It has been widely reported that privatization of state-owned enterprises in China since the 1990s has generated waves of labour unrest that worried the Chinese government. A few excellent works have recently emerged to compare the dynamics of labour unrest in different regions within China. But so far few have seriously put this wave of unrest in an international-comparative perspective. This gap in the literature is now filled by the latest book by Dorothy Solinger.
The international comparison that Solinger pursues is important, as it allows us to put the trend of China into perspective. For example, we know that the level of labour unrest in China has been high and increasing since the 1990s. But how high is it compared with other countries undergoing similar market reform? This comparison also enables us to take into account more independent variables (such as regime type) that a one-country case study cannot allow in explaining the surge in China's unrest. By contrasting the patterns of labour protest and government's responses in China, Mexico and France in the 1980s and 1990s, Solinger surprisingly finds that both the level of unrest and the state's responsiveness to such unrest in authoritarian China was far higher than those in democratic France and democratizing Mexico, defying the stereotype that the Chinese state was always repressive and aloof to the voices of the downtrodden. In search of an explanation for this paradox, Solinger carefully dissects the exceptional dynamics of China's political economy vis-à-vis Mexico and France.
In the three chapters in part one, Solinger outlines the state-led development model as the common starting point of the three countries. She argues that despite the divergence in details, all of the Chinese, Mexican and French states had abided by their pact with the working classes, warranting their job securities and benefits through protectionist trade policies until the late 1970s. Since then, economic difficulties – debt crisis in Mexico, sluggish growth in France and the anxiety of lagging behind in post-Mao China – urged the political elite to embark on the course of economic liberalization. They also subject their economies to the rules of supranational economic organizations (EU, WTO and their predecessors), in anticipation of joining them or increasing integration with them. By opening up their market to foreign manufacturers and increasing the flexibility of domestic enterprises, these liberalizing reforms jeopardized workers' job security.
Despite this common starting point, workers in the three countries responded to liberalization differently. Chinese workers' resistances were the most fierce and intensive, bringing a surge in labour protests in the 1990s and beyond, while labour unrest in Mexico and France ironically declined from the crest in the 1970s. Solinger explains this divergence in terms of the historical interaction among labour unions, the state and the workers of the three places. In France, workers had developed high dependence on unions for advancing their interests. Once liberalization weakened the unions considerably by shedding unionized jobs, the workers found nobody to turn to and became passive. In Mexico, the unions maintained a strong presence among the working class throughout the reform. But under the long semi-authoritarian rule, union bosses had transformed into latter's repressive arms that helped contain labour activism.
In China, the official union has been “worse then useless” (p. 148) for workers. Chinese workers were therefore not dependent on the union as the French workers were. At the same time, Chinese union leaders did not function as the repressive agents of the state as the Mexican unionists did. Chinese workers could therefore benefit from “the absence of active, assertive unions … that gave Chinese workers an opportunity to demonstrate on their own” (p. 166), and become very contentious in the liberalizing process. The exceptional belligerency of the Chinese workers, though unable to reverse the market reform, did successfully urge the state to implement welfare measures such as unemployment insurance to alleviate the plight of the urban poor. With the absence of strong disruptive challenges from labour, in contrast, the French and Mexican governments did little to improve pre-existing welfare programmes to compensate for labour's losses.
Previous studies of China have compared China with other formerly socialist countries. These comparative exercises are very useful for examining the 1980s, when these countries shared the challenge of dismantling the ailing command economy. But by the 1990s, the fundamental edifices of all command economies had gone, either through Eastern Europe's shock therapy or China's muddling through. This book is a timely contribution that helps release China from the conceptual ghetto of “transition economies,” and to see the new challenges faced by China as stemming less from an inefficient socialist system than from the globalization pressure shared by most other countries, developed and developing alike. The conclusion of this study – that the level of labour resistance against liberalization is shaped by the historical and institutional relations between the state, the unions and the workers, and has little to do with the general openness of the regime – not only sheds light on the possibility of progressive change in authoritarian China, but also constitutes a theoretical proposition that social scientists interested in social movements and welfare development elsewhere will find useful.
