Episode 13 | Arise, Workers of China

Growing up in 1990s China, Yangyang encountered two contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a worker. In older periodicals and occasionally in state media, workers were hailed as the ‘master class’ and being one was glorious. Many of her relatives and teachers, however, held up laid-off state-enterprise workers as a stern warning: if you did not excel, you would be weeded out.

The shifting status of workers in Chinese society embodied the country’s transition from socialist revolutionary power to market capitalism. How did Chinese workers see themselves before and during this transition? Has the Party-State ever lived up to its promises to the working class? And what did workers demand during waves of labour militancy? For this episode, Yangyang spoke with sociologists Eli Friedman and Yueran Zhang about the stirring history of labour activism in China and what it can teach us today.

Guest Bios:

Eli Friedman is Professor of Global Labor and Work at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. His most recent book is the co-authored China in Global Capitalism (Haymarket, 2024), and he has published numerous articles on labour politics in China and elsewhere in Asia. He has also translated two books: Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China’s Youth Unemployment Wave (Verso, 2026) and China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance (Haymarket, 2016).

Yueran Zhang is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the University of Chicago. He is completing a book manuscript on how shop-floor contestation and policymaking around workers’ democracy powerfully shaped China’s post-Mao transition from state socialism to authoritarian capitalism. As a graduate student, he was extensively involved in academic labour organising.

Related Materials

Gonglao Collective. 2026. Involution: A Worker Inquiry Amid China’s Youth Unemployment Wave. Translated by Eli Friedman. London and New York, NY: Verso.

Franceschini, Ivan, and Christian Sorace. 2022. Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. London and New York, NY: Verso Books.

Friedman, Eli. 2022. The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Zhang, Yueran. 2025. ‘Accidentally Emboldened: Industrial Workers between Democracy and Despotism on the Shop Floor in Wuhan, China (1984–1985).’ International Review of Social History, 70(1): 93–117.

Zhang, Yueran. 2024. Whither Socialism? Workers’ Democracy and the Class Politics of China’s Post-Mao Transition to Capitalism. PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.

Full Episode Transcript:

Yangyang (00:10)

This is the Chinese version of The International, sung by the band Tang Dynasty, the first heavy metal rock band in mainland China. This cover of The Internationale was part of the band’s debut album, released in 1992, and Tang Dynasty performed this song during its live concert in Berlin a year later. 1992 was also a pivotal year in Chinese history. Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, ostensibly retired, made his legendary southern tour and settled debate on China’s path of development. Market reforms would continue and the former socialist nation would integrate into global capitalism. Rock music, once denounced as bourgeois spiritual pollution, could exist in China thanks to post-Mao reforms and liberalization. Tang Dynasty’s cover of The Internationale, the anthem of global proletarian revolution, is rife with contradictions, just like the country that produced this band.

Is China today socialist or capitalist? What roles do workers play in Chinese society, and how has that changed over the past few decades? Is being working class a badge of honor or a mark of failure? And who actually belongs in this class?

I’m so excited to have two scholars whose works I have long admired on this show today to talk about the state of workers and the nature of work in China. First up, we have Dr. Eli Friedman, a professor at Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and a translator of a new book, Involution. Eli, thank you so much for joining us.

Eli (01:48)

Great to be here, Yangyang.

Yangyang (01:49)

So Eli, before we get to your new book, let me just ask you directly. China is ruled by the Chinese Communist Party, but as you write in the beginning of a paper, twenty-first century China is capitalist. Why?

Eli (02:00)

Yeah, you know, this is a contentious debate, I think, particularly outside of China, and there’s a few reasons. I mean, first of all, the reason that sometimes people have some confusion about this or think of it as socialist or communist is usually when they’re taking a kind of state-centered approach. So they’ll look at China and they’ll say, well, the Communist Party says that this is a socialist country on its way to communism, and we should take that seriously. I don’t take it much more seriously than when Donald Trump says the United States is a democracy. It’s part of political rhetoric and it’s important, but that doesn’t mean that it describes actually existing reality. Another thing that people oftentimes point to is the percentage of the economy that’s accounted for by the state sector, which is also really important. But if you look at China today, it’s about 25 to 30 percent of the economy is in the state sector. And that’s similar to lots of countries in the post-war period that we obviously consider capitalist, places like France, Taiwan, India. So I think that rather than this kind of state-centric approach, a social perspective on this question of whether China is capitalist or not is really more insightful, both analytically but also practically. So one way to approach this is to think about the question of workers, which is what we’re here to talk about today, and ask the question, how is it that workers survive, right?

And in a socialist society, you would imagine that you would have a society that is organized around this question of providing social needs as a matter of course, right? The way that people survive in all capitalist societies, be it the United States or be it China, is that workers have to go out into the labor market and they have to sell their labor power. They have to make themselves useful to some capitalist. And if you can do that, in exchange for selling your labor power, you get a wage and then you take that money.

