The resistance, agitation, and collective mobilization of workers have long been regarded as important factors shaping political conflicts and political development. Outcomes such as revolutionary action, democratization, economic growth, and inequality have been linked to the organization and power of labor. However, in the past decades, research on, as well as public attentiveness to, workers and labor has been on the decline. In Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, and Responsiveness, Manfred Elfstrom picks up this important strand of research to illuminate the myriad ways in which Chinese workers are engaged in resistance and the diversity of strategies that the authoritarian state adopts in response.

Elfstrom puts forth a bottom-up portrayal of Chinese politics in which the actions of workers result in both government repression and responsiveness. More specifically, depending on whether workers engage in contained, boundary-spanning, or transgressive resistance—concepts drawn from McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly (Dynamics of Contention, 2001) and O’Brien (“Neither Transgressive nor Contained: Boundary-Spanning Contention in China,” Mobilization, 8 [1], 2003)—the state responds with what Elfstrom terms “orthodox” or “risk-taking” strategies of control that encompass repressive programs and government policies.

Using rich qualitative data based on fieldwork in the Yangtze River Delta in Jiangsu Province, Elfstrom describes how workers engage in contained forms of resistance and how the local state uses orthodox control measures. Workers use state-sanctioned channels to lodge complaints against employers, make demands that the state enforce its existing policies such as payment of the local legal minimum wage, and limit the scope of organizational efforts so that collective action remains largely within worksites. Motivated by strong incentives to avoid punishment for failing to contain collective action and social mobilization, authorities in the Yangtze River Delta conduct extensive surveillance of workers and activists, engage in intensive and direct government intervention in firms to create incentives to minimize conflict and to resolve conflicts before they can escalate into strikes and protests, and produce legislation to encourage workers to pursue individualized rather than collective challenges. Altogether, the local government in the Yangtze River Delta devotes substantial efforts to preempting any form of resistance that falls outside officially sanctioned tactics and channels.

In contrast, Elfstrom’s interviews from the Pearl River Delta in China’s southern Guangdong Province reveal boundary-spanning and transgressive worker resistance as well as risk-taking government control measures. Workers in Guangdong Province adopt non-state-sanctioned tactics such as strikes, protest, and riots. They make demands that go beyond existing policy promises—for example, engaging in protests demanding wages higher than the local legal minimum and advocating for union reform. They organize beyond individual worksites and form durable linkages with labor NGOs and other grassroots networks. Motivated by the same incentives to control social unrest but faced with more intensive levels of resistance, local governments in the Pearl River Delta adopt a “risk-taking” approach to control labor, where instead of intervening in firms and preempting the escalation of collective action, legislative innovations are adopted to bolster workers’ rights—for example, laws allowing both basic-level union elections and unions to represent workers in negotiations in the event of work stoppages—and blunt, repressive force is used to crack down on enterprises, activists, and actual protests when they move beyond a certain scale.

Elfstrom’s overall argument that worker resistance predicts both repressive and responsive responses from the state is bolstered by quantitative analysis of “China Strikes,” a novel dataset created by Elfstrom of protest events from 2003–12. These observational data show that year-on-year changes in strikes are correlated both with increased provincial spending on paramilitary police and increased pro-worker decisions in employment disputes.

One important contribution of the book is its simultaneous focus on repression and responsiveness, rather than on one to the exclusion of the other, as is the norm in research on authoritarian politics. In terms of repression, the book ably demonstrates just how wide a range of repressive tactics—from covert surveillance to creating incentives to channel behavior to brute-force police tactics—are employed by the Chinese government. The book also advances existing research on authoritarian responsiveness by moving beyond the act of responding to grievances to an examination of official decisions (e.g., mediation, arbitration, court outcomes) and changes in labor policy.

This book is also a welcome intervention in response to a dominant, top-down approach to the study of Chinese politics that emphasizes how the actions of the government, regime, and state influence society. Elfstrom’s work takes seriously the bottom-up effects of society—here, resistance by labor—on the state. Although he makes clear that there is a feedback loop between the actions the government takes to control labor and the strategies of workers, the book provides numerous, eye-opening examples of how local governments are reacting to labor, especially in the context of worker activism in the Pearl River Delta.

