In the late 2000s and early aughts, China enacted a series of important national labor laws. Among other things, these abolished fees for arbitration, outlawed certain forms of discrimination, and raised penalties for employers not signing contracts. The changes sparked a level of debate in the country that would be surprising in North America or Europe, where industrial relations have slipped from popular attention (and where breakthroughs in workplace regulation have become quite rare). For example, a draft of the most important new piece of legislation, China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law (LCL), received 191,000 comments during a thirty-day public comment period. Prominent professors debated the law on Chinese television. And foreign groups were drawn into the discussion too: the American and European Union Chambers of Commerce expressed concerns about the LCL, while the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and Change to Win decried this corporate lobbying and invited a pro-LCL Chinese academic to tour the United States.

When the then-less-well-known technology firm Huawei fired and rehired employees to get around the law’s provisions mandating non-fixed-term contracts for some workers, condemnation rained down on the company from outraged citizens online. Following the LCL’s enactment and other policy changes, according to state statistics, Chinese workers doubled the number of employment cases they brought to mediation, arbitration, and court and, according to unofficial sources, took to the streets to protest in increasing numbers. At the same time, investment moved both further inland and abroad, while authorities cracked down harshly on labor advocates. A decade later, the reasons why the government pushed through the precise kinds of reforms it did, as well as the long-term consequences of those reforms, are still subject to different interpretations.

In Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State, Mary E. Gallagher (Reference Gallagher2017), one of the world’s leading scholars on Chinese labor relations and labor law, makes a compelling contribution to research on the topic. She posits that Beijing decided to shake things up for structural reasons, including a deepening labor shortage on the coast and a perceived need for a higher-skilled, more stable urban workforce. However, if China’s motivations for acting made sense, it adopted a puzzling approach that Gallagher characterizes as “high standards, self-enforcement” (31). The country’s new rules on termination of employment, in particular, would come to compare favorably to those of even some very wealthy states. But individual employees bringing individual cases, not labor inspectors or the Communist Party-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions, would be primarily responsible for drawing attention to any violations of the new policies.

The book explains the government’s decision to rely on this “fire alarm” rather than “police patrol” model as being the result of policy makers’ desires to divide workers, leave the state some discretion in policy implementation, resolve principal-agent problems between central and local authorities, and bolster the legitimacy of the center. Yet the decision generated fresh problems. Workers with more years of schooling, who were born under China’s current market economy rather than the old socialist system, or who enjoyed legal representation all tended to have positive experiences with the dispute resolution process. These people were, of course, the high-skilled intended beneficiaries of the policy. So far, so good from the state’s perspective. But less-educated, older, and unassisted workers left the process profoundly frustrated. The result was increased resort to the streets by employees and to extralegal mediation efforts by authorities, or what Gallagher, drawing on Carl Minzner (Reference Minzner2011), describes as a partial “turn against law” from below and above.

This argument both overlaps with, and departs from, other recent analyses of China’s attempts to re-regulate its workplaces. In a book published the same year as Authoritarian Legality, Cynthia Estlund (Reference Estlund2017) asserts that a New Deal-like formalization of collective bargaining would offer the most hope for Chinese workers and perhaps do the most to calm restive shop floors too but that the government simply could not tolerate the existence of organized labor, foreclosing this option. Eli Friedman (Reference Friedman2014, 6) makes a similar point, describing China as having fallen into “insurgency trap” because of its “self-imposed political constraints,” specifically, again, its unwillingness to institutionalize worker power in the form of free trade unions. In a book that echoes Gallagher’s interest in how different groups of workers experience the law, Elaine Hui (Reference Hui2018) describes the country’s labor legislation as serving a hegemonic purpose—namely, building support for the state and market economy—but with some workers giving their active consent to legal hegemony, others remaining indifferent, ambivalent, or critical and only giving passive consent, and yet others—the radicals—giving no consent at all.

Gallagher shares these scholars’ opinion that China’s chosen approach to labor policy cannot fully rein in workplace abuses and is motivated more by other goals. And her book bolsters Estlund and Friedman’s contention that authorities have put themselves in a bind from which they will have difficulty extricating themselves. Yet more than other recent works, including Hui’s, Authoritarian Legality gives the law its own separate causal weight. As Gallagher (Reference Gallagher2017, 116) writes, “[w]hile the state might be self-serving in its promotion of legal mobilization, there are also important consequences of state-led citizen activism beyond those intended by the state.” Gallagher argues for a “constitutive interpretation” of Chinese legislation as shaping rights consciousness. The way that workers experience the law can bolster Beijing’s mission or end up setting them implacably against it. Regardless, the law has a life of its own.

The most persuasive part of the book is the middle section where Gallagher carefully parses who has gained the most and least from China’s new laws. In her discussion of the government’s possible reasons for passing the legislation, she is forced to infer authorities’ motives from broad patterns in dispute rates, language in official mouthpieces, and insurance coverage. But when it comes to workers’ experiences with the laws, she has much more tailored data at her disposal—specifically, a pair of multi-city surveys about labor law usage and in-depth interviews with people who sought support from a Shanghai university-based legal aid clinic. Gallagher’s (2017) surveys show that each additional year of education raises the likelihood of workers pursing a resolution of their work-related grievances by 8.6 percent if factors like dispute experience and media exposure are not controlled for (124) and makes workers 4.1 percent more likely to choose litigation, in particular, as a means of resolution (126).

