Labour protest in China’s private sector: responses to Chinese communism with capitalist characteristics

Abstract

Building on existing studies of worker activism in formerly communist states, this paper examines the context, nature and consequences of labour protest in China’s private sector – highlighting the specific features that have emerged from China’s unique ‘communist’ political regime and partially privatized economy. As private enterprises have grown in China, private sector worker protests have been common. Three key factors have shaped this activism: (i) a disjuncture between benevolent and protective national laws and the lived experience of workers; (ii) fluctuations in the labour market; and (iii) generational shifts and learning among workers, employers and political authorities. The interplay of these factors has led protesting private sector workers to focus their ire on their employers and on occasion local political authorities, while viewing national political leaders as sources of worker support. These dynamics have had both positive and negative consequences for private sector workers and political authorities. Making comparisons with other authoritarian and communist states, this study adds to current understandings of how specific economic and political configurations engender particular characteristics of labour activism – and how these change over time.     

A note on ‘Labour value and socialist economic calculation’

Cockshott and Cottrell have reopened a debate which has been engaged with vigour in the past, but, as they rightly point out, needs to be reassessed in the light of current technology. They describe their ideas as being ‘work in progress’, and this note attempts to retain this spirit. While differing on technical matters, it emphasises the need for such a reassessment and discusses some further possibilities.

A number of different issues are addressed in their paper: these include the use of labour values as a tool in economic planning and the computational feasibility of such a process. Formal definitions are given using a computer orientated notation.¹ This note separates the issue of the impact of increasing computing power on the feasibility and desirability of computing a central plan from the issue of using Marxian labour values as a method of calculation.

Much of what Cockshott and Cottrell say is related to a wide body of literature in mainstream economics, but whose mathematical nature has given it a restricted circulation.² For instance the problem of decomposing the input-output matrix, and the problems of designing a system which clearly sets up the information which would pass from central planners to decentralised decision makers. Cockshott and Cottrell also deal at length with the specific point of using market price/labour value (cost) as an indicator in deciding which lines of production to expand or contract. This fits into a tradition which offers a number of possibilities for deciding which criteria to use.     

Aid curse with Chinese characteristics? Chinese development flows and economic reforms

Public Choice - The emergence of China as a major development partner requires a reassessment of traditional donor–recipient dynamics. In addition to adopting new rhetoric like...     

Paul Hirst’s encounters with Economy and Society

Abstract

This article examines the construction of the homo economicus in Argentina in the context of the last military dictatorship (1976–83). While the worldviews of the military and neo-liberal economists of the time were very different, their common concern for distortions in economic and political life made them translatable. These economists provided a new economic identity that would be in tune with monetarist theory, replace ‘distorting’ collective identities and allow individuals to be governed from a distance. I argue that the homo economicus was performed through two sets of tools: consumer campaigns and the financial press. However, individuals did not always behave as expected. The contradictions of neo-liberalism, between its liberalism and its quest to create self-regulating spheres through active government intervention, led to the financial crisis of 1980. Economists later blamed the crash on the irresponsibility of market actors and expressed doubt regarding the self-regulating model they had promoted. In the conclusion, the legacy of the attempt to perform the homo economicus is assessed.     

International development institutions and national ­economic contexts: neo-liberalism encounters India’s indigenous political traditions

Drawing on the case of India, which since 1991 has been undergoing a far-reaching programme of market-oriented reform, this paper argues that the World Bank and other transnational development actors have been unable to adjust themselves ­sufficiently to indigenous ideological traditions that affect the sustainability of economic liberalization. While markets are becoming increasingly embedded at the level of institutions, they are not achieving what might be termed ‘ideological embeddedness’. The paper maps the ideological context facing market reformers in India by looking at the relationship between, on the one hand, the idea of swadeshi (an indigenous form of economic nationalism), and on the other, three competing forces in Indian politics. The paper concludes by arguing that it is the mutual antipathy among these political forces, rather than any fundamental incompatibility between swadeshi’s precepts and the embedded-market framework, that prevents organizations like the World Bank from adapting swadeshi as an indigenous basis for framing its approach to market embeddedness.     

Do social policy reforms have different impacts on employment and welfare use as economic conditions change?

