Search

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers' minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. It follows anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes. China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification. Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the employment patterns, training activities, and skills development outcomes of China's Overseas Economic and Trade Cooperation Zones (OETCZs) in Africa. Drawing upon ethnographic field research and a workers' opinion survey in Ethiopia's Eastern Industrial Zone (EIZ), it answers two questions: How well has intergovernmental collaboration on OETCZs been translated into training opportunities for local workers? What are local workers' perceptions and evaluations of the potentials and constraints of skills development in Chinese companies? Analyses based on field observations and regression models indicate that workers' demographic backgrounds, employment sector, and the peculiarities of Chinese workplaces are important factors to understand the skills development outcomes in Chinese OETCZs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a historiographic and ethnographic analysis of how reflexivity, as a communicative practice and valued personality trait, has been understood, regulated, legitimised and used to control Chinese workers from the planned-economy era to the present. Using a Shanghai-based multinational company as a case study, I document how and under what conditions English-mediated reflexivity, with its stress on self-entrepreneurship, came to replace former Mandarin-mediated reflexivity supporting a notion of collective workerhood. Special attention is paid to reflexivity's changing roles in shaping, managing and evaluating workers and facilitating understandings of labour, power and agency. The paper argues that the emerging English-dominated reflexivity represents a required linguistic shift for the creation of a new worker type in the current globalised economy as it normalises managerial technologies of discipline, stratification and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background/Aims: Extensive research focuses on the advantages and disadvantages of various positions throughout active second stage labour, but there is limited focus on midwives' practice. This study aimed to explore midwives' practice of maternal positions throughout the active phase of second stage labour. Methods: An integrative review of three databases was carried out for research papers published between 2015 and 2022. Thematic analysis was used for data analysis and synthesis. Results: Five eligible research papers were included. There were four key findings: maternal positions practised by midwives, midwives as the prime decision maker, midwives' personal convenience and comfort, and barriers to practising maternal positions. Conclusions: Midwives were seen as prime decision makers, who hindered informed decision making on maternal positions during active second stage labour. Inadequate knowledge, skills and confidence were barriers to practice and attributed to midwives adopting positions that were convenient and comfortable for themselves. Strategies are needed to enhance practice through review and evaluation of current clinical settings, regular updates to evidence-based practice and refreshing essential midwifery skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether producer cooperatives could serve as a stepping stone leading to socialism is a much debated issue in Marxian scholarship. It has now been recognized that producer cooperatives might possess paradoxical potentials of promoting egalitarian economy and democratic management whilst at the same time constructing class hierarchies. So far, agrarian scholars have already identified how pre‐existing social differentiation facilitated privileged members to exploit the marginal non‐members. However, they have not explored how members exercise their agency in challenging the class division. In summer 2013, at the height of China's cooperatization movement, I embarked on a project of "engaged anthropology" to mobilize shrimp farmers in South China to establish a cooperative so as to challenge agribusinesses that squeeze farmers' returns, but members ended up hiring outside labour. However, members tried hard to bridge the hierarchy between investors and workers as well as between managers and labourers in order to expand its membership and build the village's reputation. This paper traces how cooperative members deal with the dilemmas between profit maximization and egalitarian distribution, highlighting the importance of class analysis for a pro‐poor cooperative movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the evolving relationship between China and CARICOM countries. It discusses how China has been using regional soft power to influence educational mobility. It speaks to the tensions inherent in debt diplomacy and educational mobility as economic and political regional integration (Caribbean exceptionalism) is engendered. As China pursues bilateral relations under South-South Cooperation rather than multilateral relations through CARICOM, we argue that China uses soft power through infrastructural loans and scholarships to influence regional educational policy. It concludes by suggesting that a common bilateral China-CARICOM policy of economic and political engagement is preferable for all CARICOM states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the labour force is segmented through ethnic distinctions. These distinctions can be harnessed to increase capitalist profit. While critical labour studies have documented how gender, race, and migration status are used to generate cheap labour, the ways in which ethnicity structures the labour market are less well understood. We approach this issue with ethnographic data on Yi ethnic minority people from the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture who migrate to South China to become manufacturing workers. These labour migrants enroll in factory work via co-ethnic labour brokers. The brokerage system provides workers with a sense of protection and solidarity, but simultaneously repurposes and entrenches existing inequalities. Based on how relationships between workers, brokers, and employers were structured, we develop two connected arguments: Firstly, ethnicity serves in much the same way as gender, race, and migration status to differentiate the labour force, for example by allowing for salary segmentation and flexible hires. Secondly, ethnicity differs from other labour market distinctions in that it is not only an identity marker, but also organises co-ethnics hierarchically through responsibilities and entitlements bestowed by kinship relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's first hydroelectric station began producing electricity in 1912, a year better known for marking the end of imperial rule and the advent of republican governance. Located a short distance outside of the southwestern city of Kunming, Shilongba (Stone Dragon Dam) was a cross-cultural endeavour that involved long-distance encounters of both materials and expertise that spanned not just vast expanses within China, but also a world divided by competing imperial interests. The technologies involved were at once both new and old. Turbines and dynamos represented the latest in German innovation, but the techniques used to carve the canal and lower the water table had been perfected over centuries. A history of Shilongba thus allows us to approach China's transition from Empire to Republic not merely as a political process but also as one of multiple makings – of state, technology, energy, society, and not least, history itself. This paper explores these multiple makings, focusing on the first phase of construction from 1908 to 1912, when a dam was constructed, a canal dug, and the first power station established. