Abstract
Today, if China is a dreamland for global capital looking for new forms of accumulation on an unimaginable pace and scale, I argue that a new working class comprising rural migrants and urban workers is being created, and they now form the new political subjects for potential resistance and shape the future of the labor movement in China, as well as placing a place to envision world labor internationalism.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Xinhua News Agency, June 8, 2014. Accessed at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2014-06/08/c_1111035497.htm (in Chinese).
“China Focus: China’s vocational institutions train 130 mln” Xinhuanet (29 June 2015) http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-06/29/c_134366384.htm “China learns to love vocational education” People’s daily (1 July 2015) http://en.people.cn/n/2015/0701/c90000-8913746.html “Premier Li Stresses vocational education to boost ‘Made in China’ brand” Ecns.cn (10 Sept 2017) http://www.ecns.cn/2017/09-10/272916.shtml
For example, the making of the English working class in the nineteenth century, the experiences of the “Four Tigers” of East Asian countries in the twentieth century, or the transformative experiences of South Asian and Latin American countries today. All these countries underwent a rapid rural-to-urban transformation, which relied on a working class that migrates from rural areas to settle in urban communities. Everywhere we can find examples of rural migrant workers streaming from countryside to work in industrial cities. These rural workers were allowed to stay in the city where they established family homes and larger communities.
This is of course somewhat similar to the apartheid system in South Africa.
This living experience is strikingly different from that of the urban middle class, which assumes that industrialization goes hand in hand with urbanization. Obviously, there is rapid urbanization in today’s China, but this process is mainly driven by urban property capital.
References
Becker, Jeffrey. 2012. The knowledge to act: Chinese migrant labor protests in comparative perspective. Comparative Political Studies 45: 1379–1404.
Butollo, Florian, and Tobias ten Brink. 2012. Challenging the atomization of discontent: patterns of migrant-worker protest in China during the series of strikes in 2010. Critical Asian Studies 44 (3): 419–440.
Cai, Yongshun. 2006. State and laid-off workers in reform China: the silence and collective action of the retrenched. London: Routledge.
Chan, Anita. 2001. China’s workers under assault: the exploitation of labor in a globalizing economy. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe.
Chan, Chris King-Chi, and Ngai Pun. 2009. The making of a new working class? A study of collective actions of migrant workers in South China. The China Quarterly 198: 287–303.
Chen, Feng. 2007. “Individual Rights and Collective Rights: Labor’s Predicament in China.” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40(1): 59–79.
Chen, Feng and Xin Xu. 2012. “‘Active Judiciary’: Judicial Dismantling of Workers’ Collective Action in China.” The China Journal 67 (January): 87–107.
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 1991. Are social classes dying? International Sociology 6 (4): 397–410.
Clark, Terry Nichols, and Seymour Martin Lipset. 2001. The breakdown of class politics: a debate on post-industrial stratification. Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
Fantasia, Rick. 1988. Cultures of Solidarity: Consciousness, Action, and Contemporary American Workers. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Friedman, Eli and Ching Kwan Lee. 2010. “Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30-Year Retrospective.” British Journal of Industrial Relations 48(3): 507–33.
Friedman, Eli. 2014. Insurgency trap: labor politics in postsocialist China. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Fukuyama, Francis. 2006. The end of history and the last man. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Gao, Liang. 2009. “Globalization, Liberation of Thought and the Change of Economic Development Mode.” Kaifa Daobao (The Open Herald), 2009(2): 1–3 (in Chinese).
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
Houtman, Dick, Peter Achterberg, and Anton Derks. 2009. Farewell to the leftist working class. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Leung, Pak-Nang and Pun Ngai. 2009. “The Radicalization of the New Chinese Working Class: A Case Study of Collective Action in the Gemstone Industry.” Third World Quarterly 30(3): 551–65.
Lichtenstein, Nelson, ed. 2006. American capitalism: social thought and political economy in the twentieth century. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Perry, Elizabeth J., and Mark Selden, eds. 2010. Chinese society: change, conflict and resistance. 3rd ed. London: Routledge.
Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: women factory workers in a global workplace. Durham: Duke University Press.
Pun, Ngai, and Huilin Lu. 2010a. Unfinished proletarianization: self, anger and class action of the second generation of peasant-workers in reform China. Modern China 36 (5): 493–519.
Pun, Ngai, and Huilin Lu. 2010b. A culture of violence: the labor subcontracting system and collective actions by construction workers in post-socialist China. The China Journal 64: 143–158.
Pun, Ngai, et al. 2014. Worker–intellectual unity: trans-border sociological intervention in Foxconn. Current Sociology 62 (2): 209–223.
Pun, Ngai and Chris Smith. 2007. “Putting Transnational Labour Process in its Place: Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China.” Work, Employment and Society 21(1): 27–46.
Pun, Ngai, et al. (2015). "Worker–intellectual unity: Trans-border sociological intervention in Foxconn." Current Sociology: 62:2: 209-223.
Pun, Ngai (2016) Migrant Labor in Post-Socialist China. New York and London: Polity Press.
Pun, Ngai, Tommy Tse, and Kenneth Ng. 2018a. Challenging digital capitalism: SACOM’s campaigns against Apple and Foxconn as monopoly capital. Information, Community and Society.
Pun, N., J. Qiu and B. Lu. 2018b. “Emotional authoritarianism”: state, pre-migration learning and working-class subjects. Working paper.
Thompson, Edward P. 1963. The making of the English working class. UK: Vintage Books.
Zhang, Lu. 2014. Inside China’s automobile factories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher’s note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pun, N. The new Chinese working class in struggle. Dialect Anthropol 44, 319–329 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09559-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-019-09559-0