Chinese Politics and Labor Movements

The Chapter provides a brief overview of the book. It first shares the author’s own journey through the fieldwork in China, particularly his experience of poor shop floor conditions and worker strike with unconventional tactics. It then explains why the book takes the focus back to workers themselves and uses a psychological and cognitive approach to address the central issue—Chinese labor resistance. This book argues that workers as societal individuals actually become a part of the apparatus of state repression by their conscious participation, and the Chinese working class has fallen into a ‘psychic trap’ that hinders labor activism from developing further into social movement. This chapter introduces the following chapters that examine the central issue by studying workers’ everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, their prospect of labor movement, and their sense of solidarity.

This chapter discusses the history of Chinese labor movement from the appearance of the modern industrial class in the late nineteenth century to the post-socialist era. Before the market reform, Chinese workers enjoyed a privileged status in the Chinese political landscape, and played an active role in shaping the course of history, particularly during the revolutionary time in 1920s and the socialist experiment period. The post-socialist era, however, saw the decline of the working class with stagnant labor movement after waves of market reform presided over by the CCP state, such as the SOE privatization and joining the WTO to become the ‘sweatshop of the world’. The chapter finishes with a brief discussion about Chinese labor struggles in the context of global capitalism, suggesting that local labor issues ultimately require a holistic fix against the capitalist global production system.

This chapter takes a theoretical look at the rise and fall of labor activism. Chinese labor studies literature focuses on the role of authoritarian state and its impact on the decline of labor, particularly by its censoring the use of class rhetoric. However, cases from developed and developing countries demonstrate that workers can use collective resistance to significantly lift labor’s political status, despite repressive state policy. That raises a puzzle—why has the contemporary Chinese labor activism failed to engender transformative social and political change? This chapter introduces some social movement theories highlighting the main drivers behind successful social movements. It suggests that using a subjective and psychic approach helps crack the code of complex processes of social movement formation. It argues that a state of cognitive liberation is necessary to break through the ‘psychic trap’ that hinders individual labor activism from developing into social movements with a much bigger impact.

This chapter addresses the first pillar that sustains workers’ psychic trap—how workers’ conservative interpretation of their problems becomes a cognitive hurdle for labor movement. It first gives a brief account of the cruel labor conditions at the shop floor and workers’ social suffering in daily life. It then discusses the background of the CCP’s hegemonic control of public discourse, which works as the discursive power to shape workers’ perception of their own situations. The main part of the chapter examines workers and activists’ interpretation of the state, market, and capital as the structural source of labor difficulties, as well as their own common perception of the problem. It compares ordinary workers’ interpretation with activists. It uses a Chongqing factory case to further illustrate how workers’ interpretation of their situations is conservative insofar as it becomes a psychic impediment to collective movement.

This chapter examines the second factor underlying the labor movement’s psychic trap—workers’ perception of the working class identity and political power. It discusses how workers perceive the working class’s identity as somewhat obsolete and even a dirty word, especially the younger generation. Many workers instead adopt diverse modern and urbanized identities. Most workers also tend to fail to see their political capacities to make changes, together with a pessimistic sense of fatalism when it comes to their prospect of the labor movement. It also highlights the cognitive gap of perception on those issues between workers and activists. This chapter demonstrates workers’ weak collective identity and skepticism of their political efficacy through a case study in a kitchenware factory in Jiangmen Guangdong.

This chapter discusses the third pillar of the psychic trap for labor movement—workers’ fragmented sense solidarity. It seeks to analyze several psychic factors underpinning a divided working class. Diminishing social trust amongst fellow workers is one of the fundamental obstacles that affect Chinese labor activism. The chapter goes on to examine, from a psychic perspective, why workers are risk-averse and unwilling to participate in collective industrial action. It then discusses workers’ unusual reaction to the loss of their leaders, as well as their sense of coalition building with other marginalized groups. Workers and activists’ differing sense of solidarity is highlighted throughout the chapter. Workers psychic state of solidarity is further explored in the case of Foowah factory in Shenzhen, where workers tried to organize a strike to protect their rights.

In this chapter extends from previously ethnographic studies to analysis drawing on statistics and survey to show a bigger picture about the working class’s psyche of resistance. It focuses on several areas such as workers’ social trust, understanding of democracy and politics, class identity, and class solidarity. Resonating with the ethnographic studies discussed in the previous chapters, this chapter confirms the new Chinese working class’s conservative psychic state of resistance. Whereas Chapters 4–6 contrast ordinary workers and activists, this chapter compares workers between megacities and lower-tiers. This comparison reveals the impact of economic development on workers’ cognition. As development level varies in the megacities and lower-tier cities—with the state, market and capital combined exerting different influence on the working class—workers likewise exhibit a diverse range of subtly different responses to those structural factors.

The concluding chapter draws on the previous chapters’ analysis and argues that Chinese workers have not acquired sufficient cognitive strength to further develop labor activism into a sustainable social movement. Reflecting on this whole research’s subjective and psychological analysis and the debate in the literature, this chapter sheds light into the Chinese working class’s psyche of resistance, one that evolves from a political compromise to a strategic complicity. It raises several caveats to consider together with the central argument. The chapter then puts forth several questions that open up at the end of the research, including the practical question about what can be done to break the psychic trap upon the workers in order to develop a sustainable and healthy social movement for the emancipation of the workers.