The first labor protest I encountered in China was not a conventional picketing line but a suicidal event in the bustling city center of Panyu Guangdong. Huayu was among a handful of construction workers sitting at the top of an eight-story building, a newly opened hotel, on a busy Monday afternoon. These workers had spent the last two years helping construct this building. They lived in temporarily fabricated dormitories beside the construction site, until they were demolished at the end of the contract. Huayu was a 33-year-old who came from rural Guizhou province. He was married with two children. His wife had left him three years previously, partly because he did not spend much time at home. His two sons went to primary school in rural Guizhou, and were looked after by his mother. 1
The workers had not been paid for their last two months. The contractor had disappeared two weeks before the work was finished. At the same time, the construction company refused to deal with the dispute and insisted that the workers should look to the contractor. Huayu was holding a handwritten poster with the words âreturn my hard-earned wagesâ (huanwo xuehan qian) written in red. They threatened suicide by sitting right at the edge of the rooftop with their legs dangling in the air.
In this initial encounter of workersâ resistance at the very beginning of my fieldwork, what struck me was that the workersâ protest was, paradoxically, both confrontational and conforming. Threatening to commit suicide confronts the local authorities, by potentially making them lose face in the public arena. The authorities also lose credit in their annual appraisal by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) elite if they do not use their power to solve a problem such as this. But it is also a conforming act because the act itself is a conscious alternative to a more disruptive popular protest. It is tacit recognition of the very unshakable supremacy of the local authorities, because it is their interventionâfavorable or otherwiseâthat determines the workersâ fate. The ambiguous nature of this resistance reminds me of the centuries-old tradition of shen yuan, whereby humble villagers in dynastic China sought to redress a grievance and get a fair trial by begging in front of the local county magistrate. 2
However, in terms of intent and outcome, recent Chinese workersâ suicidal protests differ from many historical cases in other societies such as South Korea and Tunisia. In Tunisia, for example, a street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi doused himself in petrol and set himself alight when police confiscated his produce in December 2010. His attempted suicide was out of genuine outrage against the stateâs injustice. His eventual death set off violent protests over unemployment across the nation, which became the beginning of the Arab Spring. 3 In contrast, most of the recent Chinese workersâ suicidal protests are attention-seeking tactics, aimed at gaining the opportunity to negotiate with the authorities to get back their economic loss. The usual outcome in these situations is that the workers end the âshow,â often receiving some economic compensation. No other workers would come to support their coworkers, as they already know the game.
When it comes to workersâ ambiguous or even passive resistance, I am interested in the processes that push workers toward the use of conservative tactics. Many labor watchers have argued that the repressive CCP state and its initiated neoliberal market reform are behind the workersâ fragmented and compromised resistance (Lee 2007; Friedman 2013; Fu 2017). Chen (2012) observes that the stateâs authoritarian legitimacy is strengthened from contentious unrest, as the routinization of social protests is mainly due to the facilitation of such activities by the party state itself. In other words, to confront the state by compromised tactics ultimately serves to conform to the state.
I do not dispute the stateâs primary role in shaping Chinese politics and labor relations. In this book, however, I wish to dissect the complex process underpinning how state and society mutually constitute and transform each other. My particular focus is on how workers, as societal individuals, actually become a part of the apparatus of state repression by their conscious participation in acts of resistance. Hollander and Einwohner (2004: 549), for example, have shown that resistance by the powerless can often simultaneously support the very structures of domination that necessitate resistance in the first place. In a paradoxical way, the intensified autocracy of the state over time is at least partly due to the workersâ particular kind of resistance. Under such conditions, state and society are not neatly distinguishable, neither are oppression and resistance.
State oppression is not always manifested in tangible coercive forms, such as police crackdowns. Tomba (2014: 19) rightly observes that the CCPâs hegemonic control has been developed into a productive network in urban Chinese neighborhood, by using means such as housing clustering, social engineering, and officially sanctioned and campaigned discourse. Urban citizensâ agency thus becomes imbedded in internalized oppression and ultimately acceptance of authoritarian governing practices. Consequently, citizens develop their own ingrained and compromised social practices that are not merely the result of their submissive attitude. I support this argument. My contention is that a citizensâ agency premised on internalized acceptance of authoritarian rule is one that is submissive politically. Resistance that not only reinforces the stateâs oppression but is also absorbed by its oppression is thus a form of empty resistance with little to no political significance.
My own field observation is that many Chinese workers are by and large risk-averse toward collective labor action. I ask myself, why should this be so? Although there is no lack of labor unrest in all forms, from legal battles to large strikes, these isolated struggles have not evolved into a concerted labor movement with claims for common justice and transformative changes. Workersâ resistance is increasingly taking new forms that go to the opposite of what a labor movement is usually supposed to look like. In the past few decades, workersâ resistance has ranged from collective inaction (Zhou 1993: 65â66)âmainly in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs)âto action without subversion in the private enterprises characteristic of the âsweatshop of the worldâ era. Neither have we seen much labor activism that takes place across industry throughout the country, except for a few high-profile strikes such as in Honda and Yue Yuen. 4 Such activism requires working side by side with other marginalized groups, as well as gaining support from the wider public. The lack of this kind of activism leads to an inability to sustain momentum. There are a range of reasons for this lack of momentum, such as state oppression, a lack of collective will, and a lack of the organizational skills needed to support social movement. But they all lead social movements that evaporate into isolated resistance (Tarrow 2011).
In contrast with workersâ risk-averse hesitance to collective movement, I have seen multiple cases in my fieldwork when workers made conscious choices that were risk accepting, at times, radical even violent. 5 For instance, after working in an unbearable shoe-manufacturing factory for 6 years, one worker in Shenzhen took a great financial risk to start a similar shoe factory by putting himself into a US$100,000 debt. A shop floor worker representative at her Jiangmen factory union took a moral risk of betrayal to become a management informant by sabotaging a strike in preparation. One activist told me his younger brother chose to work with the local gangsters to hijack a construction contractor in order to get his wage arrears back. He eventually paid the price by ending up in jail for seven years. Nationalism, particularly anti-Japanese and anti-America sentiment, often fuels workersâ anger against the employers. In January 2013, to protest working conditions, workers at an electronics factory in Shanghai held captive ten of their Japanese managers. In July of the same year, desperate workers kidnapped an American boss and held him captive for six days after negotiations broke down. 6
How do we make sense of workersâ recently diversified methods of resistance, and what makes them different from a labor movement? In terms of seeking practical solutions for their wretched conditions, worker protests could either go conservative (to uncritically succumb to the ruling eliteâs culture) or turn radical (Lee 2007: 30). Both ways show little sign of healthy labor activism that is conducive to developing into a social movement. In some instances, under repressive political conditions in an authoritarian state, Chinese protest organizers have recently tended to refrain from mobilizing aggrieved citizens to take up large-scale collective contention, but instead have been coaching them to use suicide acts and the stalking of factory bosses (Fu 2017). These tactics are at once both conservative (toward the state) and radical (toward the individual). In other instances, despite a deep dissatisfaction with work conditions, workersâ daily resistance has manifested itself in passive âsenseless behaviorâ such as throwing glass bottles from the upper floors of dormitories (Chan et al. 2013: 101).
In order to make sense of this politically conservative tendency that Chinese labor activism has headed toward, I suggest that an agent-focused approach that studies workersâ interpretations, calculations, and decision-making processes under specific political situations provides a subjective and psychological basis for their codependent relations with the state. Th...