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ID:
117722
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| Publication |
2013.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Why is there no large-scale labor movement out of intense labor conflicts in current China? Based on a comparative case study of two groups of workers-state workers vs. temporary workers-this paper is an attempt to explore the concrete processes and mechanisms of workers' struggles-how they navigated among street protests, office petitions and court prosecutions through their interaction with state agencies. The argument is that different workers obtained different symbolic rewards instead of material concessions, based on their different social positions and historical trajectories. Unlike the classical 'fragmentation' argument which attributes the working class's inaction to its internal divisions, this argument focuses on the interaction between the differentiated workers and the local state agents, during which the workers lost their radical momentum and became subjected to the state's peaceful taming based on the workers' differences. This is a process called 'dispersive containment', i.e. dissipating the labor conflicts through divergent symbolic treatment of working-class protest without granting material rewards to them.
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| 2 |
ID:
153406
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| Summary/Abstract |
The rise of ‘rights talk’ in Chinese contentious politics attracts numerous attentions and debates. Does it indicate the rise of citizens’ ‘rights consciousness’ and the retreat of the state, or the continuation of the mass’s ‘rules consciousness’ and the state’s control? Based on a discursive analysis to a wide variety of texts during a ten-year struggle for pension rights, I argue that the discourses used by the protesting workers depended on concrete contexts and power relations, and the institutional design from the state promoted the workers’ rational justification to their interest requests. The strategic employment of ‘rights talk’ by the workers, on one side, displayed the state’s symbolic domination, which successfully prevented the radicalization of protests; on the other side, it suggested that only through the realization of ‘rule of law’ could the state’s management of social contentions turn from short term containment to long range institutional absorbing.
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