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4. Chinese migrant workers: actorsconstraining the emergence o classconsciousness*

Anita Chan and Kaxton Siu

Labour protests in China, particularly among the so-called ‘new genera-

tions o peasant-workers’ (xinshengdai nongmingong ),1 have been increas-

ing during the past decade. Every time an explosive strike breaks out and

receives publicity outside China, it stirs up excitement among labour sym-

pathizers. Great expectations are sometimes placed on the disturbances,

in the belie that it heralds a rising consciousness o collective interests

among workers. Is this indeed the case? These workers are young, resh

rom the countryside, heading straight rom the elds into actories that

are usually located in new industrial zones cut o rom urban areas.

This does not at rst sight seem a likely group to exhibit any collective

identity. Is this new generation indeed developing a strong working class

consciousness?

Exponents o the thesis that migrant workers are developing class con-

sciousness do not contend that this is yet at a high level. Even scholars

such as Ngai Pun and Huilin Lu (2010, p. 512), who optimistically point

to the migrant workers’ potential to mount collective challenges, still

characterize ‘the second generation o peasant-workers’, who are seen

as more conscious than the rst generation, as ‘ gradually [our emphasis]

becoming aware o its class position’.2 Indeed, at a conerence held at

Vienna in September 2011, Pun in her oral presentation cautioned that

it would be a long time beore there would be a massive upheaval. In

this chapter we come to the same conclusion, though arriving at it rom

a dierent angle. We hope to put orth a dierent understanding o the

present class consciousness o the millions o Chinese migrant workers in

South China by drawing on Marx, Lenin, and Marxist historians’ views

o history.

CARRILLO 9781781005729 PRINT.indd 79CARRILLO 9781781005729 PRINT.indd 79 16/07/2012 11:0716/07/2012 11:07



80 China’s peasants and workers: changing class identities

CLASS AND CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS: THEORYAND METHODOLOGY

Extant studies o China’s migrant workers tend to be ahistorical in that

they either describe phenomena that took place at one point in time or

within a ew short decades. Eli Friedman and Ching Kwan Lee in their

recent article (Friedman and Lee, 2010), and Chris Chan (2010) in his

book on migrant-worker strikes, start with the late 1980s in their depic-

tions o the development o identity and consciousness among this group.

Historically, the ormation o class, the emergence o class consciousness,

labour movements and social movements have taken a much longer time

span to take ull shape. Fernand Braudel (1982) o the Annales school

and world-system theorist Immanuel Wallerstein (1991) considered evenseveral decades as too short to understand and predict social change. As

yet, there is no labour historian in Chinese studies, so we shall attempt to

place these last 30 years into a historical perspective by examining the class

ormation that occurred during the European Industrial Revolution two

centuries back. We believe that by situating China’s current level o class

and class consciousness development as a historical process we shall arrive

at a more accurate understanding o the current situation and what lies

ahead in the coming several decades.

While a large social group with shared socioeconomic conditions can

structurally and objectively be identiable as a class, subjectively they maynot identiy themselves as a class. Marx wrote o the peasantry in 1852, ‘In

so ar as there is merely a local interaction among these small peasants,

and the identity o their interests begets no unity, no national union and

no political organization, they do not orm a class’ (Marx, 1963, p. 124).

This brings us to Marx’s amous distinction between ‘class in itsel’ and

‘class or itsel’ o industrial workers:

Economic conditions rst transormed the mass o the people o the countryinto workers. The combination o capital has created or this mass a commonsituation, common interests. The mass is thus already a class as against capital,

but not yet or itsel. In the struggle, o which we have noted only a ew phases,the mass becomes united, and constitutes itsel as a class or itsel. The interestsit deends become class interests. But the struggle o class against class is apolitical struggle. (Marx, 1995, pp. 188–9)

Most scholars’ writings on Chinese migrant workers have not argued that

today’s workers have become a ‘class or itsel’, but they have not teased

out in depth the level o class consciousness thus ar attained by this enor-

mous new-born labouring group. This brings to the ore the necessity o

examining varying levels o class consciousness in the progression rom no

consciousness to political consciousness.




Factors concerning the emergence of class consciousness 81

How does a working class transorm itsel rom a ‘class in itsel’ to a

‘class or itsel’? In Europe, this was a historical process that took many

decades. It was a linear progression interrupted by ts and starts. Thedevelopment could be divided into stages and, within each stage, into

phases. Both Lenin (1947) and Marx (1963) wrote about this staged devel-

opment o consciousness. Marx observed that in the beginning workers’

strikes were isolated and were mainly over wage maintenance. Ater some

time they united across actories in an eort to counter the strength o the

capitalist employers. Finally, when consciousness was high, workers even

used some o their wages to support workers’ organizations. They had

progressed to be ‘a class or itsel’.

Lenin divided class consciousness into three dierent levels: individual

consciousness, trade union consciousness and social democratic (meaningrevolutionary) consciousness. E.P. Thompson theorized the fuidity o

class and class consciousness urther as a process that became ‘a historical

phenomenon’. ‘I do not see class as “structure”, or even as a “category” ’,

he wrote, ‘but as something which in act happens (and can be shown to

have happened) in human relationships’ (Thompson, 1966, p. 9).

As class and class consciousness are historical phenomena, the time

rame used is important in understanding the level o class consciousness.

In 1845, about 65 years ater the emergence o industrial labour, Engels

expected that the English working class would rise up in rebellion, but it did

not. Engels’ too optimistic expectation was based on the biggest workers’uprising in English history, which took place between 1841 and 1842. In

this two-year period there were many waves o strikes. Royle notes that

about 70 000 miners went on strike in eight Scottish and 14 English coun-

ties, or the most part in the Midlands, Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire,

and the Strathclyde region o Scotland. Many Chartist activists, that is,

activists advocating political change, joined in this strike wave (Royle,

1996, p. 30) and the Chartist movement. The maturation o working class

political consciousness fowered in this period. Ater this countrywide

strike, Engels had to wait until 1853 – three-quarters o a century ater

the start o the Industrial Revolution – or the next uprising, when 18 000textile actory workers went on strike in Stockport, Lancashire, Cheshire

and Preston, demanding pay rises to keep up with the high infation o that

year (Pelling, 1976, pp. 35–6). In Russia, industrial development began

only in the second hal o the 1860s, and it was about three decades later

that Lenin argued in What Is To Be Done? that workers’ class conscious-

ness would not rise beyond spontaneity unless given a push by an intellec-

tual vanguard (Lenin, 1947). Thus, Marx, Engels, Lenin and many labour

historians were impatient about how slowly class consciousness matured.

