The Situation of the Working Class in China
This presentation will introduce the situation of the working class in China in two dimensions: top-down, and bottom-up. It is based on a detailed study by socialists and anarchists in China
by Fin
Top-down Policies Cannot Solve Systemic Problems
On 17 August 2021, at the 10th meeting of the Central Financial and Economic Commission (CFEC), President Xi Jinping characterized "common wealth" as a new direction for China's development, with a focus on solving the gap between the rich and the poor. There may be good intentions behind this policy, but its top-down, campaign-style nature of the administrative order still makes outsiders question the effectiveness of this slogan.
When a government decree is issued, it is answered by a hundred people. Billionaires donate tens of billions of yuan to "common wealth" building efforts. Suddenly, overnight, they were all in favour of social justice. If nothing unexpected happens, the huge amount of investment and donations will eventually be spent on large public projects, construction, especially infrastructure. In fact, if these billionaires would abide by the existing labour laws and give fairer treatment to their workers, the goal of common prosperity could be achieved more readily.
Furthermore, what will really move Chinese workers towards common prosperity is a government that respects and protects workers’ rights, and enables enterprises and workers to negotiate on an equal footing over working conditions. Unfortunately, to this day, the Chinese government is still poor in establishing stable and institutionalized negotiation methods and platforms. This has led to difficulties in implementing the government's labour policies and further genuine efforts in improving Chinese workers’ conditions.
In 2020, in Guangdong, there was a grassroots Delivery Riders Union, and the Riders' Union supporters, which connected more than 14,000 riders. The union released a number of videos calling attention to the rights of delivery riders, exposing platforms like Uber, (there are several Chinese domestic platforms), suppression of workers, and criticizing platforms' violation of labour laws. One of the main organizers of this union claims to establish a wider organization, which allows governments to take the lead in regulating labour standards in the food takeaway delivery industry, rather than allowing private companies to oppress riders. Even though there was nothing presented against the Chinese government and the Communist Party, and everything the organizers did was within the existing framework of the law, the organizer was eventually arrested by state officials in 2021. His arrest was a warning against online collective action. The official message is clear: no matter how inactive, closed-minded and out of touch with workers' demands the officials’ own trade union organizations may be, the government does not tolerate influential opinion leaders who are outside the official organizations to speak out for workers’ rights.
Bottom-up Active Struggle
In a series of reports on human rights, China has cited economic development and the accompanying "general improvement in living standards" as evidence of "an overall improvement in human rights".
But the workers' movement we documented presents another side of reality. Despite China's economic growth and modernization, and despite the fact that China's constitution and laws, in writing, claim to guarantee workers' basic rights, corporate management always violates workers' rights and interests.
Over the past two to three decades, collective action by workers, large and small scale, has become a regular feature of Chinese society. These events are a constant reminder that despite the Chinese government's policies to boost the economy and improve conditions, workers continue to struggle to secure their most basic rights.
It is important to note that we are not claiming to provide a complete picture of all labour movements in China. There are certain obvious limitations about this research, such as the feature of gender. I want to indicate that this is not an intentional omission in my report.
There are two basic characteristics about current China’s economy: 1st there was the shift from traditional manufacture to service provision, including markets and transportation. 2nd, manufacturing moves from the coast line to mainland and inland China. What impact do these two factors have?
After 2015, the service sector gradually replaced manufacturing as the largest contributor to China's Gross Domestic Product. This was accompanied by an increase in the unstable and discrete (?) nature of the labour force, which led to significant changes in the way workers organize and act collectively. Whereas traditional manufacturing, mining and other industrial sectors typically employed large numbers of workers in fixed locations, one of the most obvious trends now is the dispersal of the work force and the decline of large-scale protests.
The government's crackdown on traditional labour and non-governmental organizations has left workers without the guidance, knowledge, and reliable support of professional resistance bodies. As a result, more and more workers are turning to online organizing, using a variety of communication software to carry out protests.
However, online organizing can be risky. A large number of workers and supporters who organize online the workers’ rights movement have been arrested by the government.
Strikes and protests by transport workers on Chinese App platforms have become mainstream since 2017. Platforms have been cutting costs to grab market advantage, with unstable incomes and a harsh system leading to frequent worker protests. From January 2017 to December 2020, the Workers' Collective Action Map recorded 220 collective protests initiated by food takeaway delivery workers and couriers, accounting for around one third of all transport sector protests in that period. Delivery workers on app platforms such as Meituan and HungryMan are required to work 18 hours work a day and suffer penalties for late deliveries. Under their manipulation, workers have no legal bargaining power, and even the platforms do not recognize labour relations duties, including with regard to workplace injuries, leaving workers struggling to defend their rights.
Passive Struggle: Lying-flat
From white-collar workers in the cities to migrant workers in the cities, basically all non-privileged groups face the pressure and insecurity of work. When people find that their growth prospects are severely limited, while their demands for work-life balance and basic health rights are ignored, it leads more and more of them to quit the social competition. 2021, the buzzword in China is "lie flat". Those who choose to "lie flat" survive with less income, refusing to work overtime and (they wish to) take more time for themselves. For this reason, the desire to start a family and give birth to children also decreases.
