The rise of migrant workers’ strikes since early 2000s and the efforts of the Chinese government to regulate labour relations have created fertile ground for labour studies in China. Developed from his PhD thesis at Cornell University, Manfred Elfstrom's book is a new contribution to this stream of scholarship. Comparing it to other recently published books, its uniqueness is threefold.
First, Elfstrom adopts mixed methods in this research, while traditionally qualitative methods are dominant in China labour studies. His qualitative research was extensively built on 152 semi-structured interviews with “197 labour activist, workers, factory managers, government officials and others conducted between 2011 and 2017” (pp. 18–19). For the quantitative part, Elfstrom constructed a dataset (China Strike) that covers 1,471 cases of strikes, protests and riots from 2003 to 2012, the full term of the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao administration.
Secondly, a regional comparative approach has been adopted. The two main regions that he studied were the portion of the Yangtze River Delta (YRD) in Jiangsu and the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in Guangdong. Apart from these two regions, he also conducted a “shadow case study” on Chongqing in southwestern China. He argues that workers from different backgrounds (i.e. economic sector and migration status) have tended to choose different forms of labour resistance. And different forms of resistance have exerted different levels of pressure on the local authorities and led to what he calls different “regional models of control” (p. 8).
Third, Elfstrom goes beyond the main concern of labour studies scholarship on state, labour and capital relations to reflect on the future of the authoritarian regime. He calls for moving beyond the “transitology” and “resilience” approaches that have dominated studies of authoritarian regimes since the end of the Cold War. Instead, he suggests researchers should understand the political transformation in China using the concept of authoritarian evolution, referring to the capacity of Chinese authoritarian state to “continually adjust to the challenges” (page 14) from below.
The book consists of eight chapters. Chapter one is the Introduction that highlights the background and contribution of this research. In chapter two, Elfstrom distinguishes various form of workers’ resistance and organizations, and their various levels of pressure on the local authorities. “Contained” activism seeks for labour rights protection through legal channels and produces the lowest level of challenge to the state. “Boundary-spanning” activism (including protests, strikes and riots) demands more than the legal minimums and exerts medium pressure. “Transgressive” activism refers to well-organized cross-workplace or cross-region strikes that demand institutional reform and create the highest level of pressure.
Chapters three, four and five analyse the mechanism of local government officials’ responses to labour unrest and two different modes of control in PRD and YRD respectively. Through a “cadre promotion” system, the Party-state creates “bureaucratic incentives” for officials in local authorities to maintain social stability, according to the author. For the sake of personal interest, local government officials are under strong pressure to constrain labour conflict. Elfstrom concludes in chapter three that where conflict “takes a more contained form, a more orthodox approach to governance emerges”; where conflict “takes a boundary-spanning or transgressive form, a risk-taking approach instead emerges” (p. 69). In chapter four, the “orthodox control” approach is illustrated with the case of Jiangsu's portion of the YRD. Compared to the PRD, this region leads in high-tech and high value-added production and has more local workers working in the factories. As a result, workers generate less and more moderate forms of resistance, and the governments in Jiangsu, in turn, adopt “an orthodox approach to governance characterized by pre-emption, caution, and nudging” (p. 86). The “risk-taking control” model in the PRD is elaborated in chapter five. Well-known as the “Workshop of the World,” the PRD region of Guangdong province is the leader in light industry and has attracted the most migrant workers in the country. The PRD was also the home to many labour rights NGOs that actively helped workers in legal disputes or collective actions. Consequently, migrant workers in the PRD have staged more radical actions. Elfstrom points out that “strikes, protests, and riots [in the PRD] are frequent and, it seems, large and long-last” (p. 108). As a response, the governments in Guangdong have had to initiate labour law and trade union reform on the one hand and strengthen crackdowns on strikers and labour NGOs on the other hand.
Going beyond the regional case studies of the PRD and YRD, chapter six uses statistics to analyse the national process of state capacity building. It shows that increased worker resistance has given rise to increased repressive (measured by spending on the military police) and responsive (measured by the outcomes of employment disputes) state capacity. Chapter seven brings in the shadow case of Chongqing to discuss the role of political elites and its impact on state and labour relations. The city of Chongqing was led by Wang Yang (from 2005 to 2007) and Bo Xilai (from 2007 to 2012). Wang and Bo have been understood as representing different ideologies (liberalism vs populism) within the Party. However, Elfstrom's analysis reveals that “neither Wang nor Bo chose to initiate significant overhauls of Chongqing's workplaces, whether in the form of repression or responsiveness” (p. 133). He argues that this can only be “explained by the fact that Chongqing has experienced only moderate unrest” (p. 145). In other words, it is the level of bottom-up pressure from workers that defines the “regional mode of control”, rather than top-down dynamics from political leaders. Following this line of thought, Elfstrom emphasizes the continuity, rather than the changes, of state and labour relations from the Hu–Wen regime to Xi's administration: “the ongoing crackdown should not obscure cross-administration continuities: repression under Xi's predecessors or responsiveness today” (p. 145).
In the final chapter, the implications of this research on the long-term political development of China and other authoritarian regimes are discussed. As mentioned above, Elfstrom emphasizes the adaptability of Chinese authoritarian state. He also suggests extending his analysis in this book by conducting more case studies in other regions of China, as the PRD and YRD are “‘most similar’ but not necessarily typical cases” in China (p. 148). Overall, this is an excellent piece of work which will inspire scholars and students in sociology, political science and labour studies. Elfstrom should be congratulated for his nuanced analysis and methodological innovation in studying Chinese labour.
