Workers in Struggle¶
Core Argument¶
This chapter examines the intensifying class struggle in China, where a new working class has contested both capital and the state from its inception. Workers increasingly organise outside the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions, demanding higher wages, timely payment, and social security. In Guangdong alone, at least one strike daily involves over one thousand workers, though these actions have not yet coalesced into a broader movement.
The 2010 Honda transmission plant strike in Foshan exemplified this militancy. Triggered by a worker pressing the emergency stop button, 1,900 workers struck for two weeks. Local government, the ACFTU, and employers combined to break the action: the union brought in thugs, and management met workers individually. Though the strike paralysed Honda's China operations and forced pay rises of thirty to fifty per cent, sacked leaders were not reinstated.
Violent protests erupted at state-owned enterprises facing privatisation. In 2009, Linzhou Steel workers kidnapped a state official to oppose privatisation to Fengbao, owned by a former Party secretary. At Tonghua Iron and Steel, a strike and riots killed the new general manager, forcing cancellation of privatisation. In 2014, 48,000 Yue Yuen workers struck over unpaid social insurance and wages; police beatings filmed and spread online sparked international solidarity pickets, compelling government-ordered wage increases and social security payments. The Guangzhou Higher Education Mega Center sanitation workers' strike, eighty per cent female, demonstrated women's leadership and student-worker collaboration, with workers refusing attempts to split locals from migrants and winning rehiring for all.
China faces an overproduction crisis. The 2008 stimulus built massive overcapacity; utilisation stands at only seventy to seventy-five per cent. Annual growth has fallen to its lowest in a generation. A world crisis would hit China hard, as exports cannot be sustained. Militant actions have forced wage rises, boosting the internal market, but this comes late. The bureaucracy now feels the constraints of world economic crisis.
Coal-mining and steel workers face precarious employment due to state rationalisation of "wasteful production", their job security threatened by a privatisation programme prompting strikes and street protests. The state intends to defeat this opposition, if necessary through police action. China's slowdown hits raw material exporters: it buys forty per cent of Chile's copper, and copper prices fell eleven per cent after the IMF lowered China's growth projections. The 2014-2015 oil price fall was also linked to China's slowdown. The IMF saw China's slowdown as the biggest challenge to Latin America's prosperity, making it a major contributing factor to world capitalist crisis.
Speculative bubbles indicate capitalist crisis. Marxists predicted China's 2008 quantitative easing would generate them. By end of 2013, land equivalent to Beijing's imperial palace was worth more on paper than all of California. A building boom created massive oversupply; unsold property hit an all-time record in 2014. The government, in a move reminiscent of Thatcher's popular capitalism, allowed small investors to borrow from state banks for margin trading, previously banned as gambling. After falling for four years, Chinese stocks rose 150 per cent during 2014-2015, driven by frenzied speculation by individual investors—grandparents, migrant workers, students—borrowing heavily. Shares became detached from company values, leading to a collapse that left millions facing substantial losses. The government closed the stock market to cool it, to no avail. The crash undermined the Beijing government's authority and demonstrated the dangers of capitalism versus the security of the public sector. Chinese productive capacity exceeds the limits of the capitalist world market. Official urban unemployment was 4.6 per cent at end of 2014, but this excludes millions of migrant workers supposed to return to their home villages when jobless.