Abstract
Reviewed by: Ching Kwan Lee, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA DOI: 10.1177/0730888415590147
As China becomes the world’s leading manufacturer of automobiles, this book offers an inviting and necessary vista into the factories and workers who make them. Zhang spent 20 months between 2004 and 2011 conducting interviews among workers and managers in seven auto factories located in five provinces. The main contribution of the book lies in its empirical descriptions of a lean, mean, and dual labor system widely adopted in the industry today. It came about in the wake of Chinese factories’ transition from state paternalism in the late 1990s when massive layoffs and enterprise restructuring happened, sped up by the anticipation of intensified competition following China’s accession to the World Trade Organization. The auto industry is male dominated (80%), with a clear division between formal and informal (or temporary) workers. Among the factories in this study, the proportion of informal workers (consisting of agency workers and student interns) varies between 33% and 60% of the workforce. They earn 50% to 75% of formal workers’ salary, receive less generous social insurance contributions through their agencies, and are excluded from the modicum of promotion opportunity within the internal labor markets of these firms. What is striking is that even the so-called formal workers are given very short-term (1–2 year) contracts.
This dual and mean labor regime underpins China’s competitive advantage in this industry, allowing for what the Chinese call a “human wave tactic”—deploying a large number of low-cost, semiskilled workers to work at an intense pace, and operating two 10-to-12-hour shifts to ensure nonstop production and maximize output. Efficiency for capital but degradation of work generates an alienated workforce. Whereas formal workers aspire to exit from the assembly line due to a pervasive sense of job insecurity, informal workers harbor deep grievances about this blatantly unequal dualistic system of compensation and status. One particular finding in Zhang’s firm- and industry-level data may be significant for the future development of labor politics in China. It is that as more and more urban youth join the ranks of the informal workforce, the entrenched boundary between rural and urban workers may be blurred in the years to come.
Notwithstanding the empirical details on the internal labor markets of these auto manufacturers, the book’s analytical and theoretical arguments are flawed. Zhang wants to make two arguments. First, she wants to argue that due to China’s socialist revolutionary past, there is an “acute contradiction between profitability and legitimacy,” which lends Chinese workers some kind of ideology-based “legitimacy leverage” in tacitly bargaining with management. Yet, not only is her definition of legitimacy leverage confusing, but also her limited data on two brief episodes of strikes fail to provide empirical support of workers having any legitimacy leverage. The second argument she wants to advance is that as global capital moves into China and its auto sector, Chinese factories become the epicenter of a new wave of labor unrest. Consequently, the text is littered with repeated assertions about workers’ “growing resistance,” “growing grievances,” and “gradual radicalization,” without any empirical support or comparative reference to establish these purported trends of radicalization. These assertions contradict her own conclusion that Chinese autoworkers’ “apolitical collective action” has so far “remained localized, short-lived, and limited in their goals” (p. 184). This conclusion echoes that of my Against the Law (2007), which Zhang criticizes and misrepresents. Straining to assert the novelty of her findings, Zhang conjures quite a few straw men in the China labor field. For instance, she claims to provide a corrective to the assumption of “affluent workers, contented workers.” Yet, she offers no reference to any scholarship that makes that simplistic assumption. Elsewhere, she criticizes another so-called master narrative in Chinese labor studies that maintains that worker politics would progress from “working class formation to trade union organization to political party to state power” (p. 194). But again, she omits citations of any scholarly writing that actually enunciates this narrative.
This book is no doubt the result of patient, timely, and hard work. Yet, its intellectual potential is limited by the absence of a strong analytical framework or theoretical agenda. Complicating this weakness, Zhang was not able to get permission to conduct participant observation on the shop floors, and we do not get a real sense of capital–labor relations as social relations at the point of production. The selection of cases seems to be dictated by convenience and accessibility rather than by any theoretical logic. In the end, the book depicts few new dynamics in Chinese labor relations that may have triggered the widely reported Honda strikes in 2010 and many other strikes in China since.