Where in China is the labour unrest rising? Visualising workers’ collective actions in mainland China

China’s economic miracle has been greatly facilitated by a labour control regime that guarantees a robust supply of cheap labour. However, the regime has catalysed widespread labour protests, which have become particularly prominent since the Nanhai Honda worker strike in 2010 (Gray and Jang, 2015). According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, the number of labour disputes under arbitration soared from 48,121 in 1996 to 1,069,638 in 2019, a striking 21 times growth. These figures demonstrate that, as Silver and Zhang (2009) claimed, China has emerged as an epicentre of labour unrest in the world.

Unfortunately, the geography of labour unrest in China is not well known due to the lack of official data. This study draws upon data from the China Labour Bulletin (https://clb.org.hk/) to map workers’ collective actions in mainland China. Collective actions here refer to strikes, demonstrations, sit-ins, and road blockages. A total of 13,187 incidents of collective actions during 2011–2020 were recorded in the dataset, and 13,092 incidents were used for the analysis after excluding duplicate records. An index was established to measure the incidence of labour collective actions in a city, calculated as the ratio of the total number of collective action cases to the average annual workforce in the city over the investigated period. Hence, the index indicates the probability of collective actions per worker occurring in a city. For the convenience of analysis, the value of the index was normalised to be between 0 and 1. Figure 1 is a visualisation of the normalised index, which was divided into five levels by the natural breakpoint method.OPEN IN VIEWER

Overall, the incidence of labour collective actions was higher in the less-developed central and western areas than in the developed eastern areas, indicating more acute labour contradictions in the former. The high-incidence areas marked with red and orange colours can be generally categorised into three types. The first type is the industrialised region and its surrounding areas, including the Pearl River Delta (PRD) (I) and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei (BTH) (III) regions. In the PRD region, well known as a ‘world factory’, the Shenzhen-Dongguan-Huizhou economic corridor and some surrounding cities such as Yangjiang and Heyuan were higher-incidence areas for labour protests, which were undertaken mostly by migrant workers. In the BTH region, the secondary cities such as Tangshan and Cangzhou were high-incidence areas. The low incidence in Beijing might be due to the strong labour regulation in the capital city. The second type is the less developed but rapidly industrialising region, including the Sichuan-Chongqing (IV) and Guanzhong Plain (VII) regions in Western China, and the Central Plain region (VI) in Central China. These regions have become the main destinations of labour-intensive industries relocated from the eastern coastal regions in the past decade, indicating a geographical expansion of labour unrest with the capitalist movement in China. The third type is the less-developed region, including some provincial capital cities in Western China such as Lanzhou, Yinchuan and Guilin, and traditional resource-based cities in Northern China such as Huhehaote, Shuangyashan and Jilin. Labour protests in these resource-based cities were undertaken mostly by the workers in state-owned enterprises, unlike the situation in the PRD region of Southern China.