And you go out and you buy all of the things that are necessary to survive, your housing, your health care, your children’s education, your clothes, your food, etc. Now, that is very, very clearly the case in China. You ask anyone in China how do you survive, and they will tell you, well, I have to go out and get a job. And that is true kind of at the class level. It’s a generalizable kind of a phenomenon.

Another kind of somewhat more abstract way to think about capitalist society is that it’s a society that’s organized around the principle of competition, rather than cooperation. And that is really clearly the case, I think, in contemporary China. You feel this kind of at the cultural level. Eminent sociologist Sun Liping just recently wrote an article talking about the pervasiveness of competition in all spheres of social life in China. And this is also kind of leading to the thing that we’re gonna get to talking about later, which is involution. China feels like a hyper-competitive society.

In lots of different realms of social life. And so that’s another pretty good indicator that you’re living in a capitalist society.

Yangyang (04:57)

Thank you, Eli, for this incisive analysis that cuts through the facade of propaganda. But of course, like for several decades after the Communist takeover in 1949, the People’s Republic of China was indeed a socialist revolutionary power. And to talk about the history of socialism in China, let’s bring in our second guest. Dr. Yueran Zhang is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and a labor organizer. Yueran, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Yueran (05:24)

Thank you so much for having me.

Yangyang (05:25)

So in your dissertation, which I understand has been translated into Chinese by anonymous netizens, you examine the role of workers in China’s transition from socialism to capitalism. So let’s talk about the beginning of that process first, when China was still socialist. You point out that there is indeed a distinction between publicly owned and state-owned. And despite the Mao-era rhetoric that the working class are in charge, like gongren jieji shi zhurenweng, the workers are the leading class, the party-state apparatus had immense power over the workers.

And yet that power relationship, as you described, was fundamentally different from power relations under capitalism. And workers in socialist China did have power, and perhaps more importantly, believed they had power. So can you explain some of that? What powers did workers have in socialist China, both in practice and also from their own aspirations and demands?

Yueran (06:20)

Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. So I think my analysis is kind of like trying to push back against both people who are more sympathetic to the experience of Chinese socialism and also people who are more critical of Chinese socialism. For people who are more sympathetic to the history of Chinese socialism, they would mostly point towards the discourse being propagated by the Chinese Communist Party.

Kind of like celebrating and valorizing Chinese workers as the masters of socialist society, as a leading class of socialist society, and pointing towards how much kind of like symbolic dignity Chinese workers really enjoyed in the socialist era. So that discourse was of course very powerful, but of course, when you look at underground reality, right? Like when you look at the everyday lives workers were living, it fell far short, compared to that discourse being propagated.

So, and but then on the other hand, the many people who are more or less critical of Chinese socialism would really kind of like understand Chinese socialism as this huge kind of like accumulation-oriented engine. Kind of like the party is really driving this accumulation bus in terms of like really trying to squeeze the amount of resources and wealth being devoted to addressing the livelihood and consumption needs of workers. Right? So within that narrative, it was like workers were really being thrown under the bus by the accumulation engine because the party-state was trying to, you know, like to really cut down workers’ wages and consumption needs as much as possible.

So, right, these were the kind of like the two most conventional narratives about labor and the workers under the socialist era that are available to us. But I think the thing I’m trying to emphasize and I’m really trying to highlight is that it is exactly that gap, right? It is exactly that gap between ideological discourse and the on-the-ground reality that was actually very empowering for Chinese workers in that era. Right? This idea that like we the workers were celebrated in official propaganda as masters of the social society. But when we look around, none of us were really enjoying the power, the privileges, the entitlements that supposedly a master should be able to access. So what went wrong?

And how should we actually think about and struggle for a society that really delivered the promise to its alleged masters? So it was those questions that many workers were inspired to think with, given this gap between ideological discourse and on-the-ground reality. So I feel like that partly explained why Chinese workers were so militant, in a socialist era, right? Like you see these repeated waves of nationwide labor struggles happening again and again and again between the 50s and 80s. And for me, that has a lot to do with this gap between the ideological celebration of workers’ symbolic status and what workers were actually able to see in their everyday lives.

Yangyang (10:13)

Thank you, Yueran. Yeah, that is like a recurring theme in your dissertation as well, right? Even when reality falls short of rhetoric. The rhetoric alone can set expectations and empower, sometimes even inadvertently. So when we come from the Mao era to the post-Mao era reforms in the early nineteen eighties, during the early days of market reforms in China, and this is a period which you describe as market socialism.

