Global Capitalism and Labour in the Age of Monopoly: Hong Kong and Mainland China

Abstract

Keywords

global capitalism Hong Kong resistance solidarity working class

Debates on Chinese Capitalism

Prognostications of the Asian century, pivoting away from the United States as epicentre of the world economy, call for in-depth understanding of this current shift, including specifying the logic and character of Chinese capitalism. Critical theories usually employ a stage theory embodied in the development of capitalism as linear temporality or teleology of historical progress. Post-socialist China, as a late comer joining global capitalism, embodies multiple forms of capital and operates as a variegated form of capitalism when compared to both the Global North and Global South (Peck and Zhang, 2013; Zhang and Peck, 2014). The simultaneous operation of multiple capitals in China (including Hong Kong) creates its own ‘third world’ in its hinterland, in its internal regions of the country and across the border to its neighbouring regions. However, this does not preclude efforts to capture the dominant features of contemporary Chinese capitalism in order to tease out its complexity, condensation and overarching forces that both constitute and are constituted by working-class masses.

To understand the formation of the Chinese working class, with its richness and fluidity, without sacrificing the clarity of its temporality and spatiality, we define the contemporary moment of Chinese capitalism as infrastructural capitalism. Infrastructural capitalism crystallizes an accelerated development trajectory characterized by strategic moves from competitive capitalism in the early reform period (Lin, 2021) to the advent of monopoly capital and an emerging imperialist rivalry. In quick succession, a state-led attempt to escape the crisis dynamics reflected by the Great Recession of 2008–2009 is followed by impacts on economic transformation, especially due to COVID-19 (Pun and Chen, 2022). Regardless of whether we understand infrastructural capitalism as forms of either state or authoritarian capitalism, its variegated nature includes features of both physical and digital infrastructures. The result sustains and speeds up expansive manufacturing, logistics and e-commerce industries as well as connecting them to the service sector.

Debates over the past three decades on the nature of Chinese capitalism across disciplines tended to identify deviations of the Chinese economic system from western capitalism and thereby proclaimed that China is not a capitalist system (Arrighi, 2009). The role of the redistributive state, coordination between the state–private business, the mixture of the role played by the party in management control over corporations and the ambiguity of private property rights all stand out as distinguishing the China model with ‘its special characteristics’. Characterizations of this China model recall earlier debates on the development of capitalism in Japan, also subject to stylized representations and the trope of the economic miracle exoticizing Japan around cultural distinctiveness. In parallel, the ensuing debates misrepresented Japan’s form of capitalism overdetermined by consensus management, thereby concealing histories of labour militancy, colonial regard/disregard, social reproduction and class formation (Aoki, 2021; Gottfried, 2015). Notwithstanding, the heated debates on whether China can be viewed as capitalist or as ‘socialism with its special characteristics’ miss the role the working class plays in significantly defining its form of capitalism. More specifically, it is largely the conflicts and contradictions between capital and labour, the production and reproduction of these conflicts, and the enduring contradictions that define capitalism while sowing the seeds of capitalism’s future destruction.

Hong Kong as Part of China’s Capitalism Project

Hong Kong was incorporated into China’s infrastructural or authoritarian capitalism (Siu and Jin, 2022) with unimaginable speed astonishing Hong Kong citizens and the international community alike. With the advent of an intervening state apparatus, Hong Kong society has been completely changed. While the framework of state-society has dominated the debates, what is missing from this discussion are the capital–labour relations as they emerged in Hong Kong, social relations which share more similarities than differences when compared to their counterparts on the Chinese mainland. This special issue is one of the first attempts to shed light on Hong Kong labourers who, as ‘invisible subjects’, serve a Chinese capitalism that has rapidly spilled over the border since the 1997 sovereignty handover. Together with the varied forms of mainland Chinese labour struggles with their recent proliferation, labourers across the border potentially will be the agents destabilizing this infrastructural capitalism in flux.

