Revisiting the South China Miracle

The theoretical question that guided the research and the writing of my book was: How was labor control over women workers accomplished in a global manufacturing region located at the borderland between socialism and capitalism? It was a project very much rooted in the Marxist labor process tradition, but which also attempted to enrich the latter by confronting it with new conditions: What happened when women workers have become core to the industrial working class in a political economy not easily subsumable under a single logic of either global capitalism or state socialism? This point of departure has resulted in an analysis emphasizing the institutionalization of domination, rather than resistance; gender as constitutive of, rather than derivative from, class; local practices and organization of the labor markets, rather than macro state-centered institutions. Pete Meiksins' and Karen Shire's most thoughtful and intelligent reviews point exactly to these issues, which have as much to do with theoretical choices as with changing realities. Eight years have elapsed since I completed the ethnographic fieldwork for the book. Perhaps it is time to re-engage these intellectual biases in light of current developments in the Chinese labor scene.

The overall trend, as presented in my book (i.e., de-industrialization in Hong Kong and sustained export-led industrial growth in Mainland China), has continued unabated throughout the 1990s. Teeming millions of young migrant women workers are still the mainstay of the labor force behind this industrial boom, especially in the foreign-invested sector, which now accounts for almost 20 percent of China's total industrial output. Do the same mechanisms of labor control through gender ideology, identity, and labor market organization still apply? Has the labor regime of "localistic despotism" been transformed? Meiksins, citing reports on official union's avowed intention to defend workers' rights in South China, urges me to reconsider my analysis of "weak" union and "passive" state as the institutional context for the formation of localistic despotism. Indeed, two important developments in the 1990s may suggest a more interventionist approach by the official union and the central government, in contrast to the non-interventionism I found during my research period. The Trade Union Law and the Labor Law were promulgated in 1992 and 1995, respectively. Union's role and organization now has a legal foundation, and labor relations are formally bound by "contract" and other regulations dealing with social security and insurance for injury, medical care, and unemployment, etc. These laws are intended to cover enterprises of all ownership types, and they signal the central government's attempt to shift its power from production and redistribution to regulation.

However, notwithstanding these central government intentions to regulate labor relations, state actions at the local level are still very much shaped by patron-clientelist ties between capitalists and bureaucrats. Many field researchers, and even the official press, deplore the ineffectiveness of China's fledging legal and union institutions to enforce the laws. Widespread violations of these laws are reported. The dismal gaps between legalization and their actual effects on the ground, between central government policy and local practices caution against reading too much optimism into changes in formal institutions. Therefore, it appears to me that the institutional context that reproduces a despotic regime of production has persisted. But, I am less certain about Shire's provocative observation that there may be an Asian pattern of state non-interventionism, predicated on the strength of communal and familial resources for the reproduction of labor power. The Chinese failure to move beyond a savage, primitive form of despotic capitalism in labor relations is more over-determined by the rift between central and local state interests than a conscious unitary state decision not to intervene and regulate.

Both critics also ask whether there is any institutional potential for class resistance. Because my interest was on the accomplishment of labor control, both the ethnographic fieldwork and the subsequent analysis were directed to address the institutional sources of domination, rather than resistance...