And the Chinese party-state was granting more autonomy to factory management to boost production. This on one hand gave factory directors a lot more power to effectively behave like dictators of the workplace. On the other hand, for a brief period, the reforms also indeed facilitated more democracy on the shop floor. And can you explain briefly some of that dynamic? You write in a recent paper that the workers were, quote, accidentally emboldened. What did you mean by that?

Yueran (11:07)

I think what my research reveals is that there was some kind of like a gap or disconnect between what the party-state was trying to do in the early 80s versus what they were trying to do in the late 80s. Right. So when the market reform was started in the late 70s and early 80s.

Indeed, there was a strong element of policy discourse that were saying, you know, like part of what market reform was supposed to do was to deliver more democracy to workers. Right? This like this idea that was being kind of like propagated again and again by policymakers, which was that as factories, right, as enterprises gained more autonomy from the party-state, then workers in those factories and enterprises were also going to be empowered because they gained more capacity to kind of like manage their own workplace. And indeed, that was kind of like what was happening in the early 80s, like as many factories were being increasingly autonomous in terms of managing

Their own internal affairs, then workers were also able to participate in some of these managerial and decision-making processes. That’s why you have scholars like Joel Andreas who are saying in his recent book that the early 80s was kind of like the golden era of the staff and workers’ congress, right? Like workers were somewhat able to exercise some democracy and power within these workplace institutions.

But then in the late 80s, there was a turn in terms of what policy reform was trying to achieve, which was that now, in the late 80s, the kind of like the prevailing policy idea was that now we should really concentrate more and more decision-making powers onto the hands of factory directors. So policymakers were increasingly seeing workplace democracy, workers participation as a distraction rather than a beneficial factor. Right. So the emphasis in the late 80s was kind of like the factory directors should be able to really take charge over things, right? But then again, that transition in terms of policy reform was really uneven, right? The rollout of these kind of like contradictory policies were really uneven in the 80s. So that unevenness really created the condition for what I called the accidental emboldening, which is that like workers were hearing from different channels, different propaganda channels, and different policy channels, really contradictory messages. Some of the messages was like, we workers were supposed to exercise more and more power in our workplaces. And then some of these other messages was like we workers were supposed to really listen more and more to the factory directors. Right?

So it was really this coexistence of contradictory messages that led some workers to question what was actually going on. Right? And could we actually take advantage of these kind of like gaps between these inconsistent reforms to really stage our demand for even more democracy and more power. And that is indeed what some workers were able to do in the mid and late 80s, basically, like taking advantage of that inconsistency in policy reforms to try to expand their space for having more say in their own factories.

Yangyang (15:17)

Yeah, China is a place full of contradictions and as you also mentioned, even during this brief period when workers had some democratic power and were making demands in the workplace, the working class in general were excluded from national-level policy making, and the party-state also saw these limited worker power and labor organizing as immensely threatening and took extreme measures to suppress that. And after Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour in nineteen ninety two, the country was set on a path of capitalist development.

And there was no more pretense of the workers as the leading class, one could say, and the workers were exploited by management and by capital, and China’s political system actually facilitated that exploitation. So Eli, coming back to you, much of your research has been on China’s hukou, the household registration system, especially across the rural-urban divide. And China’s industrialization and economic rise has to a very large extent depended on rural migrant workers and their political disenfranchisement. So can you tell us a bit about that? How have rural migrant workers been systematically exploited and denied access to full citizenship in China? And how has that been crucial to the country’s rise in global capitalism?

Eli (16:31)

So when we’re thinking about China’s working class in general, it’s really important to think about these two processes that are happening at the same time. The thing that Yueran’s describing around changes in the state sector and kind of chipping away at workers’ autonomy or capacity to direct what’s actually happening within the firm. And then the other, in some ways, the other story that’s happening, which is demographically much more significant, is the freeing up of this so-called rural surplus labor. So beginning in the late 1970s, you have a process of rural land reform, decollectivization, which allows people both to keep more of the produce that they’re producing in rural areas, sell it on the market. It’s actually initially mostly seen as a very good thing and inequality in China overall comes down a little bit. You have another process that’s happening, which is the kind of systematic defunding of rural social services, right? So basically over the course of the nineteen eighties, but really especially in the nineteen nineties, you have for workers, both for rural people, I’m sorry, both a need to leave the farm because the farm can no longer support their lifestyle, and also the opportunity now to find work elsewhere because you have the development of special economic zones, particularly in the southeastern part of the country. And so you have what becomes the largest human migration in history, you know, eventually numbering 300 million people who leave their place of rural origin and end up working in the cities. Now, like you said, there’s no pretense that this new migrant worker class is the master of the nation. They are kind of symbolically dominated and treated, I think, culturally as kind of second-class citizens. Once they get to the city, looked down upon for, you know, their lifestyle, their way of dress, certainly speech is a major marker of social discrimination that they face in the cities, but also formally discriminated against, and the hukou is the key institution that accomplishes this. Probably your listeners are familiar with hukou in general, but basically the reason it’s significant for understanding workers is once they get to the city, they’ve given up whatever rights they might have had to accessing various kinds of social services, including education, healthcare, pensions, etc. In the initial phase in the 1990s and up until 2003, they’re also able to be quite literally detained by police and deported back to the countryside if they don’t have their papers in order. And so they’re only in the cities because of official approval, which they can only get because their employer has granted it to them. So you can kind of think of this as being like an internal guest worker program where workers are in a very kind of socially and politically subjugated position. This also means that the cost of labor is in essence subsidized by processes of social reproduction that are

