It Could Happen Here - Workers Protest in Modern China, Part 1

Episode Date: December 8, 2022

Mia talks with Cornell professor Eli Friedman about the last 30 years of workers protest in China leading up to the current protests.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to Make It Happen Here, a podcast about it happening somewhere else. You know, OK, the theme of this show has gone slightly off the rails since it was first conceived. However, comma, I do think this is something that is very important to talk about, which is getting some more sort of background information and an understanding of what the history of sort of labor and general protest is in China as we look at the sort of current protest wave that is going on there. And with me to talk about this is Eli Friedman, who teaches at Cornell University and is the author of the book, The Urbanization of People, The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. So, Eli, welcome to the show. It's good to be here. Yeah, so I'm excited to talk with you about this. it's good to be here yeah so i'm excited to talk with you about this um partially because i think okay so in insofar as you've gotten sort of mainstream coverage of it there's been a lot

of focus um in in terms of the sort of current wave of protests, there's been a lot of focus on like the A4 paper stuff and people sort of, you know, hanging signs up. And as the coverage has gone on, there's been a lot less about the Foxconn stuff. There's been a lot less about the broader trajectory of what protests has looked like in China in the last 20 years, as everyone sort of like immediately reaches back for their stock Tiananmen comparisons, which I don't think are very good. Or wrong. Yeah, yeah. So I guess we could, in some sense, start with Tiananmen, because I think this has nothing really to do with it. But I guess we could start with why are the Tiananmen comparisons bad? And why is everyone still reaching for them 30 years later? Yeah.

I mean, there's maybe a couple reasons why. So the unsympathetic take on it is that you have a lot of people outside of China, particularly in the United States, who hope for things to go poorly in China as part of our imperial competition. And so 1989 was a bad year for China, whichever side of that movement you were on. A bad year for China, whichever side of that movement you were on. And so they believe that it heralds the downfall of the Communist Party and therefore America can march into the rest of the century without any real competitors. So that is a real thing, right? I think the somewhat more sympathetic take on this is that the Chinese government and particularly under Xi Jinping sets a ridiculously high standard for what qualifies as social stability. Right. So minor deviations from absolute harmony as conceived of by the state, which means, you know, no street protests. It means relatively little dissent online. And to the extent that you do see forms of collective action, they remain pretty small scale and fractured. And so when you see deviations from that, that suggests that, well, they've kind of lost control because they do want to maintain this, you know, absolute image of placidity. And if we look at the whole sequence of events that led up to where we are now, I think we have to trace it back. Well, there's a bunch of things, but one of them is the Satong Bridge protest, which is just a single person hanging banners off a bridge in Beijing. And a single

person hanging banners or holding signs in any other big city around the world does not create that kind of a stir, right? I mean, you know, you're in Washington, DC, or you're in Berlin, or Tokyo, or whatever, you know, nobody cares. Right. So that, but that just shows a little bit of a crack in the system. And so then people let their imaginations kind of run wild. Um, and we're clearly not in a 1989 situation right now. It's not inconceivable that it would develop in that way in the future. Um, at the same time, I don't think it's particularly likely for, for all sorts of reasons. And we can get into that if you want. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think – I don't know.

One of the things that I've been looking at with these protests versus 1989, partially it's just the sort of class composition is just very, very different. Like, there are student protests, but it's – like, the students now, like there are student protests but it's it's they're like these people these the students now like are not the 1989 students like this is just if this is a very different sort of like it's a very different student body it's a very different like the class composition of those people are different the the experience that they've had in the chinese system is very different and then also i think somewhat more interestingly is like it's it's not the same working class that showed up in 1989 because that class doesn't really exist anymore. And yeah, and I guess that that's another part of this that I think, I don't know.

There is definitely extent to which these protests are weird in that it is like it's a bunch of people in different places who are protesting about the same thing which hasn't which you know hasn't really happened for a long time but also like i don't know there seems to be this reluctance to talk about the fact that there have been like not insignificant protests in the last 30 years like especially in the 90s there are these huge protests against sort of uh like deindustrialization like the destruction of sort of the chinese welfare system and i guess one of the things i'm interested i don't know in asking you more about is like there's there's a kind of trajectory of what urban sort of protest has looked like and like as as as the sort of like as the chinese working classes like increasingly become a sort of migrant working class and so yeah i guess we could jump off from