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in a factory in south-east China to describe the significance of a group of activities colloquially known as "pulling the sheep's wool" (haoyangmao). This wide-ranging set of thrift-oriented practices involves gaining rewards and discounts by collecting various credits and points, most often through activities conducted on online shopping, news and payment platforms. Recent studies have sought to reposition thrift as a morally-infused consumptive practice for the creation of value, through which the concept of the house is enacted. However, this paper demonstrates how thrift is viewed by labourers as a kind of "work". As such, it is able to act in a factory environment largely unmoored from notions of domesticity, instead delineating social boundaries between production line workers and managers, fostering communal behaviours amongst labourers and—through a process of earmarking—allowing for workers to direct a greater share of their wages toward household economies. We argue that this conception of thrift as labour actually reworks the way that consumption conjoins with production, challenging our received understandings of consumption, while also providing new possibilities for the creation of both value and personhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the ideological undergirding of Marxism–Leninism, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has claimed representation of peasants and workers in its vanguard role in actualising the socialist revolution. However, as China has developed economically over the past four decades, there has been an erosion in the status of workers and peasants as legitimate stakeholders in governance and ruling practices. This article attempts to map how labour, once a critical component of the CPC's political–ideological invocation, has become peripheral as China transitioned to a market economy with an emphasis on economic rationale for growth and reforms. It examines the changing contours of the CPC's discourse and practice over the past 100 years on the labour question, sandwiched as it is between the need for continued economic growth as a legitimating tool and the continued reiteration of being representative of the working class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a comparative investigation of two rural migrant workers museums, one state-run in Shenzhen and another grassroots project in the suburbs of Beijing. We take museums as institutions of the politics of recognition and identity politics par excellence, and as fields of forces through which the matrices of political economy, state formation and popular culture are played out. The theoretical problematiques that frame our analyses are twofold. On the one hand, what are the ways in which the post-Mao political economy and socioeconomic changes are represented in the symbolic rituals enacted in the museums? On the other hand, how such representational schemes cast light on issues of labour, technologies of the self, and the collective identity of migrant workers? We argue that the Shenzhen Museum, albeit providing idealising and heroizing portrays of migrant workers, reifies a development- and market-centred view of the city that is deliberately oblivious to the structural roots of migrant marginality. In contrast, the Beijing Museum offers a powerful counternarrative to the centrality of capital logic. By prioritising migrants' lived experiences of labouring and living, it underscores claims for fair evaluation of migrant labour, welfare protection, dignity of labouring bodies, and collective voice and identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1978 and 2018 the percentage of the Chinese workforce in the service sector rose from 12.2 to 46.3. A large share of this workforce is in sales, selling products ranging from household goods, insurance, advertising space, and education, to various other services. The proliferation of salespeople in China is facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of university graduates. Personnel in sales jobs, which are particularly popular among graduates from rural backgrounds with degrees from universities with indifferent reputations, experience an extraordinarily high level of mobility. They typically change jobs every few months, either because they are fired or they pursue better opportunities. Based on one year of fieldwork undertaken between 2015 and 2017, this article shows how the rapid expansion of China's higher education subjects students from rural backgrounds to new inequalities, which, in turn, reconfigure the rural-urban divide into multiple intersecting hierarchies. Building on the concept of complexed development, this article analyzes how salespeople experience contradictory mobilities in a web of intersecting hierarchies. It shows how they achieve upward status mobility by breaking away from agricultural and manual labour and becoming university graduates and white-collar workers; but also, how they sometimes experience downward mobility in terms of income in comparison to previous generations of migrants and their less-educated peers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ever since Beijing has sought to fuel domestic growth through Chinese-led development overseas--first under the aegis of Jiang Zemin's Going Out Policy and more recently as part of Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative--thousands of Chinese have moved overseas for work. Africa has been one of the destinations of Chinese companies and their expatriate staff. Although we have learned a great deal about China's mega-projects across the African continent, little is known about the certified engineers and experienced builders who carry them out. What brings them to Africa? And, more importantly, what makes them stay for years on end, even if they wish to return to China? In this article I zoom in on the lives of Chinese men employed in Ethiopia's construction industry to show how three decades of domestic growth in China has pushed workers overseas, while jeopardizing their return. Workers' lives are marked by double displacement. They are not only isolated from local African communities