This paper uses March Current Population Survey data from 1985 to 2004 to explore whether social policy reforms implemented throughout the 1990s have different impacts on employment and welfare use depending on economic conditions, a topic with important policy implications but which has received little attention from researchers. I find evidence that many reforms operate differently as labor market conditions fluctuate. Although social policies increase employment during economic slowdowns, the largest effects are generated in favorable labor market conditions. The impact of time limits, mandatory job search, and cash diversion programs are particularly sensitive to the macroeconomy, while the earned income tax credit is associated with similar employment effects in most environments. The results vary substantially across policy “carrots” and “sticks,” levels of work intensity, and subsamples of single mothers, but a tentative conclusion is that a strong economy reinforces the positive incentives created by social policy reforms. © 2008 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Spatial egalitarianism as a social ‘counter-movement’: on socio-economic reforms in Chongqing

Abstract

Through a framework drawn from Karl Polanyi's substantivist theorization of economic practices, this paper evaluates the quest for equitable urbanization in Chongqing, a major city-region in south-western China. Illuminating the tensions arising from two interrelated reforms, namely the ambitious attempt to construct 40 million m² of public rental housing between 2010 and 2012, and the large-scale drive to ensure peasant migrants enjoy equal access to social benefits as current urban residents, the paper explains how the quest for equitable urbanization magnifies two nationwide dimensions of institutionalized uneven development, namely (i) the caste-like categorization of populations according to ‘urban’ and ‘rural’; and (ii) the coastal bias in national economic development. The paper concludes that this state-driven pursuit of spatial egalitarianism in Chongqing expresses the dialecticism of economic development in China: it is a social ‘counter-movement’ against the effects of an uneven spatiality that was instituted to drive and deepen the marketization of Chinese society.     

Immigrant parents’ everyday encounters with exclusion and public space mobilities: ‘Some type of force field’

This paper explores everyday feelings of exclusion experienced by Western immigrant parents of preschool aged children in public park playgrounds in Tokyo. These parental feelings of exclusion and unbelonging arose from negative encounters with the majority population where children's visible bodily differences led to unintegrated play. The paper argues that this sense of exclusion is socially problematic as immigrant parents feel negative emotions when using public playgrounds, turn away from local public space mobilities towards online play dates with their countries of origin, and focus more on private home centred play through a style of self-segregation as coping techniques.     

A Reply to ‘Labour and Antisemitism: A Crisis Misunderstood’

In their 2020 Political Quarterly article ‘Labour and antisemitism: a crisis misunderstood’, Gidley, McGeever and Feldman argue that the Labour Party’s responses to its antisemitism crisis have been misguided because its understanding of antisemitism is wrong. We must look less at cases of individual antisemites and more at the ‘reservoir of stereotypes and narratives’, in which the long (but unacknowledged) history of left antisemitism has deposited its ideas—and from which they can be easily retrieved. This response challenges the reservoir concept as ahistorical, and culturally adrift, lacking the components necessary for cultural understanding—of being rooted, contextualised, complex and contradictory, evolving and regressing, but always home to inconsistent, yet coexisting, ideas and prejudices. The authors simply ignore the political dynamics of this crisis which have allowed antisemitism to be weaponised and made it all but impossible to have a calm, serious, rigorous reflection and public debate about antisemitism, and about Israel/Palestine. Such a debate is long overdue.     

Between social and organic norms: reading Canguilhem and ‘somatization’

Contemporary accounts of somatization tend to imply that the 'biological' and the 'social' are competing and mutually contradictory epistemological perspectives. This situation ismirrored by the alternative between biomedical objectivism and sociological relativism in accounting for the reality (or, indeed, the non-reality) of this phenomenon as a pathological condition. This paper reads the debate on somatization through Canguilhem's writings. Cnaguilhem's vitalism sees the 'social' and the 'organic' as perspectives pertinent to the living subject, before and beyond being perspectives of the subject of knowledge. As such, they do not represent mutually exclusive choices but rather norms that interact in and through their difference, bearing on the quality of life as healthy or pathological. On this basis, the paper offers an account of how the reality of somatization might be envisaged so as to avoid the implications of both positivism and relativism.     

Japan's ‘green’ economic diplomacy: environmental and energy technology and foreign relations

The principal regional organizations in East Asia and Asia-Pacific, ASEAN and APEC, are widely seen to be crisis-stricken, ‘becalmed’ or ‘adrift’. At the same time, East Asia is witnessing the emergence of a new, as yet embryonic body, ASEAN Plus Three (APT), and ambitious projects implying closer integration between Northeast and Southeast Asia are being mooted. Departing from an analysis of the determinants of the success and failure of regional integration, this article discusses the roots of the perceived decline of ASEAN and APEC and the origins of the rapid rise of APT. The Asian financial crisis in particular, it is argued, has been instrumental both in undermining ASEAN and APEC and in fostering the rise of APT. The crisis has brutally exposed the structural weaknesses of ASEAN and APEC, both of which are handicapped by the political and economic diversity of their member states and the absence of a benevolent dominant state or coalition of states. It has simultaneously fuelled the development of APT because it has greatly strengthened perceptions of mutual economic interdependence and vulnerability in East Asia and resentment against the West and the US. As APT is likely to exhibit similar structural weaknesses to ASEAN and APEC, the odds, however, are against it developing into a strong regional organization, notwithstanding the possibility that, in the near future, external forces and trends (stagnation of world trade liberalization, closer European and American integration) will, if anything, encourage plans for closer East Asian integration.     