There was an urge to will this historical phenomenon into being and Lenin,





impatient, ultimately put his organizational prescription into practice and

tried to create history – as did Mao, ollowing in Lenin’s ootsteps.

At what stage and phase o development is the consciousness o the newChinese migrant working class? What time rame should be used when

studying the development o its class consciousness? In responding to these

two questions, we will try to survey the development o class consciousness

o Chinese migrant workers in Guangdong Province and contrast such

a development with that in other countries (or example, England and

Russia) in order to locate the current level o class consciousness possessed

by Chinese migrant workers. On top o this, we also use various empirical

cases that have broken out in China to delineate the progression and level

o class consciousness among Chinese migrant workers at various points in

time. Notably, among all the cases presented, we pay particular attentionto the Nanhai Honda strike that broke out in 2010, and evaluate its signi-

cance in terms o the level o class consciousness it suggests, using other

cases as reerence points. However, beore going urther into the details o

our cases, several points have to be emphasized: the main purpose o this

chapter is to re-mobilize Marx and Lenin’s theoretical staged development

o consciousness to objectively measure the level o class consciousness

possessed by the present-day migrant workers in Southern China. There

is no intention to suggest any advocacy plans; nor is there any intention to

demand today’s Chinese migrant workers to raise their consciousness up

to a revolutionary level; nor do we want to use other strike cases to down-play the role o the Nanhai Honda strike in contemporary Chinese labour

movement history. However, we are sceptical that its impact on workers

has been that great and that the strikers possessed very high class con-

sciousness. Our major argument in this chapter is simply that the major-

ity o present-day Chinese migrant workers are still waging isolated and

uncoordinated rights-based protests and strikes. Only a ew strikes have

gone beyond rights-based demands to an interest-based level by requesting

more than what is stipulated in current Chinese labour law. Only very ew

Chinese migrant workers are class conscious enough to ask or the setting

up or re-election o workplace trade unions, or to organize strikes beyondindividual actories at regional and country-wide levels.

THE EMBRYONIC STAGE OF CLASSCONSCIOUSNESS OF CHINESE MIGRANTS INGUANGDONG

Beginning in the mid-1980s the migrant workers in the actories o

Guangdong Province grew rom a very small number to reach some 30





million today. This is probably the astest-growing and largest rural-to-

urban actory workorce, closely packed into one geographical region,

created in human history. To a great extent the birth o this industrialworkorce resembles the birth o the industrial workorce in England

and other parts o Western Europe at the end o the eighteenth and the

beginning o the nineteenth centuries. Much can be learned by comparing

these two new-born labouring groups that existed 200 years apart. Using

empirical evidence, this section argues that the class consciousness among

the several tens o millions o migrant workers in Guangdong Province

is still at a low level when measured against the workers o the Industrial

Revolution rom the turn o the nineteenth century to the 1840s.

Evidence rom both periods rests partly on an examination o the types

and levels o protests. These can range rom quiet and orderly deliveries o signed petitions to Luddite behaviour. Among the many orms o protest,

the most signicant maniestation o collective consciousness is strikes

– workers reusing to sell their labour, resulting in open conrontation

between labour and capital.

What is the evidence or strike actions within China today?

Unortunately, Chinese provincial governments do not release strike

gures but only gures or ‘labour disputes’, which are statistics on court

cases, and should not be equated to strike gures.3 Unless local authorities

report strikes to the relevant centralized statistics-collecting bureaucracies,

a strike does not become a statistical gure. Chinese local governmentshave a tendency to under-report strikes to maintain a acade o social

stability. In addition, there are many mini-strikes or work stoppages that

only last or an hour or hal a day and are resolved quickly, unknown to

the local authorities. Thus, the available data on strikes are patchy to the

point o being useless.

However, lack o inormation has not deterred scholars interested in the

topic. A lot o emphasis gets placed on one or two strike cases 4 or even on

one individual worker as evidence o rising class consciousness (Pun and

Lu, 2010). These cases do refect in some detail the work conditions and

protest actions at the sites in question, but to conclude that consciousnessis rising rapidly and spreading among the broad migrant workorce, or

that there have been strike waves, cannot be backed by evidence.

The most systematic attempt to document the history o strikes in the

Pearl River Delta region is by Chris Chan, who in a chapter o his 2010

book gives a sweeping record o strikes in Shenzhen rom 1986 to 2004

(Chan, 2010, pp. 18–24). He explains the ebb and fow o strikes based

on the cases he collected, showing workers’ responses to the micro- and

macroeconomic situation o the time. The thrust o his argument is

that strikes increased, but Chris Chan has not taken into account strike





density, that is, the proportion o strikes in relation to the size o the work-

orce. As the number o oreign-invested actories in China has expanded

rom a small number in the county town o Shenzhen to several tens o thousands o actories crowding the delta in less than three decades, it is

inevitable that the number o strikes has risen. Given the huge rise in the

number o workers, are the recent strikes that large in number? Our com-

parative study o the Ho Chi Minh area o Vietnam and Guangdong in

China strongly suggests that the strike density is much higher in Vietnam

(A. Chan, 2011).

To compensate or the dearth o reliable statistical data, in this

chapter we will use data we have collected on protest and strike cases in

Guangdong Province stretching back or almost two decades since 1993.

The sources or these 100-plus cases are varied. They include unpublishedreports rom several labour non-governmental organizations (NGOs),

published reports o several labour NGO websites based outside China,5

internal documentation rom a Shenzhen-based labour NGO, discussions

with NGO sta members; our own interviews with workers who have

participated in strikes, reports rom Hong Kong newspapers, news articles

rom Guangdong newspapers and web-based reports posted by Chinese

labour activists. The level o detail o the inormation varies: some are

recorded in a ew short lines, some comprise several tens o pages o inter-

view notes and some include ollow-up reports. In several cases we were

able to meet with some o the strike protagonists.As ar as we know there is no empirical evidence to show that there

have been any large-scale, coordinated and organized labour protests in

Guangdong Province, nor have groups o workers rom dierent actories

made any collective demands on the local or central Chinese governments,

nor have workers attempted to set up any independent trade unions at

the workplace or multi-workplace level. The protests and strikes have

almost always been spontaneous and have involved very specic issues o

discontent within a actory.

