Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace (eds), Proletarian China. A Century of Chinese Labour.
New York, Verso Books, 2022, 879 p.

[librement accessible]
We might start by mentioning the impressive size of this book, which reflects both the gigantism of Chinese society and the 120-year period covered by the work. However, the title is probably the best place to begin, as is the way the editors explain it, introducing this collective work which puts together contributions from many authors. The reference to the proletariat evokes a renewal, if not a continuity, of the proletarian question in China (just as some have spoken of the social question in Belle Epoque France), beyond the political and social upheavals. Behind the particularities of different regions, periods, business sectors, jobs or genders that have characterised workers’ situations, this book goes further than just analysing their condition. It addresses the emancipatory possibilities associated with the term proletariat since Marx and Engels: beyond the social group and even beyond class consciousness, the proletariat is “the name for a subject awaiting its birth”, one that constantly renews its capacity for action to assert itself as a political subject. Consequently, the book examines working conditions, class struggles, strikes, protests, disputes and repression. It also explores the relationships between workers and the student youth or the peasantry, union action, and of course the intervention of the Communist Party. This doesn’t mean the book goes back to any communist doxa, or that it establishes a counter-narrative. As the editors put it (using the sociologist Alessandro Russo’s words), their aim is to “keep this fiction at bay” by “bring[ing] into conversation different perspectives from China’s past and present” about the configuration and role of the working class.
The book contains 77 contributions concerning particular moments and often specific events. Although the work is structured chronologically, certain years have several texts devoted to them, while others have none. Most of the authors are from English-speaking countries (mainly Americans, with a few Australians and British contributors), including some with Chinese names. The remaining third are from Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China and Europe. Most of the contributors are academics in history or other disciplines related to social science. The variety of subjects and perspectives gives a mosaic-like structure to this huge fresco, which is further enriched by added documents, political, literary or accounts.
The contributions span three periods. The first precedes the 1949 revolution, essentially covering the years during which the Republic of China was ruled by the Guomindang. With nascent industrialisation, mainly in a few cities, came recurring strikes. However, these were often caught up in the competition between the forces fighting over the country: warlords, imperialism, the Guomindang and (from 1921) the Communist Party. Working-class struggles often bore the consequences of shifting alliances between nationalists and communists, particularly during the bloody repression of 1923 and 1927. All along, the peasant question emerged progressively, as the peasant soviet of 1927 shows. The editors emphasize the huge importance of 1949, which they describe as a “watershed”: in the long century covered by the book, the Communist Party coming into power changed the conditions for independent working-class political expression. It also put to the test the promise of an imminent liberation of the working class, expressed by Mao Zedong shortly before his victory.
The second period, from 1949 to the end of the 1970s, was characterised by Maoist hegemony. It was contested, making this a turbulent time, particularly during three key moments: the establishment of the Party’s power, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. These episodes are evoked through the workers’ experience rather than via a sequence of events. Apart from these great upheavals, Chinese society during this period saw a plethora of initiatives, some of which lasted longer than others. Through these, the Party involved worker, peasant and student communities in issues as varied as challenging the wage system, asserting the Party’s authority in communities then challenging bureaucrats, the ill-fated attempt to prevent domestic cotton spinning and weaving, the creation of a workers’ university in a large factory, sending young students to work in the countryside, etc. The working class was subjected to the Party’s political shifts and swings, but workers were also actors of their own history: they sometimes engaged in initiatives, tried for a time to maintain union independence and launched several strikes. However, thanks to its monopoly of political representation, the Party shaped the prospects. The key debates and the important power relations happened within the Party, and it was the Party that gave form to the main conflicts that shook society.
Several texts studying events in the early 1980s (the restoration of the unions and the shift from collective agriculture to family farming) signal that a new period was starting, initiated by Deng Xiaoping. The Communist Party, once again becoming monolithic and still monopolising power, forcibly drove forward the increase in the country’s economic power and its modernisation. This third part of the book is perhaps the most fascinating. In many ways, it shows the formidable expansion of the class of new proletarians: internal migrants moving from the countryside to the cities, long deprived of rights in their own country. In 2003, the death of a young migrant in a detention and repatriation centre unleashed such a scandal that these centres were closed. These migrants are forced to work in terrible conditions that drive some of them to suicide. They are also excluded from the official social protection provided by lifelong employment (known as the “iron rice bowl”). The contributions describe, for example, a protest about a deadly fire in a factory, and strikes against exploitation in cutting-edge factories like Honda and Foxconn or against the closure of state factories deemed obsolete, where the workers resist the destruction of their existing advantages. We read about individual or collective battles on issues such as the health system corruption, forced child labour and rights around old age pensions. Outside of the official unions, these conflicts highlight the development of solidarity or support organisations that are independent from the authorities, and generally repressed by them. Thus, one case is presented as follows: “This closed the circle on what began with the attempts at labour organising by a handful of students in the early 1920s: one century later, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) consummated this ultimate betrayal of its original ideals” (p. 692).
Although each contribution can be read separately, there are some threads that run throughout the book. One of them is the relationships between students and workers that are a recurring feature in the social history of China: these of course include political relationships, but also the sharing and diffusion of knowledge. In several periods, we can also identify direct social interference when students became workers. These go well beyond young people from urban areas being sent to work in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution.
Another recurring presence is that of female workers and their struggles from the 1920s onwards. Proletarians within the working class, these women spoke out against both wage injustice and their continued marginalisation in the early years of the new regime. More recently, the poverty suffered by migrants has particularly affected women. A third thread that links the different contributions concerns the independent organisation of workers, with the progressive rise of trade unionism before 1949, its highs and lows during the Maoist years according to the Communist Party’s control over these organisations, and (particularly from the 1980s) the different intervention methods of independent workers’ organisations, referred to as non-governmental organisations in several texts. Finally, various texts examine cases concerning workers in Hong Kong or Taiwan, both of which have at times been part of China’s social history and at others very much outside of it. This reminds us that an important part of China’s story is bound up in the extension of this empire. Overall, combining the characteristics of a vast fresco and those of a well-thought-out collection of short accounts, this book takes readers on a comprehensive tour of the social history of contemporary China.
Nicolas HATZFELD
OpenEdition vous propose de citer ce billet de la manière suivante :
Notes de lecture de la revue Le Mouvement social (26 juillet 2024). Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace (eds), Proletarian China. A Century of Chinese Labour.. Le carnet du Mouvement social. Consulté le 20 mai 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/123mx