Some guy named Vladimir Lenin once said: “The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.”
In China it’s safe to say that from where I’m standing they’re not quite there yet.
My usual disclaimer on these pieces – my Chinese is very so-so, I’m no expert in anything, and I was probably drunk when I wrote most of this. But I live here, and I thought I might elaborate a little on my feelings about Xi’s China – and a problem I have with it.
I remember a few years back when I was talking to the girlfriend about the Jasic industrial action controversy, which had been publicised widely in the foreign press – a strike at a Shenzhen factory, one of the many which boiled over in Guangdong province every other day, had become slightly more serious with the involvement of members of Peking University’s Marxist Society (and other student groups across the country). These students, being young Marxists, had quite naively but understandably enough, thought that to support workers’ actions against capitalist exploitation would be a good thing to do. They had, along with leftist veterans from the Hu-era Maoist website Utopia, travelled down to Shenzhen in order to support the striking workers, whose had been attempting to form a trade union. The idealistic students were detained and arrested for their troubles and the strike, as with so many others, was quashed by police in the service of the irate management and local government. And so we come to the beginning of a very interesting time in modern Chinese history.
The decline of NGOs and the fear of ‘colour revolutions’ and subversive outside influence are two features of Xi’s China that have been well-documented. I saw a Beijing propaganda comic a few years back where a government employee was seduced by a foreign spy, who stole secret documents from her and disappeared, landing her in prison (I promised the girlfriend I wasn’t a spy after that, fingers crossed and all). It’s everywhere – not entirely unjustifiably, China’s government is always on edge.
Usually this is approached as a wholesale Bad Thing, but being a communist and a keen observer of Eastern Bloc history, the idea that foreign influence in seemingly innocuous social and economic policy areas such as workers’ rights, women’s rights and so on, can turn toxic and upend socialist governments in favour of liberal-democratic ones that, once safely established, then institute ‘Washington consensus’ privatisation isn’t an absurd one. I understand why the government of China would want to reign in the pseudo-colonial free-for-all of the Hu Jintao era, where NGOs and local governments in collusion with business took over many abdicated government functions across that particular half-failed-state patchwork. And it is good that the Chinese state wants to take its responsibilities seriously again, as seen in sincere and (hopefully) effective poverty reduction actions that should rightfully be seen as one of Xi’s major policies, alongside the usual ‘crackdown and ideology’ stuff that forms most foreign understanding of the ‘Xi era’. But a major issue here is being sidestepped by this focus on simply moving poor families into nice houses and giving them cash; In this case that would be one of the most glaring contradictions of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which is that, if socialism is supposed to be run by the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the workers and by the workers, that for the vast majority of Chinese wage-labourers languishing in the semi-private sector it probably doesn’t feel much like socialism at all.
The main cause of this isn’t specifically Xi Jinping, to be fair, but prior figures – in this case, one part of this is down to Deng Xiaoping’s reform and opening up and the use of the Mao-era “household registration” system to create a two-track society, consisting first of local people properly registered in an urban area and then of those otherwise, the floating class of urban-dwelling but rurally-registered migrant workers who, without the benefits of a local household registration, have worked for decades now in dismal conditions in factories in coastal areas like Guangdong, becoming the engine used to power the rest of the country’ s development, which by the 2000s had evolved into the low-welfare pro-market ‘Guangdong Model’ of Party boss Wang Yang (now a Politburo Standing Committee member).
This is tied into the second cause, which is best epitomised by the work of professional Halloween ghoul Zhu Rongji, of the nineties Jiang Zemin government. Now, privatisation in China was not actually that – it wasn’t, as is sometimes depicted, a mass sell-off of state assets to the capitalist class, or at least not without major terms and conditions. The official term was “grasp the large, let go of the small”, as clunky a translation as you could imagine; basically, the majority of ‘large’ state assets were to be reorganised and on paper sold off but in practice still state-controlled, reformed into profit-making, business-minded corporations, and retained close to the government’s chest, and the ‘small’ should be ‘let go’ – that is, actually sold off. Russian shock therapy or the dismantling of western social democracy this was not. China’s economy is less a sliding scale of public-to-private ownership than an intricate web of absurd, bureaucratic and baffling forms of ownership with the central government in the middle, with so many different levers for controlling, coercing and nudging private business to where the government wants them to be that working out how much of a given industry actually has any autonomy from Party actions and policies is extremely difficult (even compared to other modern mixed economies).
