Two books on the same subject. Both, as it happens, by Chinese-Australian academics based at the Australian National University in Canberra. Both full of facts and conscientious in their dealing with those facts. And utterly contrasting pictures of the reality.
The contrasts illustrates the truth that there is no neutral or objective vantage point for economic studies. Anita Chan writes from a viewpoint which identifies with China’s 80 million or so “migrant workers”. Those workers — migrants from China’s countryside to its cities, not from other countries — provide the bulk of the workforce for the new factories, producing for export, owned or part-owned by foreign capitalists or Chinese private capitalists, which have mushroomed along China’s coastline. Xin Meng identifies with the Chinese government officials wanting to maximise the investment, international competitiveness, and profitability of those factories. That explains the different pictures.
Chan systematically collated reports from the state-regulated Chinese press about labour abuses. Such reports exist. China’s ruling bureaucracy has become less monolithic. But Chan shows that many abuses took months to get into print, suggesting that many more never get published.
The background is that from the mid 1950s until about 1978, China had state control of labour much tighter than anything achieved in the USSR even at the height of Stalinism.
China, with its huge peasant population, never had the labour shortages the Stalinist USSR faced. The rural population was banned by law from moving to the cities. In the cities, those lucky enough to “inherit” jobs in state enterprises — “inheritance” was a large part of it — got a secure wage and social provision, all organised through the workplace, but at the cost of total state direction of who worked where and on what terms.
Workers could not move to new jobs. Usually they didn’t want to. The “iron rice bowl” in state enterprises was grim, but better than the chances of scraping by on the semi-legal fringes of the urban economy or being sent to the countryside.
Since 1978 state control of labour has loosened up — with the paradoxical result of extending semi-slave conditions! The state enterprises have cut lots of jobs, and worsened workers’ conditions. A vast new swathe of industry, dominated by private capitalists, has emerged, and now accounts for the majority of China’s industrial production. Some of the new factories are huge. One Taiwanese-run factory in Dongguan employs 40,000 workers, producing shoes for Nike, Reebok and Adidas.
The new workers, mostly young women, still have the legal status of tolerated exceptions to the rule that rural people stay in the countryside. To move to the cities they need an official permit. When their employers take their permits “for safe keeping”, as they often do, the workers are tied to the factory as securely as any serf to a feudal estate.
Employers also keep control over workers by demanding from them large advance payments — up to a year’s wages — before granting them a job, and paying them hugely in arrears. Workers stick to jobs in the worst conditions for the sake of a chance of getting their back wages and paying off their debts.
At the extreme, workers are literally imprisoned in dormitories within the factory compound. In one case documented by Chan, two workers were stoned to death by management thugs when they tried to escape from the compound. No official charged or prosecuted anyone for the murder, though the dead workers’ families are attempting a private prosecution.
Inside the factories, sexual harassment and violence. In a Taiwanese-owned footwear factory in Guangzhou, the boss punished workers by hanging heavy iron moulds (designed for shaping shoes) round their necks, and forcing them to run round the factory grounds, or by making them stand upside down, with their hands on the ground, against a wall, for more than an hour.
The dormitories where the workers live are foul. Work conditions are unsafe. Chan cites one cutlery factory which had 142 accidents among 400 workers within three years, with 35 workers losing parts of limbs. The hours are very long. Some workers never have a day off. And the wages are low, often around US$1.50 a day.
One article in the magazine of China’s official (state-run) trade unions commented, with what must have been deliberate sarcasm: “In early capitalist societies, the suppression of basic worker rights and the control of their movement was widespread. Today, such practices have almost disappeared except in socialist countries such as our own”.
The workers fight back. In one chapter Chan documents “worker resistance”. Strikes are becoming more common. One case cited by Chan also shows how trade unionists internationally can help — that of Chinese seafarers on a British-owned and Greek-officered ships, hideously mistreated until the ship docked in Italy and the Italian dockworkers, finding out about the seafarers’ conditions, refused to service the ship until improvements were conceded.
The same facts, blurred, appear at the edges of Xin Meng’s vision. For example, he knows that “a common feature of China’s present labour market is that migrants get paid less than they are supposed to, do not get paid at all, or have payments delayed”, and he deplores it.
But his focus is elsewhere. His concern is with measuring how much Chinese government measures since 1978 have promoted market efficiency. His method is statistical analysis on surveys done, usually by Chinese government agencies, on selected groups of factories and workers.
His conclusion is that China is moving towards market efficiency, but still has a long way to go. The big problem is “that everybody in urban China has always been looked after by the state and has an expectation that this should continue. It may, therefore, take a considerable amount of time for individuals to adjust psychologically to a new situation, particularly one which is unlikely to be as generous or caring”.
He argues that China must not develop a welfare state. The country cannot afford it, and it can only slow the necessary “psychological adjustment”, which “can be quick when it is a matter of survival”.
Ruthlessness is better in the long run, because it will create a more efficient and thriving market economy from which, eventually, the benefits will trickle down to everyone. Xin Meng’s argument is exactly like one which Marx dealt with over 100 years in Capital, coming from economists who held that job cuts through introduction of new machinery were really a blessing because the process generated new capitals which would create new jobs. “And this”, Marx exclaimed — “and this the apologist calls a compensation for the misery, the sufferings, the possible death of the displaced labourers during the transition period”.
Rhodri Evans
