Pun Ngai

Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China

As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the “world’s factory” and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way does the path of proletarianization shape the new Chinese working class? Drawing on workers’ narratives and our ethnographic studies in Shenzhen and Dongguan between 2005 and 2008, this study focuses on the subjective experiences of the second generation of dagongmei/zai, female migrant workers/male migrant workers, who have developed new forms of power and resistance unknown to the previous generation of workers. Did the pain and trauma experienced by the first generation of dagong subjects gradually evolve into the anger and resentment that has conditioned the labor strikes and class actions of the second generation? In short, what continuity and change can we observe in the life struggles of this new working class? Is the second generation of dagong subjects compelled to take action as a result of long-endured pain and anger? Self, anger, and collective action among the new working class propel the narrative described in this article.

Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers The Foxconn Experience

In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of capital expansion because of the incomparable speed and scale of its capital accumulation in all regions of China. This article explores how the workers at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been subjected to work pressure and desperation that might lead to suicides on the one hand but also open up daily and collective resistance on the other hand.

The Role of the State, Labour Policy and Migrant Workers' Struggles in Globalized China

The financial crisis of 2008 brought many changes to the world economy with China seeming to stand out as one of the countries best able to weather the storm. There is a general belief that this is because China has a strong state which has reshaped the role of China in the new international division of labour and has the ability to resume its economic development internally. Our study of labour policy and workers’ struggles tells a different story. We argue that the state-driven process of economic globalization has created a new millions-strong working class in China. A paradoxical phenomenon is that this state-driven process in economic globalization has been accompanied by a state retreat process in the areas of social reproduction and social protection. This state withdrawal process largely shapes a specific pattern of proletarianization of Chinese labour and a specific capital-labour relationship which contribute to recent, and intensifying, migrant workers’ struggles in China.

The challenge for Mondragon: Searching for the cooperative values in times of internationalization:

Competitiveness today requires being able to operate at a global scale. The financial crisis invigorated this requirement, posing new challenges to the economic viability of conventional companies and demanding alternative organizational forms of production. Although a wealth of research has focused on capitalist companies, little attention has been paid to the way these challenges affected worker cooperatives. Drawing from a qualitative case study of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, this article discusses the obstacles to internationalization faced by worker cooperatives, as well as the specific conditions and implications involved. In particular, the article analyzes Mondragon’s contradiction between being forced to expand and trying to keep cooperative values during this expansion. Two main actions aimed at responding to this contradiction are analyzed: the creation of mixed cooperatives and the extension of the corporate management model. The analysis of this process will shed light on actions for the global expansion of worker cooperatives.

Worker–intellectual unity: Trans-border sociological intervention in Foxconn

What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that ‘social science’ should never be separated from ‘politics.’ The authors also shed light on how social and economic injustice was creatively challenged by combining the strengths of workers, researchers and transnational movement activists. The study uses both quantitative (semi-structured questionnaires) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and participation observation) methods to gain insights concerning the experiences, world views and collective agency of Chinese workers who are struggling to make sense of the global production regime they inhabit and to contest the forces that shape their working and social lives.

Opening a Minor Genre of Resistance in Reform China: Scream, Dream, and Transgression in a Workplace

A scream pitched itself through the darkness of the night. It came, as usual, in the last hours of night, at about four. Yan had had that same nightmare, and she again fell to shrieking. I was awakened by the ghostlike voice, to find it passing away, and the deep silence of the night reigned once again. Yan was a dagongmei (working daughter) who worked in an electronics company owned by Hong Kong capitalists in the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen, China, where I also stayed as an assembly line worker from November 1995 to April 1996. The firm we worked for was Meteor Electronic Company Ltd., also known as “the Meteor”; its workforce ranged from 500 to 550 during my stay. Initially there to study the transformation of the working lives and identities of Chinese women in light of China’s attempt to incorporate its socialist system into the global economy in the Reform Era, I was brought to the genre of bodily politics and transgression when, at the final stage of my fieldwork, I unexpectedly encountered the

Gender and class : women's working lives in a dormitory labor regime in China

The thirty years since Women on the Line has witnessed great achievement in the literature of gender and work both in the West and Global South. There was a booming literature since the 1970s and 1980s in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women studies, and cultural studies—most of them excellent works that touch upon sophisticated debates on the interplay between gender and work, production and reproduction, dominance, and resistance in an increasingly globalized context.

The challenges of corporate social responsibility (CSR) multi-stakeholder practices: searching for a new occupational social work model in China

The emergence of China as a ‘worlds factory’ in the new millennium was accompanied by the rise of a new working class which was composed of more than 200 million peasant-workers. As internal migrant labourers, these peasant-workers were deprived of citizenship rights to reside in the city and lacked basic labour rights and protections. In order to address the precarious working conditions of migrant workers who were employed by transnational corporations, a global Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) movement emerged, introducing a wide range of transnational corporate codes of conduct, labour standards and labour rights. This article presents a case study of a transnational CSR multi-stakeholder training programme at a Chinese workplace, in an attempt to demonstrate how capital, transnational NGOs and local labour NGOs – and including social workers – are all involved in the project to promote labour rights in China. Specific focus is placed on the role of social workers in enhancing worker participation in this project; the challenges and dilemmas that they encountered in the process, and suggestions are provided regarding the future development of a new model of occupational social work in China.

Am I the Only Survivor? Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in China

Fire, pain, and memory flashed into Xiaoming’s life story, highlighting a social trauma that runs through the lives of dagongmei, migrant working daughters, in this time of restructuring for China’s state socialist system. Reform-era China is imaged through a lens focused squarely on the global market, a lens that not only occludes new forms of class and gender inequality—and thus legitimizes them as necessary evils—but also leaves the voices of individuals subsumed within the collective enterprise. Who cares? A giant China is coming, a few thousand deaths a year mean nothing. After all, it was the West that was the first to dream of and promise a giant China to come in the twenty-first century! Thus was triggered a mighty desiring machine in mainland China, its effects felt especially among the elite. The desiring machine, with all its power, was targeted on one goal: to set the nation inexorably on the track of globalization, yu quanqiu jiegui, and join the World Trade Organization. What has been tragic is the calling up of a generation of young women to work toward this dream of integration with the global economy. A consideration of China’s subaltern condition within the global order could have foretold the voices of tragedy—the tragedy of compressed time

A "World-Class" (Labor) Camp/us: Foxconn and China's New Generation of Labor Migrants

The fact that in 2010 eighteen young workers attempted suicide at Foxconn production facilities in China has attracted worldwide attention. Drawing on research conducted in Foxconn factories in three regions of China — the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and West China — the authors trace the development of the Foxconn Technology Group as a case that demonstrates the aggressive nature of capital expansion in China and its impact on the lives of Chinese workers. While the Foxconn Group produces Apple products for the world’s consumers, it simultaneously produces a new Chinese working class, the majority of whom are young migrant laborers. The authors claim that in China the state played a significant role in accelerating global capital accumulation. The authors hope to make sense of the way that a state-capital alliance is shaping a new form of labor recruitment and labor use. This article analyzes the emerging labor regime, specifically, the use of student labor in the process of Foxconn’s expansion in China. First, the article discusses the ways in which the state contributes to the rise of monopoly capital by supplying workers who are both cheaper and younger. Second, the article examines how the new labor regime, established by Foxconn, generates more pressure on workers, leading to increased levels of anxiety and desperation among young factory workers. The article’s principal research question is how a labor crisis was structurally produced in a mega global factory regime, when a new youth working class was emergent in China.