From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization addresses fast-changing capital–labour relations in contemporary China in general, and particularly the process of informalization that is occurring across all industrial sectors and in all regions of China. While not all the chapters address the nature and the process of informalization of the Chinese economy, this book brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars working on the recent changes in state policy, legal reform, labour market and industrial restructuring that have had an impact on the working conditions and labour rights of the new working class. This new working class is composed of the urban poor, who have suffered from the breakdown of the iron rice bowl system, and the rural migrant workers who have become the second generation of dagongzai/mei.
The shift from an iron rice bowl system to informalization signalled a change from a state socialist economy to a global capitalist economy, in which the working lives of the Chinese people were increasingly subjected to new labour situations and capital–labour relations. In these new labour relations, informalization and casualization are two major processes that occur throughout the labour market, regardless of the nature of the companies (foreign-invested companies, joint ventures, private companies or state-owned enterprises) and irrespective of industry or sector. Hence, the secret of the capital accumulation on a global scale and the extended reproduction of capitalism in China lies in the process of informalization. This is what the three editors attempt to address and argue in their Introduction and in the three concluding chapters.
In part one, the authors provide an overview of the transformation of the labour market, the role of the Chinese state and the reformulation of social policy in addressing the challenges posed by the rapid deterioration of working conditions. Albert Park and Fang Cai raise an intriguing issue observed in China's official statistics, that there is a substantial group of “missing workers” who are actually rural migrants working in various informal sectors. Mary Gallagher and Baohua Dong review labour law reform in detail and highlight the fact that multiple agents of the Chinese state, such as legislators, lawyers, professors and trade unionists, participated in the law-making process. At the top of “legislating hegemony,” Mark Frazier studies the role of public opinion in shaping the social policy for the protection of urban layoffs at a time of increasingly employment insecurity. This section provides an overview that enables us to understand the changes in the nature of the market and the state at a time when the Chinese economy is highly governed by the global capitalist logic.
In part two, which is devoted to the major theme of the volume, the authors provide specific studies of three different industries – oil fields and refineries, the automobile industry and the construction industry – to explore more specifically the changing nature of capital–labour relations and the informalization process. Kun-Chin Lin's article is concerned with the wage differential system and its linkage to the organizational restructuring of enterprises; Lu Zhang focuses on the emergence of a dualist labour market in the Chinese automobile industry by highlighting the growing percentage of dispatched workers used in firms and the inevitable outcome of capital–labour conflicts that accompany the informalization process; Sarah Swider, who has studied modes of employment in the Chinese construction industry, argues that employment relations in this industry create a trap of “permanent temporariness” which deprives migrant workers of any kind of labour protection.
In the final part, which claims to touch upon the agency of Chinese workers, the authors do not look at the recent struggles of the new working class, but choose to observe several state-controlled trade unions and a few grass-root labour NGOs. While Liu Mingwei tries to argue for a possible organizing space opened up by the strategies of regional associations of state-owned unions, Ching Kwan Lee and Yuan Shen almost dismiss the contribution of labour NGOs in organizing the Chinese workers, despite the fact that these NGOs have a grass-root nature, are subject to state control and survive despite financial constraints. All in all, it is a pity that this volume did not include a chapter that addressed the rapid growth of collective actions among the new working class which have arisen in the past decade as a result of the informalization process and changing structural factors.
