China: Labour Reform and the Challenge Facing the Working Class

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Abstract
Labour reform in China has resulted in the creation of a fast-maturing labour market at enormous costs to urban workers. As labour-management relations have replaced labour-state, workers' responses have been expressed in previously unknown forms of industrial dispute. The regime has taken every precaution to forestall social explosion, whilst pushing further ahead with the reform. Whilst daily struggles have proliferated, they have also been ‘sectorized’, in addition to remaining spontaneous, unorganized and economic in character. Intermittent small-scale union activities have all been suppressed; while ideologically, most labour-oriented activists accept the logic of the reform, with many seeing a private capitalist market economy as ‘just’.