Due to the current population structure and the low birth rate, the ageing of society is an issue in China - no less than in any developed country in the world. China's social security and healthcare systems are already in danger. Inevitably, this puts more pressure on society. Obviously, the vicious circle will continue as long as working conditions in China do not improve.
With the transition of economic development from manufacturing to services, the unstable and insecure economy of odd jobs and precarious employment has become the trend, and the space for protests by the workers' movement is shrinking. However, Chinese workers still suffer from many injustices and a great deal of pent-up discontent, which have not changed and have no avenues for resolution. Even if the large-scale collective protest strikes no longer exist, workers can at least use "lying down" as a form of passive protest.
If the government continues its condescending and arrogant policies, even if collective protests by workers were to disappear from the land, the countless number of desperate "lying flat" workers would not contribute to China's sustainable development. For socialists, the road forward is to organize from the bottom-up, and to create a revolutionary working class leadership. Our aim is to replace the power of the privileged Stalinist bureaucracy with a genuine workers’ democracy. Our goal is a planned economy, based on public ownership, in harmony with nature – for the billions, not for the billionaires!
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A short history of the CCP
The Chinese Communist Party was founded as a revolutionary organization in 1921. While small at the beginning, it grew massively in the period of the Second Chinese Revolution, 1925-27, and developed important links to the working class and the poor peasantry.
However, the Kremlin in Russia imposed the subordination of the party to the bourgeois Kuomintang party, which made the CCP helpless when Chiang Kai-shek waged a bloody counterrevolution against the left and the vanguard of the working class in 1927.
With the defeat in 1927, the now Stalinist CCP became totally bureaucratized, lost most of its links to the urban proletariat and retreated to the countryside during the Long March (1934-36). It became a party mostly composed of peasants. According to Peng Shu-Tse, a CCP leader who was expelled for his support for Trotskyism, workers were less than 1% of the party’s membership in the early 1930s. However, the party organized a rural guerilla struggle against the Kuomintang party and played a leading role in the resistance against the Japanese invasion. Through all those years, it remained closely aligned to the Stalinist bureaucracy of the Soviet Union.
After the defeat of Japanese imperialism at the end of World War II, the CCP successfully overthrew the corrupt Kuomintang regime in 1949 (which was forced to retreat to Taiwan). Initially, the Mao Zedong leadership tried to build the Stalinist idea of a “New Democracy” together with the capitalists. However, this project collapsed because of: 1. the pressure of the masses which wanted to go further, 2. the sabotage of the landowners and capitalists, and 3. the Cold War with the U.S. Hence, the Mao leadership was forced – against their original intention – to carry out a social revolution. That is, it abolished capitalist relations of production and established a workers’ state based on a nationalized and planned economy.
However, the CCP leadership carried out this transformation with bureaucratic methods and brutal oppression against rebellious workers and peasants (including the supporters of the Chinese section of the Fourth International). Hence, from the very beginning, the new workers’ state was bureaucratically deformed, and the working class had been politically expropriated.
The following decades saw both social and economic progress as well as vicious faction struggles within the bureaucracy. The country was shattered by devastating campaigns like the “Great Leap Forward” from 1958 to 1962 (which caused horrible famine with millions of deaths) and the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” from 1966 to 1976, which was not proletarian, not cultural and not a revolution.
From 1978 onwards, the CCP, now led by a group around Deng Xiaoping, introduced a number of market reforms which enabled economic growth but, at the same time, resulted in acceleration of political and social contradictions. Finally, these tensions provoked a workers’ and student uprising in April-June 1989 which was brutally smashed by the CCP bureaucracy.
In the following years, the party leadership drew a balance sheet of these events. It took into account the lessons of the collapse of Stalinist rule in the USSR and Eastern Europe. The result was that the bureaucracy opted, on the one hand, to accelerate the market reforms and to restore capitalism and, on the other hand, to maintain its absolute political monopoly, that is, the one-party dictatorship. The starting point of this new course was Deng’s famous Southern Tour in 1992.
These developments resulted in the emergence of a new capitalist class in China, with which the CCP state bureaucracy shares power. According to the Hurun Global Rich List 2024, there are 814 billionaires in China, compared to 800 billionaires in the United States.
Socialists oppose the remaining, still ruling, Stalinist bureaucracy, but we defend China against imperialism, against the growing western trade war, and call for the withdrawal of U.S. and allied warships and fighter jets from China’s Pacific coast region. The task of making a political revolution to stop further capitalist restoration in China, and to institute a socialist democracy there, is a task that only the Chinese working class, under new revolutionary leadership, can accomplish. We say: No war with China! No reliance on so-called Multi-polarity, and the competition of the BRICs countries. Workers to power!