Notwithstanding the important linkages between worker action and state response identified in the book, Workers and Change in China leaves open the question of whether there is a missing confounder that influences both workers’ recipes for resistance and regional modes of control. We do not have, and it is likely impossible to obtain, the counterfactual of how the government in the Yangtze River Delta would have acted had its workers adopted the boundary-crossing and transgressive forms of resistance seen in the Pearl River Delta. The counterfactual of government response in the Pearl River Delta had its workers been as constrained in their resistance as those in the Yangtze River Delta is similarly out of reach, leaving open the possibility of missing confounders. Elfstrom does offer one such confounder, political culture, noting how the Guangdong government favors “‘big society, small government,’” whereas the Jiangsu government favors “‘big government, small society’” (pp. 77, 108). However, he largely rejects the relevance of political culture, because it appears to affect the state rather than workers.

Another potential confounder not addressed in the book is the economic development strategy of different regions in China: whether a region emphasizes market-driven or state-led allocation of resources can influence the behavior of firms, worker resistance, and government responses to labor. For years, China as a whole has vacillated on how liberal its economic policies should be. Should allocation of resources be driven primarily by the market? Or should the state (or Chinese Communist Party) have a leading role in resource allocation? Whether the local government adopts an economic development strategy that is market driven or state led influences the extent to which it will directly monitor and intervene in the day-to-day operations and business decisions of firms. This, in turn, influences how firms deal with workers and the space available for labor to engage in acts of resistance.

In Jiangsu and the Yangtze River Delta, Elfstrom’s interviews show clearly that the government closely monitors the day-to-day activities of firms and workers and actively intervenes in firm operations on a case-by-case basis when there is a threat of collective action. There is so much direct state intervention that, when there are “incidents” (p. 78), businesses do not take action based on their assessment of long-term or short-term business interests but immediately turn to the government to determine next steps. Although such behavior may minimize and constrain worker resistance, it means that market forces and incentives—for example, firm profitability and productivity—are no longer at the forefront of firm decision making in the Yangtze River Delta. A state-led approach to economic development can be interpreted as a culture of “big government,” but unlike a political culture argument, the local government’s approach to economic growth affects not only state actions but also worker resistance.

Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta clearly stand out as distinct not only from Jiangsu and the Yangtze River Delta but also as an outlier from the rest of China in terms of worker resistance and state response. Based on Elfstrom’s “China Strikes” dataset, between 450 and 500 strikes, protests, and riots took place in Guangdong, in contrast to other provinces that averaged less than 50 such events in the same period. The legislative actions documented in Guangdong—from worker protections to empowering unions and labor organizing—put the region at the cutting-edge of labor law experimentation in China. What we do not see in Guangdong from Elfstrom’s fieldwork is any government intervention into day-to-day business operations and processes to manage labor resistance. Although the government does crack down on businesses, activists, and protesters when protests spiral out of control, it seems to avoid intervening in ways that would affect the market allocation of resources.

With economic development strategy in mind, Jiangsu’s preemptive, surveillance-driven tactics can be understood as part and parcel of an approach in which direct state intervention into business practices is the norm. In contrast, the heavy-handed but reactive repressive strategies of Guangdong are what are left to an authoritarian government that wants to control worker mobilization but does not want to intervene so directly into the private sector. Therefore, instead of describing repressive strategies in Jiangsu as “orthodox” and those in Guangdong as “risk-taking,” it might be more apt to understand differences in the repressive strategies of the two regions as a consequence of differences in the government’s willingness to directly intervene into the economy.

Regardless of the exact role of economic strategy, which would require future research to adequately assess, Workers and Change in China puts into stark contrast the trade-offs that authoritarian governments must make between masses (workers) and elites (employers, entrepreneurs). Either the government must tolerate some level of social organization and mobilization, as is the case in Guangdong, or it must intervene heavily in society and in businesses, which as Elfstrom points out, risks elites “becoming disillusioned with the Chinese government” and gets in the way of consolidating elite support for the Chinese regime (p. 155).

Finally, an observation underpinning Workers and Change in China, as well as my own book Welfare for Autocrats (later reviewed by Elfstrom), is that the Chinese regime is devoting a tremendous amount of time, energy, and resources to quelling dissent and mobilization. This time, energy, and resources could be used much more productively elsewhere.