The campaign to eliminate job security in China

Abstract

The article describes and analyses the discourse among planners and economists conceming policies for eliminating job security in China's industrial sector. The discourse is set in the context of the continuing crises of unemployment and job placement that have marked the widening of the reforms in China's urban areas. The effect of the dominant role of market-oriented, reductionist economic theory in policy discussions is shown to be that of blinding reformers to any alternatives to the “lazy, redundant worker” explanations for low labor productivity. The article ends with some exploration of worker responses to the campaign to eliminate job security.