The document discusses the fragmentation of workers and labor movements in post-socialist China along regional, sectoral, and ideological lines. It also analyzes the history of labor movements in China and struggles between workers and the Communist Party-state for more autonomous trade unions. While independent unions have emerged, the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions has also attempted reforms to mediate between workers and the hardline party elite, with the goal of preventing fully independent labor movements and maintaining its role within the state corporatist system. The future may involve more autonomous but not fully independent unions as China balances workers' interests and state control over the labor movement.

1. Workers of China Divide
Orientation, BCFL/VDLC Delegation
June 3, 2014

2. Workers of China Divide
Fragmentation, Ideology and Labour Movements in Post-Socialist PRC
Fragmentation:
 region: rustbelt vs. sunbelt
(Northeastern, North, and Central,
Northwestern China vs. Coastal regions’
exporting zones in Yangtze River Delta &
the Pearl River Delta)
 localities and sectors: no-cross regional or
work-unit unity
 Urban-rural divide & Hukou (urban
industrial workers vs. Rural migrant
workers)
 Industrial workers vs. knowledge workers
 Gender & generational gap
 Labor relations & state industrial policies
 Ownership patterns: domestic private
enterprises; SOEs; foreign or joint-
ventures
Ideology & Labor Politics:
 Maoism (masters & Maoist socialism)
 Socialism & Marxism (New Left,
democratic socialism, autonomous
Marxism, autonomous trade unions)
 Liberal democratic capitalism (legal
justice, industrial citizenship, social
democracy and independent trade
unionism)
Labor Movements
Major forces
 urban laid-off SOEs workers
 Educated urban & rural migrant
workers
 Rural migrant workers
Major orientation
 Maoist legacies
 Autonomous trade unions
 Independent trade unions
 insurgent identities
 class struggle or livelihood struggle

3. The trade union as a transmission belt?
Relations between the party-state, the official trade unions and the workers
Autonomous trade unions
 within the party state framework
 state corporatism (ACFTU as state
corporatist institution)
 socialism and workers’ state
 a politically assertive working class
 class-consciousness
 with reference to Chinese revolutionary
and socialist legacies
 reinventing or re-lubricating the
transmission belt
Independent trade unionism
 beyond the Leninist polity
 democratization
 Capitalism
 legal justice, legal citizenships & rights-
conscious citizenry
 collective bargaining
 societal corporatism
 civil society beyond ACFTU
 the state-society (labour) relation
 farewell to revolution

4. Five Waves of Chinese Workers’ Struggling for Autonomous Trade Unions
in PRC (Chan, 1993)
1949-1950: The first Conflict
 The Communist trade unions still
genuinely representing workers’
interests vis-&- vis the capitalists and
the emerging Communist Party
managers
 Lost a struggle for independence from
the Party
 The trade unions’ defeat signalled by
the fall of the union chairman, Li Lisan
 the incident went down in popular
memory as simply a power struggle
among the Party’s top leaders
1956-1957: The second conflict
 the Hundred Flowers period
 with the imprisonment of workers and
union activists
 the fall of Lai Ruoyu, the new chairman
of the All-China Federation of Trade
Unions (ACTFU), who was
championing the notion of a more
independent ACFTU
 The agitation from the workers in this
short period of liberalization was
completely overshadowed in public
memory by the rebelliousness of the
intellectuals

5. Five Waves of Chinese Workers’ Struggling for Autonomous Trade Unions
in PRC (Chan, 1993)
1966-1969: The third round of unrest
 accompanied by violence on a massive
scale, occurred during the Cultural
Revolution
 In terms of the number of people
involved, the duration of the struggle,
and the number of workers ultimately
jailed or killed, it greatly surpassed the
1989 workers’ movement
 The workers’ organizations that arose in
1967 as vehicles for articulating class
interests reached a level of sophistication
and independence tantamount to “quasi-
political parties”
 Yet, in the popular image, the role of the
workers is completely overshadowed by
the sensationalism associated with the
violence of the Red Guards
1976 April 5: Tiananmen Square
 groups of workers commemorated
Zhou Enlai’s death
 The activities of these workers were
subsequently recorded in official
histories
 but the incident itself was interpreted
as a popular rebellion against the
tyranny of the Gang of Four
 rather than as a movement that had
any working-class content