there to also also i guess because it's the other thing is like chinese cities are very different now than they were 30 years ago which is the thing that is both incredibly obvious and also like people don't really seem to understand very well yeah let's see there's a lot in that question maybe we should circle back around uh to the question of the class composition of the students and the workers today in comparison to 1989 but first let's just talk a little bit about the sequence of labor protests over the past. Yeah, sorry. There was a lot of me going through stuff there. Yeah, I mean, all really important insights, each deserving a little bit of their own attention. So, you know, after 1989, there's this big divergence in the opportunities that are afforded to the two constituent groups that were in Tiananmen Square

and other places around China. So you have the students and you have the workers, right? And there's other people, but that's the sort of the social backbone of that movement. The students basically get this deal with the state, which is they demand compliance and political acquiescence in exchange for which they will enjoy a couple of generations, a couple of decades of unbelievably fast growth. And if you are graduating with a degree from one of these elite universities in Beijing or even not super elite universities in other cities, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to experience upward social mobility, that you'll be able to buy an apartment, that, you know, you will feel more materially secure than was the case for your parents. Right. I think that that deal is coming undone right now, which explains the students that we see out in the street. But in any event, that that certainly was the case for, you know, for about 30 years after or at least, you years after Tiananmen, the workers who were in the square in 1989 had an almost diametrically opposed social trajectory because immediately thereafter,

they were subjected to a brutal regime of privatization, of dispossession, of theft of public property. They were thrown out of these jobs that they had believed they were going to have forever. It was called the Iron Rice Bowl. One of the main architects of that was Jiang Zemin, who's just died. He along with Zhu Rongji. I saw a great quote where someone was like,

this is basically China's George W. Bush where everyone's remembering him fondly because things are so bad now. But oh my God, this guy was awful. Like dying right now is maybe the best thing he ever did like it's yeah oh god and it it really is a testament to how bad things are now but he is i think um the most neoliberal anyway of china's leaders more so than than deng xiaoping in some

important ways uh and so you know that old working class who was told that they were the masters of the nation, under Jiang Zemin in the late 90s, they were just subjected to these real subsistence crises. And in response to that, actually the largest mobilizations to have happened since 1989 occurred in the late 90s and really the early 2000s. In some cases, you had these protest movements with many tens of thousands of people out in the street resisting privatization, resisting the theft of their pensions, and basically this private profiteering and theft of public property. And I think that even the protests that we've seen in the last week or two are still not on the scale of those worker uprisings that we saw um 20 years ago yeah which i guess you know like part of the reason why we are where we are now is that those people lost and i think that's been one of the other sort of themes of like chinese protests is like i mean i i think like like some of the local ones like win but the large scale ones have kind of just been like just like really just been getting

owned for the last like 20 really like 30 years like it's it's been kind of a bleak march and i mean i actually i want to circle back around a bit talk a bit more about the deindustrialization because i think this is a thing that like really is badly understood especially on the left um the other thing i wanted to talk about in in that is okay so you have this massive wave of privatization you have this industrialization and can we talk a little bit also about how like for for the people for the people who held on in state-owned industries what the sort of transformations that happened inside there was like because i think that's also like not understood well yeah so you have two processes one is um the uh they talk about as smashing the iron rice bowl right and and that involves

two processes one is just unemployment and there's been a lot of um efforts to try to estimate how many people lost their jobs. It is very hard. A political scientist named Dorothy Salinger wrote an article called Why It's Impossible to Know How Many Unemployed People There Are, or something to that effect. But certainly tens of millions of people lost their jobs and were just kind of thrown out into the market. And it's worth remembering that they were thrown out into the market largely in regions where the market was not at all dynamic, right? So in the northeastern part of the country, which did not have the booming economy of Guangdong province or, you know, Jiangsu province or places like that.

So there were those people. People also probably know that there are still a lot of state-owned enterprises and something like a quarter to, you know, maybe a third of China's economy is still accounted for by state-owned enterprises. to maybe a third of China's economy is still accounted for by state-owned enterprises. But those enterprises have increasingly come to function like capitalist enterprises, at least with respect to labor relations. They still receive a lot of subsidies from the state. They still enjoy monopolies, right? So they don't face competition from other firms, at least domestically. And like monopoly-based firms in capitalist countries,

they offer somewhat better pay and somewhat better benefits to their core workforce, right? So, I mean, if you think of GM or Ford in the middle of the 20th century in the United States, or you can think about Facebook or Google today, you know, these companies that are also basically enjoy monopoly position, their core workers enjoy, you know, somewhat better pay, right? But the other thing that's happened is they have increasingly come to be surrounded by a very large contingent of temporary and flexible workers, right? And so in many of these state-owned firms, more than 50% of the employees are what they call in China dispatch workers, right? They don't enjoy any of those same benefits. They don't enjoy the same job stabilities. And they, in response to market