But one major effect of Zhu’s reforms was the same as everywhere else under neoliberalism: the loss of what was called the “iron rice bowl”, or the secure employment and state benefits offered by working for a State-Owned Enterprise or other government organisation. The “grasping” marketisation and “letting go” privatisation of what previously had been SOEs, large or small, led to massive unemployment and exposed a huge proportion of China’s workforce hitherto protected to the ravages of sudden market forces. At once many people in provinces which had been dependent on work in large, unproductive SOEs were forced to sink or swim – Deng’s migrant worker class expanded massively, from roughly 23 million in 1994, before 1997’s “grasp the large, let go of the small” policy began, to 252 million by 2011. Today the iron rice bowl still exists for the remaining employees of the SOE “dinosaurs” (which western observers constantly, stupidly, push for the outright privatisation of, long after marketisation has already put them in a strange twilight world of being outwardly profit-focused and corporate while mostly unprofitable and kept afloat by government money). For everyone else, if you can’t make it into university – still not that easy in a country this populous, with such a punishing and expensive education system – and you’re unlucky enough to live in the countryside and subsequently to have a rural household registration, then apart from selling your family’s land to property companies you’re almost obliged to join the vast numbers of migrant workers in the cities, driving taxis, delivering packages, assembling phones and cleaning streets. Between them Deng and Zhu created two Chinas, and the second one, the vast shadow-economy of migrant workers, shrouded in the habitual murky legality of the post-Mao Chinese economy, sustains the entirety of the first, and yet enjoys almost no protection from the naked exploitation of capitalism this engenders – indeed, has succeeded in making China the “sweatshop of the world” exactly because of that.
We all know about FOXCONN suicide nets – but there’s also the perilous state of today’s food delivery and package delivery drivers, working until exhaustion and then working some more at the behest of the sinister algorithms that dictate that the “customer is god” and that your middle-class family who ordered Japanese noodles can’t wait the full ten minutes for their order without demanding a refund. There’s people toiling in workshop floors for hours upon hours with perhaps a single bathroom break, female factory workers forced to sleep with supervisors to keep their jobs, the themselves-poor local police and urban enforcement squads being used by local governments and factory management (often one and the same) to beat workers back to the assembly lines, wages unpaid for years by bosses who hide behind walls of police from furious workers, migrants who head to the cities to find work only to end up ensnared in organised crime and sex work, beggars mutilated in factory accidents and left on the street to die, without compensation and without hope. There’s cities drowned in sharebikes, pop-up stores, milk tea places, and whatever other gimmick the night-engine of Chinese capitalism can conjure up, all kept afloat by the tireless work of people who nobody thinks about in order to make a short-term profit. Now some of these trends are older and some are newer – some I’ve seen in-person and some are only stories – but all derive both from the general marketisation of China’s economy under Deng and his reformers, and also from the “household registration” policy and its limiting the legal rights of migrants, creating the ‘local people’ of a given city and then the migrant underclass who sustain them, who have very little help from the government and no social networks, and a slim chance of ever aiming higher than their current sustenance-level lot. They’re outside-people, who (for example here in Guangzhou) can’t speak Cantonese and whose families and support networks are hundreds of miles away, and to many of the locals they’re all but invisible. Not all but many Cantonese families would really prefer if their daughters and sons fell for their own kind: as a foreigner, I’m actually less stigmatized by my girlfriend’s family than if I had been a man from Hunan or Jiangxi!
Now this isn’t as black and white as all that. In many places there are poor local people and richer migrants, outsiders who come for middle-class jobs instead, who do fine for themselves, who face social exclusion of a very low-key kind but, especially in areas like cosmopolitan Zhujiang New Town, Central Business District of Guangzhou, actually outnumber and outperform the grumpy and complaining local people. For some migrants for decades being able to hit the road and make a living in some vast, exciting metropolis just through sheer grit and determination was a pretty cool thing. Social mobility in Deng-era China wasn’t great, but given the post-apocalyptic situation it was loose enough; many of today’s famous business types started out as nobodies selling things by the side of the road in the eighties. But as time has gone on that relative social mobility has cooled, China’s new rich have emerged with support networks and familial inheritance that have entrenched class in this formerly socialist society, the local-migrant divide has remained, and the “household registration” policy has, despite some welcome reforms at the provincial level over the years, clung to life. And most importantly, there are still no real protections for these people. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions represents migrant workers as well as local workers, but migrant workers are always, thanks to household registration, second-class citizens in these situations, and anyway, as any Chinese person will tell you, the federation is singularly useless in labour negotiations for everyone, almost always siding with employers and local government over workers of any type. This is an area that seems ripe for reform. What has happened instead has saddened me.
