Vol. 74/No. 34      September 6, 2010

This shift in ownership of the means of production was accompanied by geographical shifts and dynamic social changes that have affected the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese working people. One of the most significant consequence has been the accelerated development in China of the proletariat, the gravediggers of the capitalist system that the Chinese Communist Party government has sought to ape.

As state enterprises were shut down, downsized, or sold off and “restructured,” tens of millions were laid off in the traditional centers of industry. After losing their means of livelihood, many were denied wages owed to them and cut off from pensions, medical insurance, and other benefits tied to their employment in state firms, as well as turned down for government unemployment compensation.

In response, workers protested what they considered the denial of basic social rights by local governments and state enterprises. In some cases those who were employed in state industry wrested some concessions, but the restructuring continued unabated. One such fight, for example, culminated in protests involving 80,000 workers in two northeastern cities in March 2002. After dispensing some remuneration, two of the movement’s leaders were framed up, with backing of the government-controlled labor union, and jailed for seditious activity.

While many of the gains of the 1949 socialist revolution have been eroded, standards of living and social expectations of working people in China are still markedly higher than in India—a country of similar size, colonial history, and earlier level of development, but which had no such revolution. At the same time, the increased confidence of the youngest group of proletarians in China is a product of recent developments, not the past. A layer has begun to gain some experience in class conflicts generated by the development of capitalist methods and social relations.

While state-owned industry declined in a number of major centers, whole cities sprang up elsewhere based on the influx of foreign capital and expanding exports. Shenzhen, a port city along China’s southeast coast is a prime example. One of the first Special Economic Zones set up in 1980 to attract foreign investment, it grew from a fishing village of 30,000 to a major industrial and commercial center of some 14 million people. At the same time much of the countryside remained undeveloped.

This growth has been concentrated along the coast. While economically the most developed, these areas are also the most susceptible to fluctuations in the world market for China’s exports. For example, Guangdong Province, a major center of this development and the country’s second most populous province, relies on exports for 80 percent of its gross domestic product.  
 
Stark disparities
Although the last decades have brought a certain amount of economic development throughout China, the rate has been very uneven and regional disparities have widened. Differences in the “human development index,” limited as this gauge is, provides some picture of this. Combining factors such as per capita income, literacy, and life expectancy, index figures for 2003 put the city of Shanghai on China’s east coast on the same level as Portugal, and Guizhou Province in the southern interior on a par with Namibia.

The ballooning cities along the coast drew migrant labor from the countryside in search of higher incomes and modern benefits. Average income in the urban areas is about three times that of the rural today.

Under China’s longstanding hukou system—an internal passport of sorts set up to bureaucratically regulate population movement—migrant workers retained legal residency in the rural area of their origin. They keep certain rights as registered peasants, such as collective land rights and in some cases the ability to have more than one child without penalty. But they are denied benefits of legal residency in the city where they work, such as high school public education, welfare, public medical care, subsidized housing, and other social benefits. In some cities those who have bought property and can shell out enough money have been able to legally obtain new hukou, bestowing them with advantages of urban citizenship.

In similar fashion to how the most developed capitalist nations rely on exploitation of immigrant labor, Beijing has leveraged the second-class status of these internal immigrants to keep wages low and otherwise maximize the extraction of surplus value from the working class as a whole.

China’s urban population as a percentage of the total has grown from around 18 percent to 43 percent in the last three decades. Last year the number of migrant workers in the cities reached 211 million people, representing about 37 percent of the total urban population. In a number of cities like Shenzhen, they comprise a substantial majority.

The percent of the labor force involved in agriculture shifted from more than 60 percent throughout the 1980s to less than 40 percent today. Agriculture’s portion of the gross domestic product shrank from more than 25 percent to around 10 percent.

As a portion of world manufacture shifted to China, the proletariat there rapidly grew in size and weight. The nonagricultural workforce grew from 200 million in 1986 to 492 million in 2009. The number of industrial workers in China is the largest in the world, exceeding 220 million people—nearly triple the combined total of all countries in North, Central, and South America.

Migrant workers comprise a significant portion of this growing proletariat and are concentrated in the most dynamic industrial urban centers. Migrant worker protests against discrimination tend to break out periodically and carry a certain social weight as part of working-class resistance. In one well-known case, some 50,000 demonstrators burned police cars in Chongqing to protest the beating of a migrant worker in 2003.

Alongside this, the recent period has also seen a modest increase in resistance by oppressed nationalities, such as the Tibetans and Uighurs in the west.  
 
Dismantling social wage
During the first decade of this economic expansion, material conditions for many working people improved. But as the market gears turned, basic conditions of life and work for a large portion of rural and urban toilers began to decline.

During the last three decades much of the social wage was dismantled. Medical care is unavailable to hundreds of millions as many workers without state or private employer insurance must pay completely out of pocket and up front. In 2006 government spending on health care was less than 1 percent of gross domestic product, one of the lowest in the world. Government funds account for about 18 percent of total medical costs in the country. Last year Beijing announced it would increase health-care spending in coming years in response to growing discontent.

The quality of public education has also been eroded and an increasingly higher share of the costs have been imposed on households. Some 30 million were added to the country’s illiterate population between 2000 and 2005, according to one top education official.

Life has become more precarious as a result of the commodification of labor and dismantling of the social wage. One result has been increased savings by working people. China has one of the highest household savings rates in the world.

At the same time, over the last three decades the working class has become more independent and footloose, its outlook has broadened, and its expectations have risen.

Millions of migrant workers were laid off and returned to the countryside as exports declined under the impact world economic conditions in 2008. Since then, the government has buoyed the economy with similar methods used to “stimulate” in major capitalist countries, paving the way for deeper crises down the road.

As exports began to rebound at the end of 2009 and hiring picked up, many migrants chose not to return to the factories. With increased development in many rural areas, the risks and difficulties involved with migrating for work appeared to outweigh potential benefits for many. In combination with other factors, including the consequences of China’s longstanding one-child policy, this has created a labor shortage in key geographic centers of industry.

The recent labor shortage has coincided with government efforts to expand its domestic market, creating an opening for workers to wrest better conditions and substantial wage raises. In turn, this development has also begun to bring more industry closer in the interior—a new trend made possible by improvements in transportation infrastructure.

And so, in this manner, the Chinese proletariat develops and steps onto the world stage as a weighty factor.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home