Ching Kwan Lee

The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China

This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market exchange, rule-bound games, and interpersonal bonds, these mechanisms have the effect of depoliticizing social unrest and constitute a lived experience of authoritarian domination as a non-zero-sum situation, totalizing and transparent yet permissive of room for maneuvering and bargaining. This heuristic framework calls for bringing the subjective experience of subordination back into the theorizing of state domination.

Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers, and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves

IRLE WORKING PAPERS WP 2009-14 Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves by Ching Kwan Lee Department of Sociology, UCLA February, 2009 10945 Le Conte Ave. Ste 2107, Los Angeles CA 90095,Tel. 310 -794-5957 Fax 310-794-6403 www.irle.ucla.edu

The Politics of Precarity Views Beyond the United States

Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rather than the natural corporate response to global market competition; and (c) popular movements have insinuated alternative imaginations of work, rights, and life. These developments serve as the point of departure for any national, regional, or global policy deliberation.

Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China

Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the “precariat,” for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers’ collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past several years have singularly sustained a curious discourse of worker empowerment. Strikes in some foreign-invested factories have inspired claims of rising working-class power. Finding little empirical support for the empowerment thesis, this article spotlights the Chinese peculiarity of the global phenomenon of precarization and the dynamics of recent strikes, suggesting the need for Chinese labor studies to rebalance its prevailing voluntarism and optimism with more attention to institutional and political-economic conditions.

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.

Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women

to make gainsharing work, so that gainsharing in these settings may only serve to set up a whole new agenda for conflict. Many changes to a variety of core organizational systems will be necessary for gainsharing to succeed in these organizations. There are also many technical factors that may make gainsharing unsuitable, such as lack of accurate outcome measures, or rapidly changing technologies. Ironically, Collinss unqualified advocacy of gainsharing may in fact do the concept a disservice, by promoting application in unsuitable circumstances. In regard to his core argument that participatory organizations are always ethically superior to more traditional organizations, many observers may ask why, in a resource-scarce world, economic efficiency and high organizational effectiveness (within a framework of statesponsored labor standards and human rights protections) could not themselves be considered worthy ethical values. Others may take issue with Collinss apparent dismissal of any role that unions can play in delivering a form of democracy to workers in autocratic organizations. In any event, provocative though some of his philosophical arguments may be, I would have liked to see the author spend more time mining what I consider to be his greatest asset, his very impressive data set. Perhaps he will do so in future publications.