Conditions of the Working Classes in China

by Stephen Philion and Chi Hua
March 20, 2007

Robert Weil’s recent (June 2006) Monthly Review article “Conditions of the Working Classes in China,” provided concerned activists and scholars with a rarely visited and lucid view of the impact of China’s turn to markets on both the economic and political decline of China’s working class. Such work, based on in-depth field interviews, can only serve as a basis for a deeper understanding of both the contradictions of China’s economic growth and potential for present and future organization in defense of China (and the world’s) working class. However, despite these laudable strengths, Weil’s article falls short at the level of analysis, which reflects that of political and/or social based movement activists on whom he relied for his information. The result is an insufficient conceptualization of what we believe is in urgent need of analysis, namely the level of actual working class organization in China.

Weil details the divisions in China’s working class as the thrust toward increasing privatization and foreign export based growth has shaped Chinese inequality in the advent of WTO membership in 2001. This Weil accomplishes by documenting the fragmentation of China’s working class into rural producers who are faced with unjust tax burdens, private sector based contractual and ‘migrant’ workers who are subjected to manifold forms of economic and political discrimination, and urban workers¹in the state sector who face huge setbacks in their social position due to mass layoffs and lack of opportunities in labor markets reserved for younger and more educated workers. The point of his essay is captured straightforwardly in this excerpt:

The gains that economic development has brought—especially wider access to consumer goods and foods and increased mobility and job opportunities—are being undercut for millions by the ever-widening class divide and growing insecurity. As a result, China is entering a period of sharpening class struggle and political uncertainty that will not be easily resolved. The path forward for the working classes will be very difficult, and the revival of the left, though highly significant, is still at a very early stage. This essay explores these complexities and possibilities.

The essay was based on extensive travel and interviews with working class activists who support the political empowerment of China’s working class as a means to protect China from the inequalities generated by corporate led globalization, privatization, and the like. There is frequent reference to the previous Maoist period, during which, by law, workers, especially state workers productive sectors the Party deigned critical, were guaranteed far more extensive social and economic security. Weil’s highlighting of the differences between that period and the new forms of market led social instability and outright suffering of China’s working class today is complemented by a reliance on Chinese sources who were cadres and activist during the height of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s until Mao’s death. These sources have been very active in generating support for workers’ rights, especially political rights, in the last decade or so, in the face of the declining position of workers in China. And this type of activism cannot but be, at the start, affirmed, in the pages of any left publication.

Having said this, we, nonetheless, believe that Weil’s analysis is affected by his over-reliance on such sources. Weil aptly summarizes the way key divisions within the working class are exploited by the government to prevent unity among workers with ostensibly similar enemies and grievances. High rates of unemployment in the rural regions make it easy, for example, for the government to, in some instances as Weil cites, hire peasants to fight workers instead of police! And, at the ideological level, even activists appear to buy into the divide and conquer strategies, referring to urban or rural migrant workers as less than worthy of respect in one regard or another. These are all perceptive and accurate critiques raised by Weil.

Furthermore, as Weil notes, the need to unify and broaden struggles from individual factory to city wide or even provincial wide ones is an obvious transition that will have to take place if there is any hope for a powerful workers’ movement in China’s future:

The activists we talked with there were planning a big demonstration of workers from all the factories in the city for later in the year. But prospects for such united action are uncertain. There are many remaining divisions within the urban proletariat—economic, generational, and even political—with some more supportive of the “reforms” and the government and others holding to the socialist perspective. Even a Zhengzhou park in the middle of a working-class district that we visited is divided physically between right and left groupings of workers and retirees, with the former dominating certain areas, especially during the daylight hours, and the latter more prevalent in other parts, particularly at night… There is a desire to get together, but differences in both their conditions and their treatment by the government work against such higher levels of unification.

Having ourselves a considerable familiarity with the struggles that Weil refers to in Zhengzhou and the various political groupings that meet in the park to discuss politics, we’re not as impressed by the significance of the ideological divisions between these groupings. If anything, we have found some noteworthy overlap in terms of praxis, verbal differences notwithstanding—the former of which we find far more in need of analysis and critique than the latter.

Zhengzhou and the struggles that privatization has spawned provide a good case study of what problems confront the Chinese workers’ movement and it is not apparent that the sources Weil relied on have a solid grasp of them. It is not an accident that Weil spends considerable time on the activism in Zhengzhou, there has occurred quite high levels of protest militancy in reaction to the fraudulent sell-offs at least 50 state enterprises in Zhengzhou since the mid and late 1990’s. Weil quotes one activist stating,

Activists helping organize all the working classes are trying to bring about the move toward unification, but it is a long and difficult process, that has only begun to bridge the gap between them.

