Dear Colleagues
I am glad to announce the publication of the latest issue of Made in China, our open access quarterly on Chinese labour and civil society. 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:
Anybody Out There? The Chinese Labour Movement under Xi
Labour activism has undergone significant transformation in China over the last decade. Between the mid-2000s and mid-2010s, an increase in labour protests seemed to herald a growing and more self-confident labour movement. A series of high-profile collective actions that took place in 2010—in particular a strike at a Honda auto parts factory in Foshan in 2010—brought forward a time of renewed optimism, during which the public debate on Chinese labour came to be dominated by the idea of China’s workers ‘awakening’ and taking their fate into their own hands. This new narrative was largely focussed on the so-called ‘new generation of migrant workers’, presented in much of the academic literature and public debate as the engine of the new wave of worker struggle. Far from the optimism of those years, today the effects of economic slowdown and the tightening of civil society have thrown China’s workers into a state of uncertainty and disorientation, and the Chinese labour movement has once again found itself at an impasse.
This issue of Made in China offers a series of essays that aim at assessing and understanding the current conjuncture. In Changes and Continuity, Chris King-Chi Chan offers a retrospective of the development of industrial relations in China over the past four decades. In China’s Labour Movement in Transition, Geoffrey Crothall analyses the latest trends in Chinese labour unrest. In Gongyou, the New Dangerous Class in China?, Yu Chunsen looks into the discourses that Chinese migrant workers use to define their shared identity, probing the possibility of them becoming the foundation of a new class consciousness. In Reconfiguring Supply Chains, Nellie Chu shows how infrastructure projects that link China’s interior and coastal manufacturing regions have intensified key aspects of the country’s informal economy. In The Struggles of Temporary Agency Workers in Xi’s China, Zhang Lu tracks the activism of dispatch workers in Chinese auto factories, examining the potential for this group to successfully bargain for their rights. In ‘Robot Threat’ or ‘Robot Dividend’?, Huang Yu considers the possible consequences of automation and robotisation on employment and labour activism in China. Finally, in A ‘Pessoptimistic’ View of Chinese Labour NGOs, Ivan Franceschini and Kevin Lin revisit the debate on labour NGOs in China, offering their own reading of the current situation.
In the op-ed section, we include two pieces, one by Kevin Carrico about academic self-censorship and another by Sarah Brooks on the efforts of the Chinese authorities to influence international discourses and practices of human rights. The cultural section comprises two essays. In We the Workers, producer Zeng Jinyan and director Huang Wenhai discuss their latest documentary about labour NGOs and worker struggles in China. In The Last Days of Shi Yang, Ivan Franceschini presents a fictionalised account of a revolutionary martyr of the 1920s—a lawyer that played an important role in the labour struggles of those years. We conclude the issue with a new Conversations section, in which we feature interviews with the authors of two recently released books: Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui’s Hegemonic Transformation and Carl Minzner’s End of an Era.
The Editors
Ivan Franceschini (ivan.franceschini@anu.edu.au), Nicholas Loubere, and Kevin Lin