Mary E. Gallagher

China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law: Implementation and implications for China’s workers

This article presents empirical evidence from household and firm survey data collected during 2009−2010 on the implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law and effects on China’s workers. The Government and local labor bureaus have made substantial efforts to enforce the provisions of the new Law, which has likely contributed to reversing a trend toward increasing informalization of the urban labor market. Enforcement of the Law, however, varies substantially across cities. The article analyzes the determinants of worker satisfaction with the Law’s enforcement, workers’ propensity to have a labor contract, their awareness of the Law’s content and their likelihood of initiating disputes, and finds that all are highly correlated with education level, especially for migrants. Although higher labor costs may have had a negative impact on manufacturing employment growth, this has not led to an overall increase in aggregate unemployment or prevented the rapid growth of real wages. Less progress has been made in increasing social insurance coverage, although signing a labor contract is more likely to be associated with participation in social insurance programs than in the past, particularly for migrant workers.

“Time is money, efficiency is life”: The transformation of labor relations in China

The past twenty-five years of economic reform have seen the transformation of labor relations in China, with the widespread adoption of capitalist labor practices by firms of all ownership types. This transformation has occurred in the absence of both large-scale privatization and political change, but was part of a gradual yet dynamic liberalization and “opening up” to foreign trade and investment that occurred across both regions and across types of firms. The first half of this paper details this process of dynamic liberalization that has spawned competition and change in labor practices, including marked increases in managerial autonomy and labor flexibility. This explanation goes beyond the regional emphasis to also examine changes across types of ownership; the gradual liberalization of labor policies and convergence with capitalist practices can only be understood as part of a more general trend ofownership expansion, through the introduction of new types of firms, andownership recombination, which is the fusing of the public and non-state sectors through novel forms of organization. The much-needed panacea to this shift to capitalism—a state regulatory and legal regime that is capable of mitigating its excesses and effective organizations to represent labor—is not yet well established. The second half of this paper explores two institutions, the labor contract system and the official trade union organization, to show how labor relations have shifted dramatically toward flexibility, insecurity, and managerial control.

Users and non-users: Legal experience and its effect on legal consciousness

A major question in the law and society literature is the effect of legal experience on individual attitudes toward legal institutions, in particular the court system. Positive attitudes and confidence in the legal system are important for generating citizen trust and confidence in government generally and also for inculcating citizen values and behavior that support the rule of law and encourage legal (and peaceful) resolution of disputes and grievances more specifically. Thus, these values are important for sustaining democracy. For a country like China, in transition from state socialism, in which legal modes of governance and social control were less common than administrative edicts, Communist Party campaigns, and state repression, attempts to build an effective legal system are also linked to limited political reform. Rule of law building is the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) attempt to build more effective and efficient governance, while making an end run around democratization and the sharing of political power. In this case, creating positive citizen attitudes toward the legal system is part of a strategy to avoid democracy. In this chapter, we examine how experience with the legal system affects Chinese citizens’ evaluation of the courts through a series of comparisons between those who have used the law to resolve an employment dispute and those who have not as well as comparisons between disputants who remained positive and confident in the legal system and disputants who were fully disillusioned and negative. We find that legal experience leads to higher levels of disillusionment and more negative perceptions of the legal system’s effectiveness and fairness. Whereas nonusers tend to have vague but benevolent notions of the legal system and its effectiveness, actual disputants have less confidence in the effectiveness of the legal system.

Contemporary Chinese politics : new sources, methods, and field strategies

Introduction Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher and Melanie Manion Part I. Sources: 1. State-generated data and contentious politics in China Xi Chen 2. Why archives? Neil J. Diamant 3. The central committee, past and present: a method of quantifying elite biographies Victor Shih, Wei Shan and Mingxing Liu 4. Experimental methods and psychological measures in the study of Chinese foreign policy Peter Hays Gries 5. Internet resources and the study of Chinese foreign relations: can cyberspace shed new light on Chinas approach to the world? Allen Carslon and Hong Duan 6. Information overload? Collecting, managing, and analyzing Chinese media content Daniela Stockman Part II. Qualitative Methods: 7. The worms-eye view: using ethnography to illuminate labor politics and institutional change in contemporary China Calvin Chen 8. More than an interview, less than Sedaka: studying subtle and hidden politics with site-intensive methods Benjamin L. Read 9. Cases, questions, and comparison in research on contemporary Chinese politics William Hurst Part III. Survey Methods: 10. A survey of survey research on Chinese politics: what have we learned? Melanie Manion 11. Surveying prospects for political change: capturing political and economic variation in empirical research in China Bruce J. Dickson 12. Using clustered spatial data to study diffusion: the case of legal institutions in China Pierre F. Landry 13. Measuring change and stability over a decade in the Beijing area study Mingming Shen and Ming Yang with Melanie Manion 14. Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China Lily L. Tsai Reflections on the evolution of the China field in political science Kenneth Lieberthal Glossary.

Coalitions, carrots, and sticks: Economic inequality and authoritarian states

As the other articles in this symposium demonstrate, a countrys level of economic inequality is a function of a complex set of historical, geographic, economic, and political factors. Given this complexity, it is unsurprising that a countrys regime type by itself does not tell us much about its level of economic inequality. The predictions of the linear tax model aside (Meltzer and Richard 1981 ), democracies and non-democracies do not differ greatly in terms of their level and variation in inequality. Research focusing on democracies has helped identify some the sources of this variation, but inequality in authoritarian states remains relatively understudied. The growing body of work on authoritarian politics, however, provides a foundation for research in this area.

