Turning left: student-worker alliance in labour struggles in China

ABSTRACT

The Shenzhen Jasic struggle of 2018–2019 signals a turning point in migrant labour struggles in China since the mid-1990s, and it explicitly demonstrates a shift toward left politics, departing from a civil society framework which barely analyzes ideology and class politics, thus showing little potential to overcome class inequality. The Jasic struggle's key characteristic of student-worker unity compels us to revisit Marxism and Maoism in understanding today’s emancipatory politics and labour movements. This revisiting of Marxist Maoism is attempted on three layers: a return to class politics; a return to communism; and a return to Mao’s mass line. These three ‘returns’ are not retrospective politics romanticizing the past. Instead, they draw upon historical experiences, cultural resources and communist legacies to fight for a more egalitarian society in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Left politics
• student-worker alliance
• labor struggle
• Jasic
• China

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 www.reuters.com/article/us-china-labour-protests/student-activists-disappear-in-southern-china-after-police-raid-idUSKCN1L90YL.

2 http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/202002/t20200228_1728913.html Accessed on 15 January 2021.

3 Starrs (2013) claims that US capital took a lead in holding the shares of the listed Chinese companies in Hong Kong, both SOEs or private companies, which means that behind the scene, the US still played a very important role in controlling the economy.

4 Xinhua News Agency, June 8, 2014. Accessed at: http://news.xinhuanet.com/politics/2014-06/08/c_1111035497.htm (in Chinese).

5 “Premier Li Stresses vocational education to boost ‘Made in China’ brand” Ecns.cn (10 Sept 2017) http://www.ecns.cn/2017/09-10/272916.shtml.

6 See the article on https://jiashigrsyt1.github.io/ (in Chinese).

7 https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-6/mswv6_04.htm.

8 See the Manifesto in https://jiashigrsyt1.github.io/ (in Chinese).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ngai Pun

Professor Ngai Pun is Professor in Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong. She obtained her Ph.D. from SOAS, University of London. She was honoured as the winner of the C. Wright Mills Award for her first book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), which has been translated into French and Chinese. Her co-authored book, Dying for iPhone: Foxconn and the Lives of Chinese Workers (2020) has also been translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Chinese. She is the sole author of Migrant Labor in China: Post Socialist Transformation (2016, Polity Press), editor of seven book volumes in Chinese and English. She has published widely in leading international journals such as Cultural Anthropology, Dialectical Anthropology, Mobilities, Positions, Sociology, British Journal of Sociology of Education, Sociological Review, Work, Employment and Society, Modern China, China Quarterly and China Journal, etc.