Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt Review

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Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt ReviewAgainst the Law opens with two kinds of spontaneous labor protests in China: thousands of workers marching through the streets of Liaoyang, an old industrial town in China's northeastern province of Liaoning, to demand payment of back wages, pensions, and unemployment allowances owed them for months; and an orderly delegation of migrant workers picketing in front of a courthouse in Shenzhen, capital of the Guangdong province in the south, awaiting a court hearing in a lawsuit against their employer. Why do workers in the decaying industrial rustbelt take to the street so readily while workers from export-oriented factories in the sunbelt instinctively resort to the labor bureaucracy and the judicial process before staging protests? And why have worker protests been contained at the local level, leading neither to the formation of a national labor movement nor to representative organizations?
To answer these questions, Ching Kwan Lee conducted fieldwork in the two provinces, gathering data from in-depth interviews with worker representatives and participants in protests, strikes, petitions, and lawsuits. In the rustbelt, she founds what she labels "protests of desperation," in which veteran state workers, staking their claims on moral and legal grounds, primarily take their grievances to the street. They leverage a strategy of political bargaining by shaming local officials and disrupting traffic and public order, and make only occasional and individual forays into the legal system. Rhetorically, workers' insurgent claims draw on political discourses of class, Maoism, legality, and citizenship. Such protests coexist with a survival strategy that relies on the remnants of socialist entitlements, primarily allocated welfare housing, and on informal employment. Housing entitlements and arrangements, reciprocity within working-class families, and participation at the margin of the market economy allow aggrieved workers and their families to survive, even as the working-class community is in the process of disintegration.
In contrast, Chinese migrant workers in the sunbelt, indignant over their treatment as second-class citizens by officials and employers, stage "protests against discrimination." These workers resort first to legal activism such as filing petitions and lawsuits for collective labor arbitration, mediation, and litigation. Only when this institutionalized channel fails (which it often does) do they resort to public disruption. They stake their claims in the law, clamouring against discrimination by officials and employers and violation of labor rights, identifying themselves as weak and marginalized masses needing the protection of the state. Striving to remain employed in the cities, these workers also rely for subsistence on a system of land rights that allocates to rural residents plots of land in their birth villages. The experience and economics of 'dagong', or labouring for the bosses, cannot be abstracted from the larger fabric of workers' village lives. It is where the social reproduction of labor power is organized: getting married, building a home, raising and educating children, and subsistence farming. Migrant workers' land use rights in their birth village are a key nexus connecting their work lives with their family lives, and providing an alternative means of survival in times of unemployment or injury.
In addition to these differences, Ching Kwan Lee also found several significant features of unrest shared by rustbelt and sunbelt workers. One is their passionate appeal to legal justice, assailing official corruption as both immoral and illegal. Also, despite the large number of protests, labor unrest in both regions has been bottled up at either the enterprise or the city level. Labor unrest takes the prevailing form of localized, workplace-based activism, with workers blocking traffic in the streets, lying on railroads, or staging sit-ins in front of government buildings. This kind of decentralized "cellular" activism seldom evolves into lateral, cross-locality rebellion, and its political target has remained the local government rather than higher-level officials or the central government, with important ramifications for regime stability and legitimacy.
The key to workers' acquiescence in the transition from state socialism to the market economy is to be found not in the realm of production but in the system of redistribution. Beyond exploitation in the workplace, there are also nonmarket mechanisms for the reproduction of labor power embedded in the rural economy and the urban work unit system that mitigate the worst exploitation workers suffer at the point of production. The much-criticized household registration system that subjects migrant workers to second-class citizenship status, making them a cheap labor pool tapped by global capital, also confers land rights on those with rural household registrations. Likewise, the collapse of the socialist work unit has triggered economic distress and moral outrage, but the work units have also allowed state workers to purchase former welfare housing at subsidized prices, providing an economic safety net even in the event of enterprise bankruptcy. These institutions also generate a degree of allegiance to the regime.
Political stability is further enhanced by an attempt to shift the ground of political legitimation from utopian ideology, personal authority, administrative fiat, and violence to a government by law, or rule by law. To simplify, decentralization makes local governments responsible for developing a probusiness local political economy, while the same local government agents are called on to implement labor laws promulgated by the central government eager to resolve labor conflicts and to maintain social stability. This tension between accumulation and legitimation, between the interests of the local and the central government, gives rise to endemic violation of labor rights and entitlements. The local state becomes the target of workers resistance. The central government appears as the guardian of legality and its rhetoric of rule by law incites popular responses couched in the same legalistic language, even though few workers actually believe in the effectiveness of the regime's ideology of law-based government.
This book is targeted to an audience of academics and anthropologists, and it comes with a rich theoretical apparatus. Reading it, for instance, helped me understand better the notion of commodification of labor as found in Marx. But it also contains many lessons for other publics as well. Economists will understand better the regional diversity of China, with some provinces on the fast lane to industrialization while others are losing their manufacturing base, in a process of creative destruction. Business executives will learn what happens down their supply chain, and how violations of labor law entails a reputational risk for their operations. Some entrepreneurs may target returning immigrants as agents of change to expand market and business opportunities into remote provinces, seeking fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. Government officials will understand the difference between rule by law and the rule of law, and draw implications for development assistance aimed at supporting legal reform. Most important, the book complements media reports about China with a deep understanding of the plight of its industrial workers, helping us to understand their sense of dignity, justice and need for recognition.Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt OverviewThis study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.

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