China’s precariats

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a stylized account of the trajectory of precarious labour in China over the past seven decades and identifies the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. I define ‘precarity’ not as a thing-like phenomenon with fixed attributes but as relational struggles over the recognition, regulation, and reproduction of labour. For each of the three periods of contemporary Chinese development, i.e. the Mao era of state socialism (1949–1979), the high-growth market reform era (1980–2010), and the current era of slow growth and overcapacity (since around 2010), I analyse the political economic drivers of precarity – from state domination to class exploitation and then to exclusion, indebtedness and dispossession – and workers’ changing capacity and interest to contest it.

KEYWORDS:

• China
• disciplined authoritarianism
• new normal
• precariats
• state socialism

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jan Breman, Alf Nilsen, Mark Selden, Goran Therborn, Karl von Holdt, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments. Song Qi’s meticulous research assistance has been indispensable.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. These concepts are drawn from feminist theories; see especially Fraser (2000, 2016).

2. The supply of student interns as a source of precarious labour has resulted from the commodification of vocational education and the collusion between local government and powerful multinational corporations. Vocational schools have been privatized since the late 1990s and receive equipment, trainers, and funding in return for the internship programmes. Local governments compete with each other to lure big investors like Foxconn to move to their localities, and promise companies a steady supply of interns, see Su (2011).

3. For ethnographic depictions, see Guang (2005), Loyalka (2012), Pai (2012).

4. For the spread of social assistance programme in the global south, including China, in the past two decades, see Harris and Scully (2015).

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Notes on contributors

Ching Kwan Lee

Ching Kwan Lee is a professor of sociology at UCLA and a research associate at Society, Work, and Politics Institute, the University of the Witwatersrand. She is the author of The specter of global China (Chicago, 2017).