E106: [TEASER] Radical Reads – China in Global Capitalism

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while and had failed. So people are very excited about this, and I actually did some research into one of the consequences of this, and just one example in a store in nan Chung, which is the capital of Chiongxi Province, they had these elections, they set up a union, and they actually had a reasonably democratic election. They elected a guy who was very interesting and who really wanted to push management on just some basic workplace stuff. He wasn't

organizing to overthrow the Communist Party or anything. He had a few successes, and then very quickly the higher levels of the union got anxious because they saw that he was kind of stirring up trouble and was making them a little bit nervous. He got fired and pushed out with the consent of the higher levels of the union. So I think that that's just one example that demonstrates

some of the limitations. Even in those cases where you can have some sort of an election and someone who's going to fight a little bit, there's real institutional.

in North America, rights mostly bureaucratic, very top down. Union organizers are overworks, not given much resources, They are highly repressed or highly retarded against in workplace organizing. So I think this is actually very important point that we should be aware of in terms of not making that look like that's the exception to some kind of idealized image

of whatever democracy. So society, unions, workers, etc. To your question, So, for most of the last thirty years, striking China have been almost entirely organized by workers themselves or by workers working in those workplaces. Of course, independent unions are not allowed or criminalized. So if you'll try to organize an independent union, the chances are you'll be arrested. I think maybe waitin a few days. There are small labor and jills you can think of themselves, worker centers of a

few staff, interesting in labor rights, skilled trainings, auvacracy. I think a small number of them do try to assist workers in organizing, but they are you know, very small and very fragmented, and I don't think they are you know, for most of the workers they're organizing, their strikes are organized entirely by themselves. And this is you know, what we normally call wildcat strikes, that these strikes are that

are not organized by officially by tue unions. But again here I think I want to make this point that we talk about wildcat strike as the exception to the

more conventional sort of union organized strike. But I think if you look globally, WorldCat strikes may be the norm rather than the exception, because they're very actually very few union organized strikes almost anywhere, and I think in China in many other places in Asia, so called wildcare strikes actually are the normal kind of strikes where workers entirely

organize their own own actions. And as cause this for simple reasons that either the unions are stay controlled in the case of China or Vietnam, so they do not organize workers, they do not support workers strikes, or because the union are very pro management, or they are in this kind of union management cooperation framework, or just there's no union. Again, it's the case for I think, for the majority of the workforce globally, where they never see

any union in their workplace. So it's interesting to see this kind of very direct formal confrontation between labor and capital without the mediating role of the union. And I think if we again thinking critically about the role of the union in capitalists libert democracies, often their role is not to push the struggle forward structurally or institutionally. Their goal is now to transcend or go beyond capitalism. Their the roal is to mediate the interests of labor and

capital in some way. They of course they would push for the interest workers, but they will necessarily have to make compromises, Whereas when workers and capital are in this direct confrontation, there's no mediation, and this kind of confrontation actually see in law cases in China over the last twenty thirty years, workers end up winning their demands. There also some problem with it in terms of the after twenty thirty years, you don't you still don't see you

mass tree union, movement of mass workers organizations. So that's another aspect of this. But in terms of winning actually this kind of direct form of worker theybor capital confrontation, actually end up being favorite workers in a lot of cases. And two questions about the state approach to labor and workers struggle, and I think again here is sort of

undergone several phases, if well, since the nineteen nineties. I think for most of the nineteen nineties, the trans state didn't really treat these megro workers very seriously because you know, for the first ten years or so, ten to fifteen years or so of this rural migration to the cities, I think the trans government and I think a lot of people in public think they are just transient, right,

So that's why they're called rural mecro workers. They will come to the state for work for maybe ten months, nine months, and ten months, they go back for a chance in a year for a couple of months, and maybe after several years they are enough money in the city and they will just go back to the countryside and settle so the traditional image of workers is that of stay owned state sector industrial workers, and those so called pithon workers, that's kind of their names in Chinese

are just hybrid pithon workers. But maybe the pison part was even more important than the worker part. So they

really just tries. They didn't take workers right very seriously until workers start to protest more and more and you start to see the rise of workers protests and strikes late two thousands and early tens, where again, as I mentioned, there are thousands and probably tens of thousands strikes a year, and that's when the trans governments start to realize they have to find some way to deal with class conflict. And there are of course two sides to it. One

