JennyChan.PhDThesis.2014.FINAL

educed or eliminated, state-owned enterprises are responsible for their profits and
losses with the pressures passed on to workers. William Hurst sharply observes that,
during the 1990s through the early 2000s, “state firms became more, rather than less,
politicized through reform.” 117 Local government officials, including trade unions
and women’s federations, advise laid-off workers to learn from entrepreneurial
migrant workers to find new opportunities. They define the problem as personal, as a
question of whether the individual worker is lazy, or is taking initiative to adapt to
market changes and to advance with the times. 118
Neoliberals believe that “human well-being can best be advanced by liberating
individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework
characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.” 119
China well illustrates the stark reality that follows from this logic: increased income
polarization and structural inequality based on class, exacerbated by state withdrawal
from the lifetime employment and welfare protection of workers in state-owned
enterprises and collective firms. 120
Meanwhile, with the influx of foreign direct investment and the relaxation of state
restrictions on rural-to-urban migration since the 1980s, successive cohorts of
internal migrant workers have simultaneously become the core of the new industrial
working class and been exposed to market risks and uncertainty. With China’s
emerging state capitalism, labor flexibility, production efficiency, and competition
across enterprises with various forms of ownership and labor relations become
imperative. 121 Yet even as class contradictions sharpen across society, the language
of class has largely disappeared from Chinese discourse. As Ching Kwan Lee and
Yuan Shen demonstrate, under dual pressure from the state and academic institutions,
many scholars who study workers in post-socialist China “shun class analysis and
Labour Politics in China,” Global Labour Journal 1(1), pp. 92-111.
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=globallabour
117 William Hurst, 2009, The Chinese Worker after Socialism, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, p. 53.
118 On workers’ acceptance of the hegemony of the market and their search for a market-based
solution to maximize individual gains, willingly or otherwise, see Marc J. Blecher, 2002, “Hegemony
and Workers’ Politics in China,” The China Quarterly 170, pp. 283-303.
119 David Harvey, 2005, A Brief History of eoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 2.
120 Dorothy J. Solinger, 2009, States’ Gains, Labor’s Losses: China, France, and Mexico Choose
Global Liaisons, 1980-2000, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Yin-wah Chu and Alvin Y. So,
2010, “State Neoliberalism: The Chinese Road to Capitalism,” Chinese Capitalisms: Historical
Emergence and Political Implications, edited by Yin-wah Chu, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.
46-72.
121 Joel Andreas, 2012, “Industrial Restructuring and Class Transformation in China,” China’s
Peasants and Workers: Changing Class Identities, edited by Beatriz Carrillo and David S. G.
Goodman, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, pp. 102-23.
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