Happening in the countryside that are not being paid for by the cities. This reduces the tax burden on urban areas, cheapening labor and making it more attractive for foreign investment to come in. And so you have the recentering of all these global supply chains with, you know, famous global corporations, Walmart, Apple, Amazon, et cetera, going in there. Oftentimes you have kind of suppliers from elsewhere in East Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, etc.

That are actually producing those goods. But in essence, this mass migration of people to the cities, which are again devoid of social rights, of course they don’t have unionization rights, this is really the social foundation of globalization, kind of in general. I mean, that’s maybe overstating it a little bit, but really one of the absolutely most important parts of it and certainly one of the most important parts of the US-China economic integration that happens late twentieth, into the twenty-first century.

Yangyang (20:26)

Thank you so much, Eli. And of course, the workers in China did not just passively accept their exploitation and disenfranchisement. And the history of labor in China is also a history of resistance. And Yueran, earlier you mentioned, right, workers in socialist China did feel empowered or desired what the state was telling them in propaganda. And they were very militant. In your dissertation in particular, you described a period of labor organizing at the very beginning of market reforms in China in nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty one. Can you briefly sum up that period of labor unrest in China? What were the workers demanding and what did they get? How did the state respond to that during that political juncture?

Yueran (21:10)

Absolutely. So as some of us already know, the late seventies or the very early post-Mao period was a period when, you know, there were a lot of vibrant rethinking and reimagining across Chinese society in terms of like what democracy was supposed to look like, right? That like an a lot of that discussion that activism was captured within the so-called democracy wall movement, the minzhu qiang yundong. And the workers were actually a huge part of that, as many of them were trying to rethink and reimagine what democracy is supposed to mean on the shop floor, right, in the workplace. And at that time, you know, some of them were really, for example, looking towards Yugoslavia to really try to draw inspiration from the worker self-management model in Yugoslavia. So within that kind of like vibrant space of rethinking and reimagining democracy, then one thing that was really significant was the outburst of the solidarity movement in Poland. Right? And the information of that movement was initially very widely available in Chinese society.

Because kind of the official party mouthpiece was really actually reporting on it, because the party leadership thought it was good because it was an anti-Soviet Union movement. So there was that. But once workers started to learn about what was going on in Poland, of course they started to interpret their message, right, like according to their own circumstances.

Which primarily had to do with their long-standing frustration with the Chinese official trade union system. Right? The ACFTU after the 50s were very much paralyzed. They were not really doing effective things to advance workers’ power and wages. Right. So in 1980, after, you know, seeing what Polish workers were doing.

Many Chinese workers were like, why couldn’t we demand our independent unions too? Right? Like independent unions seems such a good thing. Like why shouldn’t we just organize our own kind of like unions and organizational entities too? Right. So that’s why kind of like immediately in the wake of the Polish solidarity movement, there was kind of like a strike wave.

In China from the late 1980 to early 1981, when many workers were striking and protesting to demand their own unions that were independent from the control of the party. And of course, that kind of like that momentum got the party leadership very very much on alert and nervous. So there was a period of

When in nineteen eighty one the party leadership was really trying to figure out how to respond to that evolving strike wave. So initially the resolution they settled upon in mid nineteen eighty one was that they decided to really enlarge institutions of workplace democracy within the orbit of party control.

Right, like such as the existing staff and workers’ congresses within factories. Right. The idea is that we would give more power to these existing institutions of workplace democracy which were still under the party’s overall control so that workers would not be so inclined to strike for complete political independence.

Right. So that kind of like dynamic of political struggle and tension between the bottom-up strike wave and top-down party response was, I would say, the primary reason of why the Chinese workers did get some kind of a golden era of the staff and the workers’ congresses.

In the early 80s, right? So workers did win a period, like three or four years, brief but still very meaningful, of being able to concretely exercise power, decision-making power in their workplaces, especially regarding issues like housing, housing allocation, bonuses determination, right? Things that were most relevant to workers’ livelihood. But of course, like those vibrant institutions of workplace democracy really went downhill after mid-1980s and really kind of like were more and more marginalized in the late 80s. And that’s partly why you really saw a comeback of workers’ democratic activism during the 1989 movement, which was kind of like in response to that marginalization and decay of workplace democracy over the late eighties.

