Dear Colleagues
I am glad to announce the publication of the latest issue of Made in China, the open access quarterly on Chinese labour and civil society supported by the Australian Centre on China in the World, the Australian National University. You can download the pdf for free and subscribe at this link: http://www.chinoiresie.info/made-in-china-quarterly/. Below you can find the editorial of the new issue:
Balancing Acts: Precarious Labour in Contemporary China
On 19 November, a fire broke out in a popular housing block inhabited mostly by migrant workers in Beijing’s Daxing district, killing nineteen. Citing the need to ensure safety, in a matter of days the local authorities forced tens of thousands of ‘low-end people’ (diduan renkou) to abandon their dwellings in the suburbs of the Chinese capital, showing absolutely no regard for their livelihoods. Families who had moved from all over China—and had, in some cases, lived in Beijing for years—were effectively thrown out on the street and left to their own fate in the freezing northern winter. In just a few days they lost everything, a cruel reminder of the precarity inherent to the life of the Chinese migrant.
This issue of Made in China includes a series of essays that examine different declinations of precarity. We open the thematic section with two essays that frame precarity in general terms. In A Genealogy of Precarity and Its Ambivalence, Coin presents a brief conceptual history of precarity, focussing on the evolution of precarious labour over the past three decades. In Work Precarisation and New Inequalities, Perocco looks at the vicious circle that links precarity and migration. Shifting our attention to China, in Class and Precarity in China, Smith and Pun question the nexus between these two concepts, demonstrating that the boundary between regular and non-regular work is far from static. In From Dormitory Regime to Conciliatory Despotism, Siu probes the new social, technical, and gendered divisions of labour inside Chinese garment factories. In The Precarity of Layoffs and State Compensation, Solinger looks into the policy processes that have led to the emergence of urban poverty in China and at the prospect of poverty alleviation. Finally, in How China’s Environmental Crackdown Is Affecting Business Owners and Workers, Fuchs and Schmitt describe the human consequence of China’s intensified environmental crackdown in Chengdu.
This issue also includes two essays on Chinese society. In Migrants, Mass Arrest, and Resistance in Contemporary China, Ma considers how migrants are commonly perceived as criminals in China and assesses how this bias is reflected in mechanisms of crime control, as well as in the judicial and correctional systems. In Counting Contention, Elfstrom explains why it is so difficult to find accurate data about strikes in China. The Window on Asia section features two pieces. In the first, Boom or Bust in China’s Jade Trade with Myanmar?, Møller outlines the history of commercial exchanges of jade between China and its southern neighbour, and gauges the impact of the recent anti-corruption drive on this market. In the second, In the Absence of a Peasantry, What, Then, is a Hong Kong Farmer?, Lou ponders the reasons for, and implications of, the absence of a discourse about peasantry in the former British colony.
The cultural section comprises three essays. In Industrial Landscapes of Socialist Realism, Smith surveys the fate of a very peculiar form or socialist art in China and North Korea; in Datong, Forever in Limbo, Kinkel reviews The Chinese Mayor, a documentary about a politician and a very ambitious plan; finally, in Resurrecting the Dead, Franceschini ponders the contemporary relevance of Old Tales Retold, Lu Xun’s final oeuvre of fiction. We conclude by interviewing Ching Kwan Lee about her new book on Chinese labour in Africa, The Specter of Global China.
This journal is hosted by the website Chinoiresie.info. If you would like to receive this journal regularly by email, please consider subscribing to our mailing list.
The Editors
Ivan Franceschini (ivan.franceschini@anu.edu.au) and Nicholas Loubere