through a dormitory labour regime that controls their time and limits their mobility, but also, more importantly, they are displaced from social life in China. Domestic development has at once increased aspirations and made them harder to obtain, especially for men, who are expected to fulfill the promise of upward social mobility for themselves and their families. In order to realize aspirations and meet social expectations related to social reproduction, geographic mobility has become a necessity for men who cannot rely on family wealth or connections, forcing them into a state of suspension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts an infrastructural perspective to analyse Chinese migrant factory workers' conceptions of and approaches towards storing money on digital payment platforms. Scholars studying infrastructural systems have emphasised that such systems generally only become visible upon breakdown. However, this article finds that during the emergence of new infrastructures for monetary storage, existing infrastructures – along with the money stored within them – also become rendered conspicuous to users. In such moments, migrant factory workers are forced to assess the differences between existing and new infrastructural systems and make careful decisions over how to store their money. We claim it is necessary to acknowledge the shifting visibility of infrastructures during occasions of systemic transformation. Doing so can help to better understand how users navigate such infrastructures in attempts to solve problems of storage, while in the process re-evaluating their relationships with a variety of entities and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In reviewing the major factors driving the ageing process in mainland China, this commentary argues that population ageing itself is neither good nor bad. Instead, the main obstacles to dealing with the challenges of aging in China are not only 'being old before being rich' but also 'being not ready to get old.' The commentary discusses how China's shrinking labour force coupled with an ageing population may be partially offset by improvement in labour quality, development of new technology and upgrading economic structures. It examines the importance of family and social support systems in coping with the challenges of ageing, particularly in the field of long term care. It concludes that while there is a wealth of international experience that China can draw from, solution should also be solidly based on the country's own development reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates how Tibetan farming communities choose between two methods of livelihood production: working as labourers on vineyard land they have leased to a French winery or collecting valuable fungi. I argue new transnational land and labour management, as part of institutional rearrangements in land tenure, are leading to significant changes with mixed benefits for rural farming communities. These communities respond by seasonally seeking freedom from capitalist labour and returning to communal forms of income production based around community land tenure and common‐pool resources. Although villagers have become contracted labour, they choose to escape this new agricultural work in the mountains, collecting fungi together as a community. The common‐pool land on which fungi are collected is also managed for access in a specific way by and for the community. Contrary to agricultural labour for the winery, fungi collection creates a chance for people to interact once again more as a cohesive community as they once did in their fields by collecting a commodity from land controlled by the community. The disembedding of one section of the economy has thus in a way reinforced the embeddedness of social relations in another as a coping mechanism for the former. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the entanglement of trajectories of transnational education/work and religious conversion among Chinese overseas students who move to the UK before returning to China. In contrast to the existing literature on returnees where the gaze is only turned on highly prestigious schemes/trajectories of return, we look at those who become involved with Christian evangelical congregations and bible reading groups in response to a general state of disillusion with social beliefs of global competition and success. By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in London and Beijing, we engage with literature on lived religion, migration and the care of the self through a sociolinguistic lens. We take pressures for successful return as a technology of hope that shaped our participants' experiences of Christian conversion, and examine religious practices as support-based subject-transformation projects whereby our participants regulate their and others' practices and feelings through daily semiotic activities as they operate within global spaces of higher education and the labour market. In so doing, we detail a complex interplay of self-transformation experiences, collective practices of refusal, and capitalist logics of market expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Workers' resistance is crucial to understanding how the working class respond to the growing labour precarity in post-socialist China. The labour studies literature posits that inequality and volatile capital movements increase workers' precarity and lead to stronger labour resistance, such as strikes. However, workers' cognition as an integral part of resistance has been rarely studied. This article examines cognitive resistance by Chinese workers from different tier cities by looking at their social trust, class identity, understanding of policies and class solidarity. Despite capital movements and precarity causing more labour unrest, it does not necessarily lead to a stronger cognitive resistance. While inequality and precarity are greater in the more developed megacities with a shifting capital favourability, workers in megacities display a more conservative cognitive resistance than those from the lower-tier cities. This study of workers' cognitive resistance provides insight into the future of the Chinese labour movement. It argues that the working class's current cognitive non-resistance suggests that even if a window of opportunity were to appear in the wall of state oppression, workers are not cognitively prepared to coalesce into a coherent social movement that would bring about transformative changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic data from the sanitation industry in Wenzhou and Guangzhou, we investigate different patterns of work organization in each city. We find that supplementary informal work can serve to subsidize low family income and therefore stabilize formal but exploitative work. In Wenzhou, the family team model creates time and space for one spouse to engage in informal work while still receiving a wage from the employer. This additional informal work significantly increases net family income, which neutralizes worker demands