Legacy of Colonial Capitalism

Hong Kong, a former British colony, and now China’s special administrative region (SAR), is a unique and important case as we seek to reveal the nature of Chinese capitalism and its complexity. As China’s SAR, Hong Kong is first of all significant in observing how the Chinese state applies its unique governance practices, especially in a robust capitalist economy. Economically, Hong Kong was often identified as one of the freest markets in the world (Friedman and Friedman, 1990). The city adopted the British (Scottish) Smithian free market economic doctrine as its ideology to govern daily economic practices and assigned the colonial state a specific role in providing building blocks to sustain the capitalist economy (e.g. rule of law, freedom of economic transaction, building physical infrastructure, public housing and public education). In particular, Hong Kong was dubbed as one of the Asian economic miracles in the 1970s and 1980s because the city was seen by economists as an ideal laboratory experimenting with free market capitalism (Friedman and Friedman, 1990). Politically, because Hong Kong was a British colony, the colonial government inherently lacked legitimacy and relied on collaborating with Hong Kong Chinese elites to rule over its society (Law, 2009). Surprisingly, during the post-World War II period, unlike other British colonies where numerous independence movements mushroomed, colonial Hong Kong society was comparatively stable. The strong economic growth and political stability of the colony presents an interesting puzzle regarding the success of its social and political economy.

The Relationship of the Colonial State to Hong Kong Society

Earlier attempts to unravel this puzzle were taken up by local sociologists. One line of research focused on the colonial state’s ruling coalition as well as its governing strategy. King (1975) used the concept of ‘administrative absorption of politics’ to describe the political process through which the British governing elites ‘co-opt or assimilate the non-British socio-economic elites into the political-administrative decision-making body’, thus yielding elite integration and legitimacy of political authority to ensure Hong Kong’s political stability (King, 1975: 473). Drawing on the concept of ‘a borrowed time, a borrowed place’ (Hughes, 1976), Lau (1984) attributed the city’s social and political stability to the refugee experience of Hong Kong’s population, to traditional Chinese values and to their orientation towards family interests. Under these formulations, the colonial state had very few direct interventions into the Chinese community; at best, the colonial state only ‘minimally integrated’ with Chinese society (Lau, 1984). Formulated in these ways, Hong Kong’s colonial state was portrayed as a non-interventionist state not exercising direct political authority and power over the everyday lives of Hong Kong people.

These non-interventionist state formulations, however, were not without challenges. Scholars from sociology, history, political science and journalism criticized King’s and Lau’s studies as both incorrect and inaccurate (Cheung, 2009; So, 1999). They argued the claim that Hong Kong was short of social and political conflicts is a myth. Before the 1950s, there were large-scale social and political conflicts, such as the Canton-Hong Kong Strike and Seamen Strike in the 1920s and 1930s. In the immediate postwar period, these conflicts continued and mostly erupted in the form of industrial conflicts, for example, the Mechanics’ Strike (1947), the Tram Union’s Strike (1949) and the Russell Street event (1949). Entering the 1950s, after the Chinese Communist Party took control over mainland China, industrial conflicts continued. Eventually these conflicts accumulated, accompanying with deep-seated ideological divides (Chinese nationalism vs British colonialism; socialism vs capitalism), to the second half of the 1960s triggering two city-wide riots in 1966 and 1967, which directly and overtly challenged British colonial rule (Cheung, 2009).

Unlike descriptions by King and Lau, colonial Hong Kong, especially in the sphere of labour and industrial relations, abounded with conflicts and the colonial government’s industrial policies largely favoured capitalist interests (Chiu and Siu, 2022; Lui and Chiu, 1993). One frequently mentioned example is the unfortunate history of collective bargaining legislation in Hong Kong. For nearly 150 years of colonial rule, there was no such collective bargaining mechanism to allow workers to organize as a collective force to engage in regular bargaining with employers at the workplace level. It was not until 1995, only two years before the sovereignty handover, that a collective bargaining bill was passed in the final term of the colonial Legislative Council. But such a bill was among the first repealed by the Provisional Legislative Council (an undemocratic transitionary legislative body with its members handpicked by the Chinese government) on the very night of the sovereignty handover.

