ABSTRACT
The rise of China as a “world factory” signifies a new century of surplus labor drawn from rural China to fuel the global economy. Since the early 1990s, we have witnessed a surge in the relocation of transnational corporations (TNCs) to China from all over the world, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, and Western Europe. More than 100 million peasant-workers have been working for TNCs, either directly owned or joint-ventured by big brand-name American and European companies, or in their Chinese production contractors and subcontractors. With China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO), capital from manufacturing industries, high-tech sectors, and financial business further poured into China, creating a hegemonic discourse in the West that Chinese workers have increasingly stolen jobs from Western labor markets. There are, however, increasing concerns emerging amongst nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as well as academic circles about globalization and labor conditions in post-socialist China. In spite of the increase in transnational codes of conduct, practices at the company level, and legal mobilization of labor at the societal level, precarious labor regimes in China are still prevalent (Chan, 2001; Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005a ; SACOM, 2005). Globalization and “race to bottom” production strategies adopted by TNCs work against the improvement of labor relations in China through new legal or institutional practices and employment relations, and the changed nature of ownership ( Pun, 2005b ). Instead, new global production regimes and capital–labor relations produce employment systems which are still highly precarious, generating huge hidden costs that Chinese women workers carry while creating a huge social force ready to resist and challenge the existing social order. How would migrant women workers understand themselves collectively in terms of class and gender identity? Could they be organized as a new worker-subject newly emerged in post-socialist China? At the crossroads of China’s incorporation into global capitalism, what are the new forms of labor organizing and women empowerment?
