ABSTRACT
The global economic crisis that surfaced in 2008 portends a turbulent period of social instability and labor unrest, according to top Chinese officials, academics and international observers-“the biggest political test the ruling party has found since the 1989 incident in Tiananmen,” some warned in response to reports about plant closures and rising unemployment in exportoriented towns along the Pearl River Delta. This is not the first time in the past three decades that official anxiety about “the specter of labor unrest” has been palpable, even though the expected working class challenge never quite materialized. From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, incidents of worker unrest by a massively unemployed population became so routine that government and party leaders identified labor problems as one of the biggest threats to social stability, along with tax revolts and land disputes by peasants. With hindsight, it seems that the really significant question is not whether or not workers pursue collective mobilization to make claims and express discontents. They have always done so. The question we should ask is whether there are qualitative changes in the scale, strategy, goals and outcomes of labor activism. This chapter probes continuity and change in these aspects of labor politics by reviewing the major pathways of labor activism during a period of expanding marketization and global integration. We can see that while the literature on 1989 has focused on the student movement centered on Tiananmen, it was an extraordinary moment of cross-class mobilization resulting in wide-ranging if ultimately abortive economic and political demands on the central government. In the wake of state crackdown, subsequent worker protests were restricted within a cellular module targeting local officials and employers, with no effective expansion of scope or scale, and no radicalization of worker demands, as a result of a combination of government repression and the fragmentation of interests among workers. If the latest economic downturn is going to trigger a rethinking of development strategy on the part of the Chinese government, it will not be because of the threat of worker unrest but because the global economy may challenge, or even exhaust, the possibilities for China’s labor-squeezing growth model.