PRE-1994: A STAGE OF PRE-CONSCIOUSNESS

Even today, most protests and strikes in Guangdong result rom serious

immediate grievances o individual workers or a small group o workers

or, at the most, a sizeable number o workers at one workplace. That was

even more the case two decades ago. In our view the strikes recorded by

Chris Chan, which occurred at the end o the 1980s and in the early 1990s,

all into the category o pre-class consciousness. His ndings are supported

by the evidence recorded in 77 private letters that we have studied. These





letters were written by migrant workers to the Zhili toy actory re victims

o 1993. They were retrieved rom the deceased workers’ dormitory by a

Chinese researcher and were passed onto one o this chapter’s authors.The writers o the letters represent a random sample o migrant workers

in the Guangdong region. They revealed horrendous working and living

conditions in those early days o industrialization in the region’s export

sector. Some workers wrote to their riends and relatives at Zhili that they

literally did not have enough to eat: that their wages were so low that they

had to cut down on ood consumption. In these letters, there was not even

one expressed wish to attempt to do something to improve their plight, not

to mention ideas o taking protest action. These workers accepted their

ate, and the only hope they had was to nd a better job in another actory,

which in the end oten turned out to be no better (A. Chan, 2002).Compared with today, working and living conditions 20 years ago were,

as one worker cited by Chris Chan called it, an ‘invisible prison’ (C. Chan,

2010, p. 29). It was very common or actory management to take away

workers’ identity documents and to delay paying them to prevent them

rom leaving, reducing them to bonded labour (A. Chan, 2000). The Zhili

letters, written in 1993, pre-date the enactment o China’s Labour Law,

which was passed in 1994. While there were regulations on maximum

work hours and overtime pay beore 1994, the authors o the 77 letters

were not aware o these, or o any other saeguards against exploitation.

They had no notion o rights, but only that their immediate individualcircumstances were horrible. The period beore 1994 can be considered a

pre-class conscious period. The best that workers in such circumstances

can do to protest their conditions is to nurture seeds o individual hidden

resistance.6

POST-1994: A PHASE OR RIGHTS-BASED PROTESTS

The 1994 Labour Law was the rst labour legislation passed in China

since the ounding o the People’s Republic o China (PRC). The passageo the law stirred up a debate among government bureaucracies. The All

China Federation o Trade Unions (ACFTU) ought to ensure that the

spirit o the law was advantageous to workers. It was passed not because

workers had been collectively making demands on the government, but

because there was a consensus within the political elite that social stabil-

ity had to be maintained by having a law to regulate industrial relations.

In nineteenth-century England, the introduction o the Reorm Act in

1832, the Factory Act in 1833 and the New Poor Law in 1834 were also

or the purpose o maintaining stability. The dierence was that in early





nineteenth-century England large-scale labour protests had or several

decades been putting a lot o pressure on capitalists and on the state

to improve working conditions. In the 1990s in China, such consciouscollective demands did not exist.

The 1994 Labour Law did induce a change in workers’ awareness, and

migrant workers in the Guangdong region gradually began to use the law

as an instrument to ‘protect rights’ (weiquan) when their legal rights were

violated. Note that these rights reer to legal rights and not to inalienable

human rights. The Chinese social discourse on ‘rights protection’ is char-

acterized by the acceptance o prevailing laws as the standard by which

work conditions and wages should be set. Weiquan is a hegemonic dis-

course deployed by the political and social elites, and rom there it popu-

lates the vocabulary and consciousness o this new working class. Weiquan is the best tool the dagongzu (‘toiling tribe’) has to ‘deend [its legal] rights’.

This slang term zu, meaning ‘tribe’ or ‘ethnicity’ has been accepted by

the elite to describe what is in reality a ‘class’. In the post-Mao era the

discourse downplays the concept o class, which was an everyday word

used under Maoism, so as to expunge the idea o class rom social con-

sciousness. This has played a part in constraining the development o class

consciousness among the migrant workers born in China’s new ‘classless’

era.

The ‘Intellectual Vanguard’ of the Pearl River Delta Region

When Lenin grew impatient that proletarian class consciousness was

developing too slowly to stage a revolution, he proclaimed that the

workers needed a ‘revolutionary vanguard’ drawn rom the intelligentsia

to quicken the historical process. China’s revolutionary vanguard was

the Chinese Communist Party led by Mao. Since the economic reorms,

several Hong Kong labour NGOs have come into Guangdong’s Pearl

River Delta to ll the place o the ‘intelligentsia’ o yesteryear, but by no

means are they Lenin’s and Mao’s ‘revolutionaries’.

The Hong Kong labour NGOs, usually staed by a ew people, begansetting up o ces across the border in the mid-1990s. These NGOs, run

by mostly middle-class, young idealists and hired PRC sta, have played

a signicant role in popularizing the idea o ‘rights protection’ among

Chinese migrant workers in the Shenzhen region.7 Their programmes

ocused on raising awareness o the details o the Labour Law and laws

related to occupational health and saety (OHS) among migrant workers.

They taught migrant workers how to read their pay slips and pointed

out where the payment and work hours ell short o legal requirements.

They helped injured workers seek compensation, which requires an expert





understanding o how to assess grades o injuries and litigation proce-

dures. This strategy allowed them to establish a oothold among workers’

communities. They were accepted by the Chinese local authorities becausetheir ree services were in tune with the new laws. These activities became

legitimate and were tolerated as China became increasingly legislated.

With time these NGOs became better organized, trained more mainland

sta and ran more train-the-trainer programmes. As sta members split

o to orm splinter groups, an increasing number o indigenous labour

NGOs sprang up in the Delta region.

Their persistence paid o within the space o a decade. Most migrant

workers today in this part o China know about the legal maximum over-

time, about the region’s o cial minimum wage and about industrial inju-

ries compensation. Taking bosses to court or underpaying, going to theauthorities to lodge legal claims or back pay and suing or injuries com-

pensation have become commonplace. Litigation is a legitimate orm o

protest. These paralegals and lawyers o labour law rms have come to be

known as ‘citizens’ agents’. One well-known citizens’ agent handled 6000

cases in a decade and a hal (‘Labour NGOs in Guangdong Province’,

2008). The rise o litigation and o citizens’ agents has catapulted China’s

industrial relations into a new phase. In response, the Guangdong govern-

ment has had to grapple with the question o whether it should co-opt and

incorporate the citizens’ agents and other labour NGOs by taking them

under its wing.While the NGOs’ legal aid movement has been instrumental in raising

workers’ awareness o their labour rights, the very act that the movement

is ramed by the discourse on ‘rights protection’ individualizes labour

dispute settlements in a reactive, rather than proactive, manner. That is,

only when labour rights are being violated and, specically, when minimal

legal rights are being violated, do workers come orth. China is headed in

a direction that is becoming increasingly litigious, interrupted sporadically

by industrial violence. This ‘intellectual vanguard’ o rights protectors

delimits itsel to the law-abiding activities o individual litigation. While

not intending to belittle their eorts, we think that they have actuallyhelped to alleviate social discontent by channelling workers’ grievances

into the legal system, which is exactly why the legal instruments were

created in the rst place.