is depression. If you are a very high profile worker leader, you may be highrassed, you may be attacked, assaulted, or you may be jailed. But there is also other part of that which is more consolidatory, and there's parts to that, minds legislation. So trying to in the eight to the nine start to implement pro labor legislations, labor contract laws, laws on mediation and arbitration, and actually those are if

they are implemented, are actually quite in favor workers. And then there's other part, which is the XFT you and state state institution that actually start to play a mediating growth because they see labor and capital confy had to mediate in some way, so they start to implement with institution reform in order to mediate. And then the final part of this is it changed again in the second half of the twenty tents, where I think the trands state revert back to a more repressive kind of approach.

So they start to shut down labor and jails their rights and put very harsh surveillance on worker organizers and regularly harass, you know, anyone would try to do anything to do its labor, and so you began to see kind of much more exclusionary of the world and much more repressive approach by the state to the working class.

migrant workers that lost their job. But in contrast to what was happening in western countries, China really resumed growth quite quickly, and so you see a period of high speed growth, but also growth in wages and a really severe tightening of the labor market that's happening in this period of time, which gives workers some kind of structural advantages that they may might have been enjoying quite as much before. So in twenty ten, you have this factory.

It's in a city close to Guangzhou in southern China, wholly owned by Honda, just producing transmissions, and it's in

the city of nan High and a strike happened. It was just organized a small group of workers from Hunan Province who had trust with each other, and they stopped working in the transmission assembly workshop of the transmission plant, and very quickly thereafter the other workshops had to stop because of this kind of just in time production, and so they couldn't proceed, and within a matter of days, Honda's entire supply chain within China was shut down and

the company was losing I think tens of millions of dollars every day, So it had a huge national and international impact. And the thing that was really interesting, there's a number of things that were really interesting about this.

The first was that workers were very militant and they were very insistent, not just on having the laws implemented, but they were demanding to have a wage increase above and beyond what they were legally entitled to, which was something of a departure from the dynamics of labor unrest that we had seen previously. Right, workers are on the offensive, but they weren't just demanding economic gains. They were also

demanding unionization. They didn't like the union officers that existed there, and they wanted to be able to directly elect their own union representatives. That showed a kind of higher level of political consciousness that was beginning to develop at the time. They also had At this point, it was kind of the most developed that Chinese civil society was, and so there was support from NGOs in the area as well as kind of pro labor a student and academics who

were in the area. And it's worth noting that at following previous patterns, the union organized directly against them, and in fact, the union organized a bunch of thugs to go and try and break the strike. So it was a very, very kind of nasty, but the workers want They got a huge wage increase, they were promised that

they'd be able to elect their own union representatives. Ultimately that that ended with a lot of frustration, but a process was initiated, and they did so with support from the much from the provincial level of the union federation, who saw this as maybe an example that they could use to begin to develop some sort of system of more regularized labor relations. The other thing that happened is

it got a lot of coverage. Chinese media was also more open at the time, and there was a strike wave in the auto industry, and you had many other plants in the region and around the country that were going on strike at that period of time, and all of them basically were winning big wage increases. That was the moment that Kevin and I were very involved in a lot of the activism that was happening there, and

I think was the most optimistic period. Very shortly thereafter, you begin to see growing repression and less willingness to compromise, both on the part of state and capital.

Could you maybe just give a brief explanation of what you mean by social reproduction and what its crisis in China actually looks like.

to spend time with your family. Whoever you might care for and love and to be able to live a kind of a dignified and meaningful life. And again, this is a process that happens on kind of a daily basis, but also intergenerationally between parents and children. And China's experiencing a severe crisis of social reproduction. It's one again to come back to a theme that we've touched on several

times already. It's one that very closely mirrors things that are happening in lots of other countries, and I think it's another opportunity to kind of de exceptionalize China. The headline number that you can use to kind of understand this crisis of social reproduction is the falling fertility rates. And if you look at fertility rates in China over the last forty years, they have dropped, and they've dropped

really precipitously just in the last few years. Now. People might know about the so called one child policy that was enacted for the eighties nineties into the twenty tens, and of course that somewhat you know, artificially depressed the fertility rate, and there was a lot of human rights violations that came along with that, forced abortions for civilizations

