A Response to Robert Weil’s “Conditions of the Working Classes in
---Stephen
Philion and Chi Hua*
Robert Weil’s recent (June 206) MR article on the condition
of the Chinese working class has provided us with a rarely visited and lucid
view of the impact of
Weil details the divisions in
The
gains that economic development has brought—especially wider access to consumer
goods and foods and increased mobility and job opportunities—are being undercut
for millions by the ever-widening class divide and growing insecurity. As a
result,
The essay was based on extensive travel and
interviews with working class activists who support the political empowerment
of
Having said this, we, nonetheless, believe that Weil’s
analysis is affected by his over-reliance on such sources. Weil aptly
summarizes the way key divisions within the working class are exploited by the
government to prevent unit among workers with ostensibly similar enemies and
grievances. High rates of unemployment
in the rural regions make it easy, for example, for the government to, in some
instances as Weil cites, hire peasants to fight workers instead of police! And,
at the ideological level, even activists appear to buy into the divide and conquer
strategies, referring to urban or rural migrant workers as less than worthy of
respect in one regard or another. These
are all perceptive and accurate critiques raised by Weil.
Furthermore, as Weil notes, the need to unify and
broaden struggles from individual factory to city wide or even provincial wide
ones is an obvious transition that will have to take place if there is any hope for a powerful workers’ movement in
The activists we talked with there
were planning a big demonstration of workers from all the factories in the city
for later in the year.
But prospects for such united action
are uncertain. There are many remaining divisions within the urban
proletariat—economic, generational, and even political—with some more
supportive of the “reforms” and the government and others holding to the
socialist perspective. Even a Zhengzhou park in the middle of a working-class
district that we visited is divided physically between right and left groupings
of workers and retirees, with the former dominating certain areas, especially
during the daylight hours, and the latter more prevalent in other parts,
particularly at night… There is a desire to get together, but differences in
both their conditions and their treatment by the government work against such
higher levels of unification.
Having ourselves a considerable familiarity with
the struggles that Weil refers to in
Zhengzhou and the struggles that privatization has
spawned provide a good case study of what problems confront the Chinese
workers’ movement and it is not apparent that the sources Weil relied on have a
solid grasp of them. It is not an
accident that Weil spends considerable time on the activism in Zhengzhou, there
has occurred quite high levels of protest militancy in reaction to the
fraudulent sell-offs at least 50 state enterprises in Zhengzhou since the mid
and late 1990’s. Weil quotes one
activist stating,
Activists
helping organize all the working classes are trying to bring about the move
toward unification, but it is a long and difficult process, that has only begun
to bridge the gap between them.
Weil continues to quote a former Cultural
Revolution era Red Guards from
As
one former Red Guard in
These quotes come from a section hopefully,
arguably too hopefully, entitled “Return of the Left”. However, our knowledge of the leftists’[whom
Weil interviewed] reaction to worker
activism in Zhengzhou leaves us less optimistic about its ‘return’ or prospects
for a future without facing the real sources of its present weakness vis a vis
the workers movement as it has transpired in Zhengzhou.
For example, the Zhengzhou Paper Mill, which
served as a ‘model’ for worker organization against privatization in China’s
state sector actually fell far short of its potential as a ‘model,’ despite
the presence of a cadre of leftists from the Cultural Revolution era in
Zhengzhou and nearby municipalities. It
served as a bright spot precisely because of the determined forms of collective
self-organization that the mill workers pursued in 2000, when they realized
that their factory land was going to be sold to speculators, in violation of
privatizers’ promises to reinvest in production and compensation to
workers. The workers elected a new
Workers Representative Congress [WRC] and took over their factory in May, 2000
demanding that property rights be turned over to the WRC, which would restore
production under the principle of worker democratic self-management[2]. Instead, the workers were met with police
repression on August 8th, 2000.
Despite that repression, workers struggles at the Paper Mill led to the agreement
on the part of the Zhengzhou City Government to return property rights to the
Paper Mill WRC.