Weil continues to quote a former Cultural Revolution era Red Guards from Zhengzhou stating:

As one former Red Guard in Zhengzhou put it, the understanding of a “two-line struggle,” a clear demarcation between the socialism of the revolution and the capitalism of the present, is now coming out primarily from the working classes themselves, and not mainly from the intellectuals.

These quotes come from a section hopefully, arguably too hopefully, entitled “Return of the Left”. However, our knowledge of the leftists’[whom Weil interviewed] reaction to worker activism in Zhengzhou leaves us less optimistic about its ‘return’ or prospects for a future without facing the real sources of its present weakness vis a vis the workers movement as it has transpired in Zhengzhou.

For example, the Zhengzhou Paper Mill, which served as a ‘model’ for worker organization against privatization in China’s state sector actually fell far short of its potential as a ‘model,’ despite the presence of a cadre of leftists from the Cultural Revolution era in Zhengzhou and nearby municipalities. It served as a bright spot precisely because of the determined forms of collective self-organization that the mill workers pursued in 2000, when they realized that their factory land was going to be sold to speculators, in violation of privatizers’ promises to reinvest in production and compensation to workers. The workers elected a new Workers Representative Congress [WRC] and took over their factory in May, 2000 demanding that property rights be turned over to the WRC, which would restore production under the principle of worker democratic self-management². Instead, the workers were met with police repression on August 8th, 2000. Despite that repression, workers struggles at the Paper Mill led to the agreement on the part of the Zhengzhou City Government to return property rights to the Paper Mill WRC.

How then could such a victory not lead to the further growth of the left and the workers’ movement in Zhengzhou in the time period since? A careful dissection of the failure of the Paper Mill struggle to result in more than a hollow victory, and in some senses a demoralizing ‘model’, helps answer this question in ways the Zhengzhou cadres do not. While the Paper Mill WRC did manage to win back property rights to the factory and land, it could not translate that victory into its ultimate goal of restoring production in a democratically managed fashion. To the extent the Paper Mill succeeded in accomplishing that goal, it would have provided a very positive model for other factories in very similar, indeed nearly identical circumstances 1] , 2] could have provided a base for training workers from other factories how to both fight for rights and create an alternative that could democratically restore production in the face of globalization led factory closure, and [3] provided a base for the political education of workers involved in similar struggles around China.

This was not the outcome however. Instead, once the WRC won back property rights to factory assets, the WRC encountered a serious structural barrier to that strategy, namely assumption of the enterprise debt that years of corruption and insider scheming engendered. In a nutshell, the lack of capital and state support put workers’ leaders in a position of not knowing what possible means existed to find the capital necessary to invest in production with the aim of providing state enterprise workers with social and job security. If anything, this pushed some leaders in the direction of consigning their futures to restructuring along lines of corporate shareholding once rights to factory assets and land were restored to the WRCs.

However, the lack of options in the ZZP case was hardly set in granite. If anything, the belief that looking for private stock purchasers as a means to save the factory in the face of the debt the ZZP was saddled with contributed to the undermining of the strength of the WRC that led the struggle for repossession of the factory for almost 5 years after the 2000 factory takeover. Interviews conducted in August 2005 reveal that a labor activist from Beijing frequently met with the ZZP WRC in 2002 to persuade them to stick to their plan to rely on direct worker participation in decisions that affected the fate of the Paper Mill:

Labor Activist Lai: This is what was most frustrating because this inclination to look to private investors for investments in the ZZP after the WRC retained its property rights to the factory is what undermined their solidarity. Many regarded the WRC’s internal battles as a result of personality clashes. That certainly had something to do with it. But there was more to it than met the eye. Instead of turning to the workers to debate and decide on different options, they took it upon themselves to find outside sources of capital and invariably that led to WRC representatives identifying with the goal of bringing in private investors instead of strengthening their bond with workers. While I advocated strongly for making the issues known to the workers and letting them debate what route to go, in the end the representatives went each their own way frantically trying to win outsiders’ interest in the factory and not involving workers in that process. This is what really led to the failure of the WRC to carry through their original plan to implement worker control of the factory after taking it back from the fraudulent ‘private capitalists’ who stole it from them (August 2005 interview, Beijing).

There was one other factor that added to the detour from the WRC’s road to worker controlled production after the battle to win back factory property rights was won. That would be the politicized orientation of local3 older cultural revolutionaries [i.e. Weil’s main source for information about Zhengzhou] who were interested in establishing a relationship with the various SOE workers’ leaders who organized collective actions against fraudulent privatization in Zhengzhou from 1999 onward. Their involvement, although most welcome from workers seeking outside support also added to the difficulties in developing the conditions needed to develop the capacity for worker controlled factories in Zhengzhou becoming the basis off of which to build workers’ political strength:

Activist Lai: These older supporters who were activists in the Cultural Revolution have sought to rebuild a type of militant political atmosphere that they lived through 40 years ago. That’s all well and good, but by not prioritizing what the workers movement needed in Zhengzhou to grow through the establishment of real models of actual worker controlled alternatives to privatization, they caused harm to the workers’ leaders.