and things of that nature. But one of the things that I think is really surprised demographers but also really surprised the state, is that once they've lifted in essence, they've ended that there's now nominally a three child policy, but you can have as many kids as you want. Actually, the fertility rate has continued to crater right, and so now it's right around one, which means that it is

lower than It's much lower than the United States. It's lower than most of Western Europe, although I believe Southern European countries Italy, Spain might be a little bit lower. And it's in league with the place that have the lowest fertility rates in the world, places like Taiwan, South Korea. It's lower than Japan now, I believe. And this is just kind of an indicator, right about how people are feeling about bringing children into the world. And there's a

lot of reasons that people are anxious about it. And some of it may be the political instability, some of it may be climate change, but there's other explanations which are basically it is very hard to bring children into the world because all the things that you need to survive,

including critically housing, education, health care. Those are the big ones, but also we should include elder care in there have become much much more difficult for Chinese people to organize as they have been marketized, as the cost has increased a really dramatically, and you know, with respect to the question of elder care, China is now a rapidly aging society.

So if you are a single person of childbearing Asian, your your twenties, thirties, whatever, and you're thinking about having a child, well, first of all, you have to think about taking care of your aging parents. And there is definitely not adequate facilities for elder care in China, which again doesn't make it at all exceptional in the world.

And as the costs for all these other things have gone up, that's going to really give you pop. Now it's really important to note, of course, the gender dynamics of this, because the expectation in China, as an all patriarchal societies, is that women are going to take on all of the labor or almost all of the labor that's associated with social reproduction, with caring for children, with caring for older people, etc. And one of the things

that that makes trein actually pretty exceptional is that, in contrast to global trends, the gender pay gap between men and women has actually been getting bigger in China over the last forty years.

capitalist countries. One of the ways that they've tried to resolve this, and here you can see that it's not just a kind of a gender form of gender oppression, but there's other forms of social hierarchy involved, is by trying to push those costs of social reproduction specifically onto

rural women. How does that work well, is you can see the fiscal reorganization of the state, which has really undermined the basis of social reproduction and rural areas and created this big urban bias, right so that people so that women in rural areas and especially grandparents in rural areas have to take on a disproportionate share of child rearing while the young, younger people are out working in

the cities. And so you have a kind of reorganization of the family structure in rural areas where it's almost the norm in many places to have grandparents looking after children while the parents are way that's hard work, especially you're going to do your sixties, seventies and even eighties. It's hard work to look after children. And then the other way that it works is by bringing domestic workers

into relatively well off urban households. And the domestic workers, in contrast to most places in the world, are not sourced from elsewhere in the Global South. Y're sourced from rural China, right, So almost all of the domestic workers nannies, etc. Come from rural China to urban China, and they are paid substandard wages to essentially make the lives of urban

women somewhat easier. It's not to say that urban women themselves don't face all kinds of struggles, but that's the way they've tried to balance it, and it hasn't worked right because, you know, some people think about it as

like a reproductive strike. Women are not willing to have children, and this has created great anxiety on the part of the country's patriarchs in the Communist Party this past year over the lunar New Year holiday, the government announced that they were putting a ban on sort of online discussion that was opposed to marriage or opposed to childbirth, basically telling people no, no, no, like it's you know, it's your patriotic duty to get married and to have children,

but it is not working so far. Yeah.

kind of right across the West. It's quite striking, and I wonder if as part of that de exceptionalizing China that we've talked about, maybe there are other kind of parallels, things like I think you talk about restrictions on abortion, restrictions on LGBTQ rights, and actually this experience of migrant women workers as kind of domestic help, you know, which is kind of famous in you know, the sort of the big wealthy cities London or New York, Paris and

things like that, where often it would be women from like you said, from the global South who come to do this work. In China, it's women from rural China. Again, it really feels like there are these really strong parallels of the gender regime of China with a lot of Western countries. Does that feel fair or is that like a fair comparison?