The repeal of the collective bargaining bill on the night of sovereignty transfer left a lasting scar on Hong Kong’s labour movement still evident today (Chiu and Siu, 2022). This pro-business action has its origin dating back to the late 1980s when the Beijing Chinese government prepared for Hong Kong’s post-1997 future and the SAR’s first government. The Beijing government believed that the Hong Kong capitalist classes were crucial agents to ensure the smooth transition of sovereignty, maintaining Hong Kong’s social stability as well as prolonging Hong Kong as an ‘economic city’. An ‘unholy alliance’ between Hong Kong’s capitalist classes and Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing patriotic forces thus took shape. Members of this alliance were handpicked by the Beijing government to serve in different important committees (e.g. preparatory committee of the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s post-1997 mini constitution). At the same time, the Beijing government also denounced pro-democracy political parties, trade unions and pressure groups as oppositional forces. The 1995 collective bargaining bill proposed by the pro-democracy camp was seen by the Beijing government as a piece of subversive legislation to worsen Hong Kong’s post-1997 industrial relations and thus was one of the first two laws repealed in 1997.

Nevertheless, Hong Kong’s labour movement still showed its strong resilience in renewing its organizing strategies and mobilization patterns in different periods of colonial and postcolonial Hong Kong as indicated by four papers contributed by Tommy Tse, Tat Chor Au-Yueng and Jack Qiu, and Lisa Leung, to this special issue. Today, we find that labour precarity in Hong Kong, which induces labour conflicts and labour solidarity, increasingly shares similar patterns with its counterparts in mainland China. Without an effective functioning of trade unions in both places and other forms of organized labour being suppressed, we could anticipate the increasing difficulty of the workers on both sides to organize themselves. At the same time, the papers in this special issue written by Yuyang Kang and Ka Ho Mok, Haley Lap, and Ngai Pun, based on reflexive theories and in-depth ethnographic studies, contribute to disclosing the unresolvable contradictions within global capitalism and the richness of the everyday practices in the workplaces and beyond, fostering labour solidarity and providing hope for the future of humanity.

Hong Kong Workers Under Global Capitalism

This collection of articles contributes to the scholarship on changing landscapes of labour relations worldwide. Although the sociology of work and employment has opened its field of vision to other regions of the world, insufficient attention sustains analyses beyond paired case study comparisons within Asia (such as comparing Japan and South Korea). Written in the midst of the pandemic, these articles shed light on the acute precarity of an already precarious workforce. Taken together, they flesh out labour in the age of monopoly capitalism by adopting a global and historical perspective to contextualize the specific trajectories in the development of capitalism in both Hong Kong and mainland China. To understand Hong Kong, the papers situate analyses in geopolitical relationships both in the context of former British colonial rule and its relationship to China. In this way, Hong Kong is Janus-faced; simultaneously shaped by the legacy of British colonialism through maintenance of the city-state as a capital-friendly financial hub, while pivoting east through China’s political takeover of the state apparatus and an increasing incorporation into infrastructural capitalism.

Liken to a thunderclap, the papers on work and workers in Hong Kong describe the shock of this fraught transition. Throughout, the papers resist the tendency of ‘lumping together diverse countries’ when analysing Hong Kong and China into a single type of authoritarian capitalism. Siu and Jin’s article on the making of a precarious workforce stakes a claim that Hong Kong’s postcolonial state played an active role in shaping both labour market conditions and the precarious existence faced by young workers. From the 1980s onwards, the surplus absorption problem fuelled speculation and boosted property prices, inflating and overextending the housing bubble (Harvey, 2008). Housing prices in Hong Kong, supercharged prior to becoming an SAR of China, remained out of reach for most young workers as mainland Chinese investors in housing bid up already high real estate prices. Rising real estate costs against a background of residual welfare deprives young workers of their ability to form independent households (a phenomenon in other East Asian countries).

