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ABSTRACT
Xi Jinping’s government has curtailed some of the ways that China’s workers formerly influenced the management of their workplaces while promoting other forms of rank-and-file participation in enterprise governance. Numerous studies have documented the forms of worker activism that have been curbed but few have discussed the state’s efforts to bolster alternative forms of participatory management. This article addresses this imbalance with evidence that the Staff and Worker Representative Congress system has been empowered under the Xi government in ways that amplify the voice of China’s workers within their enterprises. In advancing this argument, the example of school congresses and the determination of teachers’ performance pay is used. Based on interviews, the study suggests that congresses further the ability of teachers to deliberate, decide and manage the metrics that determine the distribution of performance pay and resolve milder forms of workplace grievances. The findings lend credence to commentators who have suggested the congress system may emerge as a substantial feature of China’s industrial relations system.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. It is underscored that teachers are workers even if one prefers to consider them to be professionals. The categorisation of highly educated employees has been addressed by the OECD (Citation2019, 19, 76–77) when discussing the “squeezing of the middle-class.” In brief, the OECD holds the notion of middle class is so ambiguous that it is preferable to use the terms “middle-income class” and “middle-class workers” and accepts most individuals thus categorised are workers.
2. For details on the nature of the 2012 reforms see Yu (Citation2012); Li (Citation2014); Huang, Wang, Li, and Weng (Citation2016); and Schipani and Liu (Citation2018).