The Evolution of Workers’ Rights in China – Mary Gallagher

03/14/19 • 79 min

Economic reform since the late 1970s, as well as the dynamics of globalization unleashed in full by China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, have significantly complicated the relationship between the Chinese Party-state and Chinese workers. Some of this complexity was made apparent in the 1990s, after millions of workers were laid off from state owned enterprises, and then it was highlighted again, in a different form, in connection with worker suicides at Foxconn plants and strikes at Honda factories in Guangdong Province in 2010. Most recently, the gap between official rhetoric and state practice, as it relates to Chinese workers, has been most dramatically indicated by the crackdown on Marxist student groups and organizers at elite Chinese universities.

In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses the evolution of workers’ rights in China, since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party after the May 4th student movement, and through the present day, with University of Michigan political scientist Mary Gallagher, one of the most influential scholars of Chinese labor and labor mobilization. The episode was recorded on February 14, 2019.

Mary Gallagher is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, where she is also the Director of the Center for Chinese Studies. Her core research explores the relationships between capitalism, law, and democracy, and her empirical research on China is used to explore those larger theoretical questions. Her books include Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State (Cambridge University Press 2017), Chinese Justice: Civil Dispute Resolution in Contemporary China (co-editor, with Margaret Woo; Cambridge University Press 2011), and Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China (Princeton University Press 2005). In China, Professor Gallagher was a foreign student at Nanjing University in 1989; she also taught at the Foreign Affairs College in Beijing from 1996-97; and she was a Fulbright Research Scholar at East China University of Politics and Law in Shanghai from 2003-04. You can follow her on Twitter @MaryGao.

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo

Previous Episode

Rights Lawyering in China – Teng Biao

Over the past 16 years, there has emerged in China a community of self-identified "rights defense" (weiquan) lawyers, akin to "cause lawyers" in the United States, who select cases and frame legal advocacy with a goal of achieving wider societal impact. Once celebrated in official discourse, these lawyers have increasingly come under scrutiny and pressure by the Chinese Party-state, that has intensified despite official promotion of "rule of law" concepts since the CCP Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum in 2014. In this episode, scholar and activist Teng Biao, one of China’s earliest and most famous weiquan lawyers, discusses with Neysun Mahboubi the history and current predicament of "rights defense" lawyering in China, and charts possible future directions for this work. The episode was recorded on April 11, 2018.

Dr. Teng Biao is an academic lawyer and a human rights activist. He was formerly a Lecturer at the China University of Political Science and Law, in Beijing. Since first coming to wide public attention in connection with the Sun Zhigang incident in 2003, he has provided counsel in numerous human rights cases, including those of activists Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia, religious freedom claims, and death penalty appeals. He has also co-founded two groups that have combined research with advocacy in human rights cases, the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng) and China Against the Death Penalty. Most recently, he has visited at Harvard Law School, Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and NYU’s US-Asia Law Institute. He maintains an active blog in Chinese and you can also follow him on Twitter @tengbiao.

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Special thanks to Nick Marziani, Justin Melnick, and Kaiser Kuo

Next Episode

Property Rights and Economic Development in China – Susan Whiting

At least since China’s 1994 fiscal and tax reforms, land-backed development has served as the greatest source of revenue for Chinese local governments—potentially almost 1 trillion US dollars in total this year—as well as a powerful engine both for rapid industrialization and for social discontent. This circumstance reflects how the state allocation of land-use rights, in China, remains a vestige of the planned economy, and how fiscal pressures on local governments, combined with differential pricing of land for purposes of takings compensation versus resale to developers, incentivize what often looks to be predatory behavior. In this episode, Neysun Mahboubi discusses China’s property rights regime, especially pertaining to land in rural areas, and how it informs the influential theory that economic growth requires stable property rights, with University of Washington political scientist Susan Whiting, a prominent scholar of China’s political economy of development. The episode was recorded on March 16, 2018.

Susan Whiting is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, in Seattle, where she also holds appointments in the Jackson School of International Studies and the School of Law. Her first book, Power and Wealth in Rural China: The Political Economy of Institutional Change, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2001. She has published articles and chapters on authoritarianism, “rule of law,” property rights, fiscal reform, and rural development in volumes and journals such as Comparative Political Studies and The China Quarterly. She has contributed to studies of governance, fiscal reform, and non-governmental organizations under the auspices of the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the Ford Foundation, respectively. Her current research focuses upon property rights in land, the role of law in authoritarian regimes, as well as the politics of fiscal reform.

Music credit: "Salt" by Poppy Ackroyd, follow her at http://poppyackroyd.com

Special thanks to Nick Marziani and Kaiser Kuo