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| 1 |
ID:
175475
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| Summary/Abstract |
Although much has been written about China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), so far little attention has been paid to how Chinese investment is affecting workers in BRI-targeted countries. To explore this dimension of global China, this paper examines the labor rights situation at Chinese-owned construction sites in Sihanoukville, a city on the Cambodian coast that in recent years has been described as embodying the worst excesses of Chinese foreign investment. Based on extensive interviews with Chinese and Cambodian workers, this paper argues that while Chinese-owned construction sites in Cambodia are grounded in a labor regime as exploitative as those in mainland China, workers’ agency in the former case is further undermined by their employers’ adoption of a policy of labor force dualism that draws boundaries between Chinese and Cambodian workers.
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| 2 |
ID:
175480
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In the last two decades, some Javanese rice farmers have learned to be plant breeders with the help of Farmer Field Schools for Participatory Plant Breeding. However, they have experienced problems with seed and intellectual property laws primarily focused on the strengthening of the seed industry and compliance with development plans. A number of farmers have been prosecuted for experimenting with seeds, prompting a partly successful challenge to relevant provisions in Indonesia’s Constitutional Court. Subsequent legislative changes have restored some farmers’ rights, but also brought new reporting requirements and limitations. Using James Scott’s concept of “transformative state simplifications,” this article shows that legal challenges to regulations are just one strategy of self-help. The political reform process and possibility for constitutional challenges have opened up space for debates about how farmers can benefit from laws that seek to regulate their cultivars. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other developments are likely to intensify discussions about what precisely various laws mean by their encouragement of “small farmer varieties,” “food sovereignty,” and a “sustainable agricultural cultivation system.”
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| 3 |
ID:
175474
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While most scholars agree that China’s central authorities are no longer the sole actors controlling socio-political life in the country, few have paid adequate attention to the proactive role of China’s grassroots actors, especially during critical public crises. During the 2020 Covid-19 outbreak, Chinese society was fragmented in its response. Rural authorities imposed capricious and uneven restrictions, and civil disobedience among urban residents assumed myriad guises. The degree to which state directives on virus control were implemented within rural China depended on two factors: individual villages’ social structures, and how effectively political pressures were channeled from the top down. Furthermore, quarantined residents in urban areas should not be understood as passive victims, but rather as active subjects, whose diverse manifestations of civil disobedience during the crisis posed a challenge to the effectiveness of official restriction policies.
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| 4 |
ID:
175473
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| Summary/Abstract |
This paper analyzes the social crisis of the Covid-19 epidemic and the government responses in China from a performance perspective. It argues that the epidemic outbreak in late December 2019 initiated a highly contested social drama, in which loyalty was tested, political order questioned, and ideological crisis made visible. The numerous netizens and residents drew on a wide-ranging repertoire of discourses, symbols, and narratives to heighten public spectacles of suffering and sympathy, which placed extensive blame on the lies, negligence, and censorship of the government. Nonetheless, within the short span of three months, the conflictive, cacophonous social drama was overshadowed and subsumed by a hegemonic political performance of national victory, unity, and patriotism, framed and channeled by state propaganda, censorship, ritual, and practical policies. Social protests in cyberspace continued in even more dramatic forms. But these it only constituted sporadic performances of resistance, rather than a monumental social drama that challenged the fundamental political order.
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| 5 |
ID:
175478
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Drawing on the narratives of women and men who have domestic or international migration experiences, this study explores the gendered impacts of migration on small-scale farming in rural Ha Tinh province in Vietnam. The paper investigates men’s and women’s migration experiences, their influence on agricultural production, and impact on their livelihoods after migration. The findings show that households use various strategies to sustain agricultural production in the absence of some members. Women’s increased economic independence through labor migration has not necessarily lead to their increased management roles in agriculture, but they are increasingly challenging stereotypical images of rural women. While migration can be a catalyst for men to transform their livelihoods, it can also widen gaps in social and economic statuses among men.
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| 6 |
ID:
175479
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article examines the technologies of power and subjectification in China’s social credit system through a theoretically informed analysis of policy and legal documents as well as the narratives of social credit practitioners, including local officials and representatives of business partners. The ongoing project is a heterogeneous ensemble of discourses, regulations, policies, and any number of programs aiming to govern social and economic activities through problematizing, assessing, and utilizing the “trustworthiness” of individuals, enterprises, organizations, and government agencies. Drawing on governmentality studies, the article explicates the operation of governmental and disciplinary-pastoral modalities of power in the project, which are interrelated in their logics and overlap in the tactics employed. Whereas the strategy of governmental/biopolitical power is centered on achieving effective economic governance and improving regulatory compliance through technological fixes, disciplinary-pastoral power aspires to shape individual behavior and the collective mores of a locality according to a mixture of market-oriented and socialist-traditional values. Social credit is envisioned to produce and channel homo economicus and homo moralis. However, the relationships between liberal and socialist subjectivities and between rationalization and moralization are by no means coherent. The assemblage of social credit government is characterized by contradictions and contestations.
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| 7 |
ID:
175476
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Post-socialist China is characterized by the loss of social and economic safety nets for workers, particularly the most marginalized. Scholars and others have assumed that informal laborers lack the associational power needed to mitigate the precarity of their lives. Drawing on ethnographic data collected between 2004 and 2016 in Chongqing, this article examines the ways in which precariously employed rural migrant men create their own safety nets by drawing on their past experiences of agricultural collectivization in the socialist era to form cooperative associations. It further explores how these men leverage cultural resources from the socialist period to retain male privileges. China’s decades of de-ideologized reforms and waves of informalization of work have not completely deprived migrant workers of the moral and symbolic resources which they use to make claims. Migrant informal laborers’ capacity for collective resistance in post-socialist times is deeply entwined with their gendered experience of work in rural, pre-reform China.
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| 8 |
ID:
175477
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