Migrant workers in modern China, as described, often have a grim position in society, with very little help from either police (if you got robbed, we don’t need to help you), local government (you shouldn’t even be here, so you’re not our problem), or the trade union (your boss went drinking with me last month, so he’s alright, quit bitching). As such they’re some of the toughest people around, practical and hard-headed, and their solution to a lack of support through official channels was simple – to make their own. Under Hu Jintao wildcat strikes were extremely common and unofficial union organisations were everywhere: having been made rootless proletarians, the workers of China were beginning to do as Marx had once predicted and identify with one another as a class. I remember a woman I once met proudly telling me she’d helped organise a strike in 2010 that had, through stopping production of ball-bearings at a group of factories in Zhongshan, managed to cripple the supply chain of Toyota. An imperfect solution, of course. These strikes are by and large purely economic in focus, and do not constitute an organised front for the protection of labour from exploitation, usually being single-issue events that are over as soon as the workers get what they want. In the face of the household registration system and the weakness of the official trade unions and decades of devastating, prosperous, snake-oil-selling capitalism, this was the best that could be arrived at.
As China Labour Bulletin[1][MF1] can tell you, strikes and industrial action are still constant. By 2018 there were about 1,700 labour disputes in China in that year, increasing from 1,200 before – and these are only reported cases. This doesn’t mean that the rate of them is always going up, or that the great socialist awakening is here. I don’t put stock in unionisation as the salvation of socialism with Chinese characteristics. To me this just means that when confronted with a lawless capitalism that cares nothing for them that workers need to protect themselves. This represents a failure of state policy and is something that seems to fuel many of China’s other myriad social issues, from organised crime, poverty, and social atomisation and inequality. The strikes and actions are more a symptom than a sign of some future upheaval. Under Xi, however the state has mobilized to prevent any potential coordination and organisation of these actions, arresting union leaders and activists, which along with the well-known actions taken against NGOs both foreign and domestic have made it much harder for migrants to find representation and take community action against exploitative employers. And the household registration system persists, and the two-track society goes on.
And what happened at Jasic, with loyal students of the elite proclaiming their loyalty to Marxism at a time when Xi himself was trying to stress Marxism and ideology in a big way, trying to help out these migrants with overtly Marxist political organisation (however unneeded and naïve this might have been, reportedly meeting with a cold reception from the workers themselves, ironically enough), was a good symptom of the new environment for workers – as wages have stayed the same and the economy has slowed, the only thing that has changed, by and large, is that the state has mobilised to prevent them from asking for more. Migrant workers still have a grim position in society, except now the crackdowns make their usual wildcat strikes and organised walkouts and actions much riskier. This is indicative of a problem in Xi’s China whereby the weakening state of the “long nineties” has been supplanted by a much stronger state that, despite its newfound power, seems, owing to its own massive internal inertia and institutional mistrust of outside actors, unwilling or unable to attempt to grapple with many of the problems before it. It’s not only that local governments and their entrenched business interests are blocking some central attempt at reforming this situation – it’s that there are many things about the sticky place China is in now that, good or bad, are so ingrained that prying them out of the system without upsetting things is very difficult, even if Xi himself might well want to order it to happen tomorrow.
Household registration and the dismal workers’ rights situations in China are baked very deeply into the core of the reform-era system, urban areas and their blossoming upper-middle-classes being dependent on workers who work for very little to do the jobs they themselves are unwilling to do, and the foreign investment that has built modern China being contingent on cheap labour – to ask for either to be gone tomorrow is, it’s true, to fall into the perestroika trap of acting as if these things can simply be removed without consequence. The country is reliant upon the divide between rural and urban household registration and the drifting working class it has created, uncomfortable as that is to face.
And there have been easings of the household registration laws under Xi, and improvements in other areas, including attempts to erase the practice of not paying workers on time and generally a positive change in health and safety in the workplace compared to the old wild west days, and Xi’s poverty alleviation campaign is a much-welcomed attempt to both help out and bring attention to China’s most disadvantaged. Discussion and ‘pilot scheme’ experimentation about reform in these areas is ongoing.
But from my amateur perspective a bolder approach could be possible – although discredited now, Wang Yang’s Guangdong Model – basically a Thatcherist approach of an unregulated market patrolled by a strong state not to curb business but to curb workers – once faced opposition from disgraced mayor Bo Xilai’s so-called ‘Chongqing Model’. Now, I’m not of the opinion that Bo was about to create true communism in China – he was as much a product of the system as Xi and Wang. The Maoist sloganeering and supposed populism were just that. But his Chongqing Model did also attempt to reform the household registration system by making urban household registration easier to obtain, Bo himself saying he wanted over three million people to move from rural Chongqing into the city. Bo also was noted for dealing with the 2008 taxi driver strikes through publicised debates with strikers and citizens, and allowing the taxi drivers to form their own trade union (!). Typical Bo showpiece politics, yes, but still – it happened, and it could well happen again. Bo Xilai was immensely popular with the Chinese left and for a while was even an international darling, outshining Guangdong as a model and definitely outshining pre-leadership Xi – because before Xi got onto it he seemed to be one of the first Party officials actually talking loudly about and taking actions, however superficial, to resolve the reform-era contradictions.