Rights-based Protests Versus Interest-based Protests

It is instructive to introduce the dierence here between rights-based as

opposed to interest-based protests. Rights-based demands push or legal

compliance when legal rights are being violated. In this sense, the law





imposes a maximum on claims – these can be no more than the minimum

standards that the law requires. Interest-based demands go beyond the

minimum standards dened by law: or example, a demand or a wage riseabove the legal minimum wage. Thus, the issue at stake in interest-based

claims is not one o legality, but o whether management chooses to accept

or resist workers’ demands.

This distinction between the two types o rights can only exist when the

standards set by the labour laws are recognized as a legitimate ramework

or regulating labour relations. Thus Chinese migrant workers, in taking

the litigation route, have not questioned the legitimacy o this structure.

They have not reached the level o consciousness at which they could assert

their rights to what is beyond the legal minimum. It can be said that since

the implementation o the Labour Law their level o consciousness has notprogressed very ar. In act, in our comparative study o the labour laws

o China and Vietnam as regulatory regimes, Chinese migrant workers

lag behind their Vietnamese counterparts. The several thousand strikes

that have broken out in Vietnam since 2005 were mostly interest-based

strikes. The law to them is irrelevant: every single one o these Vietnamese

strikes violated the detailed strike procedures laid down in Article 14 o the

Vietnamese Labour Code. In contrast, Chinese migrant workers’ demands

are normally rights-based. This is evidenced by Ching Kwan Lee’s asser-

tion, in Against the Law: Labour Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt,

that she ound ‘that migrant workers . . . see the Labour Law as the onlyinstitutional resource protecting their interests vis-à-vis powerul employ-

ers and local o cials’ (Lee, 2007, p. 160). Migrant workers in this part o

China work with the law and not against the law.

However, the consciousness o Vietnamese workers is also not high

when compared with European workers o the late nineteenth and early

twentieth centuries. Two hundred years ago in Europe, workers again and

again staged mass protests to spur the enactment o new laws. In other

words, at that time the concept o two types o protest – rights-based

and interest-based – did not exist. Labour laws then were in the making,

pushed into being in part through workers’ actions. In the early nineteenthcentury, as workers emerged out o an agrarian society, the concept o a

maximum number o work hours a day or paid labour did not exist. As

Marx’s historical survey on the corvée system reveals, some landlords

orced peasants to work 365 days a year and successully turned peasants

into a orm o chattel (Marx, 1976, p. 348). Only later, when workers

were coerced into labouring beyond the limit o physical tolerance, did

they begin to struggle or shorter work hours. Marx recorded the bitter

history o struggle or shorter work hours in Capital . First, in 1833, it was

a struggle or a 12-hour day, then or a ten-hour day in 1838, and then an





eight-hour day in 1866 (Marx, 1976, pp. 340–411). Each struggle was a

learning process that ed back into a consciousness that the workers, dis-

persed across workplaces, cities and regions, belonged to a socioeconomicgroup with shared interests.

But in Marx and Lenin’s conception o class, this was still a class in

itsel. The workers’ main concern was still their physical well-being, as

Marx pointed out. The workers’ demands still revolved around narrow,

non-political, immediate issues o whether long working hours would lead

to casualties, or whether dangerous work in dye and bleach industries

were hazardous to workers’ health (Marx, 1976, pp. 340–411). In act,

in the early days o industrialization those leading the struggle were the

labour aristocracy made up o cratsmen who considered themselves a

cut above the unskilled workers and, later, as the actory system beganto take root, above the actory workers. There were no legal norms to

constrain the development o workers’ consciousness. Factory workers

inherited the experience and tradition o class struggle rom the several

decades o struggle staged by the labour aristocracy. In China today, the

migrant actory workers have no accumulated experience to all back on.

They have to start rom zero, and it will take several decades to catch up

with their English counterparts o the years between 1829 and 1834, a

period that historians commonly agree was the period when the English

working class began to be aware o its class identity (Musson, 1972, p. 21;

Hobsbawm, 1979, pp. 4–68; Morris, 1979). The confict between employ-ers and labour was the essential ingredient in shaping this class identity.

This awareness took more than 50 years to develop ater the beginning o

the Industrial Revolution.

The labour laws in China today have another type o constraining eect

on the development o class consciousness. In China, the political elite

pass labour laws that largely are in compliance with international labour

standards (except or the core labour right o reedom o association: that

is, permitting independent unions). The Chinese laws have been shaped

without any input rom workers. In that sense, while today’s workers

in the ormer socialist states have had it easy because they did not haveto struggle or legal maximum overtime and a minimum wage, this has

pre-empted and deprived them o the experience to voice their interests

through collective struggle to press or laws in their avour. The conten-

tion today is whether the bosses have breached the legal standards set or

them. The acceptance o the legitimacy o labour laws and o the standards

set by these laws has thwarted the development o millions o workers’

collective consciousness to question whether the minimum wage is set too

low. Both Chinese and Vietnamese workers or the time being are only

holding employers responsible or their exploitation and have not reached





the level o making political demands on the state, which Marx and Engel

dened as a higher stage o consciousness.

2010: THE BEGINNING OF INTEREST-BASEDPROTESTS?

The Honda transmission plant in Nanhai, Guangdong, has been consid-

ered by a number o writers to be a watershed in workers’ consciousness,

rising rom the phase o rights-based to interest-based agitation. Two

thousand workers downed tools on 17 May 2010 and demanded a raise o

800 RMB a month – an 80 per cent increase. What was more, they insisted

the increase had to be added to their basic wage rather than as a subsidy.The big increase they demanded was unprecedented, as labour protests

have almost always been over unpaid overtime, wage arrears or other

legal violations. In addition, they wanted a stepped wage structure. Their

demands indicated an aspiration or job security, an incentive system or

promotion and introduction o a seniority system. This is in line with

Pun and Lu’s (2010) analysis that this generation o workers do not want

to return to their home villages or home towns. They want to stay and

become permanent residents o Guangdong Province. The workers at the

Honda parts plant also complained that the salaries o the Japanese sta

were too high and the gap between the Japanese and Chinese employeestoo wide. This was also unusual, because or the last decades migrant

workers have accepted the act that oreign sta are on a much higher

salary scale. Workers might have complained about this in private, but not

as an open grievance. This was a sign that the Honda strike leaders have

developed a sense that there should be a airer distribution o income. A

last demand worth noting, though by no means unprecedented, was a call

or a new election o the actory’s trade union committee to replace the

existing ineectual union leadership made up o management sta.