‘Appointment with history’: The referenda on the Stormont peace agreement,May 1998

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Democracy, East and West. By Howard P. Kainz. London: Macmillan, 1984. Pp. 152. £20.

Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? Edited by Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan and Paul Allen Beck. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp.xvi + 513. £59.20 (hardback), £12.60 (paperback).

The Place of Ideology in Political Life. By D.J. Manning and T.J. Robinson. London: Croom and Helm, 1985. Pp. 128. £17.95 (hardback).

Against Socialist Illusion: A Radical Argument. By David Selbourne. London: Macmillan, 1985. Pp. vii + 327. £25 (hardback), £8.95 (paperback).

Socialism, The State and Public Policy in France. Edited by Philip G. Cerny and Martin A. Schain. London: Frances Pinter, 1985. Pp. vi + 298. £17.50 (hardback).

Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Politik unter bürgerlichen und sozialdemokratischen Regierungen: ein internationaler Vergleich. By Manfred G. Schmidt. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1982. Pp. 258. DM 45.00 (paperback).

Vom Armenhaus zum Wohlfahrtsstaat: Analysen zur Entwicklungder Sozialversiche‐rungin Westeuropa. By Jens Alber. Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 1982. Pp. 280. DM 45.00 (paperback).

Western Europe and Japan Between the Superpowers. By Wolf Mendl. London: Croom Helm 1984. Pp. 181. £15.95.

Economic Summits and Western Decision‐making. Edited by Cesare Merlini. London: Croom Helm, in association with EIPA, 1984. Pp. 212. £15.95.

From Dictatorship to Democracy. Coping with the Legacies of Authoritarianism and Totalitarianism. Edited by John H. Herz. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982. Pp. xii + 311.

Die Neue Freiheit: 1945–1961. By Erich Mende. Munich and Berlin: Herbig, 1984. Pp. 491. DM 44.

West German Lay Judges: Recruitment and Representativeness. By John P. Richert. Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983. Pp. ix + 223. $19.00 (hardback).

The Politics of Public Enterprise: Oil and the French State. By Harvey B. Feigenbaum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Pp. 194. £26.90 (hardback) £7.40 (paperback).

The View From Inside: A French Communist Cell in Crisis. By JANE Jenson and George Ross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pp. x + 346 (no index or bibliography). £29.95 (hardback).

Industrial Policy and the Motor Industry. By Stephen Wilks. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Pp. xviii + 318. £18.95.

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No Pope of Rome: Militant Protestantism in Modem Scotland. By Steve Bruce. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing Co., 1985. Pp. 270. £12.95 (hardback).

Socialism and Abundance. Radical Socialism in the Danish Welfare State. By John Logue. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Pp. XX11 + 353. $35.     

UK Labour and the EU Single Market: ‘Social Europe’ or ‘Capitalist Club’?

This article looks at the UK Labour Party’s view of the EU single market over the last four decades, focussing on three case study periods when this issue was particularly salient: first, the time of the single market’s introduction under Neil Kinnock’s leadership; second, the A8 accession with Tony Blair as Labour Prime Minister; and third, between the 2016 European referendum and 2019 general election during Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader. This historical narrative uses the theoretical approach of Harvard economist Dani Rodrik—of a ‘trilemma’ faced by national policy makers in response to globalisation—as a lens to describe a clear arc in Labour’s policy towards the single market across the three case studies. A position of initial scepticism moved to support under Kinnock’s leadership, and then active encouragement under Blair, before coming back again under Corbyn to uncomfortable non-commitment. This arc directly correlates with the ebb and flow of the party’s overall economic approach—first the Keynesian, national Alternative Economic Strategy at the time of the party’s 1983 general election defeat; then, the deviation under Blair to a policy that actively encouraged cross-border market liberalisation; and finally the return to an Alternative Economic Strategy-style approach under Corbyn.     

“That’s not how it works”: economic indicators and the construction of partisan economic narratives

This study examines the processes through which partisans update their (biased) economic judgments during periods of mixed and asymmetric economic performance. I show evidence that citizens express relatively unbiased perceptions of the movement of the stock market, suggesting that partisans do not engage in processes of motivated reasoning when reporting judgments of widely available economic data. Instead, partisans respond to fluctuations in stock market performance by revising their assumptions about the way the economy works: in response to positive or negative developments, the stock market is perceived to be more or less important for the health of the broader US economy depending upon Americans’ partisan worldviews. This form of biased narrative construction has substantial importance in light of a “two-speed” post-Great Recession economy.     