Recontextualizing creative labour in Hong Kong situates the development of creative industries showing the theoretical importance of grounding the analysis in the histories of specific cases placed in their relationship to colonialism (also see Lei, 2021). In this brief snapshot, the article captures Hong Kong’s economic ascendence, particularly the accelerated growth during the 1950s and 1960s. Through a context-specific, qualitatively rich examination of job insecurity within four subsectors of the creative industries, the article by Tse contributes a more wholistic account of the types of insecurity, their impact on workers’ perceptions of their employment, and tracks workers’ responses (from acquiescence, resilience, resistance and change) at different scales. In nuancing these types and responses to insecurity, Tse’s analysis parses aspects rarely discussed in the vast literature: both ‘managerial insecurity’ and ‘industry development insecurity’ do not receive much attention. The case study of creative industries in Hong Kong dislodges theories from their moorings anchored in the global North, as reflected in the comparison with studies from Britain. It provides a contrast to Vallas and Schor (2020), whose typology of platform workers fails to consider the uneven effects within and across regions nor adequately theorizes the relationship between global, local and sectoral forces.

Gig Economy and Platform Workers in Hong Kong

Given the prominence of logistics in general and firms like Alibaba, Tencent and Didi (especially during the pandemic), the collection provides an insider’s view of the digitalized labour process, of platform-mediated labour markets and of emergent platform capitalism in the 21st century. Furthermore, case studies flesh out the concrete conditions undergirding infrastructural capitalism in Hong Kong and mainland China. Digitalization has spawned a vast literature seeking to characterize what some have called a ‘Polanyi-type great transformation’ (Atzmüller et al., 2019), a new age of surveillance capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) and its ‘fractious connections’ (O’Reilly, 2022). Drawing on Polanyi, Au Young and Qui advance an economic sociological perspective analysing the dynamics between embedding, dis-embedding and re-embedding of gig work, and the making of platform-mediated labour markets. The matrix between reliance on and status of workers’ market bargaining power is shaped by the market competition dynamism in each sector (i.e. whether a given market has only one or multiple competing platforms). Platforms represent a new form of governance, exercise power over economic transactions by delegating control among participants and by establishing a digital infrastructure with which to govern the service triangle that links employers, workers and customers (Vallas and Schor, 2020: 282). In this way, customers/clients take on new roles in the relationship between the worker, the platform and the client/customer. Customer ratings enter the calculus of platforms matching of workers to jobs. Ratings function as disciplinary practices in the absence of direct management of the platform (see Gottfried, 1991). Workers strive for a good rating, for a five-star review, building a portfolio of job performance used by customers faced with multiple choices when engaging services on a platform. At the same time, multi-platforming also gives workers a lever in negotiating the gig labour market.

From the general discussion of institutions and connectivity, the article by Leung presents a case study of platform food delivery work that makes visible the racialized subject in Hong Kong tied to the circulation of labour and capital in the region connecting former colonies of the British Empire. Racial divisions simultaneously disrupt the monolithic Asian subject, serving both as a source of solidarity across and the basis of divisions in the working class. Analysing the advent of platform work beginning around 2016, but intensified during the onset of the COVID pandemic, the article focuses on South Asians living and working in Hong Kong, details the way they are represented in the media, outlines how this population is unable to find more secure jobs and describes the media representation of these workers intensifying the animosity and discrimination they face at work. Using interview data and media reports, the article goes on to describe how these workers were able to manifest resistance through strikes organized both online and offline, and in this way fostering a collective identity. Finally, an important aspect of this article is the way these workers overcame challenges and formed resistance with the same technology that defined their working lives. By ‘switching off’ their apps they caused delays and cancellations in the new chain of food preparation and delivery. Using the communication technology that directed their assignments, these workers formed a social media group to share information and air grievances similar to the discussion of Didi drivers in the article by Kwan. This is important because it demonstrates that the online platform environment not only controls workers but can also be the basis of community among workers toiling in isolation.

