By Gokula Dutt
Since the late 1970s, China experienced a dramatic transition from a planned economy to a market economy. It observed social and economic transformations where China’s socialist regime opened Chinese society to the global liberal order and private sectors in a quest to modernize. With the economic reforms and relaxation of the restricting household registration system, hundreds of rural workers migrated to urban cities in search for better jobs and stable income. In the mid-1980s, the government imposed a Labour Contract system to replace the old system of lifetime employment(Gu, 2003). Today China is an efficient provider of cheap goods and services to the global market. I aim to analyze the transformation and production of rural workers to industrialized productive laborers using Michael Foucault's conceptualization of biopolitics, power and security. In studying the complex coexistence and interaction of global capitalism with Chinese state socialism, I reveal the power relations between the state, society, and market with migrant workers.
Source: CEPR
Under Mao Zedong, the Communist Party of China (CPC) was a planned, primarily agrarian, economy where the state controlled allocation of resources, land and capital amongst the population. There were major restrictions on labor mobility as the Household registration system segregated rural and urban lifestyles by restraining people to lifetime jobs in their towns/villages of birth (Meng,2000). Mao Zedong had also launched the Great Leap forward and the cultural revolution by purging remnants of capitalism and tradition in Chinese society. With the political and economic reforms in late 1970s, the emergence of township and village enterprises, relaxation of the rigid regulations on labor deployment, and establishment of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) resulted in more interaction between rural-urban labor markets. Power acts on the population in an anticipatory manner to optimize a state of life, to maximize life utility and this power aims to let live in contrast to the ancient right to take life. According to Michel Foucault, biopower is that domain of life over which the sovereign entity has the power to life, or control the sustenance of life (Mbembe, 2003). He identifies two forms of Biopower ; One which was centered on the body as a machine, including its disciplining, optimization of its capabilities, extortion of its forces, maximizing the utility of docile bodies, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls. These were ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body, also known as Disciplinary (Foucault, 2003, pp.139). The second, was focused on the species body, embedded with mechanics of life and of biological processes such as births, mortality, level of death, life expectancy etc known as Governmentality. While the docile bodies of rural and urban workers remained loyal subjects of the CPC in the socialist system, can the notion of biopower be sufficient to elaborate on the modern Chinese state post economic reform with respect to the migrant workers? Achille Mbembe draws on the concept of biopower and explores its notions of sovereignty and the state of exception(Mbembe, 2003, pp12). Expanding on Necropolitics, we can understand the inherent violent and unjust practices on bodies of migrant workers in China with the rise of Sino-capitalism.
Source: DW news
The SEZs attracted huge numbers of rural migrants who were in search of better salaries and livelihoods as the wage gaps between rural and urban workers is huge. The flow of rural migrants were considered a threat to the order and stability of the urban city, especially by the urban businessmen and elites who deemed the workers uneducated and uncivilized. Regulation of their bodies and activities was a priority, involving projects of culture and power that worked on their minds, bodies, behaviors, beliefs, aptitudes etc. Turning a young and rural body into an industrialized and productive laborer, a seemingly universal project of discipling labor, became the primary task of transnational production when it met migrant laborers in urban cities(Ngai, 2005, pp 77). The state designed a panoptic surveillance system of these bodies, from tracking their travel across towns and city borders, to daily activities and job applications. According to Foucault, the body becomes a useful force only if it's both a productive body and a subjected body (Ngai, 2005, pp 77). The socialist system was blamed for producing uncompetitive workers, in contrast to the Hong Kong workers, who as capitalist subjects were disciplined, productive, profit minded and possessing rational economic senses(Ngai, 2005, pp78). The extraction of labor power specifically from the female body can be examined through the experiences of the Dagongmei- the term for female migrant workers. Women workers weren’t just identified by urban or rural origins, but also by their region and ethnic backgrounds. A divided work-force was created, as locality and kin-ethnic relationships were mapped out and reinforced to shape a hierarchy of jobs and to facilitate labor control (Ngai, 1999). It is a common assumption that Chinese women tend to be passive and economically dependent. The active role of women in a great diversity of productive work, being active agents in living their own lives and earning wages, granted them new power and freedom to balance their lives between work and family, especially for rural women migrants (Ngai, 1999, pp 68).