for better wages and working conditions in the formal sector. In contrast, Guangzhou workers are subject to relatively rigid spatio-temporal controls, impeding them from participating in informal work to supplement their formal wages. Despite receiving higher wages and more benefits, these workers are highly wage dependent and express much greater discontent than their equivalents in Wenzhou. Theoretically, we contribute to the literature on informality through a discussion of "ancillary informal work," highlighting how access to certain kinds of informal work both subsidizes and is facilitated by formal sector employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the territorial and logistical factors surrounding the leasing of the Greek port of Piraeus to a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned enterprise COSCO, this paper responds to calls to investigate variations in experiences of precarity. The article is based on research conducted in 2014 when the container processing area at Piraeus was divided between two terminals: the first run by the Piraeus Port Authority (OLP) and the second run by COSCO's subsidiary Piraeus Container Terminals (PCT). By contrasting the threatened unionized labour regime at OLP with the highly precarious labour conditions at PCT, the paper asks how the operative dimensions of capital condition precarity's intensification and spread. In this light, precarity emerges not simply as a form of labour insecurity or an unevenly shared condition of human vulnerability but as a relational nexus that links questions of political economy to matters of subjectivity, space, power, and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the implications of government control over public information about air pollution. First, we model the incentives for a local government with control over the media to affect popular perception concerning pollution. We argue that biased announcements can influence the inflows of labour force in a municipality beyond economic factors. Then, we examine some evidence on information misreporting in the context of Beijing, China. We show that official air pollution announcements diverge systematically from an alternative source of information, provided by the US Embassy. The results point at a manipulation of popular perception consistent with the motives indicated in our model. Furthermore, using an original household survey, we examine whether the distorted public signal affects agents' behaviour. We find that households that depend upon government-controlled media are significantly less responsive to pollution peaks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The proliferation of global value chains is portrayed in academic and policy circles as representing new development opportunities for firms and regions in the global south. This article tests these claims by examining original material from non-governmental organizations' reports and secondary sources on the garment and electronics chains in Cambodia and China, respectively. This empirical evidence suggests that these global value chains generate new forms of worker poverty. Based on these findings, the article proposes the novel Global Poverty Chain approach. The article critiques and reformulates principal concepts associated with the Global Value Chain approach – of value-added, rent and chain governance – and challenges a core assumption prevalent within Global Value Chain analysis: that workers' low wages are a function of their employment in low productivity industries. Instead, it shows that (1) many supplier firms in the global south are as, or more, productive than their equivalents in the global north; (2) often predominantly female workers in these industries are super exploited (paid wages below their subsistence requirements) and (3) chain governance represents a lead firm value-capturing strategy, which intensifies worker exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has experienced serious labour-management conflict. The majority of Chinese workers today, out of a workforce of around three-quarters of a billion, belong to a ‘new generation’ of employees (xinshengdai yuangong), who have been labelled as the ‘post-1980s’, ‘post-1990s’ and ‘millennial’ phenomena, who see the world differently from the previous generation. They have experienced a ‘sea-change’ in ‘Industrial and Labour Relations’, as well as ‘Human Resource Management’, across the ‘Middle Kingdom’. In this collection, we explore the background of, the challenges to and the importance of this cohort of young workers in the PRC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on existing studies of worker activism in formerly communist states, this paper examines the context, nature and consequences of labour protest in China’s private sector - highlighting the specific features that have emerged from China’s unique ‘communist’ political regime and partially privatized economy. As private enterprises have grown in China, private sector worker protests have been common. Three key factors have shaped this activism: (i) a disjuncture between benevolent and protective national laws and the lived experience of workers; (ii) fluctuations in the labour market; and (iii) generational shifts and learning among workers, employers and political authorities. The interplay of these factors has led protesting private sector workers to focus their ire on their employers and on occasion local political authorities, while viewing national political leaders as sources of worker support. These dynamics have had both positive and negative consequences for private sector workers and political authorities. Making comparisons with other authoritarian and communist states, this study adds to current understandings of how specific economic and political configurations engender particular characteristics of labour activism - and how these change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study looks at trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and the transformation of cross-border activism between Hong Kong and mainland China. Examining two cases, it demonstrates the mechanism and processes of trans-border, anti-sweatshop campaigns and networks involving non-governmental agencies, student groups and workers. The study suggests that anti-sweatshop activism has been conductive and transferrable from Hong Kong to China in a way that has mobilised local civil society power, cultivated mainland activists and nurtured localised pro-labour activism. With Hong Kong activists acting as movement conveyers and mainland activists acting as adapters, anti-sweatshop activism has evolved. Once centred on marketplaces and consumers, it is now centred on production sites, and has moved domestic actors (including workers, students, scholars, media and consumers) from the margins to the centre. Anti-sweatshop activism has moulded itself to local contexts by rebuilding its strategies and tactics while coalescing with overseas networks to integrate strengths across the Hong Kong-Chinese border. Although