Organizer: Kellee S. Tsai, University of California, Davis
Chair: Elizabeth J. Perry, Harvard University
Discussant: Martin Whyte, George Washington University
Since the late 1990s, the acceleration of economic reform in China’s state sector has generated tens of millions of laid-off workers (xiagang zhigong) who now constitute a massive new urban underclass. In order to maintain stability in urban society, reintegrating this extraordinarily large group of laid-off has become a pressing concern of the party-state. The current conditions and survival strategies of these laid off workers vary greatly from place to place and from person to person. The proposed panel thus aims to understand how laid-off workers in different contexts are coping (or not coping) with this drastic social and economic transformation. Based on recent field research in Beijing, Wuhan, Fujian, Zhejiang, and Henan, the four panel presenters explore the diverse strategies of laid-off workers from different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, political science, and anthropology). The panel also assesses the political and social implications of this emerging urban unemployment for the future development of Chinese state and society.
Survival Strategies Among Laid-Off Workers: Notes from Wuhan
Dorothy J. Solinger, University of California, Irvine
Most scholars investigating the massive unemployment that has existed in China since late 1997 have focused either on its growing numbers and insufficient funds to help its victims or else on strikes, demonstrations, and protests. My paper will instead ask how former state workers are in fact surviving, how local economies are managing somehow to absorb them, how they are rebuilding their living, and what the shape of the new urban economy is as the state factories cease to sustain the numbers that they once did. The paper will be based on interviews in Wuhan and on journal and newspaper sources from the last few years.
Forming New Alliances between Laid-Off Workers and Migrant Entrepreneurs in Beijing
Li Zhang, University of California, Davis
Into the late 1990s, millions of Chinese workers are being forced to xiagang (step down from one’s working post, meaning being laid off) as the reform of state-owned enterprises deepens. Having lost their jobs suddenly, how do these workers and their families find new livelihoods without support from the state? This paper sets out to explore how several closed-down factories and their workers in a Beijing suburb deal with these life-shattering social and economic changes by forming a new kind of commercial alliance with relatively well-to-do Wenzhou migrant entrepreneurs in the same area. In particular, I focus on the commodification of space controlled by state-owned factories, and show how this process is crucial for the business and community development of Wenzhou migrants who lost their self-constructed housing compounds during a devastating government campaign several years ago. The proposed paper will also discuss the political ramifications and the ambiguous attitude of the city government towards the newly emerged interdependence and forms of alliances between these two groups (laid-off workers and migrant entrepreneurs).
A Divided Class: The Politics of Private Enterprise and Self-Employment in China
Kellee S. Tsai, Emory University
While the ranks of state-employed workers are declining dramatically, private enterprise represents one of the fastest growing employment categories in China. Scholars of contemporary China have begun to speculate about the political ramifications of this expanding sector of the population; specifically, should private entrepreneurs be seen as constituting a "middle class" that may evolve into a pro-democratic force in China? Or are business owners simply too preoccupied with economic pursuits to make political demands on the regime? Based on surveys of self-employed private entrepreneurs (getihu) in Fujian, Zhejiang, and Henan, the proposed paper argues that private entrepreneurs should not be treated as a single "class" within China. Even among the sub-section of small-scale private entrepreneurs (getihu), business owners have widely varying social and political identities. Some are former peasants that have engaged in petty commerce since the early years of reform. Others are former state sector employees that have turned to self-employment as an economic survival strategy much more recently. And some microentrepreneurs retain their formal status as state employees, but rely on private enterprise as their primary source of income. As such, the paper concludes that the employment background of private entrepreneurs is a better indicator of the ways in which they interact with the staff of the state in pursuing their political economic interests.
Hidden Injuries? The Impact of Xiagang on Workers’ Social Lives
Stephen Chiu, Chinese University of Hong Kong; Eva Hung, Australian National University
Most existing studies of xiagang focus, justifiably, on the economic aspects of the problem and examine its impact on workers’ material livelihood. In this paper we take another look at the problem but focus instead on the impact of xiagang on workers’ social life. Based on intensive interviews of some eighty xiagang workers in the city of Beijing, we gauge the effects of xiagang on workers’ self-perception, identities and social relations through their own voices and aritculations. Frustration, demoralization, and anger often characterize their reactions to their being laid off after serving the state for so many years. Xiagang is also followed by a loss in self-esteem because the latter is often a result of their proud status of being a worker creating wealth on behalf of the nation and socialism. For women workers in particular, xiagang often leads to the involuntary retreat into domesticity and shifts in the household power structure and division of labor. By documenting these "hidden injuries," we hope to contribute to the understanding of xiagang as a multifaceted process impinging on the everyday lives of workers in China.