China in Revolt | Hacker News Reader

China in Revolt

jacobinmag.com

64 pointsllambda17 comments

Here are some key points from the article (which was correctly submitted with its original title, reflecting the view of the author):

"While there are no official statistics, it is certain that thousands, if not tens of thousands, of strikes take place each year. All of them are wildcat strikes – there is no such thing as a legal strike in China.

. . . .

"Workers have been asking for wage increases above and beyond those to which they are legally entitled, and in many strikes they have begun to demand that they elect their own union representatives. They have not called for independent unions outside of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), as this would surely incite violent state repression. But the insistence on elections represents the germination of political demands, even if the demand is only organized at the company level."

I have been reading the government-controlled mass media from China in English since 1975 and in the original Chinese since 1979. Chinese media sources are very wary of reporting on the genuine condition of working people in China. As the article kindly submitted here reports, and as can even be confirmed from the official media in China, there are thousands of instances of local unrest each year in China. (A category for "China unrest" stories I have set on Google News regularly turns up new cases reported by many different media sources.)

Progress in standard of living and even in day-by-day freedom for the masses has been real in my lifetime, and rather steady since the repression after the Tian'anmen Square Massacre relaxed, but the common people of China still mostly live in conditions that were unacceptable in neighboring countries decades ago. The test of China's development in the next decade will be whether political reform can at length catch up with having multiparty democracy and free and fair local elections--something Taiwan had in the 1950s. If government censorship of the mass media ends in China, as it ended in Taiwan more than twenty years ago, then maybe China can have an honest internal debate about how to continue progress for the masses. If it has that honest debate, one likely suggestion is to have free and fair elections at the national level, so that there is an actual chance of a peaceful transfer of power from the Communist Party of China.

AFTER EDIT: The first kind reply to my comment asks how likely (peaceful) change in the direction of democratization and press freedom is in China, and my answer is that I am not sure. I remember a conversation with a friend in 1985 who was sure that the Soviet Union would still exist, with the Communist Party still in charge, well into the twenty-first century. I can remember a different friend telling me in 1989 that she knew of an ethnic church somewhere in the United States where people prayed daily for the freedom on Czechoslovakia--which happened just months after I had that conversation. Taiwan's transition to press freedom and free and fair elections was surprising peaceful, and already happened quite a while ago. China's government has been second to none in studying every example all over the world of dictatorships clinging to power, but social scientists in China are mostly very aware of how suddenly Hungary's and East Germany's and Romania's and Yugoslavia's dictators fell from power when that was least expected. I know from long acquaintance with Chinese people inside and outside China that Chinese people aspire for freedom just like most people in the modern world. I wish them the best in gaining a peaceful rather than a violent transition to more freedom.

And if wishes were horses beggars would finally have some meat.

How likely is any of that?

I believe the whole point of that set of sentences was "We have no earthly idea. Things could suddenly change or things could never change; but the trend has been in these other countries for things to change, and for them to change suddenly"

So much China discussion today.

"Suffice it to say that a large swath of manufacturers in coastal provinces such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, and Jiangsu has not been able to attract and retain workers."

Actually what is happening is these regions never had a surplus in unskilled labourers. They were depended on migrant labour and since 2011 the government has put strict limits on the migrant labour. Limits much lower than demand. By 2016 migrant labour is to be stopped to major cities in these provinces. It is all part of the current 5 year plan. The desire of the government is to get low value manufacturing out of these regions. As it believes the economy has develop beyond the need to depend on such manufacturing. This is an intentional move. It is not due to a change in worker attitude or slowing economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_People%2...

It appears your link is incorrect and perhaps that's why you were downvoted.

Working link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_of_the_People%2...

Thanks.

A bigger reason is that migrant workers can now find more opportunities closer to home. Why bother moving to a coastal city when you get a decent job in a city near your village? Perhaps building more factories inland is part of the 5 year plan, but I see it as an inevitable progression in China's development.

The inland factories are not the same type of low value factories that covered the coastal regions. Those factories depend on low labour costs and low logistics cost to be able to produce tons of junk; to be sent all around the world and sold for cents in stores all around the world. The inland factories came from major investments made in building sophisticated factories and supply chains inland.

Its a bit more of both I think. The SMEs* on the coast are moving production inland to take advantage of human and natural resources. They haven't gone into villages yet, but definitely into cities like Chongqing, Wuhan, Lanzhou, Urumuqi, the supply chains follow (which are also SMEs).

The big blocker to this movement so far have been coastal export zones, where import tariffs on supplies are waved as long as the production must be exported, which is why we in China pay so much for things "made in China." But as China produces more for its own domestic economy, that becomes much less relevant.

* Small and medium scale enterprises, usually private, compared to the massive SOEs (state-owned enterprises) and JVs (joint ventures).

I'm talking a lot less professional than SME. More like the equivalent to a lemonade stand in the manufacturing world. Those businesses won't make it inland without some logistics miracle. If you are involved you know what I mean.

I'm not sure, like-kinds of small business always cluster together to solve logistic problem. The side effect here is that its a race to the bottom since all of these guys are doing pretty much the same thing. Its not sustainable even on the coast, I think.

While the article starts out very interesting, towards the end the author starts to sound almost delusional. He implies that although the introduction of capitalist reforms seemed to help the Chinese at first, it has ultimately been an instrument of oppression. In reality, the market-based reforms in China are a classic case of the introduction of some capitalist principles massively increasing overall quality of life. An article telling how factory workers in China are offensively demanding better wages and better treatment is fascinating, but the author's militant Marxist worldview made the whole article a little less believable.

After reading the article, I can't help walk away with the idea that China has massive internal tensions that will probably be resolved by violent revolt, whether it takes place on a civil war model or on the model of the riots during the fall of Soharto in Indonesia in 1999. What we are seeing, I think, are indications of tensions and these will be released just as tension within he earth is released by earthquakes.

I suggest that the issue at hand is that all we see is shadow play - we have incomplete data, which hints at many different ways the ground reality may be moving.

Even if we had complete data, with a country like China there are many actors pulling ground reality in different directions, so being able to arrive at a binary state for the country seems unlikely.

The requirements of violent revolt are pretty extensive - most people endured generations of hardship, and for them to overthrow the system the leadership and hardship requirements are steep.

China Labour Bulletin [1], the NGO run by Tiananmen labour leader Han Dongfang and labour expert Robin Munro and staffed by a talented group of activists, gives a far more detailed and nuanced representation of mainland Chinese labour issues.

[1] http://www.clb.org.hk/

To summarize the article:

1. There have been many successful labour actions in the last 3 years, mostly for higher wages. However, the demands have not been for better living conditions.

2. Most factory workers are migrants, and as such, their social lives back home are separated from their economic lives in the coastal cities where they work. In addition, obvious political movements are strongly suppressed, so the workers present their strikes as solely economic. These prevent strong activist movements for workers' rights from developing.

3. Recently, companies have been moving factories towards the source of the migrant workers: the interior. The author thinks that from this merging of workers' social and economic livelihoods, the workers' rights movement will bloom and lead to a true leftist movement in China.

Linkbait title.

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