Why China’s Workers are Losing Their World by Marc Blecher
		1 | 2 | 3 "The main responsibility for the factory's problems is the factory. The government's policy is to let everyone get rich. Whoever is capable will have food to eat. The government doesn't want to see factories do poorly, and doesn't want workers to lack for food. But some [factory] leaders' methods are mistaken. If you're a worker, what can you do? China's workers don't fear exhaustion, but only want to have work to do, to have hope." Certain workers did, however, blame local government officials. Yet holding local officials responsible is different from blaming the state. As several of these accounts state explicitly, my interviewees did not blame the state for their problems, or even expect the state to solve these problems. Workers' behavioral responses to the crises they face also evince the hegemony of the market. Many adopted market-based coping strategies. Others said that workers' dependence on their ailing firms increased labor incentives. A common response was for workers to develop all manner of advice for turning their firms around, and often to proffer it to their management. "Our factory has two labs, both of which have lots of administrators and experiment personnel, but they have nothing to do. No new products come out of there. We feel that the bosses should make them go do some other work, or at least put them all together so the other building can be vacated and used for a factory or rented out. We workers complain to our factory manager about this all the time. We just talk to him when we bump into him in the plant. We tell him to close down one of the labs, because the people who are supposed to be doing research there just sit around and play cards. But he won't do it. He likes to have two laboratories around. We workers shouldn't have to pay for this. But the manager runs the factory like a patriarch." Some workers put their entrepreneurial ideas for their firms into action: "When things are going badly for the factory, everyone thinks of a way to help out--through friends and relatives--to get business for the factory. The plant also encourages people to help the factory to market its products. It gives out bonuses according to how much workers helped out with marketing." Further evidence of work-unit-based thinking reflects the workers' acceptance of the economic and political situations they experience. These workers focused their protest on their enterprise, not the government that owned the company. The energy and expectations brought to the protests by the minority who rebelled were low, since they knew their enterprise's capacity to help them were low. Protest is understood, probably correctly, as behavior engaged in by people who are desperate and who have no other recourse through the market or through normal channels. In other words, protest is an extraordinary response to workers' problems; ordinary responses revolve around the market or appeals through channels. And hegemony is, of course, a way of defining the ordinary. Moreover, when political conflict does break out, it can reflect and even reinforce hegemony. The most common slogans reported at protests demand food, not social change. Even the kind of food demanded can evince workers' acceptance of inequality. At their most political-sounding, workers' demands are more often focused on the behavior of and revenge against individuals, not on the policies and structures that underlie that behavior. Their demands are, rather, well within the hegemony of the state, which itself has been dishing out capital punishment for a handful of notorious cases of corruption. <...Read More about the Crisis Faced by China's Workers> 1 | 2 | 3
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