Researchers across different disciplines have come to a more or less shared understanding of Chinese labour politics as involving a special mixture of control and contention: the country's authorities have succeeded in heading off a Polish-style national workers’ movement that could threaten the Communist Party's hold on power – a great fear of the early reform-era leadership – but they have saddled themselves with chronic grassroots conflict in the process.
This situation has been conceptualized in different ways. Focusing on experiments by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, sociologist Eli Friedman, for instance, has described the country as stalemated in an “insurgency trap,” wherein the union's wariness of acting more decisively on behalf of its putative members means that labour's voice is never fully institutionalized and must instead be raised in the streets (Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, Cornell University Press, 2014). Meanwhile, examining the effects of China's employment law reforms of the late aughts, political scientist Mary Gallagher has shown how workers have at once felt empowered and disillusioned by their experiences navigating the country's hyper-individualized dispute resolution process, leading to a withdrawal from the legal system on both the part of the workers themselves and frustrated elites (Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State, Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Sungmin Rho's new book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China's Rise, offers a new framework for understanding the same contradictory dynamic. According to Rho, rather than incorporating workers via political parties or corporatist structures, the Chinese government has allowed relatively small groups to strike and protest over purely economic demands concerning particular firms, thereby avoiding more broad-based, politicized mobilization. Her analysis thus far echoes that of previous research. But she departs from the work of others by arguing that this “atomized incorporation” engages the working class unevenly. Specifically, the process empowers a relatively privileged stratum of workers who both possess the connections necessary to organize collective action on their shop floors and hold the sorts of modest grievances that are tolerated by authorities. At the same time, a great mass of downtrodden people who blame the system itself for their problems are left out in the cold.
The book's greatest contribution is perhaps the fresh empirical data it assembles on worker demands and actions. Atomized Incorporation draws principally on a survey of 618 workers across 155 factories in Shenzhen in 2013, sampled to include a near-equal number of line supervisors and rank-and-file employees, as well as people employed in foreign and domestic private companies. The survey covers a remarkably wide range of different aspects of working life, allowing Rho to return to its results throughout the book, focusing on responses to different questions in different chapters. The study is supplemented by statistics drawn from China Labour Bulletin's strike map, interviews conducted in the Pearl River Delta and Yangtze, River Delta, and, in parts, by another survey conducted by scholars at Sun Yat-sen University.
Atomized Incorporation works through its argument piece by piece. First, Rho provides evidence that people with a higher position and experience in a firm have the greatest ability to mobilize others. But she also establishes that line supervisors are likely to see workers themselves as responsible for their conditions, while rank-and-file workers, especially young ones, tend to hold broader social grievances and to blame local and central governments. Next, the book shows that the same line supervisors, along with people who have been at a given company longer, generally have no interest in taking part in collective action, and when they do take action, it is over firm-level grievances, not, again, anger at the state. Rho then examines the determinants of interest-based strikes and protests, i.e. activism involving demands that go beyond basic legal guarantees, finding that “collective action for an interest-based cause is unlikely at the domestic-private and small-scale firms that generally provide the worst labor conditions (pp. 174–175). At larger, foreign and more law-abiding companies, workers have greater leverage over their employers via the media, as these firms are vulnerable to bad publicity. The final chapter relates how the Xi Jinping administration has repressed non-governmental organizations that tried for a period to overcome the atomization of workers and advance collective bargaining.
Along the way, Rho contributes in interesting ways to ongoing debates. For instance, she provides evidence that the free-rider problem is less of an issue for labour organizing in China than the first-moved dilemma and workers’ self-perceived odds of success. The book also contends that interest-based claims by employees are less threatening to the government, because actions driven by such demands concern the policies of firms, rather than the enforcement powers of local authorities, and tend consequently to stay contained within factory grounds (strikes for higher wages do not require rallies on courthouse steps). This matches with the 2020 findings of Yujeong Yang and Wei Chen regarding government responses to different worker demands in Guangdong (“Different Demands, Varying Responses: Local Government Responses to Workers’ Collective Actions in South China,” The China Quarterly 243, 839–854).
Although the book's survey analysis is, as noted, a tremendous asset, in some places that analysis feels like it involves too many moving pieces and focuses too much on correlations between various responses to questions where the direction of causality is, as Rho acknowledges, impossible to determine with survey data alone. Greater reliance on the qualitative evidence that Rho assembled during her fieldwork would help tie together her argument and flesh out the mechanisms that she hypothesizes link specific worker characteristics and actions. A compelling set of case studies in the penultimate chapter concerning collective actions involving workers wielding different discursive weapons shows what this kind of analysis could add. This minor critique, though, should not detract from the overall strength of the study.
Rho's argument concerning the long-term prospects of atomized incorporation is compelling. For her, again, the greatest danger for the Chinese government lies not in the people who essentially play on the state's terms. Instead, it is everyone else – young rank-and-file migrants floating between sweatshops and nursing a growing disenchantment with Chinese politics writ large – who might one day overturn the cart. How these marginalized individuals will organize en masse given the challenges they have experienced in coming together over more immediate concerns so far is an open question. But there are inklings of what this might look like in, say, the growing activism of Chinese gig economy workers, such as app-based delivery drivers. With the country's economy entering a bumpier period, this book should be read by academics, activists and policymakers concerned with China's evolving workplaces.
