This powerful, beautifully structured, deeply and impressively researched study is a pleasure to read. Inside China's Automobile Factories amounts to a multiple case study, covering seven automobile factories in six cities through close ethnographic work over a span of eight years (2004–11). The plants varied in size (ranging from 3,000 to over 13,000 workers), ownership type (two state-owned and five joint ventures), geographic location, market position, and the country of origin of the foreign partners of joint ventures (Germany, Japan, and the United States).
Lu Zhang clearly won the confidence of her over 300 subjects—formal and temporary workers of varied sorts, managers, Party and union cadres, local government and trade union officials, labor dispute arbitrators, labor scholars, and automotive industry experts. Their often-quoted words are fresh, straightforward, and revealing, enlivening the analysis substantially. In addition, she also drew upon archival and documentary sources. She further deepens her reportage and her interpretations by often appealing to comparative literature, on the United States recently and historically, on Japan, on South Korea, and on Europe. These juxtapositions yield insights and contrasts that help her to decipher events in China.
The argument is complex and subtle, indirectly talking back to those who are dubious about Chinese workers' ability to react effectively and to gain results when they are mistreated and feel aggrieved. The chief contribution is Zhang's argument that, caught between the conflicting demands of attaining profitability and sustaining legitimacy—the achievement of each of which tends to undermine the chance of attaining the other—the Chinese regime and the enterprises it oversees have cut up the labor force through labor market dualism. That model—granting higher wages, a fair measure of security, and decent benefits to the formal workforce while keeping temporary agency workers, student interns, and labor dispatch workers deprived and excluded—aims to render the formal workforce loyal and compliant, while using informal workers as buffers against the changeability of market demand, all to ensure favorable economic returns.
A major strength of the book is the wonderful way Zhang has set it up. The early chapters depict the social composition and demographic distinctions within the labor force and provide minute but socially relevant details of the working conditions under which it must survive—conditions that have not been ameliorated in any significant manner even after over twenty years of scholarly criticism, NGO efforts, and workers' protests. Zhang uses these background factors to illuminate the facets of factory life that breed resistance, as well as the modalities managers use to elicit what she casts as “negotiated compliance” (p. 115)—as opposed to actual consent—in the face of conflict.
Additionally, Zhang explores the intricacies of recruitment, hiring, wage and evaluation standards and conventions, and the chances for advancement, and how these affect the myriad subsets of the workforce, as well as how these conditions vary depending upon ownership and region. Grasping the complexities of factory technologies and shop floor politics had to require tireless and committed investigation; Zhang later shows us how her analysis of worker struggles grows directly out of the technical and interpersonal situations and the near-unbearable labor practices—harsh and unrelenting discipline to work longer, harder, and faster, and based upon arbitrary regulations—on the ground.
Workers' bargaining power, Zhang contends, has mounted as Taylorist and just-in-time regimes are increasingly vulnerable to work stoppages, making management desperate to resolve worker complaints, thereby empowering striking workers. She interprets wage raises, enhanced welfare benefits, and new labor laws as responses by firms, companies, and the central government to their collective unease over the disruption labor is able to mount and to the costs in stability and profitability such disturbances can cause.
Another fascinating feature of the work is its frequent reference to revolutionary and socialist-era legacies, which, Zhang argues, have produced an opportunity for workers to use their “legitimacy leverage,” as they call upon managers to observe such Maoist principles as the mass line, egalitarianism, and paternalistic empathy for workers. In fact, however, it would appear that these traditions fuel workers' expectations and disappointments much more than they guide plant officials' actions.
One more strand in the story is the impotence of the unions, situated as they are in their mission to promote production and to “build harmonious labor relations” (p. 132), along with their consequent failure to represent the workers or genuinely help to redress their troubles. This lack of either guidance or assistance from the unions is one of the conditions that spawns both open and hidden styles of opposition; other conditions, such as wage delays and various perceived injustices dealt to the temps, were other issues that sparked work stoppages. Actions that brought the formal workers and the temporary workers together in refusals to work succeeded most.
Despite enjoying and admiring this book, I had several questions. The most outstanding one is about Zhang's challenge to the new model of the “precariat,” a term coined by Guy Standing, which casts the casual labor produced by globalization as without recourse, a conclusion reached in different language in Eli Friedman's 2014 work.Footnote 10 Zhang sees rising labor activism and growing radicalization (e.g., pp. 146, 171–72), especially among the temps, as the spur for the enactment of several pro-labor laws in 2007. But she does not document such change over time, only protests at a particular moment; moreover, much of her interview material and observations appear to come from around 2007.
Another issue is her description of temporary workers as grounding their indignation over unequal treatment in memories of workforce treatment in the time of Mao (p. 188). But, given that most temporary workers appear to be people not possessing the urban hukou, it is unlikely that they or their forebears ever experienced industrial Maoism.
Inside China's Automobile Factories ends envisaging various scenarios for the future, propelled by the growing restiveness of workers and their alleged accelerating ability to push central-level politicians to legislate on their behalf. I am afraid that the volume did not help me to feel optimistic about this possibility. Nonetheless, this is a masterly work, sure to be accessible and valuable to students at any level in several disciplines—sociology, labor relations, and political science, to name three.