Authoritarian Survival, Resilience, and the Selectorate Theory

In this chapter, we delve into two of the key questions that Dimitrov (Chapter 1) argues are central to a theory of communist resilience. First, what is the basis of the rule of communist regimes, and how does it change over time? Second, why do some regimes collapse while others survive? As a framework for this analysis, we draw upon the selectorate theory as set forward in the Logic of Political Survival ( LPS ) by Bueno de Mesquita et al. and later amended by Bueno de Mesquita and Smith. This theory is presented as a parsimonious explanation for the survival of rulers, authoritarian and otherwise, based on key characteristics of a country’s institutions for selecting a ruler. As such, it is a useful point of reference for evaluating many of the arguments raised in this volume. If the theory’s predictions are accurate, a more narrow theory of communist resilience is unnecessary. We find, however, that the theory cannot explain the divergent outcomes of communist regimes. The crux of the matter is that the selectorate theory predicts that outcomes in communist countries should resemble the outcome in North Korea: highly repressive rule by a narrow elite, unaccountable to the mass of citizens and offering little improvement in general welfare. The theory is thus unable to provide an adequate explanation for authoritarian rulers who mix political repression and growth-generating public goods, producing resilient authoritarian regimes buttressed by robust economic performance. Two of the five surviving communist regimes, China and Vietnam, fit this description, and the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party appears intent upon pursuing a similar strategy.

China’s Older Workers: Between Law and Policy, Between Laid-Off and Unemployed

Substantial layoffs in China’s state and urban collective sectors began in the early 1990s.1 Important government regulations and edicts on xiagang followed in the late 1990s after the fifteenth Party Congress, which announced a new intensification of the state-owned enterprise (SOE) reform process, including top leadership support for massive layoffs and privatization of small and medium SOEs. The policy of allowing SOEs to lay off large numbers of workers by designating these workers “xiagang” is a temporary policy that targets a certain class of workers for a limited period of time.2 While in English the term “laid-off” has a mostly economic connotation (something done by a company to a worker or group of workers), the term xiagang in Chinese is also a political term and a classification that is closely linked to government and Party policy toward SOE restructuring. This term is also linked to the phasing out of the previous employment system, which was characterized by lifetime employment, cradle-to-grave benefits, and very limited labor mobility.

Mobilization without Movement: How the Chinese State “Fixed” Labor Insurgency:

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of two recent labor disputes in Guangzhou and Shenzhen, this article asks: Why has a broad-based labor movement failed to emerge in contemporary China? Both pro-labor legislation and the existence of movement-oriented labor NGOs appear to provide opportunities and resources for workers to engage in organized action to expand workers’ rights. Two political mechanisms, however, help explain why a strong labor movement has not developed: 1) legislation and courtroom procedures and 2) official institutions that monopolize the space for representation—specifically the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). We call these two mechanisms “political fixes” and discuss how they interact to engender a feedback between the fragmentation of collective action during labor conflict and the continuous uptick in labor insurgency. This article contributes to labor movement theory: It puts greater emphasis on the institutional mechanisms that constrain labor, as opposed to sheer repression or economic factors.

Chinese Justice. Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (W. Kessler)

Part I. Legal Development and Institutional Tensions: 1. From mediatory to adjudicatory justice: the limits of civil justice reform in China Fu Hualing and Richard Cullen 2. Judicial disciplinary systems for incorrectly decided cases: the imperial Chinese heritage lives on Carl Minzner 3. Proceduralism and rivalry in Chinas two legal states Douglas B. Grob 4. Economic development and the development of the legal profession in China Randall Peerenboom Part II. Pu Fa and the Dissemination of Law in the Chinese Context: 5. The impact of nationalist and Maoist legacies on popular trust in legal institutions Pierre F. Landry 6. Popular attitudes toward official justice in Beijing and rural China Ethan Michelson and Benjamin Read 7. Users and non-users: legal experience and its effect on legal consciousness Mary Gallagher and Yuhua Wang 8. With or without law: the changing meaning of ordinary legal work in China, 1979-2003 Sida Liu Part III. Law from the Bottom Up: 9. A populist threat to Chinas courts? Benjamin L. Liebman 10. Dispute resolution and Chinas grassroots legal services Fu Yulin 11. Constitutionalism with Chinese characteristics? Thomas E. Kellogg.

Contemporary Chinese Politics: Tables and Figures

Introduction Allen Carlson, Mary Gallagher and Melanie Manion Part I. Sources: 1. State-generated data and contentious politics in China Xi Chen 2. Why archives? Neil J. Diamant 3. The central committee, past and present: a method of quantifying elite biographies Victor Shih, Wei Shan and Mingxing Liu 4. Experimental methods and psychological measures in the study of Chinese foreign policy Peter Hays Gries 5. Internet resources and the study of Chinese foreign relations: can cyberspace shed new light on Chinas approach to the world? Allen Carslon and Hong Duan 6. Information overload? Collecting, managing, and analyzing Chinese media content Daniela Stockman Part II. Qualitative Methods: 7. The worms-eye view: using ethnography to illuminate labor politics and institutional change in contemporary China Calvin Chen 8. More than an interview, less than Sedaka: studying subtle and hidden politics with site-intensive methods Benjamin L. Read 9. Cases, questions, and comparison in research on contemporary Chinese politics William Hurst Part III. Survey Methods: 10. A survey of survey research on Chinese politics: what have we learned? Melanie Manion 11. Surveying prospects for political change: capturing political and economic variation in empirical research in China Bruce J. Dickson 12. Using clustered spatial data to study diffusion: the case of legal institutions in China Pierre F. Landry 13. Measuring change and stability over a decade in the Beijing area study Mingming Shen and Ming Yang with Melanie Manion 14. Quantitative research and issues of political sensitivity in rural China Lily L. Tsai Reflections on the evolution of the China field in political science Kenneth Lieberthal Glossary.