fluctuations and profitability, those are always the first ones to be let go, right? So, you know, the fact that they are state-owned, I think, matters to some extent when but it doesn't mean that the old labor regime from you know the 1970s has kind of continued unchanged like they are being these firms are being subjected to market pressures and that's reflected in how they treat labor yeah and i mean that's something that like if if if you if you listen to xi jinping like actually talk about what's going on he he just constantly every every like two speeches that he gives there is a line about how like the the the economy is directed by the market and like oh yeah no he's very clear about it yeah in some ways he's he's like very reaganite like he's just like we don't we don't

want these lazy people just enjoy welfare benefits like they believe in the power of the market to discipline people there's no question about it. Yeah, and I guess the other sort of consequence of this is China's enormous migrant worker population. That's another thing I wanted to talk about, because that was another round of protest that happens in the 2000s that's about this

giant fight over household registration that I guess was the last kind of successful really mass protest thing in China. Can we talk about that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, there haven't been the same scale of collective protests by migrant workers, but just as a little bit of background, you have the old state-owned working class is

kind of declining or subjected to the market pressures that we're talking about. And so unrest in that sector becomes a little bit less significant over the course of the 2000s. But that's happening at precisely the same time that the working class in the private firms is increasingly constituted by these rural to urban migrant workers. When they come to the cities, they are treated essentially as second class citizens and don't have guaranteed access to all kinds of social services, healthcare, pensions, education, etc. And so there is a lot of mobilization. I mean, you know, the HUCO household system, household registration system still exists and it still has an important role in structuring people's classed experiences. But it's a little bit less coercive than it used to be.

So in 2003, there was this famous case. A migrant named Sun Juegang was taken into custody, as frequently happened. At the time, police would just ask people for their papers on the street if they looked suspicious. happened you know at the time like police would just ask people for their papers on the street if they looked suspicious and they had a a thing in place at the time called uh custody and repatriation where they would take you into custody and they would they would repatriate you back to your village right so very similar you know to like ice raids yeah but against chinese people yeah yeah like they had you know this is i think one of the things about like in insofar as you can make comparisons between, like, the Chinese system and the Soviet system is like that. That's one of the few things that was, I think, kind of similar is that you do have these very intense.

Well, OK, simultaneously, you have these very intense, like, internal restrictions on migration, but also very similar to the US system. It's like the economy is based on everyone breaking these things. That's right. Simultaneously, it's illegal the the economy is based on everyone breaking these things that's right simultaneously it's illegal yeah yeah right exactly like there's no illegal immigration to the united states but the economy would obviously collapse without undocumented workers and it's exactly the same in china like you know they're like we we know that these people are here we know that our economy particularly in the coastal cities, is completely dependent on them. But we're still going to have cops ask you for your papers on the street. And if they don't like you, they can round you up and send you home.

In this particular case, back in 2003, the guy they got, it's like he was the quote unquote wrong guy because he was actually a university student. And they detained him and killed him. And so when this came out and they're like, Oh, they killed a college student. Like if, had they killed a normal migrant worker, that'd be one thing. Uh, but he's a college student. So, uh, so that created a big fuss. And as a result, you know, they actually got rid of, of detention and repatriation, which is good. Um, there, And so migrant workers today, when they're on the streets in the big cities, are not likely to just have cops randomly ask them to see their papers. But they're still subjected to all kinds of social discrimination

and definitely institutional discrimination. Yeah. So, okay, speaking of institutional discrimination, we're going to take an ad break, and then we'll come back and talk more about this. So enjoy some ads from companies who are probably benefiting from all of this. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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a lot of riots in 2011, but one of the big things about the COVID restrictions that I don't think people understand has been how bad it's been affecting migrant workers and the extent to which – because one of the things about the household registration system is, as best I can tell, this is the way a lot of resources in terms of like here's how you're getting food having being distributed and if you know if you're in a place that's not where your house of registration is it's like well okay the state's not giving you your food how are you going to deal with this stuff and yeah they're not telling you that that that that's been a big thing that like i don't know i but a lot of this has been me being upset with the media coverage of these protests because like people will just say COVID zero and then not explain what the actual consequences of this are. So, yeah, I was wondering if we could talk about sort of specifically how how the lockdowns, especially as lockdowns have gone on, have been affecting migrant workers and then how that's.

