Manfred Elfstrom is a political scientist whose research focuses on labour protests in China. He is the author of . Serhii Shlyapnikov spoke with Elfstrom about labour struggles in China and prospects for change under an authoritarian regime.
* * *
About 15 years ago, United States sociologist Beverly Silver forecasted that China would become a global . Looking back, do you think that turned out to be correct?
When Silver wrote that, China was a major centre of global labour unrest. Strikes, protests and riots occurred at an extraordinary level, even taking China鈥檚 big population into account. Looking back, it seems there was a peak in the early- to mid-2010s, followed by a gradual decline. I say 鈥渟eems鈥 because the data is extremely patchy.
Those of us studying strikes in China rely on social media accounts and limited state media coverage of labour disputes. Under [President] Xi Jinping, social media and state media coverage of labour conflicts has been sharply curtailed.
The other factor is the COVID-19 pandemic. China featured lockdowns that significantly curtailed all kinds of activity. But with China lifting COVID-19 restrictions, strikes appear to have picked up again to some extent.
Right after the change of policy, there were strikes by people directly affected by the pandemic, such as delivery drivers, who became a vital lifeline for people under lockdown in Shanghai, or people manufacturing personal protective equipment.
I do not think the level of activity is the same as in the early 2010s, but it is hard to say much more due to the lack of data.
Could you tell us about some of the more important strikes by Chinese workers in the past decades?
The 2010 Honda strike is worth dwelling on. Workers there were not just asking for unpaid wages or injury compensation. They were asking for pay rises 鈥 what I refer to as offensive labour demands. Honda鈥檚 just-in-time manufacturing process meant that shutting down the auto parts plant had ripple effects all along the supply chain, leading to copycat strikes in other auto plants.
At first, the official trade union did not acquit itself very well, but when the municipal trade union got involved, it became broadly supportive of the bargaining process and did not rush to restore order, which is what trade unions often do in China.
The strike also occurred against the backdrop of many other disputes and discussions regarding new legislation for strikes, which never materialised. It came not long after a wave of new labour laws were pushed through in 2008. These included the Labour Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law聽and the Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law.
In short, it occurred under rather exceptional circumstances.
The Honda strikes received a lot of attention, but several other noteworthy strikes occurred afterward. Only a few years later, a major strike broke out at a shoe factory in Dongguan. It is considered one of the largest strikes in modern Chinese history.
Other notable strikes involved truck drivers, as well as a strike by port-based crane operators. Notably, these strikes were coordinated nationally. Typically, strikes in China are contained to a single workplace, and occasionally they spread across workplaces. But they do not usually spread across regions in a coordinated way.
The last one I would mention 鈥 it鈥檚 not really a strike, but a protest movement 鈥 was the Jasic electronics factory protests in 2018. Activists had been expelled from the factory in Shenzhen. Students from different universities 鈥 mainly from leftist student groups 鈥 came to Shenzhen and protested on behalf of the workers.
With the movement spilling beyond normal social boundaries, the government cracked down hard: students were detained, student organisations were shut down, people were shoved into vans on their campuses. Around this time, the government launched a big campaign against labour NGOs and detained several prominent labour NGO leaders.
Electronic workers seem to be at the centre of strategic tech sectors and exports. However, many are subcontracted. Could you tell us more about these workers?
Some electronic workers can be said to be strategically located. But many are doing really basic and repetitive assembly jobs, such as assembling iPhones or computers for foreign multinationals. Whether their location grants them unique leverage, however, is hard to say.
In a certain sense, they do have leverage, though, as many foreign multinationals have structured their supply chains around China and a limited number of key suppliers. For example, much of iPhone production is centred on Foxconn 鈥 a major Taiwanese company that operates huge worksites in China employing about 200,000 workers. It is not easy for Apple to uproot and find a new supplier.
At the same time, these workers are fairly replaceable compared to workers in more high-tech manufacturing. Even some garment workers have developed skills that are more difficult to replace.
Subcontracting is both a widespread phenomenon and a broader structural problem across the Chinese economy. In fact, even state-owned enterprises (SOE) 鈥 which were whittled down in the late 1990s and early 2000s 鈥 now only offer secure benefits and stable employment to a relatively small group.
Instead, they increasingly rely on subcontractors. They have an older, permanent workforce that enjoys benefits typically associated with SOEs. Alongside them are newer, more precarious workers, hired through labour contract companies.
Your book focuses on how ordinary people can impact the state. Could you say a bit about this?
There is an assumption that authoritarian states are less responsive to their citizens than democracies. That assumption holds some truth, and likely applies more strongly to certain authoritarian regimes than others.
In some contexts, however, precisely because there are no pressure release valves such as elections, and because every protest is treated as a serious problem, repertoires of resistance 鈥 whether protests, strikes or riots 鈥 can achieve more than in more open societies.
So, for instance, in Canada or the US, there are often protests over polluting chemical plants or something similar. In China, there are also protests against these plants, and some have led to multi-million dollar projects being cancelled in really short order. Just the fact that lots of residents in a city showed up was seen as enough of a big deal that local authorities had to shut the problem down.
More broadly, my book examines how labour unrest 鈥 particularly labour activism 鈥 might be reshaping the Chinese state and its capacities. It arrives at a mixed conclusion.
In some respects, I provide evidence that activism is leading the state to be more responsive to workers. In regions with higher levels of unrest, courts tend to rule more often in favour of workers, or deliver split decisions in formally adjudicated employment disputes. There are also signs of hesitant reforms in the official trade union federation. That is all on the positive side of the ledger from workers鈥 perspective.
But the conclusion is mixed because, in those same regions, the state has also significantly increased its repressive capacity. It spends more on security services.
I provide statistics on increased spending on something called the People鈥檚 Armed Police, which is a paramilitary force that gained elevated status after the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989 as part of the state鈥檚 response to domestic unrest. The idea was that it would take on the role of maintaining domestic order in place of the military. The People鈥檚 Armed Police gets promoted in places where there is more unrest.
Qualitatively, one can also examine how people in power respond to individual disputes.
In the Pearl River Delta, strikes and protests have become normalised and the government no longer feels it must get involved in every case 鈥 at least not as much as before. However, it comes down hard on organisers in high-profile incidents, and in recent years it has gone after civil and labour societies in the region.
My broader argument is that workers are reshaping governance in China, but they are doing so in two opposing directions at the same time.
How difficult is it to build grassroots organisations in China?
It is hard, especially when you try to build something and it fails. When I wrote my book, labour NGOs in China were already under pressure. Since then, most of that vibrant world, especially in the southeast, has been eliminated.
Leaders of these organisations were either detained or warned off activism. Most left the field entirely, while some shifted to less politically charged work, like helping migrant workers鈥 children.
Labour organising has been shut down, which is a real loss. These groups had begun to move away from legalistic work toward a more movement-oriented approach.
This is not the first time labour and civil society in China has faced repression: similar crackdowns happened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But the current wave has been especially devastating for independent labour organising.
[Abridged from .]