Yangyang (26:53)

Thank you so much, Yueran, and especially for also illuminating this transnational dimension. And as you mentioned, the limited and brief period of more workplace democracy in China in like the early to mid nineteen eighties was partly facilitated by market reforms, but that was also a direct result of labor unrest and workers’ own demands. And Eli, coming back to you, to the period of capitalist China and back to the role of rural migrant workers, and contrary to a lot of the Western literature caricatures, the Chinese people do protest a lot. And especially in your first book, Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, you write about labor unrest in China in the 2000s, early 2010s, which happened very frequently on a local scale.

And so how much did these labor protests in twenty-first century capitalist China echo earlier labor action and demands described by Yueran, and what are the key differences?

Eli (27:53)

So the first thing to note, which Yueran may have more to say about, is that there was still the old working class and the state-owned enterprise still had a few spectacular bouts of resistance in the end of the nineties and the early twenty-first century, precisely because of this kind of gap between the rhetoric of them being the masters of the nation and the way that they were treated, particularly after nineteen ninety seven when Jiang Zemin really accelerates the privatization of those enterprises. So I just want to put a pin in that. So, but, you know, increasingly you see the kind of the epicenter of labor unrest in China shifting from the state sector into the private sector, shifting also from those kind of urban-based workers to the migrant workers. Typically, in the nineties, you know, there wasn’t that much unrest. People felt quite lucky to have these jobs, despite the fact that they were very exploitative. They were earning more than they could in rural areas, that is true.

And people’s expectations generally were quite low, keeping in mind that this is the generation that grew up in quite severe poverty in some cases in the aftermath of the great famine. But what we saw over the course of the 90s and into the 2000s as China begins to construct a legal framework for labor relations. They passed the labor law in 1994, they passed the labor contract law in 2008. Previously China has no labor laws whatsoever. And so rights begin to be granted at least on paper. The problem is that oftentimes those rights are very poorly enforced. And if you look at China’s labor law on paper, it’s actually quite strong and stronger than many countries that are more developed. And so you had this development of what was called weiquan, right? Or kind of rights protection activism among workers where they would say, well, you know, we’re supposed to be entitled to whatever the minimum wage is and our boss is paying us below that. There was

The biggest source of conflict in this period of time was frankly just non-payment of wages. And you don’t really need a labor law, I think, in order for workers to intuit that something’s wrong with that. But non-payment of wages was endemic. It continues to be in certain industries, especially construction. So they fought back against non-payment of wages. They would fight back against various kinds of abuse and humiliation that they would be subjected to in the workplace.

You know, being forced to kind of kneel down in front of employers, oftentimes kind of nationalist sentiments could be inflamed, you know, if it was a Korean or a Japanese boss demanding some sort of thing, you know, people rightly revolted against that. And so you saw kind of a gradual expansion of the scope and also the sophistication of the unrest. And there’s no question that by the early twenty-first century, China is the world’s epicenter of global labor unrest. There’s more strikes

That are happening there. And every time that Chinese workers go on strike, they’re doing so without any legal protection. Right? They’re doing so, maybe there’s no union in the workplace at all. And or if there is a union, the union is almost certainly going to side with employers against the workers. So they’re kind of self-organizing these wildcat strikes. And as they’re kind of growing in sophistication, in militancy, there’s a kind of a confluence of factors that lead to what I think

Many people think of as the kind of the pinnacle of worker unrest at a time that was quite hopeful, I think, for many people, in the early 2010s. So again, you get the labor contract law that’s passed in 2008. That’s kind of passed in part in response to this growing tide of labor unrest and the government saying, well, we want to try to channel this into kind of a legal framework rather than this kind of disorganized unrest.

But what it does is it actually further emboldens workers. They learn more about the rights as their rights are increasing. After 2008, unlike most economies in the world, China growth resumes quite quickly. There’s a huge stimulus package. And there’s also tightening labor markets, particularly in Guangdong province in the south. And so the one strike that most people point to as being kind of the most interesting, most exciting moment in this whole cycle was in 2010, at a Honda transmission plant in Nanhai close to Guangzhou, where the workers went on strike completely self-organized. And they were demanding actually not just to have their wages paid or just to have the laws enforced. All the laws were basically being enforced. What they were saying is we want to raise above and beyond that to which we’re legally entitled. If you look at the history of labor movements in lots of other countries around the world, this is kind of the exciting moment where you can begin to see labor.