Now, today things are different. Bo’s political enemies have got their friends out of the jails he put them in, quietly resuming business as usual, and nobody except bitter leftists really talks much about the Chongqing Model now. At the same time we can see here possibilities of a kind of change apart from the state/business collusion of Guangdong, which was basically an evolution of the long nineties way of doing things, or the spectre of Maoist-style social upheaval and class struggle. I believe Xi, no stranger to the substance of Bo’s anti-elite, ideology-first championing of the poor, if very much not of his showboating style, is trying to find a ‘third way’ between these two paths, to avoid upsetting business so totally as to confront it head-on, which is what household registration and union reform would do, but also to preserve social stability by reducing China’s inequality and poverty – and of course, to protect the position of the Party and to avoid subjecting China to the influence of “outside agitators” regardless of their intent or actions. I do believe the household registration system will be reformed – I believe it will be reformed very slowly, in a way that preserves social harmony and punishes very harshly anyone who wants to pick quarrels and provoke trouble over the matter. Hell, it’s possible that this all could work out. Who knows? We’ll see.
However we can’t only judge the current government only on what might happen next, or solely on its positives – as well as poverty and corruption reduction, from where I stand the Xi era has seen increased proletarianization and a heavy hand deployed against non-state labour organisation. Quite pointedly another incident of the Xi years has been the demolition and evacuation of the migrant neighbourhoods in both Guangzhou and Beijing – done officially for reasons of fire hazard prevention, but also, it might be fair to suspect, in light of their haste and the coercion involved, because slums very much go against the image of the harmonious socialist society; not to mention the business interests of the property developers in both cities, whose bubble economies are hugely important to local politics. The bad habits of gangster-capitalism are hard to shake.
This whole situation shows us many regrettable themes of the prior decades of reform: the priority of stability maintenance over necessary social policy change, the close relationship between both local and central authorities and businessmen, and last but not least the paranoia of “outside agitators” that has ensured every strike or grassroots organisational project is viewed not as a cry for help from a society constantly exploding with change and contradiction, but as a threat from unseen forces who only wish China ill (even if they don’t themselves know it yet).
In the wake of COVID-19 it has been very sad to see even more delivery drivers lounging about in the streets, waiting for food and package orders. The vast mass of unpeople, the workers, who make up the muscles and tendons of modern China are in a better place than before, and Xi’s government should be proud of this, but still by and large their social position in the class society of China, as outsiders, remains – and while this could be a much more catastrophic failure (the party-state still prevents ‘shock therapy’ from taking hold, and is still in its lumbering way set on serving the people), it also represents, in my opinion, a serious issue that needs to be dealt with better. The inequality of modern China can’t be dealt with by dancing around the interests of business: poverty reduction in and of itself won’t fix the problems of today. The structural issues continue. The Chinese state isn’t ready to wither away just yet, regrettably. It’ll be here, in all its glory, for a long while. At the very least I hope in the next few decades it can be put to good use.
[1]I know someone will read this and tell me that China Labour Bulletin is run by Tiananmen exiles/NED/CIA or whoever, but their data is basically free of ideological gloss and merely serves to catalogue strikes and industrial disturbances. I see no reason not to use them as a source.
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I liked this piece. I think it poses a very interesting question, and shows the difficult position of the CPC. If their political strength rests on their popular support, and their popular support rests on their ability to provide economic growth, and that growth relies on a highly exploited migrant labor class, then it will be very difficult to improve the situation of migrant workers without threatening the profits that make Chinese economic growth possible. The rate of profit is the rate of exploitation, after all.
From America, it has been easy for me to see the virtues of the Chinese system in their containment of the pandemic and what seems to be a rational approach to handling problems. I am happy to see China breaking up a unipolar world order and providing an economic alternative for countries exploited by the United States. The infrastructure projects and multilateral agreements of OBOR seem to be a good way to improve global prosperity and break out of America’s attempts at isolating China.
I hope that China can survive and the Chinese people can prosper, and that if the time comes where the CPC must finally decisively choose between prioritizing economic growth or the welfare of the people, it will choose the people. Thank you for your thoughtful post.
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