Question: How so?

Activist Lai: Their interests were in building their own social movement, primarily by encouraging workers’ leaders to join their Mao Anniversary Movement⁴. There’s no better gift to the police than to politicize the workers’ movement in this fashion, it gives them the perfect excuse to round up workers’ leaders. At a time when leaders are needed to develop the base of the workers’ movement, their potential is wasted in jail and the general public comes to associate the workers’ protests with taboo political causes, which they naturally fear (Ibid.).

What we believe is the significant lesson to be drawn from failures such as the Paper Mill struggle is not that the working class in China is too divided and thus easily conquerable [albeit that is a real issue and the cleavages Weil draws out are very helpful]. Instead, there are also ideological differences over what the priorities of organizing a new left in China should be, i.e. what is its heart of the growth of a new left presence in China: workers’ collective self-organization [and here we plainly are not merely referring to the liberal goal of free trade unions] or street protests that garner attention in the short-term in the western [mainstream and left] media? The propensity toward the latter among the older left in China, shaped greatly by its Cultural Revolution experience, is, we would argue, one that has not given enough attention to what it means to organize China’s working class.

It is not surprising that Weil reports that his sources claim to see evidence of increasing size and militancy of political oriented demonstrations, ostensibly reflecting a new ‘higher’ level of working class ‘organization’ and ‘ideology’:

In an attempt to get beyond this relatively isolated form of struggle, which has in most cases proved inadequate to halt the overall march of privatization, unemployment, and lost services and securities, workers from the different enterprises in Zhengzhou are beginning to link up. In Kaifeng too—where most state-owned enterprises have closed, leaving 100,000 jobless—workers have expressed the need for greater unity in order to succeed. Only recently, those from the different plants—including the many who have already lost their jobs and the few who are still currently employed—have started to get together, holding meetings with representatives from each of the enterprises, and organizing joint protests drawing participants from all of them. The activists we talked with there were planning a big demonstration of workers from all the factories in the city for later in the year.

However, it is doubtful that this is really the case as much as something that Weils’ sources would like to happen as a result of their organizing strategy5. And it is here where the pitfalls of organizing strategy on the part of the left in China needs to be more carefully interrogated. We believe, given what we’ve seen of organizing campaigns such as those that have occurred among Zhengzhou’s state workers and elsewhere, that leftist organizing in China [to the extent it’s possible in a one-party state deeply committed to restructuring markets in line with the needs of global investors] needs to be more organically tied to actual forms of strong workers’ self-organization [especially in the state sector where the ideological adherence to socialist goals remains highest among China’s working class] that have more than clarion calls for demonstrations and attention in headlines abroad as their basis for the Chinese left’s expansion. We know that such thinking and rethinking of what it means to organize a left in China is occurring among this generation of Chinese Marxists and will continue into the future. We also suspect it is where the hope for a regeneration of China’s left as a powerful presence in Chinese society, one day able to actually take real power, is centered.

Notes:

¹.By ‘urban workers’, we mean those workers who have official residence in cities and the requisite access to public schooling, some health insurance, and varied benefits that come with possession of official urban residence status.

². The idea was one that many WRCs in China hope to implement when confronted with similar crises, not unlike, say, workers have done far more successfully in Argentina in the last decade. See Naomi Klein, “Argentina's Luddite Rulers,” http://www.countercurrents.org/argentina-klein25403.htm .

³. By ‘local’ I refer to those from Zhengzhou and nearby cities about 40 miles from Zhengzhou.

⁴. This refers to activities every September 9th to commemorate Mao in Zhengzhou on his birthday by marching to one of the few remaining statues of Mao and handing out leaflets critical of the Party for departing from Mao’s policies and becoming corrupted by capitalism.

⁵. The labor activist we quoted above contends that the numbers of marches such as the yearly Anniversary of Mao’s Birth Marches in September are exaggerated to create the impression their strategy of bypassing actual workers organization and going straight to political and social movement oriented street demonstrations is effective.

* Stephen Philion teaches Sociology at St. Cloud State University, currently working on a book with Routledge/Taylor Francis on Workers’ Democracy and China’s Transition from State Socialism, scheduled for publication in spring, 2008. Chi Hua is one of many Chinese leftists who support workers’ struggles against corporate led globalization in China.

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