The strike lasted 19 days and ended ater the intervention o several

people: the CEO o the Guangzhou Automobile Group, which is theChinese partner o the Honda assembly plant,8 the provincial deputy trade

union chairman, and a well-known legal scholar. The workers obtained

the wage rise they demanded and were promised that they would be able

to elect their own trade union committee (Lüthje, 2010; Chan and Hui,

unpublished). The Honda strike and its results were well publicized, espe-

cially through the Internet. Within a two-week period, strikes at two other

Honda auto parts plants in Guangdong Province broke out. These also

ended with workers winning big wage increases. In other parts o China,

about a dozen or so strikes o a similar nature were reported in about the





same period. It was unclear whether these latter strikes were inspired by

the Nanhai Honda strikes, but this was widely assumed to be the case.

The strikes that broke out in the ew other Honda auto part plants wereall peaceul. Within days they were able to orce production at several

large Honda assembly plants to grind to a halt. The losses to Honda were

enormous, and this can easily explain why Honda conceded to workers’

demands. In all these cases, the provincial government and Guangdong

provincial trade union intervened as mediators. These strikes attracted

national and international media attention, which characterized them as

signs o the beginning o serious workers’ unrest. In addition, the Chinese

government, the o cial trade union, labour NGOs, labour activists and

academics all indicated that the Nanhai Honda strike elevated China’s

labour movement into a new stage.The demand or a big wage rise did send alarm bells to Honda, other

companies and the government, that the low-wage era might be over.

That strikes in supplier actories can disrupt production chains, causing

huge loss to capital-intensive industries, was without doubt a serious

cause o concern or the state and capital. These strikes, i allowed to

spread, could have had ripple eects on the Chinese economy. But when

we examine closely what these strikes, and the one at Nanhai Honda in

particular, mean in terms o workers’ class consciousness, there seems not

to have been any ‘breakthrough’. There are a number o reasons or this

conclusion.First, based on some inside inormation we were able to collect, and also

based on what has happened since the strike ended, it can be said that this

strike, though quite long and staged with great solidarity, was spontane-

ous. There was no planning, no organizing o core activists or o a strike

committee. A Chinese labour activist who went to Nanhai and met with

the strike leaders was surprised by the strike leaders’ almost total lack o

knowledge o trade unionism.9 Once satised that their economic demands

had been met, they did not press or the immediate election o a new trade

union committee. Thus, when the provincial trade union took several

months to organize the rst round o elections or 30 trade union repre-sentatives, workers’ enthusiasm and sense o solidarity dissipated, along

with their willingness to struggle or genuine representation. Divide and

rule tactics by management had succeeded in planting dissensions among

dierent groups o workers. The strike leader lost her election in a run-o

vote and is now reportedly taking Japanese classes oered by the company

to urther her own advancement. The 30 newly elected representatives are

mostly management sta, because workers did not know who to vote or.

The election or the new trade union chairperson was postponed to 2011

when the term or the existing union committee expired.10 This eectively





means that the strike has ailed to set a precedent to replace an ineective

workplace union with an eective elected one. The provincial government

and trade union are intent that there should be no such precedent.11

Second, this strike, like those that preceded it, has not led to workers

pulling together to orm a sustained and stable organization through

which to continue the struggle, either within the actory or beyond it.

From the very beginning the strike possessed the ingredients o an ephem-

eral protest action. The two original strike leaders wanted to stir up a

strike ater they handed in their resignations to the company. They had

not built up a solid core o workers to lead the strike in the event that

workers responded; there was no long-term plan. Their ellow workers

did respond, and ater a ew days, when the two leaders were red, they

just let, as they had already planned to do. This much – that they wouldleave the plant – was planned. When Ms Li, a 19-year-old, took up the

leadership ater their departure, she was too inexperienced to take up the

challenge beyond reacting to immediate circumstances.

Third, the several strikes that took place in June and July had no coor-

dination across workplaces. Workers involved in the strike that broke out

at the Honda Lock plant in Zhongshan County did not contact strikers at

the Nanhai Honda plant beore they began to strike.12 Within these two

months, workers who started strikes in other parts o the country might

have been inspired by what they read in the media and on the Internet

on the Honda strikes. However, the small strike wave showed no signso coordinated, collective eort across workplaces, industries or regions.

These activities remained isolated and workers’ consciousness did not rise

beyond immediate economic demands.

In the Nanhai Honda strike there were two important elements: workers

requesting a big wage rise and a demand or re-election o the workplace

trade union. The wage increase demand was unprecedented and was a

clear-cut interest-based action rather than a rights-based action. To put

the Nanhai Honda strike into context, we will present other strike and

protest cases in Guangdong. Each o them has its own eatures. All o

them qualiy as interest-based actions. Some o them are similar to theNanhai Honda strike in that workers asked or a substantial pay rise or

or the election o a new union chair; yet some o them dier in terms o

awareness o the importance o international support, scale, organization,

persistence and solidarity.

The rst case is V-tech, a Hong Kong electronics rm o several hundred

employees in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. The V-tech case was

an exemplary case o workers’ commitment and willingness to up the ante.

The spark that lit the use on the protest was that V-tech had been paying

unusually low wages and suddenly laid o a large number o employees





with little compensation. As early as 2000, 60 employees had signed their

names to an open letter addressed to a New York-based labour NGO,

China Labour Watch, listing their company ID numbers and their tel-ephone numbers. In an extremely emotive gesture, ve representatives

pressed their bloody thumbprints on a document authorizing them to

be representatives. They asked China Labour Watch to ask American

buyers to intervene on their behal. Approaching the outside world was

an unusual and risky move to take. It was in act strategic, because those

were the years when corporate social responsibility (CSR) was a big issue

in the export sector. China Labour Watch’s exposé reports o poor condi-

tions in the supplier actories o popular brands could easily damage the

brands’ human rights record, and those reports became a matter o grave

concern. This was a case in which the workers showed an awareness o theimportance o reaching out or international support.