From Precarity to Solidarity: Young and Female Workers in Mainland China

The third section brings workers’ struggles to the forefront of the analytical frame. Echoing the focus on youth in the other articles, the paired articles by Kang and Mok and by Pun reveal the contradictions and labour conflicts at the centre of Chinese infrastructural capitalism. China’s late development, and the particularly regional character (spatial concentration in coastal cities) of its capitalist activities, created both specific and ‘generic’ contradictions. Educated Chinese youths end up employed in the informal labour market in part because they want to remain in the more vibrant coastal cities and in part because of the mismatch between their training and the jobs that were available. This specific characteristic of Chinese capitalism produces the broken promise of educational attainment leading to meaningful work in their chosen fields, as detailed by Kang and Mok. Broken promises belie socialist rhetoric that productive activities will lift all boats. Mass education cannot deliver on its promise of improving the quality of life and workers’ livelihood because of the structural inequalities at the heart of the capitalist mode of production. The primary redistributive mechanism became disembedded from the work unit as formerly embodied in the ‘iron rice bowl’.

The study of resistant cultures of solidarity by Kwan builds on the new labour movements literature looking at informalized workers and atomized labour processes. There is increasing evidence of platform-based drivers going on strike and fashioning innovative digital-based strategies fostering communicative interactions and cultures of solidarity. Communication technology is a central aspect of the analysis, both as a research tool for gaining access to the population of female drivers and as a means of control and resistance. Using an innovative method, chatnography enables Kwan to collect data from a difficult to reach population, especially during the pandemic. Excerpts from women worker’s narratives enrich the analysis of the everyday experiences negotiating, navigating and resisting gig work. WeChat became a mechanism of mutual support among the female drivers, sharing care, and creating a community of shared responsibilities in the absence of a shared workplace echoing the findings in Au Young and Qui’s article. For example, WeChat and other social media platforms can offer personalized communication alternatives, enable individuals to establish networks of social capital of varying quality, facilitate collective action efforts by more rapidly sharing of knowledge and creating shared meanings, and permit networks to locate, motivate and coordinate individuals collectively that in the past were extremely difficult and costly to organize effectively because of their spatial dispersion. The effectiveness and impact of these new associational forms in realizing broad social change remains to be seen.

The final paper, by Pun, both brings the analysis back to the foundations of Marx’s theory of class formation while going beyond by “intersecting macro-structural analysis with micro-foundation of working-class solidarity”. New labour organizing campaigns at Amazon, among Google employees, and the global US$15.00/hour movement suggest a new cycle of labour activity and militancy due to macro-structural changes. The article advances debates, most notably articulated by Bev Silver (2003) in the Forces of Labor and Erik Olin Wright’s (2000) concepts of the sources of worker power. Pun challenges the notion that there is a decline in working-class solidarity by bringing to bear a discussion of the emergent Chinese working-class youth behaviour. Arguing that contemporary analyses by Marxist scholars has turned away from seeing the working class as a force for social change because of a decline in class conflict, in the article Pun points to Marx’s analysis of ‘combination’ to demonstrate that theoretically the working class is still a location for social transformation. Through a dual model – a macro conceptualization of structural factors within neoliberal capitalism that fosters change and a micro-analysis of the process of cooperation and mutual support – Pun argues that working-class solidarity is a viable force for social change. A fundamental claim is that the training and internship experiences become ‘significant alternative sites for studying the formation of working-class solidarity’.

Taken together, the collection of articles provides insights both into the unique nature of Hong Kong and China’s development of capitalism, and into the potential for these new technologies of infrastructural capitalism to promote resistance and foster militancy of workers.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Ngai Pun

Kaxton Siu

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