How then could such a victory not lead to the
further growth of the left and the workers’ movement in
This was not the outcome however. Instead, once the WRC won back property
rights to factory assets, the WRC encountered a serious structural barrier to
that strategy, namely assumption of the enterprise
debt that years of corruption and insider scheming engendered. In a nutshell, the lack of capital and state
support put workers’ leaders in a position of not knowing what possible means
existed to find the capital necessary to invest in production with the aim of
providing state enterprise workers with social and job security. If anything, this pushed some leaders in the
direction of consigning their futures to restructuring along lines of corporate
shareholding once rights to factory assets and land were restored to the
WRCs.
However, the lack of options in the ZZP case was
hardly set in granite. If anything, the
belief that looking for private stock purchasers as a means to save the factory
in the face of the debt the ZZP was saddled with contributed to the undermining of the strength of the WRC
that led the struggle for repossession of the factory for almost 5 years after
the 2000 factory takeover. Interviews
conducted in August 2005 reveal that a labor activist from
Labor Activist Lai: This
is what was most frustrating because this inclination to look to private
investors for investments in the ZZP after the WRC retained its property rights
to the factory is what undermined their solidarity. Many regarded the WRC’s internal battles as a
result of personality clashes. That certainly had something to do with it. But
there was more to it than met the eye.
Instead of turning to the workers to debate and decide on different options,
they took it upon themselves to find outside sources of capital and invariably
that led to WRC representatives identifying with the goal of bringing in
private investors instead of strengthening their bond with workers. While I advocated strongly for making the
issues known to the workers and letting them debate what route to go, in the
end the representatives went each their own way frantically trying to win
outsiders’ interest in the factory and not involving workers in that
process. This is what really led to the
failure of the WRC to carry through their original plan to implement worker
control of the factory after taking it back from the fraudulent ‘private
capitalists’ who stole it from them (August 2005 interview, Beijing).
There was one other factor that added to the
detour from the WRC’s road to worker controlled production after the battle to
win back factory property rights was won. That would be the politicized
orientation of local[3] older
cultural revolutionaries [i.e. Weil’s main source for information about
Activist Lai: These
older supporters who were activists in the Cultural Revolution have sought to
rebuild a type of militant political atmosphere that they lived through 40
years ago. That’s all well and good, but by not prioritizing what the workers
movement needed in
Question: How so?
Activist Lai:
Their interests were in building their own social movement, primarily by
encouraging workers’
leaders to join their Mao Anniversary Movement[4]. There’s no better gift to the police than to
politicize the workers’ movement in this fashion, it gives them the perfect
excuse to round up workers’ leaders. At
a time when leaders are needed to develop the base of the workers’ movement,
their potential is wasted in jail and
the general public comes to associate the workers’ protests with taboo
political causes, which they naturally fear (Ibid.).
What we believe is the significant lesson to be
drawn from failures such as the Paper Mill struggle is not that the working
class in
It is not surprising that Weil reports that his
sources claim to see evidence of increasing size and militancy of political
oriented demonstrations, ostensibly reflecting a new ‘higher’ level of working
class ‘organization’ and ‘ideology’:
In an attempt to get beyond this relatively
isolated form of struggle, which has in most cases proved inadequate to halt
the overall march of privatization, unemployment, and lost services and
securities, workers from the different enterprises in
However, it is doubtful that this is really the case
as much as something that Weils’ sources would like to happen as a result of their organizing strategy[5]. And it is here where the pitfalls of
organizing strategy on the part of the left in
[1] By ‘urban workers’, we mean those workers who have official residence in cities and the requisite access to public schooling, some health insurance, and varied benefits that come with possession of official urban residence status.
[2] The idea was one that many
WRCs in
[3] By ‘local’ I refer to
those from
[4] This refers to activities
every September 9th to commemorate Mao in
* Stephen Philion teaches Sociology at
[5] The labor activist we quoted above contends that the numbers of marches such as the yearly Anniversary of Mao’s Birth Marches in September are exaggerated to create the impression their strategy of bypassing actual workers organization and going straight to political and social movement oriented street demonstrations is effective.