the anti-sweat shop movement in China has its weaknesses, its evolution has the potential to gradually alter the power asymmetries between domestic and overseas activists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's growing presence in Africa is not news: the expansion of bilateral trade and investment ties has garnered intense media and political focus over the past decade. However, less is known about the people accompanying these increasingly intensive flows of goods and capital. This paper focuses on Zambia, drawing on multiple primary datasets to shed light on both the scale and nature of Chinese migration to the continent. Two years of Department of Immigration employment-permit data serve as the basis for the first quantitative analysis of the "Chinese" in "Africa," illuminating the increasing diversity of this population flow. While the growing Chinese presence in Africa is often viewed as a coherent neocolonialist strategy planned and implemented by the Chinese state, this paper demonstrates that it is in fact typified by a multitude of both public and private actors with independent motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Although studies on Chinese industrial relations (IR) have examined topics such as unionization and collective bargaining, little is known about employers’ reactions to recent IR changes. In particular, researchers have not thoroughly considered foreign employers’ labor relations strategies. Amidst this background, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how a foreign employer perceives and responds to the recent IR changes in China.Design/methodology/approach This paper conducted an exploratory, inductive study of the Chinese subsidiary of one multinational corporation. The data were collected through the author’s extensive fieldwork at its headquarters and Chinese subsidiary.Findings This paper shows that the union of a foreign firm in China serves three major functions – a collective voice, a monopoly, and an external affairs function – and that the firm’s interpretation of these functions has changed within China’s dynamic IR environment. Further, this paper finds that an employer has initiated its own compliance strategies, such as forming a friendly union, decoupling the union’s functions, de-collectivizing employment relations through effective HR practices and stricter policies, and scaling down in size to reduce administrative burden.Originality/value By introducing an employer perspective regarding recent IR changes, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of unionization and collective bargaining implementation in China. In addition, this paper identifies an emerging pattern of employer perception and response in China, highlighting unique features that have not been addressed in the existing literature on employers’ anti-union behavior. This study’s contributions also facilitate further research encompassing different contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an investigation of the Shenzhen Collective Consultation Ordinance and the Guangdong Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises, this article demonstrates how transnational capital in China deploys its associational power alongside its structural economic power to lobby and pressure the national and local governments to advance its own interests. In addition, building upon the ideas of Hall and Soskice about the varieties of capitalism, the authors have developed the concept of “varieties of transnational capital” to account for the differing positions of overseas business associations regarding the two laws. We find that these positions are shaped by two determining factors: a) where the associations are situated in global production chains, and b) the industrial relations model in their home countries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – Collective bargaining (CB) in China is perceived as inadequate, thanks to the lack of trade union independence and representation. However, CB of the sweater industry in Wenling, one of the world’s largest manufacturing centre, shows another tendency. Using Wenling as the case, the purpose of this paper is to explore whether a new form of CB is emerging in China. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a qualitative case study approach, and covers stakeholders, including the government, trade union, sweater association, workers and employers. Findings – In China, trade unions are constrained by corporatism and therefore cannot become the effective agents of CB. However, the increased industrial conflicts could in effect push employers to become the engine of change. This paper finds that employers endeavour to use CB as a tool to stabilise employment relations and neutralise workers resistance. Consequently, a gradual transition in labour relations system is on the way, characterised by “disorderly resistance” to “orderly compliance” in the working class. Research limitations/implications – The case industry may not be sufficient in drawing the details of CB in China, while it provides the trend of change. Originality/value – Conventional wisdom on the Chinese labour relations and CB tends to ignore the employer’s perspective. This paper partially fills in the gap by offering CB and change of employment relations from the aspect of employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that whilst the relationship between US consumerism and China's low-wage production has underpinned China's economic growth in recent years, policy-makers are increasingly cognisant of heightened internal and external vulnerabilities, namely increased domestic social unrest and downturns in US demand. Despite calls for increased domestic consumption, opinion remains divided as to the extent to which policy-makers will make a genuine departure with China's export-orientation. This paper argues, however, that the direction of the Chinese political economy will depend much on the transformative role of workers’ struggles. Placed in a broader north-east Asian comparative perspective, we argue that China appears to be on the verge of a transition towards a limited labour supply, as evidenced in increasing labour shortages, rising wages costs and new forms of labour unrest. An in-depth case study of the strike at Nanhai Honda in 2010 suggests that China's migrant workers are beginning to develop a class consciousness and move from reactive to proactive demands. Furthermore, the response of the Chinese state and employers has shifted from one of outright repression to one of accommodation. These trends are likely to be highly significant in terms of China's uneven integration into the global economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined Chinese fathers' feelings about their partners' delivery and views on their presence during labour and birth. A questionnaire survey was conducted with 403 fathers whose partners gave birth in one provincial hospital in China. Data were analysed by descriptive statistics, χ2-test and content analysis. The results indicated that more than 80% of