The female body was of utmost importance to global capital in China because it is the means by which the production machine can extract labor power (Ngai, 2005).
Essentially the migrant workers were vulnerable both inside and outside factories. Outside the factories, Pun Ngai notes that laborers struggled with attaining basic necessities such as shelter and often shared small cramped places with other factory workers. Some parts of urban cities were dominated or crowded with migrant workers in cramped spaces. They felt insecure on the streets of the city due to the controls enforced by the public security officials who surveilled. the day to day activities of the workers(Florence,2007). The Political Anthropological Research for International Sociology (PARIS) discusses the securitizing agents who cultivate fear, unease and insecurity. As the state considers migrant workers as potential threats to the overall security of the city and the state, policing or patrolling out on the streets as well as within the factories, creates a sense of insecurity amongst the workers. Within the corporations, administrative decentralization meant slacking in creating appropriate and safe working conditions, resulting in fierce exploitation that workers endured. The CCP communicated its expectations from workers through newspapers and magazines. Party propaganda still existed, like in Shenzhen Special Zone daily, the articles published model workers, norms and values that needed to be upheld. This is a part of culturing the rural workers to the demands of the State. Furthermore, 1994 onwards the government dissolved several enterprises due to their inefficiency in a process of centralization that caused mass unemployment. Consequently, the ‘floating population’, or the number of unemployed migrants without urban residency status increased and outgrew the permanent workers (Nolan, 1993). Migrant workers' exhaustive and repetitive daily routines at the factories, poor living conditions, exploitative workplaces, long working hours, low wages/compensation and discrimination from the society strips them of their respect and life. Necropolitics discusses this concept where in Mbembe argues that forms of social existence where populations are subjected to “conditions of life, conferring upon them the status of living dead”(Mbembe, 2003, pp.39-40). While Foucault’s conceptualization of biopower emphasizes on the power of the state to sustain lives of the subjects of the modern state. To this Giorgio Agamben adds that because the inhabitants are divested of political status, they are reduced to leading a bare life(Mbembe, 2003, pp. 12). Mbembe critiques the idea of biopower as stated by Foucault adding to which, he argues that human beings truly become a subject of the modern state when they confront death(Mbembe, 2003, pp14). The rural migrant workers, including floating populations, struggle with finding equal ground and climbing the social and economic ladder. In the production of working bodies to serve the reimagination of China as a world factory, there is an integration of the transnational with the local. At the end, distancing the global with the on ground reality that rural migrant workers face.
Source: The Epoch Times
References:
Foucault, Michel. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage 95 (1990). (Selection: Part Five: Right of Death and Power over Life)
Mbembe, Achille. 'Necropolitics.' Public culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11-40.
Ngai, Pun. “Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls): The Politics of Identity and Difference in Reform China.” The China Journal, no. 42, 1999, pp. 1–18. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/2667638. Accessed 12 Apr. 2024.
Meng, Xin. “Labour market reform in China”. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Ngai, Pun. Made in China: Women factory workers in a global workplace. Duke University Press, 2005.
Florence, Eric. "Migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and narratives about work as sites of struggle." Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 121-150.
Nolan, Peter. “Economic Reform, Poverty and Migration in China.” Economic and Political Weekly 28, no. 26 (1993): 1369–77. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4399901.
Gu, Edward. "Labour market insecurities in China." SES papers 33 (2003).
A very intriguing analysis of rural migrant workers in China. I was wondering if the notion of bio-politics and power alone adequately capture the complexities of the modern Chinese state post-economic reform, especially in relation to the experiences of migrant workers ?
Excellent analysis, Gokula! An analysis such as this reminds us of the follies of the economic argument often presented for authoritarian rule.