And I guess. Yeah. yeah okay so we'll start start there before i jump into a question with 700 parts i i mean i do think it's really important to understand why people are opposed to zero covet and sometimes for people outside of china they think back to the spring of 2020 when you know in the united states we had like libertarians with guns being like in the lockdown like we want our freedom like it is not that for all sorts of reasons um and and the way to get at why it's different is to understand some of the the classed differences that zero covid has has entailed and i should just say it's been pretty terrible for everybody including rich people and like you know we can we can feel some sympathy

for them too um but but it's had some particularly nefarious consequences for for migrant workers. This became really clear in the Shanghai lockdown. It's also worth noting that there are 300 million migrant workers in China. So this is not a routing error or anything. This is like half the population of Europe. Like that's how many people we're talking about here. It's absurd. of Europe. Like that's how many people we're talking about here. It's absurd.

It's almost an America-sized population of people who are not living where their household registration is. And so the basic thing is, as you were just sort of saying, that when there is a lockdown and you're a migrant worker, you kind of don't exist from the states or you might exist, but like you might also be overlooked from the perspective of the state. So one very concrete way that this screwed people over was in these hard lockdowns, you're not allowed out of your house and you're dependent on the neighborhood committee, which is, which is connected to the state. It's kind of the lowest level of the state. You were dependent on them for the delivery of everything that you need to survive, right? Critically food and medicine.

Yeah. I want to back up and say something about this. This is something very, very different than the American lockdowns, which is like, well, okay, it depends on a, like, it depends on a, on, on like a province by province basis. Like I know my family was in Inner Mongolia. They like in Inner Mongolia, like you, you just, you like the lockdown isn't like you don't go to work the lockdown is you cannot leave your house like you can you can say i think i think their lockdown their first one was one person in their house once a week can leave to go get groceries but

it's like it's not like yeah like it's it's you like you physically cannot leave you will be if you attempt to leave you will be prevented from doing so. And this means that you don't really have an independent way of like getting food or like going shopping or. That's right. Yeah. Like getting I don't know, like toilet paper. Like, yeah, no toilet resonates with with Americans in our in our toilet paper shortage of 2020. But I mean, in some cases, like people would actually just be literally chained into their apartments right so like this is not whatever people in in in the u.s or even even in parts of western europe you know where the lockdowns were a little bit more intensely policed like it is not that it is

a qualitatively different thing and so yeah you're completely dependent on the state so therefore it's really really important that the state know, you're completely dependent on the state. So therefore, it's really, really important that the state know that you are there and that the state feels itself to be tasked with your survival. And if you're a migrant worker, so one of the very concrete ways that this affected migrant workers is that a lot of them live in informal housing, even in the biggest cities, even in places like Shanghai and Beijing, because those are the only places that they can live. As far as the state's concerned, like that informal housing might not exist. There are very, very frequently more people living in those dwellings than are sort of legally accounted for. So, you know, like there's 10 people living

in an apartment that's supposed to be for, you know, a family of three. And so they deliver three people's worth of food but there's actually 10 people living there that's a subsistence crisis right um you know the medical stuff is just yeah it's like astonishing and very harrowing i mean you know just people just dying in their apartment because like they can't get insulin or yeah i i know i know people whose family died because they had cancer and they couldn't get treatment for it because yeah yeah like yeah it's a disaster yeah so so that's that's the situation that's one of the problems with them for the migrant workers and then in the very intense lockdowns at least in shanghai back in in the spring of this year um you know they also can't leave so like one option would be like okay

will you go back to the place where you do have your household registration you know, they also can't leave. So like one option would be like, okay, well you go back to the place where you do have your household registration, you know, back in the village and you have a piece of land and like you can survive. They couldn't leave, right? There's no transportation. Um, and so they were trapped in a situation where they couldn't work. The government wasn't, you know, delivering them food and they couldn't go to some place, some other place where, where they could get food. And so, uh, you know, there's been a lot of attention to these recent protests, which are extremely important and qualitatively different. But even back in April 2020, we saw food riots. Like in Shanghai, a group of migrant workers just like requisitioned like a truck full of cabbage, you know, and just started like

tossing cabbages to people on the street because people were like literally starving. So I mean, yeah, so it's a real problem for the migrant workers. And on that note, this has been It Could Happen Here. Join us tomorrow for part two of this episode, where we'll be talking more about lockdown, similar problems with migrant workers, and this all going. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever

you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com sources thanks for listening. by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast,

and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech

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