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From “Master” to “Loser”: Changing Working-Class Cultural Identity in Contemporary China*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2015

Ju Li
Ju Li*
Affiliation:
Central European University, Hungary
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Abstract

This article explores how the prolonged and erosive deindustrialization in China's struggling state-owned enterprises (SOE), an inevitable result of the neoliberal shift in industrialization policy from socialist import-substitution industrialization to globalized export-oriented industrialization, has changed workers’ perceptions of themselves and their work. Based on in-depth interviews with workers and participant observation in one enterprise—Nanfang Steel—this study describes how what it means to be a worker has changed over two generations of SOE workers. The “glorious” identity of the worker, promoted by the state during the Maoist era, and emphatically proclaimed by elder workers despite its internal limitations and contradictions, has been dismantled by the neoliberal reform and has instead metamorphosed into a newly developed and “stigma-laden” cultural identity created by contemporary hegemonic discourse and then bitterly internalized by currently employed younger workers.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 88 , Fall 2015 , pp. 190 - 208
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2015 

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Footnotes

*

My greatest appreciation goes to these senior workers in Nanfang who warmly and trustfully shared their stories with me. I would like to thank Mahua Sarkar especially for her insightful comments. I am also grateful to Frederic Deyo, Leslie Gates, John Chaffee, and József Böroöcz for their encouragement during my writing process of this paper. I also thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers of ILWCH for their constructive comments. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the generous support of the institute of IGK at Humboldt University, Berlin.

References

NOTES

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2. To protect the interviewees in this study, I use Nanfang Steel as an anonymous name for my case factory.

3. For a detailed history of the Third Front Construction, see Ju Li, All that is Solid Melts into Air: An Exploration of the Transformation Process of a Third-front Enterprise in China (Ph.D. diss., Binghamton University, 2012); also Chen, Donglin, “From ‘the Plan of Food, Clothing and Daily Necessities’ to ‘Preparing the War’—the Changing Process of the Third-Fifth Thoughts,” Contemporary Chinese History Research 2 (1997): 65–75 Google Scholar.

4. For an illustration of the restructuring process in NS, see Li, All that is Solid.

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9. Li, All that is Solid.

10. Chan, China's Workers Under Assault.

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12. See, for example, Cai, “The Resistance”; Yongshun Cai, State and Laid-Off Workers in Reform China: The Silence and Collective Action of the Retrenched (London, 2006); Lee, Against the Law; M. Pei, “Rights and Resistance: The Changing Contexts of the Dissident Movement,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict, and Resistance, ed. E. Perry and M. Selden (London, 2003), 31–56; William Hurst and Kevin J. O'Brien, “China's Contentious Pensioners,” The China Quarterly 170 (2002): 345–60.

13. Hurst, The Chinese Worker.

14. Lee, Against the Law.

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16. Solinger, “The New Crowd of the Dispossessed,” 23.

17. Li, Ju, “Fight Silently: Everyday Resistance in Surviving State Owned Enterprises in Contemporary China,” Global Labour Journal 3 (2012): 194–216 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In this article, Li describes how the urgency of survival and the denial of alternative work opportunities have effectively prevented any form of collective resistance on the part of NS workers. Though there is great resentment and even hatred toward the management in their minds, the workers at NS are far from militant. Rather, they are generally compliant—at least ostensibly. Their resistance manifests in much more subdued, spontaneous, and individualized ways: backstage rumors and curses, apathy, foot-dragging, feigned ignorance, pilferage, and so on—the typical “weapons of the weak.”

18. Song, “Thirty Years of SOE Reform.”

19. Hurst, The Chinese Worker, 16–36.

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22. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 28.

23. For examples of how socialist workers using this ideal to fight for their rights, see Li, All that is Solid; also, Lee, Against the Law.

24. Among many others, see Randy Hodson, Dignity at Work (Cambridge, 2001); Michele Lamont, The Dignity of Working Men: Morality and the Boundaries of Race, Class, and Immigration (Cambridge, MA, 2000); Jeremy Rifkin, The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-market Era (New York, 1995); Andrew Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge, 2005); Richard Sennett. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York, 2011).

25. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character.

26. Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” in The Oral History Reader, ed. Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London, 1998), 63–74, 68.

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29. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston, 2001), 81–9.

30. Lee, Against the Law.

31. For an illustration of such failure, see Miklos Haraszti, A Worker in a Workers’ State (New York, 1978).

32. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character.

33. Ibid.

34. Among many others, see Bian, Yanjie, “Chinese Social Stratification and Social Mobility,” Annual Review of Sociology 28 (2002): 91–116 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Li, Yi, “The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification,” Social Forces 87 (2005): 4Google Scholar.

35. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (New York, 1972), 72.

36. Ibid.

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38. Sennett and Cobb, The Hidden Injuries, 58.

39. Ibid., 248.

40. James Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. (Berkeley, CA, 1999), 236.

41. “Education Level of Young Migrant Workers Raised,” China Daily, October 10, 2011, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2011-10/10/content_13863246.htm (accessed April 20, 2013).

42. Austin Ramzy, “The Chinese Worker,” Time, December 16, 2009, http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1946375_1947252_1947256,00.html(accessed October 10, 2012).

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45. Ferguson, Expectations of Modernity, 123–65.