fathers experienced feelings of pride related to fatherhood and of love towards their partners and newborns. Significant differences in fathers' feelings were found between subgroups with regard to age, education, employment, presence in the delivery room, method of birth and whether preparatory visits had been made to the hospital. The majority who answered an open-ended question on the meaning of fathers' presence in the delivery room held a positive attitude towards fathers' presence at labour and birth, as their presence could empower their partners and provide psychological support. This study indicates fathers' presence at delivery and birth is important and that younger fathers need more support. It also provides evidence for clinical practice and future interventions to improve fathers' psychological health and experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narrative about Chinese NGOs active in defending migrant workers' rights describes these organizations as increasingly powerful instruments through which Chinese people take part in public affairs, develop and articulate personal interests, and collectively form a more active and participatory citizenry. This article challenges not only the idea of labour NGOs as a progressive force for political change, but also the belief – widely shared among the international labour movement – that these organizations are sprouts of independent unionism in China. After a short overview of the historical process which led to the birth of labour NGOs in China, this article analyses the relations between these NGOs and four fundamental actors – the state, the workers, international donors and other NGOs – and argues that many of these organizations are struggling as a consequence of a substantial lack of “social capital.” [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study analyses data from household surveys in six large Chinese cities in 2010 to describe the nature of informal employment and estimate the returns to education in the formal and informal labour markets. It is estimated that 25.4 per cent of the urban workers are informally employed and 22.2 per cent of them work in the informal sector. Wage equations for informal and formal workers are also estimated by using OLS, Heckman selection correction models, switching regression models, and quantile regressions. The results show that the returns to education are lower for those working informally as compared to formal workers, and that the gap in returns is even larger for those working in the informal and formal sectors (4.2 per cent versus 11.1 per cent per year of schooling according to a switching regression model). The quantile regression results reveal that the returns to education increase at higher quintiles for informal employment but not for formal employment. The results suggest that the formal and informal sectors are characterised by labour market segmentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the emergence of transnational regimes of regulation governing labour standards and how these impact and articulate in China. Specifically, the article addresses how domestic non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in China communicate emergent regulatory norms and extend these into domestic domains, redefining how labour codes are developed and instantiated in local policy contexts and throughout the globalized value chains. It does so by adopting a qualitative case study approach to analyse how engagement with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) norms transforms labour-support organizations and their roles in labour negotiations, regulation and oversight. Using a case study approached focused in the Guangdong Province of China, the findings suggest that a transnational private regulation supports the development of local NGO activity and in turn transmits norms, modes of conduct and regulation that has a fundamental impact on how labour NGOs ensconce themselves and help transmit and construct regulatory practices that govern labour practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational corporations (TNCs) have increasingly addressed labour conditions associated with their commercial suppliers in developing countries. For TNCs, however, weak rule of law, poor governance capacity, corruption and gaps in appropriate legislation in developing countries have made the management, enforcement and monitoring of local labour practices problematic, in the process exposing TNCs to reputational risks and potential commercial harm. TNCs have attempted to overcome these constraints by developing corporate responsibility (CR) strategies designed to set in place codes of ethical conduct in the treatment of worker rights while protecting shareholder interests and those of other stakeholders. As this paper explores, TNCs are pursuing the development of regulatory codes that are required to be adopted by their supply chain partners, in the process, setting standards that are diffused to local businesses and organizations and impacting the regulatory structures that govern local business behaviour. As this paper notes, however, this is not a one-way process of norm diffusion but rather a site of norm reciprocity, where local institutions and practices shape the regulatory outcomes that evolve. To this end, the paper examines the interactions between TNCs and other actors (international organizations, the state, civil society and private actors) in norm diffusion, attempting to map and ascertain how reciprocity in norm diffusion shapes norm and institutional outcomes in CR activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter-the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn-the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery, resulting in intense pressures and illegal overtime for workers. Responding to the high-pressure production regime, the young generation of Chinese rural migrant workers engages in a crescendo of individual and collective struggles to define their rights and defend their dignity in the face of combined corporate and state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of mining projects in Papua New Guinea, since the development of the Panguna copper mine in Bougainville during the 1960s, have contributed to our understanding of the politics of interactions between resource companies, host governments and landowners. The Ramu Nickel mine, situated in northern Papua New Guinea, is China’s largest investment in the Pacific to date at US$1.4 billion. The project is managed by a state-owned enterprise, China Metallurgical Corporation, and financed by China ExIm Bank. This venture presents an opportunity to understand Chinese resource investment in a comparative perspective. While many issues, such as conflict over land, internal migration, and the limited involvement of the Papua New Guinean state, are constant, one aspect specific to Chinese resource investment is the use (or non-use) of host country labour, and the high proportion of Chinese labour employed at the mine sites. This practice