In October, some of China’s largest cities—including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Tianjin, and Hangzhou—rolled out new regulations on internet-based ride-hailing businesses. China has thus become the first country in the world to create a formal legal framework for the sector. The regulations limit the pool of drivers and vehicles, citing concerns about traffic and […]
On 11 October at a high-level national meeting Xi Jinping reaffirmed the centrality of Party leadership over China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). According to the official Xinhua News Agency, Xi emphasised that under a stronger leadership from the Party—‘the root and soul’ of SOEs in his words—SOEs should serve to implement the decisions of the Party, […]
In this issue, we present three distinct perspectives on how the party-state manages and controls Chinese society. First, we consider the role of labour law in China as a vehicle for reinforcing capitalist hegemony. We then look into the limitations of the welfare system in relation to migrant labour. Finally, we challenge some widely-held assumptions about the political nature of land-related social movements in the Chinese countryside. The issue also includes a forum on how precarisation has impacted the Chinese workforce and an article that reflects on the role of poetry as a form of resistance.
On 27 September, a gas explosion in a coal mine in Ningxia took the lives of twenty miners. Similar explosions killed thirty-three miners in the municipality of Chongqing on 31 October, twenty-one miners in Heilongjiang province on 29 November, and thirty-two miners in Inner Mongolia on 3 December. More recently, on 5 December a gas […]
Edited by Elisa Nesossi, Sarah Biddulph, Flora Sapio, and Susan Trevaskes, Legal Reforms and Deprivation of Liberty in Contemporary China offers a series of analyses by prominent legal scholars on the complexities inherent in the process of reforming detention institutions in China. It also discusses at length the development and subsequent abolition of the re-education through labour […]
On 26 September, the Panyu district court in Guangzhou held separate hearings for labour activists Zeng Feiyang, Zhu Xiaomei, and Tang Huanxing. Zeng was sentenced to three years imprisonment, suspended for four years, for ‘gathering a crowd to disturb social order’, while Zhu and Tang received prison sentences of eighteen months, suspended for two years, […]
On 19 June, hundreds of residents in the southern fishing village of Wukan, Guangdong province, returned to the street five years after protests had flared up against official corruption and land grabbing. The protesting villagers demanded the release of Village Chief Lin Zuluan, who had been detained on 18 June for his persistent advocacy for […]
After the passing of the Charity Law and the highly controversial Foreign NGOs Law earlier this year, over the summer, the Chinese authorities have continued to move forward with the revision of legislation related to the management of civil society organisations. Since June, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has issued draft registration and management regulations […]
In mid-July, China’s National Bureau of Statistics issued a report warning that sustaining economic and wage growth will be a challenge in the second half of 2016. In particular, the report cited industrial overcapacity in the state-owned coal and steel sectors, and declining agricultural prices as contributing factors. In the first half of this year, […]
In July, the struggle of Walmart workers in China entered a new phase. Early that month, Walmart workers at retail stores in Nanchang, Chengdu, and Harbin staged wildcat strikes against the company’s new working hour system. Dozens of workers from each of these stores participated in the strikes, holding signs, and chanting slogans inside the […]
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