 2003 accounted for 29.3 percent of total national employment, compared to 21.6 percent provided by the secondary industrial sector.¹⁰ This changing economic structure has farreaching consequences for state control over the workplace. Grassroots official unions confront a membership crisis as state employment has shrunk and union membership has fallen by 15 million between 1990 and 2000, to 103 million.¹¹ Non-state employers are unwilling to establish unions on the shop floors. Among private and foreign firms, the rate of union membership remained at just four percent and 33 percent respectively in 1999.¹²

Besides economic restructuring, labor policy reforms have also reshaped the legal context of work and employment. The gradual dismantling of the “iron rice bowl” or the permanent-employment system for state employees began with the introduction of the labor contract in the early 1980s and became universally mandatory in 1995, when China’s first National Labor Law was implemented. From that date, employment relations were to be regulated by the Labor Law, and labor conflicts would be resolved according to the 1993 Regulations for the Handling of Labor Disputes, involving a three-stage procedure of mediation, arbitration, and litigation.¹³ Universalist laws, rather than managerial or Party policies, which were fragmented along the lines of business ownership, provide a floor of workers’ rights and benefits. Mechanisms of the labor market also replace labor administrators in the allocation of labor. Together, the increasing importance of the 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. A panoply of new policies covering social insurance and welfare has overhauled the old work unit-based workers’ entitlement system. Both employees and employers are now required to contribute to pooled insurance or housing funds managed by the government’s social-security agencies, to cover employees’ pensions, housing, and medical care. A central imperative underlying all these measures is to reduce the budgetary responsibility of the government and to shift the financial burden of welfare provision to individual employers and employees. Pension reform has gone the furthest, driven by recognition of the dire financial crisis faced by many state-owned enterprises and the sharp rise in the number of retirees in the past two decades. Nevertheless, many workers have fallen through the cracks of the new safety net, because of widespread unemployment, business bankruptcy, or managements’ refusal to contribute.¹⁴ In certain localities, employees in the state sector are caught in the transition between the old and the new systems, that is, when central budgetary allocation has stopped but local pooling of employer–employee contributions falls short of required pension payment.¹⁵

The Chinese Workplace as Contested Terrain

Against this backdrop of a sea change in the political economy of work, what kinds of workplace relations and experiences can be found? A second common theme that emerges from the ethnographies collected here, besides the palpable decline of state and Party authority in the workplace, is the pervasive presence of conflict and cynicism, even alienation, in the workplace. This situation exists across a wide range of occupations; it seems that even after state political control recedes from people’s daily working lives, new forms of conflict divide the workplace. Nor do most workers experience greater job satisfaction. To oversimplify, the Communist shop floor, as previous studies show, was burdened with employees with lackluster motivation, antagonism between political activists and ordinary workers, fear of persecution, the lack of opportunity for mobility, and cadre tyranny. In the reform period, on the other hand, labor discontents and workplace tensions reported in this book are primarily the product of layoffs, bankruptcies, insecurity of jobs and rewards, the failure of enterprises to pay wages over months and even years, the non-payment of benefits accumulated over a lifetime of labor, and the unsettled nature of legal and organizational frameworks regulating work relations and workers’ rights. On the one hand, there is a shift from state to enterprise responsibility for securing welfare and wage payment. On the other hand, to many workers, the processes of the labor market are seemingly impersonal and lacking agents. Both trends have deepened workers’ sense of powerlessness, particularly when the fledgling legal system has proven to be quite ineffective in defending workers’ legal rights.

For instance, the legal profession that Ethan Michelson studies is plagued by job insecurity as well as financial and labor-market pressure. He has found that most Chinese lawyers are accorded very low social status, that they are merely self-employed “getihu with legal knowledge”. They are paid entirely on commission and do not enjoy any social insurance or fringe benefits. Under constant pressure to screen out cases that are not financially profitable – that is, labor lawsuits – lawyers maintain confrontational relations with their clients. They are also alienated from their law firms, which are empty shells of workplaces, offering neither social support nor prospects for promotion. Michelson thus reaches the conclusion that even with legal reform and the rise of the independent law firm, one reason why Chinese workers’ legal rights are not better protected is the weakness, low prestige, and instability of the legal profession. The denial of legal justice to a vulnerable and volatile segment of society prompts labor protests that Ching Kwan Lee examines in her chapter. She shows that the lack of effective legal institutional channels for workers to redress grievances and labor violations has pushed large numbers of workers to take their discontent to the streets.

Engineers in China’s information technology industry who enjoy high, even inflated, salaries confront other problems. Dimitri Kessler’s research in Beijing and Shanghai reveals that the shortage of young and experienced engineers, preferred by international companies, has led to intense competition among firms and dramatic salary hikes and high turnover in the IT-engineering labor market. High turnover makes control of proprietary information difficult, sparking anxiety among international managers, based on the widespread perception that Chinese engineers are technology thieves, driven by both nationalistic sentiments and personal interests. These forces in the labor market translate into shop-floor practices such as restricting engineers’ access to companywide technology, isolating these engineers into narrow specializations and requiring elaborate documentation of their work processes. These control strategies in turn fuel yet higher mobility among engineers and aggravate workplace relations. Distrust, antagonism, and the lack of organizational commitment characterize China’s high-tech workplace.

Andrew Ross, looking at China’s new generation of knowledge workers in the greater Shanghai region, depicts the instability of the labor market, the insecurity of technical careers, and the unsettled rules of work in the information technology sector. Globally mobile multinational corporations come to China in search of cheap but skilled technicians and engineers while making a minimum commitment to the locality or workforce. This situation has created a mirror-image workforce – employees who seek to maximize short-term opportunities and who are keen on using job-hopping as their bargaining chip. Faithless employers meet rabidly individualist employees. For the moment, both find a common interest in bringing technical knowledge to China as other nations’ corporations are eager to offshore so as to cut costs, while Chinese engineers are enthusiastic about moving China up the industrial chain and securing their own future careers. Yet, the harsh realities of a highly competitive industry, the fierce pressure to perform, and the mutual distrust between employers and employees combine to generate a great deal of tension in the workplace. Mutual cultural stereotyping and miscommunication are exacerbated when companies demand more flexibility and multitasking from their employees, or when managers try to translate an imported corporate policy into directives for an inexperienced local staff. In short, Ross finds that these conflicts derive from “the contentious nature of workplace relationships in a new industrial environment, where the rules of work are not yet established. What managers expect and what employees are willing to give is by no means a settled matter”. Although these young knowledge graduates, earning an average salary of 1,550 RMB per month in 2003, have so far escaped the relentless downward wage pressure in the global “race to the bottom”, this generation of Chinese workers, including its privileged segments, is beset by pressures not experienced by their parents.

Service workers experience particul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Mapping the terrain of Chinese labor ethnography
• Part I: Remaking class and community
• Part II: Gendering service work
• Part III: New professions and knowledge workers
• Index