differs from the relatively limited, short-term use of expatriate labour common to Western mining projects in developing countries. The attitudes and experiences of local and Chinese workers and managers will be examined to determine what is new in this approach to resource extraction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article offers a critical evaluation of the development of labour market policies in China. It argues that although active labour market policies (ALMPs) in China have been extended in response to the changing labour market and emerging labour conflicts, they have not replaced passive labour market policies (PLMPs). While the laid-off state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers’ protests have compelled the government to introduce ALMPs targeting the SOE workers in the 1990s, protection of rural-to-urban migrant workers is minimal. In recent years, however, both ALMPs and PLMPs have been extended to migrant workers due to the recurrence of labour shortages. This, however, has led to new problems such as the massive exploitation of student interns. The impact of ALMPs on the migrant workers’ rights is uncertain due to the patchy implementation and a lack of monitoring to policies enforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the relations between supply chain strategies and impact on terms and conditions of employment of multinational corporations operating in China. Design/methodology/approach – Case study analysis of two production plants owned by leading multinational corporations, and a number of their suppliers (five in total), was undertaken. Semi-structured interviews with managers (personnel, production and supply chain) and workers in each case study were conducted both to gain information and to triangulate evidence. Visits were made to each of the factories and to the environment in which the workers lived and worked. Findings – There is no uniform or single deterministic relationship between supply chains and labour standards. Supply chain strategies, ownership form and industry are all determinants of the relationship. However, size, as measured in terms of number of employees, does not seem a significant factor in power relations. There is also a balance between cost squeeze and other factors (the potential of cost saving, desire for predictability) in relations between existing firms in a supply chain. Originality/value – Analysis of management practices and its relationship with employment issues in supply chain theory is still not well integrated. Part of the reason lies in the concerns of each discipline. By treating supply chain concerns as a menu of issues rather than an integrative theory, through case study analysis, a nuanced and explanatory detail can be given. These will need later repetition in quantitative or qualitative forms of research. Ontologically, the paper attempts to draw together the critical research and business school approaches to strategic management concerns. While both approaches provide a wealth of substantive evidence, there is a need to read from both perspectives to be able to catch the nature of work organisation and the management practices that inform them in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a new working class is in the process of remaking itself in China, the latest trend in labour studies has rejected the Marxist tradition which sees the social relations of production as the point of departure for analysing workplace conflict. According to the new current, influenced by post-structuralism, class is only one of the identities articulated by workers, and it can be understood only with reference to their discourses. By critically evaluating an important book by Ching Kwan Lee (Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt), this article suggests that her approach generalising workers' protests with the notion of citizenship cannot satisfactorily explain the changing pattern of labour protests in China since 2004. By using fieldwork data and connecting the analysis of the social relations of production with the changing patterns of workers' struggle, this paper argues that migrant workers protests are a significant part of the emerging class conflict in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private recruitment agents have been a major concern of policy makers in international labour migration. The agents are seen to undermine state authority, the market order and migrant rights. It is commonly suggested that their role can be curtailed or even eliminated if the administrative red tape of migration control is cut down (a liberal approach), or regulation on the intermediary business is tightened up (an interventionist approach). The Chinese government has done both at different times since the 1980s, but only to make the process of recruitment more complicated and private agents more powerful. This paper explains why. Based on a period of seven years of field research and documentary study, the article provides an ethnographic account of the change of the practice of international labour recruitment in China, especially in relation to systemic reforms, between 1980 and 2008. The centralized state in a liberalizing economy seems to need private agents in order to render individual mobility governable, migrants protectable and agents themselves "blamable" and punishable. If limited centralization of state power gave rise to earlier intermediary forms (e.g., tax farming), intermediary agents today result from governmental practices of the highly centralized state. As such, private agents should not be construed as autonomous entities located between demand and supply, or between migrants and states; they are instead an integral part of a complex structure of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caesarean rate has been increasing year by year in China and other countries in the world. In fact, caesarean section is associated with increased risk of maternal mortality and serious foetal pulmonary morbidity. To reduce caesarean rate, obstetricians in physician-based birth units get used to take early intervention for any delay in labour progress that could cause dystocia. However, standard obstetric care enhanced by obstetric power has not consistently been shown to reduce rate of caesarean delivery. Other than physician-based model, midwife-led model of care is aiming to promote normal birth by use of midwives’ skills as well as continuous support rather than augmentation of labour through excessive medical treatment. Midwife-led care model is novel to worldwide birth units where standard obstetric care still dominates. It has made some headway in efforts to reduce caesarean rate. The fact that standard obstetric care of childbirth have not consistently reduced rate of caesarean delivery encourages us for creating the hypotheses that midwife-led care model satisfying puerpera with care and support could minimise unnecessary obstetric intervention and facilitate vaginal birth, and finally reduces caesarean rate. This hypothesis, if confirmed, might have