6. Five Waves of Chinese Workers’ Struggling for Autonomous Trade Unions
in PRC (Chan, 1993)
1989: The fifth cycle of confrontation
 with the popular protest movement of
1989
 Yet once again the role of the workers
(and the trade unions) became
subordinated in public consciousness to
the high profile of the students
 The government condemned worker
participants as unemployed vagrants and
hooligan
1989 - Workers in the Tiananmen
Protests:
 The Beijing Workers’ Autonomous
Federation
 anti-elitist
 anti-bureaucratic
 institutional restraints on managerial
power in workplaces
 union representation and collective
bargaining
• and, more vaguely, a role for an
independent union in national policy-
making and an institutionalized right to
“supervise” the Communist Party’s
exercise of power
(Walder and Gong, 1993)

7. Chinese Labor historian & political scientist: Elizabeth J. Perry ， 1995

9. In 1980-81, not long after Deng Xiaoping and his team took power, a wave of
strikes and agitation for the formation of autonomous trade unions swept
China, around the same time as the Solidarity movement in Poland
Tendency towards autonomous articulation of
workers’ interests. And alongside these official
unions have emerged independent unions
willing to push even more forcefully for
autonomous workers’ rights

10. Chan, 1993:
In this history of sporadic Chinese working-class movements and
their recurrent alliance with Communist trade unions, sceptics would
surely question whether workers and the official communist
trade unions shared similar goals, or whether the trade unions
had ever defended workers’ rights vis-a-vis the Party. Very often,
to be sure, the trade unions and their cadres have acted against
workers’ interests - corrupt, inefficient, ineffectual, functioning
merely as an arm of enterprise administration, etc. However, this
does not alter the fact that in both China and Eastern Europe the
political structure of a one-party communist state is not totally
monistic, and that a bureaucratic organization within it, just as in a
pluralistic structure, seeks sometimes to assume its own separate
identity. It can act in accordance with the institution’s collective
interests and/or its members’ individual interests. In short,
bureaucratic politics is often at work.

11. Chan, 1993:
If we recognize this model of a party-state with a multiplicity
of bureaucratic interests, then it is easy to understand the logic
behind the five conflictual episodes involving Chinese workers
and, at times, trade unions.

12. The ACFTC: Future and Labor Movements
 During the 1980s, the ACFTU was allowed to re-organize itself.
 The party-state even granted the ACFTU a certain measure of power to protect
workers' rights from being violated by the party-state itself .
 ACFIU institutional agitation from above, and independent spontaneous protest from
below and the liberal wing of the ACFTU tried to play a mediating role between the
hard-line party elite and rebellious workers.
 Some ACFTU cadres even instigated and helped organize workers to stage protest
action

13. In 1985, based on an ACFIU proposal, the State Council ordered that
henceforth the Council itself and all relevant administrative organs would permit
trade unions to take part in their meetings on matters relating to workers'
interests.
In 1987 the ACFTU tendered to the State Council a whole series of proposals
designed to protect workers' rights, including specific legislation to protect the
welfare of the disadvantaged.
To counteract the erosion of standards of living by inflation, the ACFTU also
proposed several times in the 1980s that incomes be indexed to inflation, but
these suggestions were turned down by 'some economists', according to a
member of the ACFTU executive committee.
At the enterprise level, the bureaucratic status of the trade-union chair has been
elevated and, at least on paper, the staff-and-workers' councils have acquired an
ill-defined 'supervisory' power over management.
 All these measures, though presently merely on paper, could in future
conceivably have repercussions in a new configuration of rights and powers
within the corporatist structure and within enterprises

14. More Autonomous Trade Unions than Independent
 Future developments of the
ACFTU,
 its relationship with the Chinese
working class,
 and the repercussions of this upon
the future of the Chinese socialist
system.
 What can be highlighted here are
the aggressively unprecedented
attempts by the ACFTU to share
power with other bureaucracies in
decisions on administrative matters
and in drawing up new legislation
pertaining to workers’ interest
 The ACFTU as a state corporatist
institution (as opposed to some of
its more radical members who
advocate societal corporatism) and
the conservative engineers realized
that unless the ACFT7U was
allowed to reform itself so as to be
able to represent workers' interests,
even if only to a limited extent, a
Chinese workers' Solidarity
movement might emerge.
 To pre-empt the rise of an
independent movement, the
ACFITU has undergone a series of
organizational reform