In this important new book, Parry Leung delves into aspects of Chinese labour politics and mobilization that have been too little studied in the past – notably how activist workers and middle-managers proactively organize strikes as a tactic for getting factory managers to the bargaining table. This perspective, informed by Leung's careful ethnographic fieldwork, adds new depth to previous ideas about labour mobilization and provides important new insights. As such, this book will be of great interest to political scientists and sociologists working on any aspects of Chinese labour politics or social mobilization and contention.
The core of the study is an analysis of a series of strikes during the late 2000s across the jewellery production sector in southern Guangzhou, as well as another strike against a consumer electronics producer in Shenzhen. Working through labour rights NGOs based in Hong Kong, the author made contact with key labour activists in Guangzhou, and through sustained close interactions with them over ten months in 2010 uncovered the dynamics of several different types of strikes as shaped and witnessed by their organizers. This allows Leung to refine many of the core hypotheses and arguments of earlier scholars regarding mobilization in China's export-oriented industrial economy.
Specifically, Leung presents a typology of three main types (one of which is further divided into two subtypes) of strikes. What he calls Type I strikes are spontaneous and unorganized – examples of what some other scholars have observed (or thought they observed) both in the Pearl River Delta and in state-owned firms across other parts of China. Type II strikes are orchestrated and directed by a corps of organizers and leaders, but do not result in sustained mobilization. Instead, these discrete contentious episodes help force the hands of factory managers, driving the sides together into negotiations over wages, benefits or working conditions, or laying the groundwork for eventual lawsuits. Finally, Type IIIa strikes are led by activists and evolve into sustained labour actions through loose coordination among leaders and organizers across firms, while Type IIIb strikes are characterized by formally elected leadership groups within one firm that then proceed to more regularized negotiations with management.
This typology is both novel and illuminating, but there are some important shortcomings in the book. First, while the author makes some effort to situate the jewellery sector and the consumer electronics sector within the context of the Pearl River Delta's export economy, he does not adequately explain the position of these sectors in Chinese industry as a whole. Relatedly, Leung avoids engaging with many key recent works of scholarship on Chinese labour politics and mobilization. Perhaps most glaring is the omission of any discussion of Eli Friedman's very important book, Insurgency Trap (Cornell University Press, 2014), though he can perhaps be forgiven for neglecting such a recently published work. But the reader gets a broader impression that Leung is not sufficiently well versed in much of the literature on Chinese labour politics published over the last two decades.
There are also other hallmarks of a too-lightly revised doctoral dissertation that unfortunately remain in this book. Chief among these are that the typology is presented systematically and completely only in the concluding chapter, that the first two chapters (totalling 46 pages) largely summarize points that are already common knowledge in the field without laying out the book's argument or its contribution, and that the text is poorly written and shows signs of insufficiently careful proof-reading. These issues could have been easily remedied prior to publication, but because they were not the book's influence and impact will be limited.
Much more serious than these smaller weaknesses, however, is that Leung relied on a very small sample of data to craft his arguments. Despite his stated goal of building only inductive “typological” theories, the fact remains that he has fewer than ten strike actions to analyse, spread across a small handful of firms in two nearby localities, and seen from the perspectives of fewer than 15 activists introduced to the author by Hong Kong NGOs. What's more, each informant – as is true in most interview-based research – does not provide an equal share of Leung's data. While it would be unreasonable to expect that they would, Leung ends up relying very disproportionately on just two individuals, who are married to each other and may in many other ways also be outliers among the population in question.
Even with the acknowledged weaknesses, this is an important book that demands the attention of all scholars of Chinese labour politics or social mobilization as well as students at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. The research is impressive and the perspective presented is both novel and – at least potentially – widely applicable.