Her interviews with worker plaintiffs then demonstrate that self-education can substitute to some degree for traditional school learning. Gallagher similarly presents convincing evidence that whether or not employees enjoy representation or, at least, some sort of coaching from others has a significant effect on the positivity of the process for them. The negative experiences with the law of older workers are likewise well documented: the book shows that each year of a worker’s age reduces their belief in the effectiveness of the law by 1 percent without controls (Gallagher Reference Gallagher2017, 179). In Gallagher’s interviews, employees with a background in the previous planned economy are shown to bitterly resent the gap between what Ching Kwan Lee (Reference Lee2007, 12) calls the Mao era’s expansive “socialist social contract” and the much narrower rights afforded by the actual paper contracts of today (which are the product of an earlier round of labor law reform in the mid-1990s). As one former state-owned enterprise employee says to Gallagher (Reference Gallagher2017, 174), ridiculing propaganda about the law being a weapon, “[t]hey say we have a weapon, what weapon? I pulled out this weapon and it was useless.” Most intriguing of all, though, are the worker plaintiffs who come out of their lawsuits with both a stronger sense of personal efficacy and greater cynicism about the system or, as Gallagher says, “strong opinions that the law doesn’t work well, but that they have learned to work the law more effectively” (114). Gallagher (Reference Gallagher2006) has written about this phenomenon of “informed disenchantment” elsewhere, but it adds an important layer to the book. Overall, the volume’s exploration of labor’s varied encounters with formal dispute resolution processes shows the benefit that can be derived from focusing on a phenomenon with a broad range of analytical tools and an openness to finding surprising nuances.

Indeed, the book supports a more forceful theoretical claim than the ones it explicitly advances. Gallagher situates the volume in the growing research on liberal institutions in illiberal contexts and those institutions’ contributions to authoritarian resilience. However, she offers her findings as essentially a friendly amendment to this literature: where others have focused on attempts by dictatorships to coopt elites, she highlights the importance of winning over, or dividing, the disenfranchised masses; if repression has been assumed to be autocrats’ main tool for dealing with dissent, Gallagher joins other China researchers in emphasizing the hyper-responsiveness that can also spring from non-democracies’ existential uncertainty, and while many have explored how authoritarian regimes have adopted elections, she explores the law.

Instead, the book could be framed as mounting a frontal challenge to resilience scholars’ belief that dictatorships can innovate their way out of thorny social contradictions. Scattered throughout the book are statements to this effect, for example, that China’s “heavy reliance on individual rights protection and legal mobilization with inadequate legal representation jeopardizes both … autocratic resilience [and] democratic convergence” (38) and that the country’s “cycle of mobilization and state-led resolution is a dysfunctional dynamic that exposes the limitations of democratic institutions in authoritarian regimes” (50). But these statements are softened by other sections laying out the logic of China’s chosen approach. It is unclear if Gallagher is ultimately ambivalent about whether the rational or counterproductive elements of China’s labor policy are more theoretically important or if she has simply buried the lede. Regardless, readers should focus on the evidence of legislative dysfunction that appears repeatedly in the volume. Gallagher’s work ought to encourage further research examining the underexplored feedback effects of other areas of Chinese policy making.

At the time of this writing, four years have already passed since the publication of Authoritarian Legality. In that period, much has changed. China has twice relaxed the country’s previous one-child policy, which once seemed immune to change despite the obvious damage it was wrecking (not the least to the size of the country’s workforce). It has also wrapped up a massive campaign that the leadership claims has succeeded in eradicating extreme poverty in even remote corners of the land. The government has moreover surprised observers by nearly completely undoing Hong Kong’s special “one country, two systems” arrangement and has enacted extraordinarily repressive measures in Xinjiang that some have described as genocidal. Further afield, China is building artificial islands in the South China Sea and dramatically extending its influence in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and Africa via its Belt and Road Initiative. In many ways, Beijing seems quite unfettered, for better or worse.

Nonetheless, on the basic labor law questions of wages and social insurance and ensuring that people are not fired for capricious reasons that are Gallagher’s focus, China still ties itself in knots—now opening, now closing, now encouraging citizens to involve themselves, now discouraging them. Meanwhile, the country’s rural-urban divide, which Authoritarian Legality argues has been an important driver of workplace reform efforts, remains a yawning gulf. Many countries struggle with how to resolve issues like these. But China’s interlocked concerns with development and stability make its task all the more difficult. Gallagher closes by discussing rumblings of elite discontent about the LCL. However, as new forms of industrial contention break out in China in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in the poorly regulated gig economy, pressure is now mounting for the state to step back in, not withdraw. Gallagher’s book provides an invaluable guide to evaluating the impact of any new labor legislation that might be put forward. But the volume also has a broader reach. It should be of interest to any who are concerned with rule of/by law in China and the contradictions of autocratic governance more generally.