Insurgency Trap develops an important, textured, original analysis of labour politics in China. It places its subject squarely within macro- and meso-level theories of labour relations, political economy and overall transition, to which it also makes very significant contributions. Its core question is “Why is it that labor is strong enough to win concessions at the national and sometimes provincial or municipal level but not strong enough to allow migrant workers to significantly benefit from these victories or gain their recognition?” (159, Kindle edition location, here and throughout). The answer lies in the structure of the Chinese state and, in particular, its labour unions. Leaders at the centre and in some provinces and municipalities, increasingly concerned that rising labour insurgency might develop into a labour movement, respond with concessions. But these are unenforceable because of the strong alliance of capital and local governments. In dealing with restive workers, the Chinese state is trapped.
Yet Insurgency Trap is grander and more interesting than just another analysis of the contradictions between higher and lower levels of the Chinese state. It begins with no less a figure than Karl Polanyi, an apposite choice for a country undergoing so great a transformation. But the Chinese case has stimulated Eli Friedman to develop an important emendation to the theory of the countermovement by dividing it into insurgent and institutional moments. Chinese workers have certainly reacted, with increasing force, against commodification of their labour. But the state cannot mollify working class insurgency by institutionalizing the decommodification of labour so long as union locals remain weak, ineffective and often downright hostile to workers in the face of grassroots governments' commitment to economic growth driven by local capital.
In another significant theoretical contribution, Friedman argues that “corporatism,” which has been used to explain China's labour politics, can't do so precisely because the country's working class has not been incorporated institutionally into the state, as it was under second-wave industrialization through Fordist arrangements in the US and UK and corporatist ones in continental Europe and Latin America. “Appropriated representation” works far better, he believes, since it emphasizes that, like all Chinese, workers are unable to represent themselves or choose their own representatives.
Insurgency Trap also adds to our understanding of the relationship between political economy and labour protest. Why, it asks, did sector-wide wage agreements – an example of the institutional moment of the countermovement against labour commodification – emerge in southeast Zhejiang but not in Guangdong? Friedman grounds the explanation in the nature of capital, which was much more regionally based in the former, compared with the latter's more international and mobile firms. Yet, even in Zhejiang, the institutional breakthrough remained trapped by the structure of the unions and the state, which could not overcome resistance from, and their dependence on, private businesses. Thus, the Zhejiang agreements could not be enforced, and most workers didn't even know their unions had hammered them out. Friedman concludes that such “oligarchic decommodification” (yet another useful conceptual innovation) is probably bound to fail. Though he does not say so, this is another example of the inadequacy of the corporatist framework for China, where capital, like labour, also lacks robust organizations licensed by the state, in its case to restrain it from undermining efficiency and upgrading by hyper-exploiting labour.
The penultimate chapter shifts from spatial to temporal comparison, laying bare in rich detail the contradictory dynamics of two Guangdong labour insurgencies: the previously little-known 2007 strike at Ascendant Elevator and the very prominent 2010 automobile industry strike wave that began at Nanhai Honda. The former failed, while the latter produced significant contagion and wage increases. Friedman accounts for the difference in terms of political and economic developments over the intervening years.
On the political level, 2008 and 2009 saw unprecedented levels of labor conflict (with the Pearl River Delta as the epicenter), in which labor arbitration courts were completely overloaded and worker insurgency frequently spilled out into the streets…Economically, the onset of crisis increased the central government's determination to shift away from a model of development so wedded to exports. And in Guangdong, the provincial authorities gained confidence that they occupied a less subordinate position vis-à-vis transnational capital than had previously been the case (3432–3438).
Yet even the workers' breakthroughs of 2010 did not offer any escape from the insurgency trap, since they did not produce lasting institutional change.
How serious is the trap? What are its implications for the future? Friedman sketches four scenarios. First, the state's goal is a benevolent technocratic victory, which is unlikely because it would have to break the powerful alliance of capital and the local state. Second, institutionalization of reformed industrial relations could result if ongoing “insurgency strengthens the segments of the state that are committed to compromise” (3819–3820), underpinned by a material base in the economic benefits from stabilized industrial relations and in Keynesian demand stimulation. Though Friedman doesn't mention it, the recent tendency of labour insurgency to focus on bread-and-butter demands is also propitious here. Third, the stalemate could drag on, grounded politically in the obstacles to fundamental centralization of power in China's political economy, and economically in the absence of competitive pressure from lagging international capital to achieve efficiency gains that would undermine the material basis of hyper-exploitation. The danger of that is the fourth scenario: ongoing insurgency leading to broad working class radicalism, with potentially fatal consequences for the state.
How likely that is depends not just on the complex dynamics of social movement politics and the state's determination and capacity to manage or repress them, but also, in the first instance, on broad working class support for it. Friedman is right to point to rising working class insurgency in recent years, and Insurgency Trap does a terrific job of explaining its political implications. But whether the inclination to protest, much less radicalism, is anywhere close to approaching a critical mass that would be required for a transformative political movement is another question, which Friedman does not pose, and which readers of his outstanding book would do well to keep in mind. If the tipping point is far away, then China's labour politics may remain trapped for the foreseeable future.
