Anita Chan's edited volume, Chinese Workers in Comparative Perspectives, is a timely project that contributes to challenging Chinese exceptionalism in China studies in general, and Chinese labour studies in particular. As Anita Chan rightly points out, apart from the giant size of China's working population, the neoliberal transformation of China, its export-led industrialization, its attraction of huge volume of foreign capital, its relaxation of state protection of labour, the use of massive numbers of migrant labourers as informal and precarious workers, the ineffectiveness of trade union and labour regulation to protect workers, and the resultant conflicts and resistances in recent years, all these phenomena are part and parcel of global capitalism and are shared by the rest of the world, whether developed countries in America and Europe or developing countries in Asia and elsewhere.
Anita Chan argues that Chinese exceptionalism in academic circles colludes with China's official discourse of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” defined as the basic principles of scientific socialism combined with the factors of building socialism unique to China. To Chan, this “uniqueness” is problematic in the sense that China therefore can only be approached as providing a special case study. This prevents efforts to situate China in a larger and global context, and deters comparative studies that could shed light on the pros and cons of its developmental path in contrast to other countries. Moreover, Chan penetratingly points out that when Chinese scholars talk about the “Western model,” it usually refers to the “America model,” which also stands out as another form of exceptionalism. In this regard, Anita Chan contributes not only to disclose the fallacy of Chinese exceptionalism, but also the exceptionalism of the American model.
Similar to this fallacy is the label “made in China,” which is usually identified as a threatening force in the world's market. The labelling of the products as “made in China” often creates a misleading impression, as it masks the reality of the transnational corporate power in eating up profits, and subsumes the phenomenon of labour exploitation through a global supply and production chain. The prime example is Apple, whose strength is well illustrated by its ability to capture an extraordinary 58.5 per cent of the value of the iPhone despite the fact that manufacture of the product was entirely outsourced. Particularly notable was that labour costs in China accounted for the smallest share, only 1.8 per cent, or nearly US$10.00, of the US$549.00 retail price of the iPhone in 2010. Often the label was manipulated to misrepresent a global capital war in a nation-state competition when US politicians voiced their criticism of China and created a “Chinese threat.” The threat from China was usually augmented by the mass media at the time when the Chinese elites sought to promote a “big” country, excelling in global politics.
In order to overcome the fallacy of exceptionalism in Chinese labour studies, Anita Chan invites contributors to generate different forms of comparison in this volume. Part one tackles the macro political economy, in particular examining historical and structural developments. For example, Boy Luthje compares and contrasts German and Japanese transnational production regimes in China (chapter one), and Liu Mingwei and his colleagues compare the American and Chinese industrial relations system, debating the issue of convergence or divergence (chapter two). Most scholars of China's labour focus on a state-led process of globalization. In part two of Chan's edited volume, authors like Kevin Lin, Florian Buttollo, Kaxton Siu and others instead situate their studies in the labour process realm, and compare and contrast working conditions at the workplace level in China, Vietnam, Pakistan and India. For example, Kevin Lin studies migrant workers in private companies and state-sector workers, and finds that there is convergence in the making of a same working class in terms of working conditions at the workplace level (chapter three). The chapters in part three examine trade unions, collective bargaining and the right to strike, hoping to draw on the experience of other places such as Taiwan (Chris King-chi Chan and Yu-bin Chiu), Vietnam (Katie Quan), Australia (Thomas Nice and Sean Cooney) and Russia (Tim Pringle) in order to shed light on China's further labour movement. Nice and Cooney's chapter is particularly important in sharing lessons from the Australian experience to highlight that having a law to provide “the right to strike” does not necessarily create more strikes but instead limits them. Spontaneous strikes in China still provide more space for aggrieved Chinese workers to take action.
All in all, this edited volume is the first attempt to provide us a comparative perspective for understanding China's and the world's labour, contributing to labour internationalism in the long run. More studies should follow this path.