One o the two most important things that drew so much attention to

the Nanhai Honda strike was the big pay rise or which workers dared

to ask. This was a signicant interest-based demand. In our research we

have identied two cases in which workers demanded pay rises above the

minimum wage. Inormation on the rst is derived rom an unpublished

report written by a labour NGO sta member. The incident happened in

September 2007. Normally each year around July the Shenzhen govern-

ment announces the new minimum wage or the city, but that year the gov-

ernment instead told the press that they could be adjusting the minimumwage either upward or downward. Workers were already eeling the pinch

o infation that year. The announcement caused much dissatisaction

in the workorce. To paciy the workers management promised a wage

adjustment, but the adjustment turned out to be unairly distributed and

too small to keep up with infation. Workers went on strike, asking or a

raise rom 700 RMB to 800 RMB a month. Management stood rm on

750 RMB, which was then the o cial minimum wage or a 40-hour week.

Workers took to the streets and several hundred police came to drive them

back, and then locked them inside the actory. The (unpublished) NGO

report recorded this interesting observation:

The strike in Dechang is characterized by the consciousness o a new genera-tion o workers. Unlike workers in other enterprises where demands tend onlyto revolve around paying up to the o cial minimum wage standard, Dechangworkers realize that their wage has to keep up with infation.

In other words, at that time the ability o migrant workers to draw a

relationship between infation and wage was considered as a new develop-

ment. This NGO sta member had been a production line worker or 15

years beore joining the NGO ve years earlier. From experience, he was





able to detect this minor but interesting dierence between this strike and

other strikes. The workers were only asking or a 14 per cent raise, and

between their request and the company’s oer, the contentious gure wasa mere 7 per cent. Yet over this small amount, which translated to a di-

erence o one or two American cents per hour, the workers aced great

resistance and had to struggle harder than the Nanhai Honda workers.

Though the increase asked or was pitiully little compared to the Honda

workers, it is still an interest-based protest.

The second example o an interest-based strike was that staged by

crane operators and truck drivers o a huge Shenzhen container port in

November 2007. Both the Hong Kong and Chinese media covered the

story (Zhang and Chen, 2007). The interest-based nature o the protest

was obvious. Dock workers were making a comparatively high wage o approximately 4000 RMB a month (admittedly ater putting in a lot o

overtime and or heavy work). The demand was or a raise o 25 to 50

per cent. Although they already enjoyed relatively high pay, the workers

decided to ask or at least our days o rest a month and an overtime rate

six times higher than the illegally low rate o 3 RMB an hour. That the

strike started on 1 May was a strategic choice to select a date crying out

with socialist symbolism. It was not an unplanned, spontaneous action.

Workers elected their own representatives to negotiate with management,

while the Shenzhen trade union served as mediator, urging management

to concede to workers’ ‘reasonable’ demands quickly. The results o thebargaining were not made public, but appear to have been avourable or

the strikers as they resumed work ater two days. Both the Nanhai Honda

workers and these dock workers showed an enormous sel-condence in

the worth o their labour in demanding such high wage increases.

Nanhai Honda workers asked to have a new election or the trade union

committee. Others had tried this beore. In 2008, a group o workers at

a Nestlé actory in Dongguan, led by a worker who had worked there

or 13 years, started distributing leafets to ellow workers calling or the

trade union, which had been in existence or 12 years, to be replaced. The

trade union chair was the manager who had continued to worsen workconditions. The news story was covered by the Chinese press, including

China Daily. It was used as an example to illustrate the consequences o

management violating the Trade Union Law in not having a regular union

re-election (‘Juechao Dongguanchang . . .’, 2008; Zhan, 2008). Despite

the publicity, the leader o this protest was dismissed by the company on

grounds o misconduct. When a labour NGO tried to contact him, he had

let the area.

It is interesting that though management-controlled unions are inactive,

on rare occasions their ormal existence can inspire workers to ask or a





union re-election. This was what the Nanhai Honda and Nestlé workers

did. A higher level o consciousness, however, is when workers ght to set

up a new union – trade union consciousness, to use Lenin’s expression.Normally the leaders o these ghts already have some sense o trade

unionism and take legal channels. This means taking an application with

at least 25 co-workers’ signatures to the district union that expresses the

desire to have an election to set up a trade union (Article 13, The Trade

Union Law o the People’s Republic o China, 2001).13 In 2003, Liu, a

29-year-old worker who worked in a Hong Kong supplier actory that

made aquatic sportswear or a New Zealand rm, collected 182 signatures

(out o 2000 workers) and went to the district union to apply to set up a

union. He then called a New York Times reporter in Beijing asking him

to come to Shenzhen to cover the story (Kahn, 2003). This strategy wasinitially useul in that it put pressure on the New Zealand buyer, who in

turn put pressure on the Hong Kong supplier, to hold an election to set up

a new union. But as in other similar cases, the union and actory manage-

ment manoeuvred and controlled the union election and the eort came to

naught. Liu then went to another actory to try to do the same but did not

succeed.14 Liu’s consciousness was quite high: he wanted to set up a new

union and was willing to take the risk o conronting management and the

local government. Collecting signatures requires planning and courage.

The case that we think exemplies a high level o trade union conscious-

ness, coupled with organizational ability, ghting spirit and solidarityin the ace o massive police suppression and violence, was a strike at a

Uniden plant. The struggle began in December 2004 and lasted or about

ve months. This Japanese-owned plant had 16 000 employees, o whom

1000 were men (mostly o ce, technical and research sta) and more than

14 000 women (mostly production workers). Management culture was

harsh and suppressive. Workers’ demands were rights-based due to the

large number o legal violations. The organizers o the protest issued a

number o open letters to local government bureaucracies and manage-

ment, and made good use o the Internet to report on the latest develop-

ments to ellow workers and the public, coordinating daily and hourlyactions. These reports and open letters provided a vivid picture o the

scale and intensity o the struggle within and outside the plant or several

months. It was quite clear that the core group o leaders were technical

sta members, headed by someone who had studied in Japan. The call-to-

action bulletin listed 15 demands related to wages, work hours, penalties,

dismissals and social benets, and one demand was to set up a trade union

(‘Riqu Shenzen . . .’, 2004). Japanese management quickly gave in to many

o the demands, but not the demand to set up a union. Ater that man-

agement tried to isolate the leaders, humiliated them in public and had





security sta beat them up. This provoked three days o large-scale erce

conrontations between strikers and police. A letter to the city mayor,

reverberating with emotion, describes the violent strike scene:

This morning our workers cried and some policemen also cried. These werenot ordinary tears; these were bitter and painul tears. This morning at 7 a.m.worker representatives were scheduled to assemble on the courtyard, but themoment they appeared security guards came to grab them and cordoned o the stage to prevent the women workers rom coming close. But our womenworkers rushed up to protect them. There was kicking and pushing . . . Screamsand cries lled the air and echoed inside and outside. Our Uniden womenworkers were so determined and strong. Many men workers were just standingthere looking on. The women with tears in their eyes broke through the cordonand stood next to the representatives. They screamed, ‘running dogs, running

dogs’ at the security people and drove them out . . . Now everyone sat downand sang the Internationale, and when they reached the phrase ‘without theCommunist Party there would not have been a new China’, all 10,000 peoplesang with tears in their eyes . . . Ater that they signed their names to supportthe representatives. 4700 people signed to demand a union.

