Until recently, “comparative politics” meant simply the study of politics in other countries besides one's own. In the last few years, though, comparativists have begun to live up to their name by doing more direct comparison. Among China scholars, Dorothy J. Solinger has taken this approach to new heights in States Gains, Labor's Losses. Steeping herself in the voluminous and diverse literatures on political economy, labor politics, and globalization in France and Mexico, she has produced a work of bold conception, breathtaking scope, high imagination, refined texture, and large, fascinating, and counterintuitive conclusions.
Why match France and Mexico to China? In part, Solinger wants to make the point that regime type matters less than we often think—certainly an appropriate perspective for so many reasons having to do with the real-world politics that swirl around us. But she also wants to examine the effects of revolutionary legacies in countries that have plunged into not just the world economy, but also, more specifically, supranational economic organizations (SEOs), in the process abandoning long-standing commitments to labor. China, France, and Mexico all fit the bill. And their many differences in other respects only make the comparison all the more intriguing and, she argues, compelling.
Solinger's argument, as one might expect from such a project, is complex. Around 1980, all three countries experienced serious capital shortages as their Keynesian import-substitution policies and institutions began to break down. Partly because this crisis actually had begun in the early 1970s, each country already possessed a new coterie of elites who were more technocratically minded and predisposed to nascent neoliberalism than their predecessors. They shared the basic worldview and economic theories of the SEOs, which held out the prospect of, and dangled the resources for, escape from the political-economic “cul-de-sacs” in which China, France, and Mexico found themselves. The SEOs demanded policies that required each country to jettison long-standing ties to labor that had roots in their revolutionary traditions.
Thus far in the argument, the similarities among the three countries outweigh the differences, but now that shifts. Each country's historical ties to labor, over time, coalesced into nationally distinctive institutional and political “terms of attachment” among workers, unions, and the state. The differences among these patterns shaped the highly variegated levels, forms, and foci of labor protest against the new political economies and the SEOs that served as their midwives. Here, Solinger offers her most intriguing argument: she conceives of labor unions in terms of their power not to represent or advocate for workers so much as to control them. Thus, in China, whose statist labor federation had almost no power, influence, or credibility with respect to the proletariat, workers had space within which to organize protests. By contrast, France had a multitude of labor federations, the divisions and conflicts among which debilitated and disillusioned the working class, undermining a political response. And Mexico had developed a social contract under which the labor aristocracy was well treated in return for its political loyalty, while protest was met with stern repression that continued to influence and intimidate workers as neoliberalism bit. These different levels and patterns of protest, in turn, shaped the states' very different responses in developing welfare policies to cope with the proletariat's new difficulties. Solinger stresses that the responses of labor and, in turn, the state, cannot, as we might commonly think, be explained by each country's union density, regime type, level of state power, party in power, history of labor activism, union–party ties, level of international effects, or depth of the crisis. Rather, the “terms of attachment” do the analytical heavy lifting.
In so ambitious and complex an argument, there is a great deal to chew on for scholars of China, France, Mexico, comparative politics, social movements, comparative historical sociology, welfare politics and policy, and international political economy. For readers of the Journal of Asian Studies, the most pertinent questions concern what the comparison tells us about China that a more exclusively sinological perspective cannot. Starting with the similarities among her cases, we learn that China was far from alone in experiencing a structural economic crisis that was coming to a head in the 1970s, even if the specific sources of China's crisis were very different from those of the advanced and late industrialized capitalist countries. Those countries, too, experienced political divisions between “reformers” and others who were still steeped in the glory days of the recent past. Like them, China's new leadership saw accession to an SEO as an integral part of its way forward. And, for broadly similar reasons, such new linkages with SEOs demanded the breakup of older arrangements benefiting labor. Finally, the Chinese state is far from alone in experiencing considerable anxiety about the prospect of working-class protest, a result, in part, of popular movements that rocked all three countries in the 1960s, each in widely different ways, to be sure. Yet Solinger argues that China's apprehension is greater than France's or Mexico's because of the later historicity of its revolution and its continuing formal profession of socialist ideals.
Turning to the salient differences, China experienced the most vigorous labor protest, which, in turn, elicited the highest level of response in terms of welfare policy. China specialists are not used to thinking of the country as having livelier popular politics than “democracies,” and most would bemoan rather than celebrate its welfare provision. Most surprising, we are not used to thinking of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions as a stimulant to labor protest. State's Gains, Labor's Losses challenges us to rethink many of our basic assumptions.
Yet the book ends on an all too familiar, if still somewhat controversial, note. In the complex politics among workers, unions, states, and SEOs, the winners are the states rather than the SEOs. Each state has been able, Solinger shows, to successfully challenge the SEO that it entered when it felt strongly enough. The losers, of course, are the workers. That may be no surprise, but of greater interest is Solinger's argument that some have lost more profoundly than others, and her intriguing explanation for why that is.
