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Why China’s Workers are Losing Their World
by Marc Blecher
The
Puzzle
Karl
Marx urged the workers of the world to unite. "The proletarians have nothing
to lose but their chains. They have a world to win." China's workers,
however, have lost their world. In the Maoist period, they were an exalted,
pampered and yet, paradoxically, extremely radical class. Under China's
structural reforms of the past two decades, they have fallen fast and
hard. Employment security is nonexistent and unemployment is rampant.
For those fortunate enough to have dodged the axe, wages have not kept
pace with those of other sectors or with inflation, and poverty--particularly
"deep poverty"--is skyrocketing. State-supplied housing, medical care,
and education have declined in quality and availability, and increased
in cost to workers. Yet most of China's workers have taken this lying
down. How and why this has happened are the subjects of my next book,
tentatively titled A World to Lose: Workers’ Politics and the
Chinese State.
To be sure, many Chinese workers have protested. The fiercest demonstrations during the mælstrom of 1989 came from members of the working class, some of whom violently attacked security forces. By the late 1990s, proletarian protest had become endemic throughout the country. This past spring many protests and strikes by tens of thousands of outraged workers in Daqing, the former Maoist industrial model, and in several other cities, caught the whole world's attention.
When I began my research in 1995, I thought this pattern of protest had the potential to topple the People's Republic of China, sending it the way of the USSR and the state socialist regimes of Eastern Europe. Yet after seven years of research, my focus has shifted. Workers' protests, although numerous and widely distributed, remain spasmodic and localized. The vast majority of Chinese workers, including the unemployed, remain politically passive. In a 1997 survey, 96 percent of respondents said they had not participated in any sort of labor protest during the previous five years. The several dozen Tianjin workers I interviewed between 1995 and 1999 were unanimous in saying that although labor protests in their city were frequent, only a very small minority of workers participated in them--mostly retirees angry about not receiving benefits.
There is no shortage of potential explanations for this situation; some of which include political repression, lack of leadership, the fragmentation of the Chinese working class, and the state's skillful use of benefits and other policies to ameliorate the workers' misery. Each of these examples has some purchase on the problem, and will be dealt with in A World to Lose. In an article I published this June, however, I explored a rather different line of explanation--that workers have become subject to the hegemony of both the market and of the state.
Hegemony
For
Antionio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, hegemony occurs when a politically
dominant class has persuaded a politically subordinate class of its own
"moral, political and cultural values."1 Over the past two decades, many
of China's workers have come to accept the core values of the market and
of the state as legitimate. Why and how has this happened, and what are
the prospects for this hegemony and for a counter-hegemony that would
oppose the state and the market?
With the support of both Oberlin College and the National Endowment for the Humanities, I interviewed several dozen workers between 1995 and 1999.2 All of them, including a former factory foreman with Maoist sensibilities, expressed an acceptance of market values and of the legitimacy of the state.
1 | 2 | 3
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