A union election was promised, but similar to what occurred in the Nestlé

actory, the Uniden actory quickly got rid o the strike leaders, workers

became demoralized and they lost control over their union election.

The workers displayed a high level o trade union consciousness in the

Uniden case. They realized that only by having their own unions could

they have an institution to genuinely represent their interests in the longterm, even i management had conceded to their economic demands. The

protest was planned, but strike leaders made no attempt to solicit support

beyond the workplace beore beginning the struggle. The labour struggle

was partially motivated by nationalism. The strike took place at a time

when anti-Japanese rallies were springing up across the country and in

Guangdong Province it was in the third week o anti-Japanese street

protests.

All these examples, together with the Nanhai Honda strike, were led

by intelligent and courageous individuals. Some o them exhibited great

workers’ solidarity; at times the strikes were staged with strategic plan-ning, and a small number were aware o the necessity o setting up their

own trade unions i their hard-earned struggle was to be sustained.

In three o the above cases, workers wanted to elect their own unions.

But this kind o demand is extremely rare. As a whole, the concept o

unionism is non-existent or vague among workers. In this sense, the

strike leaders who applied to orm unions are a kind o vanguard o class

consciousness. However, since there has been no upsurge o workers

in other actories using the same strategy to apply to orm workplace

unions these isolated, individual eorts are unlikely to succeed. And as





has been seen, none o these attempts to orm unions have yet succeeded.

Workplace unions cannot exist in isolation. Unortunately, in not even

one case was there an attempt to link up with workers in other actoriesto organize a bigger, collective protest or democratic elections o o cial

unions. The absence o such a movement is a refection o low trade union

consciousness.

CONCLUSION

One o the tasks o this chapter has been to locate the level o conscious-

ness o the migrant workers in South China along a historical continuum

o consciousness. Based on the empirical evidence presented here using theMarxist-Leninist theoretical schema, we conclude that migrant workers

in South China as a class are at the level o ‘embryonic trade union con-

sciousness’. Breaking down the development o consciousness into stages

and phases since the mid-1990s, we can see that their consciousness has

been hovering at the rights-based level. The workers’ main concern is

still their own personal and immediate economic conditions, and only

occasionally is there a breakthrough into the interest-based level. At times

sparks o union consciousness might ficker.

Thus ar, those who have asked or a union have been willing to register

with the o cial union. This could have been strategic, but we think it isbecause workers continue to have the illusion that they can place their

trust in authority. For instance, the Nanhai Honda workers allowed the

provincial union to take over the organization o a union re-election.

Their trust turned out to be misplaced. Their trade union representa-

tives are now mainly management sta. One o the International Labour

Organization’s (ILO) core labour rights is reedom o association, which

means allowing workers to have their own independent unions. The reality

o the situation is that the Chinese state is not going to let go o its grip on

labour. And, the migrant workers are also not ready to orm independent

unions. The hope o the state and the ACFTU is that, i their version o ‘collective consultation’ can take place on a large scale in China, industrial

relations can be regulated on their own terms, and social stability can be

maintained. But without truly representative unions there cannot be real

collective bargaining. The campaign or workplaces to conduct ‘collec-

tive consultation’ will only be another bureaucratic exercise. Presently

the litigation route is not viable either. The number o litigations since the

passing o the Labour Contract Law o 2008 has multiplied and there is a

big backlog o cases to be processed. Workers’ trust in the legal system will

soon vanish in rustration when they came to realize that the legal system





is not on their side. They will have to look or alternatives – the next big

step to take could be recalling management-controlled unions and electing

their own union representatives and trade union chairpersons.The solution to the problem comes back to workers having their own

representation. Workers will have to struggle or it. But how long it will

take or migrant workers to acquire a trade union consciousness is not

easy to predict. Ater all, using history as our guide, it took many decades

or European workers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth cen-

turies to organize themselves into mature trade union structures and,

when strong enough, to ght to gain recognition rom capital and state.

Only then would the latter agree to negotiate with unions. At present, no

such collective action has suraced in the Pearl River Delta region. The

process may take another two decades. The process o maturation may bequickened i, or example, there is a drastic economic downturn, run-away

infation, an even more rapid widening o the income gap (which has not

stopped widening) and i migrant workers rise up again and again.

The chapter has shown the actors constraining the development o

class consciousness. One actor is that the material conditions o migrant

workers have been rising, though they have not kept pace with the condi-

tions o the prospering Chinese middle classes. Despite all the complaints

about infation, long work hours and poor housing, the conditions o the

migrant workers o 2011 have improved since the days o the Zhili letters,

when migrant workers endured hunger pangs because their income was solow and their conditions so poor. That was the era o bondage and physical

punishment inside actory compounds and, outside, the high risk o being

thrown into detention centres by police and local government militia, o

being beaten up, extorted or ransom, or being sent back to where they

came rom – a suppressive situation not dissimilar to the pass system that

operated under South Arican apartheid (Alexander and Chan, 2004). In

Vietnam in the past ew years, there have been press reports o migrant

workers going hungry because the raised minimum wage could not keep

up with the high infation. In Dacca, Bangladesh, thousands o garment

workers have risen up time and again to demand that the state raise theminimum wage because they cannot survive on such a meagre income. In

India, where 93 per cent o the workers work in the inormal sector, which

is excluded rom legal protection and rights, workers have organized them-

selves to demand legal recognition as ‘workers’. In September 2010 there

was a one-day general strike (Ali, 2011). In India, Foxconn workers went

on strike and struggled hard to ask or a signicant wage rise, the ‘regu-

larization’ o contract workers and union recognition (‘India: victimized

Foxconn . . .’, 2010).15 These were big, organized protests and the trade

union leaders and strike leaders were quickly thrown into jail. The Chinese





government has avoided such mass protests by raising the minimum wage

high enough to catch up with infation. As least Chinese migrant workers’

material conditions are relatively good in comparison to workers in quitea number o Asian countries. This can partially explain why Chinese

workers have not elt the desperate need to organize themselves to demand

the state to raise the minimum wage.

