From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labour Regimes in Chinese Factories

Like opening Pandora's box, Chinese reforms have unleashed institutional and social forces which have led to a variety of production regimes co-existing under the permissive banner of “market socialism.” The industrial scene of Guangdong, which boasts of itself as one of the first, the most and the best reformed provincial economies, bears witness to the profound and wide-ranging transformation in production politics. Compared to the era of state socialism, a restructuring of industrial employment has evidently occurred. The 740 state-owned industrial enterprises in Guangzhou, for instance, now account for only 15 per cent of a total of 4,903 industrial establishments, and the 307,000 employees in the state industrial sector account for one-third of the city's 940,000-strong industrial workforce. Twenty-one per cent and 46 per cent of all industrial employees are found respectively in 2,005 collective enterprises and 2,158 private, foreign and joint ventures. As recently as 1985, the state industrial sector was still dominant, employing 65 per cent of the city's industrial workforce, and producing 68 per cent of industrial output. The composition of the work force has also significantly changed: among the 2.03 million urban (including non-industrial) employees in Guangzhou, 700,000 are “registered” migrant workers, of whom 280,000 work in state and collective enterprises. For the province as a whole, registered migrant workers numbered 3.6 million in 1996, while a generally-accepted estimate for the entire migrant labour population reached a staggering 11 million. In the pre-reform days, this massive pool of rural labour was sequestered in the countryside by the hukou system and the number of those who found employment in state factories as temporary contract workers was estimated to be only about 6 per cent of all employees in urban state enterprises by 1978. Complexity is further induced by a new round of deepening reform measures in the 1990s, targeting enterprise ownership, scientific management and labour laws.