Anita Chan

Does China have an apartheid pass system

This article makes and defends the claim that Chinas contemporary household registration system can reasonably be described as a quasi‐apartheid pass system. The historical and ideological underpinnings of the two systems vary greatly, and the racial core of the South African system, lacking in China, led to its eventual demise. Nevertheless, the essence of both systems lies in the use of passes to control the influx of rural migrants into urban areas, thereby buttressing cheap‐labour economies. Possible explanations for this similarity are presented. Finally, it is argued that in China, as in apartheid South Africa, the pass system is associated with massive abuses of human rights, and that its retention should be opposed.

Inheritors of the Boom: Private Enterprise and the Role of Local Government in a Rural South China Township

Relations between the rural populace and the grass-roots levels of government vary enormously across China. A key reason, we have discovered during research in a range of rural districts, is that the very nature of the power wielded by a local rural government today is strongly influenced by the extent of local industrialization and, just as importantly, by the type of factory ownership that prevails locally. Thus far, most studies have concentrated on rural districts where the officials of villages and former communes have engineered the development of publicly owned, not privately owned, industry.1 (Sally Sargeson and Jian Zhang describe precisely such a district in this issue of The China Journal.) Jean Oi, who has written a good deal about such local areas, states that their “local governments have taken on many of the characteristics of a business corporation, with officials acting as the equivalent of a board of directors”.2 Since they control the revenues from the publicly owned factories, local officials can shift new investments and resources from one enterprise to another, and to non-industrial parts of the public sector as well, much as a conglomerate shifts resources between its subsidiaries. Local officials also control access to coveted employment in factories, and through this and their control of revenues they can build patronage relationships

Challenges and possibilities for democratic grassroots union elections in china: A case study of two factory-level elections and their aftermath

In 2001 and 2002, Reebok facilitated democratic trade union elections at two of its supplier factories in China. After initial successes in one factory in bargaining with management to improve conditions, in the end the experiment failed. This article describes in detail the election process, the elections’ aftermath, and the power dynamics of the actors involved (Reebok, the supplier companies’ management, the workers, their newly elected trade union committees, the district-level trade unions, and the Chinese trade union federation). The article analyzes the reasons behind this failed experiment and concludes by arguing that in a new changed climate today, both within China and within the international trade union movement, the Reebok experiment is worth reexamining.

Strikes in China's Export Industries in Comparative Perspective

Several Chinese and Vietnamese instances are analyzed and compared to explain the nature, causes and underlying factors that lead to the strikes in the Chinese export industries. The labor laws, relation between the government and the official trade union and the minimum legal labor standards are shown to be the some of the main causes of such strikes.

ANALYZING EXPLOITATION: The Mechanisms Underpinning Low Wages and Excessive Overtime in Chinese Export Factories

The codes of conduct of Western brand-name corporations normally require supplier factories in the Global South to comply with the local country’s minimum legal wage; the codes also often stipulate a maximum sixty-hour work week. But the problems of illegally low wages and overtime violations in supplier factories remain unresolved. This article uses survey data collected in a city in South China on workers’ wages and work hours to show how legal minimum wage rates, which normally are expressed in developing countries as a monthly wage, obfuscate the level of wages paid to workers. This will be demonstrated by comparing two different payment systems: time rates (which predominate in the toy industry) and piece rates (which predominate in garment manufacturing). The differences in the compensation rates and work hours resulting from the two systems lead the authors to contend that countries in the Global South and the implementers of corporate codes should calculate minimum wages in terms of hourly earnings in order to make wage payments more transparent and help reduce exploitative practices.

The Emerging Patterns of Industrial Relations in China and the Rise of Two New Labor Movements

* Anita Chan is an Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University and co-editor of The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs. Authors note: This article will appear eventually as a chapter in Robert Lambert (Ed.), Asian Labour Movements. My findings are based on four yearly field visits, each of one to two months, to various cities in China between 1991 and 1994. The last two trips were funded by the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and Chinese Academy of Social Sciences Exchange Programme and an Australian Research Council Small Grant. Thanks are due to several colleagues from various Chinese institutions who worked with me as an ad hoc research team. As team members we shared contacts and helped each other to arrange interviews and factory visits. Thanks also go to Zhu Xiaoyang for helping with documentary research in Canberra and to Zhao Minghua, Li Cheng, Vic Taylor, Stephen Frankel and an anonymous referee for their comments on earlier drafts. I am grateful to Jonathan Unger for his unreserved criticism and copy-editing. The ideas expressed here remain my own. This article focuses on the changed and still changing relationship between the Chinese Leninist state and workers over the decade and a half since the beginning of the economic reforms in 1978. It will illustrate the division of Chinese industry into two major economic sectors, the state-run and urban collective sector on the one side, and the new capitalist and rural collective sector on the other. As a consequence two very different groups of workers now exist in China, each entering into a different kind of relationship with the state, with the state’s surrogates and, at the enterprise level, with management. These two types of worker groups are now restive, and two different labor movements are

Students and Class Warfare: The Social Roots of the Red Guard Conflict in Guangzhou (Canton)

Until recent years, scholars of modern China had generally assumed that in the Cultural Revolution violence of 1966–68 young people were almost arbitrarily joining one or the other of the opposing Red Guard groups. Only within the past few years have researchers begun to unveil the antagonism among students early in the Cultural Revolution over “class” issues and the resulting differences in the composition, tactics and goals of the Red Guard factions.

Disciplinary labor regimes in Chinese factories

Using a survey the authors initiated in fifty-four footwear factories in China, this article investigates the extent to which Chinese workers today are subjected to coercive workplace discipline. The authors compare the management practices of state-owned and collective factories, private factories owned by mainland Chinese, and those owned by investors from Hong Kong and Taiwan. The survey selects five indicators of a disciplinary labor regime: corporal punishment, compulsory overtime, discipline vis-a`-vis bodily functions (such as toilet-going restrictions), imposition of monetary penalties, and bonding of labor through mandatory deposits.

A Chinese State Enterprise under the Reforms: What Model of Capitalism?

The article discusses research conducted at a prosperous distillery, a Chinese state enterprise, to better understand models of capitalism. Extensive research is needed over coming years to reveal whether the Chinese-style organization-oriented model can survive the restructuring processes in the state-owned sector.

Staff and Workers' Representative Congress: An Institutionalized Channel for Expression of Employees’ Interests?

An enormous amount of research and publication has been devoted to Chinese village elections, but as yet there has been no study of Chinese workers’ democratic participation at the workplace, since even to raise this as a possibility is likely to invite cynicism and disbelief. However, as media reports about how workers were exerting their rights by seizing the staff and workers’ representative councils (zhigong daibiao dahui) (SWRCs) began to appear, we began to turn our attention to a closer examination of the role of the SWRC. In our collection of cases, those SWRCs that were suddenly activated by workers to fight for the survival of their enterprises and their jobs had not previously functioned well or had functioned only formally at normal times. A crisis point was needed before workers rose up and sought to use the SWRC as a legal weapon. The question surrounding the SWRC, then, is whether at ordinary times it serves at all as a vehicle for “participation in democratic management.” We have uncovered some unexpected pointers, based on analyzing the data of a large survey of enterprises and workers’ attitudes conducted in 1997 by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The analyses indicate that the SWRC has unexpected levels of approval among workers. To probe this phenomenon further we spent three weeks conducting field research in Beijing, Tianjin, and Jilin province’s Lisu county in August and September 2000 to gain a better grip on how to interpret the documentary and statistical data. In 2003–2004 Zhu Xiaoyang spent one month studying a collectively owned enterprise (COE) in Kunming.