Material and social conditions in China have been rising gradually in

the past two decades. It is a popular belie that the second generation o

migrant workers is better educated. They want a better lie. They want to

stay in the cities. As a result, they are more prone to protesting. This line

o argument regards generational actors as important in causing a rise in

class consciousness. However, earlier in the chapter we argued that even

30 years is too short a time rame to ully understand class ormation andclass consciousness. By lengthening the timerame we gain a historical per-

spective. The emergence o a class or itsel takes longer than one or two

generations. Thus, despite the expectation that this second generation o

migrant workers will push through to a new stage o class consciousness,

reality militates against this expectation.

The state worries that workers’ economic demands can turn into politi-

cal demands, and because o this it is suspicious that labour NGOs and

‘citizen agents’ could be potential sites rom which a political vanguard

might emerge. Their existence is tolerated because their activities actually

help to maintain social stability. They are at the same time distrusted andclosely monitored, and sometimes harassed by the authorities. However,

as we have demonstrated, these groups are cautious not to over-step the

scope o their activities beyond economic rights-based demands. They do

not impart political ideology to the workers. In a state-controlled society

in which the political climate is kept non-ideological (except or some or-

malistic slogans, such as ‘market socialism’, which is devoid o ‘socialist’

content) migrant workers have little to inspire them to understand their

own class position. One very practical drawback is the absence o reading

materials on trade unions and labour movements in general bookstores

and libraries. Young Chinese migrant workers and students with curiousminds oten have to look back to the pre-1949 period or ideological inspi-

ration. For instance, one o the two strike leaders o the Nanhai Honda

strike told a reporter he liked to read Mao’s poems (‘Shoudu Maozedong

. . .’, 2010).16

Production line workers’ ability to mobilize thus ar has been limited.

It seems that those who can organize better and communicate more eec-

tively are either technicians (C. Chan, 2010, pp. 43, 86) or sta members,

as seen in the cases o V-tech and Uniden.17 Without an intelligentsia

vanguard, the vanguard o the next stage o consciousness may ultimately





emerge rom within the working class. Not the less educated and exploited

production line workers, but these better-educated members o the ‘second

generation’ working class may be the labour movement actors. They maybe the ones to take on the challenge to propel their own labour history

orward.

NOTES

* A shorter version o this chapter was presented as a paper at a conerence held bythe Friedrich-Ebert-Stitung (FES) at Nanjing University in April 2011. A very shortversion was published in the German-language journal Das Argument in March/April2012.

1. This newly coined expression has become popular among Chinese academics. Forinstance, see the edited volume, The Problem of the Country’s New Generation of Peasant-workers Melding into Towns and Cities: An Academic Forum, organized bythe Guangzhou Social Science Association, the Guangzhou Development ResearchInstitute and the Guangzhou Human Rights Research Centre, held at Guangzhou City,November 2009 (Guangzhou Social Science Association, 2009).

2. Pun and Lu dene the second-generation peasant-workers as migrant workers who‘were born in the late 1970s and 1980s and who entered the labour market in the late1990s and 2000s. This category includes the children who were born to the rst genera-tion and who grew up in either urban areas or rural communities’ (2010, p. 495).

3. In act, di culty in collecting strike gures is a problem in all countries, not just inChina. Even in the US, only work stoppages o 1000 workers or more are recorded ino cial statistics (see United States Department o Labor website: http://www.bls.gov/

wsp/). Also see Dave Lyddon (2007, p. 27).4. For instance, Chris Chan (2010) ocuses on two cases.5. These labour NGOs include: China Labour Bulletin, China Labour Watch, SACOM

and Globalization Monitor.6. This kind o hidden resistance is particularly well-portrayed in Ngai Pun (2005).7. Initially the main NGOs were the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee

(HKCIC), Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC) and Chinese Working WomenNetwork (CWWN). Many o the idealists who ounded these organizations shared acommon experience: they were Hong Kong university students who went to support thestudent movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Ater the movement dissipated, theseyoung idealists wanted to understand Chinese society in the hope o getting involved insocial movements in China. The ounding o these labour NGOs was one o the waysthey thought suitable at a time when there were serious constraints on political rightsand reedom o association.

8. All oreign companies setting up assembly plants in China have to be joint ventures. TheChinese partners o these joint ventures are all local state enterprises. In Guangzhou,the auto company is the Guangzhou Automobile Group, which has a number o auto

joint ventures. The CEO is an important government o cial. He plays three roles: as anemployer, a mediator and as a government o cial whose job is to protect the workersrom oreign exploitation.

9. We regret not being able to disclose more details than this or reasons o condentialityand security. One act we know is that these leaders have never read the Trade UnionLaw.

10. Based on inormation rom a Zhongshan University student who has been in touchwith the workers, no election had been held by September 2011.

11. The inormation was provided by several Zhongshan University students who con-





ducted ollow-up research on the post-strike development o the plant. They went to theplant and the dormitories several times in 2010 and were able to talk to workers quite

reely. The interpretation that the strike has ailed is ours.12. Inormation came rom the Chinese labour activist who went to Nanhai to nd outmore about the strike and who met with some strike representatives.

13. A translation o this law is available at http://www.novexcn.com/trade_union_law.html.

14. One o us was able to track down Liu and met with him in 2007 in Shenzhen.15. In China, Foxconn workers have not staged such protests. The big Foxconn contro-

versy was over the suicides o more than a dozen workers in the rst part o 2010.16. Another example is Li Qiang who now heads the labour NGO China Labour Watch,

based in New York. He told me he read a lot about the early period o the Chinesetrade union when he was a labour activist in China. Yet another example is the workerwho got the largest number o votes in a democratic trade union election organized byReebok in one o its supplier actories in 2001. See A. Chan (2009).

17. Another example is the Walmart employees. Ater the Walmart trade unions were

set up in all Walmart stores in China, the one case in which employees collectivelynegotiated with Walmart was the one in which some management sta, rather than theordinary workers, negotiated when they were laid o in 2008. Inormation rom GaoHaitao, the ormer trade union chair o the Walmart Nanchang Baiyi store who helpedthese managers in litigation.




147

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