the potential to be disseminated elsewhere in the world, where most women still take standard obstetric care. Moreover, it has political implications for the national health-care policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by engaging with some recent attempts to bring the study of the agency of labour into analyses of global capitalism, and argues that these approaches fail to capture the ways in which labour movements impact upon state strategies and, in turn, how this affects the spatial and temporal nature of global capitalist restructuring. Through adopting Antonio Gramsci's concept of passive revolution, the article shows that whilst China has witnessed a significant degree of spontaneous and unorganised labour unrest, the state has been highly active in seeking to forestall the emergence of a politically conscious organised labour movement in ways that have important implications for the mode of China's insertion into the international division of labour. In accordance with Gramsci's framework, this 'revolution from above' should be understood within the framework and the specificity of the international states system. Labour struggles, class formation and the role of the state in these processes are conditioned both by geopolitical rivalry and by the demonstrative effects of earlier cases of successful industrialisation, as well as by examples of resultant labour struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Epilogue to the Symposium, we look at the conclusions we can draw from our tour d'horizon of managers, markets and the globalized economy in the People's Republic of China. We have seen that, since the late 1970s, industrial ownership has significantly opened-up and become more fragmented, that the state-owned enterprises are arguably no longer the dominant mode in the economy and indeed neither is their management model. Managing, we also noted, has become more complex and diversified, as well as more professional. This edited collection has thus shown how China's managers now have to operate in a more market-driven context if somewhat bounded by the parameters of the 'harmonious society'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Middle Kingdom' has come a long way in the last few decades, its economy has burgeoned and its prosperity has flourished. Chinese management has evolved greatly too but is now at the 'crossroads', as the People's Republic of China celebrates the 60th anniversary of the 'Liberation' led by Mao Zedong and the 30th anniversary of the economic reforms launched by his successor, Deng Xiaoping. In this symposium, we review its past legacy, its evolution to date, as well as its options, covering a wide range of management topics. As ownership of its enterprises has opened-up and has become more fragmented, state-owned firms arguably no longer dominate the scene, nor does their management model. Being a manager has also become more complex and diversified, as well as more professional. The Party has proclaimed the 'Harmonious Society' as the route to reconciling economic performance with social justice. This edited collection asks what are the next steps and will assess the current directions in which Chinese managers are developing, as its economy now has to cope with a slowdown in the face of global uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose -- The purpose of the paper is to examine observed differences in China's ethnic majority and minority patterns of labor force participation and to decompose these differences into treatment and endowment effects. Design/methodology/approach -- Data from the three most recent population censuses of China are employed to explore differences in the labor force participation rates of a number of China's important ethnic groups. Gender-separated urban labor force participation rates are estimated using logit regressions, controlling for educational attainment, marital status, pre-school and school-age children, household size, age, and measures of local economic conditions. The focus is on the experience of six minority groups (Hui, Koreans, Manchu, Mongolians, Uygurs, and Zhuang) in comparison to the majority Han. The technique developed by Borooah and Iyer is adopted to decompose the differences in labor force participation rates between pairs of ethnic groups into treatment and endowment effects. Findings -- Sizeable differences are found between the labor force participation rates of prime-age urban women of particular ethnic groups and the majority Han. Men's participation rates are very high (above 95 percent) and exhibit little difference between Han and ethnic minorities. For almost all pairwise comparisons between Han and ethnic women, it is found that differences in coefficients account for more than 100 percent of the Han-ethnic difference in labor force participation. Differences in endowments often have substantial effects in reducing this positive Han margin in labor force participation. Roughly speaking, treatment of women's characteristics, whether in the market or socially, tend to increase the Han advantage in labor force participation. The levels of these characteristics on average tend to reduce this Han advantage. Research limitations/implications -- The paper analyses only one aspect of the economic status of China's ethnic minorities -- labor force participation. It would be useful also to examine income, educational attainment, occupational attainment, and unemployment. Originality/value -- This paper contributes to and expands the scant literature on ethnicity in China's economic transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To provide background for the four papers on Xinjiang and the Uyghurs in this special issue, this introduction discusses developments in the region since 1991, then outlines the events of June and July 2009 in Shaoguan, Guangdong, and Urumchi, Xinjiang, as best can be pieced together from available information. It concludes with brief introductions to the four articles on Xinjiang that follow in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work examines the labour export programme of south-west Xinjiang that brought Uyghur migrant workers to the Early Light Toy Factory in Shaoguan, Guangdong and places it in the context of capitalist-working class divisions emerging in contemporary China, where clashes between managers and workers have become frequent occurrences, and increasing worker solidarity and growing labour activism have become a leading concern of the Communist Party of China and an increasingly influential business class. The author suggests that labour export is primarily utilized not as a means to alleviate poverty and reduce minority-Han income gaps, as claimed by official sources, but as an instrument of business-class interests for dividing and conquering the shop floor through the ethnic diversification of the workforce, an age-old tactic of factory bosses harkening back to the manipulation of foreign-born workers in late-nineteenth-century industrial America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]