Asserting its demands, its interests, right? Rather than just saying, you know, we want the kind of the bare minimum. And one of the things that I think is quite interesting about this strike and shows perhaps some continuity with what Yueran was just saying about how Chinese workers, conscious of the overall political environment, will try to use some of the existing and officially approved organizations that exist, but kind of repurpose them to their own ends. So in addition to demanding this big wage increase, which they got, by the way. The other thing, and to my mind, the more interesting thing that they demanded was what they called a reorganization of the enterprise-level trade union. By reorganization, they meant we want to be able to directly elect our own union leadership at the enterprise level, and that those people will then negotiate on our behalf. And so this really begins to look like what we think of as a traditional labor movement.

But they are using the existing union structure. So they’re still going to be within the overall framework of the All China Federation of Trade Unions, which is formerly subordinate to the Communist Party. So, you know, the views of the solidarity movement in Poland change very dramatically. And of course, by the 21st century, the Communist Party is very anxious that they might see something like a solidarity movement emerge in China. So and the workers are very aware of this. If they had gone on strike and said, we want to raise and we want an independent union.

They would face political repression very quickly. And so they didn’t do that. Now, the very end of the story is that it didn’t actually work out all that well. The process of union reorganization, even with some support from the Guangdong-level government, ended up being gradually kind of undermined by employers and with the kind of acknowledgement of higher levels of the state. That was kind of the pinnacle. And there were some other big and important strikes that were happening in the 2010s.

But the real turn happened in 2015 for reasons we can get into later if you’re interested. But basically, under Xi Jinping, the state becomes much less willing to tolerate this kind of disorganized, not political, but you know, quite widespread labor unrest. And so we begin to see greater repression. They haven’t managed to get rid of it, it’s still around, but it’s not happening on the scale or with the degree of militancy that we saw in the kind of the golden era of the early 2010s.

Yangyang (34:58)

Thank you, Eli, for this fascinating history. And thank you for pointing out, like in at the end of the nineteen nineties with the massive state-owned enterprise layoffs and there was this wave of like the old socialist working classes, massive nationwide demands before this labor unrest moved from the public sector to the private sector. And as you just pointed out, like since the mid twenty tens, with increasing political repression in China under Xi Jinping, there was less indeed like fewer labor unrest or public demand in general. However, there was a very significant wave of labor unrest in 2022 happening under the conditions of the pandemic and the zero-COVID policies. And these were workers who were working under the so-called closed-loop factory system, that they were confined to their factories to maintain production.

And many workers, especially the workers at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, the world’s largest iPhone plant, rebelled violently, just asking to be let out and go home. Can you describe to us very briefly what was this closed-loop factory system and what were the workers demanding in 2022?

Eli (36:10)

Sure, so we’ll come to Foxconn, which is the kind of the spectacular end of the cycle. But one of the things that I think is really important to understand about 2022 is that you have these kind of small-scale protests that are happening in workplaces, in communities going back many months. And you can see this if you look at the China Dissent Monitor, they’ve got good data that shows this kind of rise in the number of protests that are happening. Really, you have the Shanghai lockdown in April.

Of that year. And then over that summer and into the fall, it’s really growing. In Shanghai during that spring 2022 lockdown, the first big-scale worker revolt was at a Quanta factory, which is a supplier for Apple and for Tesla. So what this was really to some extent innovated in Shanghai, although I think drawing on earlier kinds of technologies of governance.

What they would do during these city lockdowns, they didn’t want the economy to stop altogether, right? Because famously these lockdowns went on for quite a long time. So workers had to go into the plant, and then they were put in what’s called a closed loop, which basically means they couldn’t leave. So the food, medicine, whatever was necessary to keep the factory going would be delivered, a kind of a drop-off point, brought into the factory, but as few people as possible would go in and out.

And this was happening at Quanta. It happened at the Tesla factory as well, which is also in Shanghai. And they just weren’t doing a good job. Now, this is logistically complicated. I think there’s probably no state in the world that would even attempt this aside from the Chinese state, but they didn’t do a good enough job. There wasn’t enough food in some cases, there wasn’t enough medicine. Workers, you know, they got tired, frankly, of sleeping on the shop floor.

And there was also apparently some differential treatment for the workers and their Taiwanese managers. And so you had this kind of big revolt that happened at the Quanta factory. And so that was kind of the first intimation of what would come at Foxconn. And Foxconn was a very similar process which happens later in the fall in twenty twenty two in Zhengzhou as Omicron is now circulating through Henan.

And there, on an even larger scale because this is, as you’ve said, called iPhone City, right? This is where most of the world’s iPhones are made, and it has about 200,000 workers in it at the time. They’re put into lockdown, and there, you know, you can blame to some extent Foxconn management, you can blame the Zhengzhou city government, but they’re doing quite a bad job managing this. People were getting sick on the job. When they were sick, they were put into, you know, health facilities within the campus, but there were people who were being put in there who weren’t sick or who didn’t believe themselves to be sick and were later getting sick. They were not getting adequate medicine. In some cases, people were not getting enough food. And so you had this massive revolt and people just literally jumped over the fence.