what is the hinterland that they can draw on. Well, if you're in Los Angeles, your hinterland is Mexico or the Philippines, right, And you bring in domestic workers, you bring in nannies, you bring in elder care workers, you bring in nurses from those places at depressed wages. Sociologists talk about these care chains, right, which is to try to understand that the global dynamics of this, if those people are coming from the Philippines or from Mexico or

from elsewhere in Latin America to Los Angeles. That means that they're leaving behind their own care responsibilities in their own country, right, which means it's similar to chrya. Oftentimes you know elder people, you know grandparents that have to look after kids, and of course there's the emotional cost of being away from your children for you know, key

years of their development which cannot be quantified. So in that sense, I think we just have to think about these these kind of global cities and what their hinter lends are, and in China, I think for people outside of the country can sometimes be hard to understand the way that the Chinese countryside functions as that hinterland, and that there are similar kinds of restrictions even in terms of citizenship as institutionalized through the household registration system that

they call Huko. It's very similar to the way that I think global cities in western countries will draw on different kinds of hinterlands in the global South. With respect to the question of LGBTQ and kind of queer rights within China today, you know, to me, there's just so much overlap with what the right wing extremists in Western countries are trying to accomplish and what China already has accomplished in a sense, right like Donald Trump just wants

to get up to the speed that China's already at. Right, And I think that there's a way in which the right feels like in Western countries feels like they've missed the boat. You know, we already have gay marriage, and now they have to attack trans people to make sure that they don't kind of lose out on that and that they don't lose the next generation. I think, you know, in China, there's no gay marriage. There's not going to

be gay marriage anytime soon. I can guarantee you that there's been a concerted attack on queer groups, even very mild ones, you know, these kind of like student groups that are there to provide emotional support for people. You know, coming out is very difficult in China, as in all contacts,

those kinds of groups have been under attack. And you know, to say nothing of trans rights, like that's not even remotely part of a discussion in China, because I think people understand that it's not possible, and with this increased hysteria, really about the following following fertility rate. Of course, it is disproportionately following falling on women and CIS women, because

that's just numerically a larger people. But there's no question that it is also enhancing discrimination against queer people, against trans people, because they're not going to be reproducing in the way that the state demands of them. And if that is your kind of overriding political aim, then it's going to have those very clear and kind of heteronormative consequences. You know. The last point on abortion, because this in

China is a huge, huge issue. Of course, I already mentioned the one child policy and the forced abortions and things like that. There was I think some fear for a while that they were going to flip in the other direction because there is this kind of like extreme polarization and how the Chinese state has approached a childbirth. You know, from the late nineteen seventies on, they're basically saying, we have you know, we have too many people. We

really really have to restrain it. And they're saying that up until whatever it was in the mid twenty tens, and then they're saying, wow, we don't have enough people. We got to force everyone to have more children, and so people thinking that rather than making abortion widely available and sometimes coercive, that they were going to go in the other direction and say, no, you're not going to

be allowed to have an abortion. And you know, there were some statements from the state based saying well, you know, we shouldn't be doing abortion if it's not medically necessary, and you know, doctors maybe trying to kind of counsel women out of having abortions if they don't deem it to be medically necessary. So far, we haven't seen evidence that there are intensive restrictions on abortions, and that's a good thing, but I do think that it's something to watch out for for sure.

in Beijing. This was a big event. Famously, Clinton went there, and you know, there's things to be I think dismissive of,

certainly with Hillary Clinton and with the UN. But one of the things that a lot of feminists say in China is that this really brought attention and gave legitimacy to women's rights as a kind of a distinct issue and an issue that couldn't just be left alone to the al China Women's Federation, which is the kind of the official body for representing women's interests, and its problematic

in all sorts of ways. So after nineteen ninety five, you actually do see the growth of a kind of civil society organizations working on different kinds of women's rights issues, and that is a really important foundation for the things

that came afterwards. We begin to see some more to me and to many of my comrades, more interesting organizing that happened in the twenty tens at the same time that this kind of more interesting labor organizing was happening in In fact, a lot of times there's a lot of overlap between the people and the labor and the feminist world, not coincidentally, and there was a famous event in twenty fifteen where you had a bunch of feminists who were organizing against domestic abuse, and they were doing

some campaigning that I think is liberal democracy would seem pretty tame. They were going out into public and distributing information about domestic violence, really doing the important cultural work to let people know, here's what domestic violence is and here's why it's a problem. Right, And the state decided

to crack down on that very hardly. And I think that the reason that they did that was not even so much that they couldn't bear to have any kind of discussion about domestic violence, but because it demonstrated that they had organized kind of at the national level, because there was women in multiple places around the country who were taking similar kinds of action at precisely at the same time. So it was the kind of the existence of an organizing network that the state could not tolerate.