Overcoming ‘small peasant mentality’: semi-proletarian struggles and working-class formation in China

ABSTRACT

The accelerating urbanization for peasant-workers and the growing labour unrest in China since the 2010s have promoted some scholars to applaud how proletarianization can lead to working-class consciousness and action. Drawing on Marxian theory of proletarianization, we question the assumptions that ‘proper proletarians’ possess more revolutionary potential than semi-proletarians, and that institutionalized collective bargaining represents a more advanced form of labour struggle. Through an ethnographic study of labour activists and workers in China, this paper investigates the dilemmas that peasant-workers have encountered in working-class formation as well as tactics for overcoming these barriers. Migrant workers’ ‘small-peasant mentality’ can be overcome not by turning them into full proletarians or relinquishing rural identity, but by educating more co-workers and getting them more experienced in collective action organization. China’s experience will provide important lessons for conceptualizing the direction and tactics of organizing informal labour for the Global South.

KEYWORDS:

• Proletarianization
• small peasant mentality
• migrant workers
• working-class formation
• strikes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The total workforce of peasant-workers was 291 million.

2 One of the most pessimistic recent analyses comes from Ching Kwan Lee (2016) who argues that wildcat strikes in China would remain ‘cellular, legalistic, and self-limiting to state-defined boundaries’ due to a number of barriers, including precarization of labor through land dispossession, the ACFTU’s legal monopoly on worker representation, and relentless crackdowns on labor NGO practitioners.

3 The term ‘labor NGOs’ refers to grassroots non-profit organizations that help with workers’ education, gender and cultural empowerment, labor rights protection (weiquan) and, more recently, facilitate collective action. Over the years, many local governments have been hostile to these organization, interpreting their activism work as promoting social unrest. Therefore, we keep the NGOs anonymous.

4 1 hectare = 15 mu.

5 This represented about ninety times more than the average annual salary of migrant workers, which was about 800 yuan in 1981 (Lu, 2012).

6 The Trade Union Law outlaws the formation of trade unions independent of the ACFTU. So far, since few of the grassroots trade unions have worker-elected leaders, unions controlled by either the authorities or employers are thus virtually absent from labor demonstrations and strikes in China (Chen, 2016).

7 Prior to the economic reform in China, practically all urban workers were organized as part of the a danwei, publicly owned enterprises or institutions. Danwei served multiple social, political, and economic functions, providing employees with life employment and benefits (Andreas, 2019).

8 Interview on November 14, 2015, Dongguan.

9 Interview on December 5, 2015, Shenzhen.

10 Focus group on November 14, 2015. Interviews on December 13, 2015 and January 11, 2016, all in Dongguan.

11 Interview on November 28, 2015, Shenzhen.

12 Interview on December 13, 2015 in Dongguan.

13 Interview on November 14, 2015 and August 3, 2018 in Dongguan.

14 Interview on August 3, 2018 in Dongguan.

15 Interview on December 15, 2015 in Dongguan.

16 Interview on December 13, 2015 in Dongguan.

17 Interview on December 5 and 6, 2015 in Shenzhen.

18 The right to strike is an ambiguous issue. ‘Freedom of strike’ was granted legal status in the Constitution passed in 1975, but was removed in the 1982 Constitution. However, there are also no rules or regulations against the strike either (see Chang & Cooke, 2015).

19 Interview on December 5 and 6, 2015 in Shenzhen.

20 Interview on November 28, 2015 in Shenzhen.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant entitled ‘Enhancing the Research Capacity for Junior Faculty Members’, sponsored by the Minzu University of China.

Notes on contributors

Yu Huang

Yu Huang (PhD, 2012) is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Minzu University of China. She researches labour politics, industrial automation, as well as agrarian change in China.

Kenneth Tsz Fung Ng

Kenneth Tsz Fung Ng (PhD, 2019) is Lecturer in Political Science and Sociology at the School of Professional and Continuing Education, University of Hong Kong. His research centres around civil society, industrial relations, and labour activism in mainland China.