And one of the things that’s interesting and notable about this. Is it’s also a reflection of the changing dynamics of labor migration in China. So previously people would come from interior provinces and go to a place like Shenzhen, far away from their home. The whole reason that Apple and Foxconn wanted to relocate to Henan is because they couldn’t get enough workers in Shenzhen anymore. So they wanted to be closer to where the workers are in Henan. What this also meant is that when the workers were ready to get out of the facility, again they literally just jump over the wall and walk home because they’re close enough to their home villages. And you know, in some ways it was, I mean it was tragic. People were getting sick, but it was also inspiring because you would see people from the surrounding communities kind of coming out to the road and giving them water and giving them food, in some cases giving them rides, you know, in the back of the truck or what have you. And so, you know, this was a moment which kind of came just before these big white paper protests, which I think are more famous. This was in some ways larger in scale.

It really encapsulated both the capacity, I think, of repression, both on the part of capitalists and the state, but also, you know, the will of Chinese workers to resist and say, we’re not gonna take this anymore. Our lives are endangered and we’re gonna go somewhere else. So that kind of spirit of resistance, again, they have not been able to kind of crush that.

Yangyang (40:34)

Thank you. And I thank you for mentioning the white paper protests which came after the massive labor rebellions that were popping up in various parts of China, led by these rural migrant workers. And I think in a lot of ways, like 2022 was a year of protest in China, but a lot of the ways it has been remembered or reported in Western media has focused on the protests at the end of the year, the so-called white paper protests that were

And a lot of the attention were on elite university students and urban young professionals. Many of them held up a blank sheet of paper to protest state repression and censorship, hence the name the white paper protest. And I should also mention that many of these protesters did also sing The Internationale. And so there was beauty in some of the gestures of solidarity, but also some contradictions and irony.

So with that, I would like to come to your most recent book that you had translated, Involution from the Chinese Gonglao Collective. And that book focused more on these college-educated young urban workers who are just entering the job market and were frustrated by the labor prospects, by low pay and poor working conditions. And quite a few are choosing to quote like lie flat as a form of passive resistance. In the introduction, you wrote that some of these subjects were confused about their class position.

They might be very precariously employed in low-paying jobs, but they were also college educated and they were not sure if they were actually working class since they do not actually work in a factory or in manual labor. So can you tell us a bit about this new book? What are the prospects for broader solidarity among workers in China when there is a deeply rooted hierarchy that privileges mental labor over manual labor? Capitalist production has of course reinforced that stratification, but has more recent developments in our current stage of capitalism actually blurred that division?

Eli (42:34)

Yeah, so just very briefly on the book. This is a book that was put together by Gonglao Collective, a group of researchers and activists in China. And it’s just interviews with a number of young university graduates and talking to them about their struggles looking for work and their struggles having work as well. So it’s a really interesting insight into what it’s like to be a young, hopefully white-collar worker, but for some of them, finding that job is quite difficult.

On this question of the possibility of solidarity between what we might think of as a kind of a downwardly mobile, or at least socially kind of stagnant but highly educated youth, and the more traditional blue-collar migrant workers, you know, this is a really complicated question in China and in every society where it exists.

But just very briefly on the backdrop. So if you look at the beginning of the twenty-first century, getting into higher education in China was a golden ticket, right? There were many, many fewer people who were going on to university circa year 2000, right? Kind of in the single digits. By the 2020s, if you get into high school, chances are you actually are gonna go to university. So there’s been this massive expansion of higher education, which has been a very conscious plan on the part of the state, I think a good one, right? It’s good to expand opportunities for higher education, fits in with their overall strategy of trying to move up the value chain towards more kind of capital-intensive forms of production and knowledge-intensive forms of production. The problem is that it seems like they overshot the mark a little bit. That there actually are not enough jobs of the kind that people were expecting. It also turns out that the kinds of wages that they’re going to be able to get are no longer kind of commensurate with living a life of relative comfort. This also has to do with the increasing cost of housing, of education, of various other sorts of things. And so for their parents’ generation, let’s say someone who might have graduated university in the 1990s, for them, you get into university and you’re kind of on your way upwards. You’re going to have a reasonably good middle-class life in a growing city. China is growing very quickly, etc. That is not the world that say a 22-year-old, 23-year-old who’s graduating from university over the last couple of years experiences.