Gendering the ‘responsible risk taker’: citizenship relationships with gender-neutral social assistance policy

This paper explores the gendered relationships among reforms to social assistance policy, concurrent transformations in citizenship rights to benefits, and low-income parents' experiences of these changes in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Policy discourse in all three provinces increasingly constructs mothers and fathers as ‘responsible risk takers’ who are entitled to income support conditional on their employability efforts (for example, attendance in welfare-to-work programmes) or market citizenship. Qualitative interviews with 41 mothers and five fathers illustrate how this ‘gender-neutral worker-citizen’ model can be gendered in application and is contradicted by parents' gendered identities and everyday realities when living on social assistance. Using the theoretical perspective of gender as a social structure, the paper draws upon these findings to provide empirical support for a dominant theoretical argument in feminist scholarship – that gender-neutral policy is gendered and has deeply gendered consequences.     

Social media as semiotic technology and social practice: the case of ResearchGate’s design and its potential to transform social practice

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the need for critical approaches to social media by bridging the focus on language and other semiotic resources that characterises discourse studies with the broader perspective on social media as social, cultural, economic and technological constructs that dominates media and cultural studies. Specifically, we propose a model for analysing how social media as semiotic technologies, that is, technologies designed to enable and constrain meaning-making, may transform social practices. By incorporating Van Leeuwen’s [2008. Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis. London: Oxford University Press] framework for the critical analysis of discourse and social practice, the model extends the social semiotic approach developed in recent critical multimodal studies of software such as PowerPoint to social media, which function primarily to provide platforms for and commodify social practices, rather than to offer rich arrays of semiotic resources for creating multimodal texts and artefacts. Using the academic social network site ResearchGate and the practice of research peer review, we illustrate the model’s capacity to account for the ways the design of social media platforms – through the semiotic resources they make available and the ways these are presented – enables and constrains their users’ ability to perform key social practices and has the potential to transform these practices.     

The Franco‐German relationship and economic and monetary union: Using Europe to ‘Bind Leviathan’

This article explores the interaction between the institutional, strategic and cognitive dimensions of the Franco‐German relationship on Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). It begins by spelling out its institutional setting and its context of structural power. These sections highlight the main informal rules that have shaped the relationship and help explain the choice of negotiating strategies to reconcile their objectives and secure influence on the design and content of EMU. The next section focuses on the cognitive dimension of the relationship, identifying the nature of Franco‐German objectives, their basis in differences of inherited beliefs and problems in reconciling them. In the final section the nature of the political theory underpinning EMU is clarified and explained and the kind of challenge that it poses for French policy makers as it tests the limits of the republican state tradition. More broadly, EMU is an attempt to redefine the relationship between state and Europe and state and society, bringing with it new political meanings.     

The social order of Chinese capitalism: socio-economic uncertainty,communist party rule and economic development, 1990–2000

China's financially repressed economy remains characterized by a distinctly resilient political structure (the Chinese Communist Party, CCP) that penetrates both increasingly rational ‘private’ (market) and ‘public’ (state) organizations. How are we to understand the financial system's role in this persistently illiberal yet marketizing political economy? This paper develops a theory of China's financial reform as the management of socio-economic uncertainty by the CCP. Since the early 1990s, the financial system has formed a locus of the CCP's capacity both to manage and to propagate socio-economic uncertainty through the path of reform. The unique path of financial reform in China should thus not be viewed solely in terms of ‘partial’ or ‘failed’ free-market reform, but rather as the product of a more concerted vision of how the financial system enabled a mode of economic growth that combined the drive for accumulation of capital with the distinctive legacies of China's post-1989 socio-political circumstances.     

‘Who were those People?’: The Labour Party and the Invisibility of the Working Class

Labour’s historic cross-class alliance of ‘workers by hand and by brain’ has endured a hundred years, but it has never looked so vulnerable as today. Brexit, in particular, has spectacularly exposed—and widened—a crack in the alliance. On opposite sides of the argument sits a high proportion of the Labour party’s working-class supporters (the so-called ‘left behinds’) and the liberal and relatively affluent middle classes (the so-called ‘metropolitan elites’). Much of the traction in the Brexit debate was, and still is, achieved through ‘identity politics’. But where the question of class is concerned, this is not as new as it can sometimes seem. No one used the term ‘identity politics’ in the early twentieth century, but Labour representation, from the very start, had an important psychological dimension to it. It exploited a formidable and tenacious working class desire ‘to be counted’ and not be pushed into the shadows of public life. The notions of respect and humiliation (or outraged respect) continued to provide vital sources of fuel in the growth of the Labour Party for the next fifty years, and beyond. If the party is to have a future, it will need to get to grips with the feeling of many of its traditional supporters that they do not count anymore. And to better understand that feeling, it could look with profit to its own past for guidance.