And that was made, I think, very, very clear to people when the pandemic ended. There was some idea that the pandemic’s gonna end and things are gonna come roaring back to life and it’s gonna be just like the good old days. That’s very clearly not the case, right? Youth unemployment was up around twenty percent in 2023. The government stopped reporting those statistics, which really angered a lot of young people because they felt like, you know, they’re trying to be lied to. They came out with a new calculation for unemployment and it was, you know, significantly lower, but it has been ticking up once again. And you know, anecdotally we know that a lot of people are having a really hard time finding work. So if you look at the kind of the basic material conditions of say a person with a university degree and assuming that they don’t come from a rich family, kind of going out into the labor market trying to find a job now, and say a migrant worker who is looking for, you know, blue-collar employment going out into the labor market right now.

It’s actually not all that different. Like wages for entry-level, you know, white-collar job working in some company are in some cases lower than what you can get going and working in a factory. But you know, the point, Yangyang, that you made about this kind of deeply entrenched sense of hierarchy, you know, is a real problem. Again, this is not a thing that’s unique to China at all. But if you go and you get a university degree, and then afterwards you tell your parents, well,

I spent all this, you know, this time studying for the university entrance exam and getting through college, and it turns out I can make more money as a welder. You know, your parents are probably not gonna be that happy about it. It’s gonna be hard for you to explain to your friends. But the white-collar job that you expected doesn’t exist or doesn’t exist in the way that you hoped it did. And so that leaves people in this very kind of amorphous, challenging, emotionally challenging situation. You know. The possibilities of forming solidarity between these two different social groups is really quite challenging, but like structurally they are being brought closer together, there’s no question about it.

Yangyang (46:57)

Yeah, I remember when I was a young child, like during the mass layoffs of state-owned enterprise workers in the late nineties and early two thousands, and what my mother was teaching me was like, you need to study hard. If you don’t study hard, you’re going to end up like them. And of course it’s understandable from a point of like parental expectations, but of course like structural issues cannot be resolved with individual striving. And on the note of solidarity across professions and social classes, as we approach the end of this show, Yueran, as a final question.

I’d like to come back to you. You’re not just a scholar of labor, you’re also a labor organizer yourself, and you have been very deeply involved in academic worker organizing here in the US, as an international student from China before and now as a scholar. And actually, quite a few Chinese international students like yourself have been active in graduate student unionization efforts here in the US. So can you give us, as a closing note, a key takeaway from your experience?

Why is it important for academics like ourselves to see ourselves as workers and to organize? And what makes labor organizing as an international student or scholar from China distinct and distinctly meaningful?

Yueran (48:07)

Well, thank you for such a wonderful closing question. So I think what I observed in terms of the general trend of like grad workers organizing in general really paralleled what Eli just described, because people do feel like graduate students do feel like they’re becoming more and more proletarianized over the years, right?

Like these days, like you know, over the past decade, being a graduate student like in an elite university like Harvard or UChicago or UC Berkeley, no longer feel like you are part of this class of intellectual elite, right? It just feels more and more true that you are just a worker being exploited by a neoliberal university in terms of your teaching load in terms of the wages you’re paid for, and also in terms of your career prospects, right? Because it’s no longer true that being in a good doctoral program in an elite university would guarantee you a good job after you graduate.

So there was a real sense of career stagnation and downward mobility that changed how graduate students, graduate workers understand the kind of work they do. So I feel like that really drove this whole like extremely energetic momentum of graduate workers’ labor organizing over the past decade.

And I think in terms of what was distinctly meaningful that experience was for Chinese international students, is that I feel for many Chinese international students, that was kind of like the first ever experience, the first ever direct and embodied experience they have ever had in terms of like really fighting for improvements like for their rights for their improvements in a collective setting. Right? Because those opportunities for political participation were not really available for you know, like when people were still in China, right? Even though some sort of like individual-based efforts of struggle and negotiation were possible, but collective forms of struggle and negotiation were not that available in China.

So I thought there was this kind of like whole very important socialization and politicization process that was happening within the context of higher ed organizing in the US, where Chinese students really started to feel like they were part of a collectivity in action. And I feel like that experience of being in a collectivity, being in a struggle alongside your peers, like that was very meaningful in the sense that it provided basically political education for Chinese international students in terms of like what it means to be a political citizen of a collective community. So, you know, so I guess like regardless of whatever material improvements and rights student workers were actually able to achieve through their struggle, like that very experience of struggling in a collective was extremely meaningful.

Yangyang (51:46)

Thank you so much, Yueran. A good part of my own political education here in the US also happened with the graduate student unionization effort at University of Chicago when I was a doctoral student in the early 2010s. And that was happening in the backdrop of the militant actions of the Chicago Teachers Union. And so I guess as the lyrics from The Internationale goes, the international union shall be the human race. Dr. Yueran Zhang, thank you so much for joining us and for being an inspiration.

Yueran (52:12)

Thank you so much.

Yangyang (52:13)

And Dr. Eli Friedman, thank you for sharing your insights and scholarship and congratulations on the new book.

Eli (52:18)

Thank you. Appreciate it.