Status Updates From Proletarian China: A Centur...

"During the summer of 2018, Jasic workers, prodded by underground Maoist activists, mobilized to demand, among other concessions, the right to estabish their own workplace union--a request that was met with harsh, coordinated repression by the employer and the local government, which [triggered] expressions of solidarity from groups of Marxist students all over the country."

"Some overseas chambers of commerce were strongly opposed to legislation on collective negotiation...As a consequence, both the Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises and the Shenzhen Collective Consultation Ordinance were suspended."

Foreign capital blocks Chinese workers' path to democratic organizing---and the lack of that is used as a pretext for foreign governments' moralizing about democracy.

"In March [2003], a young graphic designer named Sun Zhigang was stopped by police on a street in Guangzhou...Since he did not have his [ID] and residence permit with him, the police officers suspected him of being an illegal immigrant...The following day, he was transferred to a Custody and Repatriation Centre, where [he] died, allegedly of heart failure...Public uproar [led] to the abolition of C&R centres."

"In smothering the rights-based work of labour NGOs, the Xi period also brought to a halt any innovation in approaches to resolving workers' grievances."

Jude Howell's essay on "Labour NGOs in China" dodges the question of *whose geopolitical interests* 'rights-based foreign NGOs' might represent. This doesn't mean they're all CIA fronts, but what kind of NGOs are emboldened by WTO entry? Nuance is underrated.

"Whereas the economic reforms of the 1990s greatly benefited intellectuals and students, they almost completely destroyed the urban working class. As the majority of state-owned enterprises were restructured, downsized, and privatized, workers...faced much worse working conditions...The power and radicalism of urban workers...alarmed the party leaders and made them determined to break down the urban working class."

"Since the fields were still owned collectively by all of the production team's households, they were able to recalibrate use rights over time. Starting in the 1980s and into the 2000s...every half decade or so they met as a group to readjust the team's fields...to recreate an equal per capita possession. The national government opposed these land readjustments...But the farmers ignored these official directives."

"The Tan-Zam railway's lasting legacy as a monument to both the friendship between China and Tanzania and the international aspirations of the CCP has been recoded in the discourses...China's post-Mao marketization has abandoned the Maoist imperative of world socialism via interest-free development, in pursuit of profit-driven resource acquisition for China's benefit."

"Socialism was not a 'secure' society that would automatically lead to communism. Accordingly, the only chance to actually accomplish the transition to communism was to maintain an open space for political experimentation and for the direct participation of workers in the management of production and also in the educational field."

"In [the Dazhai system], all of a production team's members sat in judgment of one another at periodic team meetings...to award work-points based not on what a team member had physically accomplished, but rather on his or her attitude and effort. Initially, this worked well. But...members [loudly defended] their own work and took umbrage if awarded lower points."

On incentives see Alfie Kohn's "Punished by Rewards".

"Work in China's coalmines continued to be extremely perilous into the early twenty-first century, though from around 2003, China started to dramatically improve its record, by 2019 reducing the recorded death rate to 2 percent of what it had been in the early 2000s."

The difference? Neither market reform nor change of Party, but leveraging of state capacity to shift from productivism to substantive safety measures.

"Despite initially rough conditions of material scarcity, most Chinese workers and their families interviewed...fondly recalled their lives in Mongolia. Worker diplomacy was beginning to bear fruit. However, the workers on both sides were not immune to the enveloping political context."
- *The Short-Lived Eternity of Friendship: Chinese Workers in Socialist Mongolia (1955-1964)

Another tragic lost opportunity.

On the Democratic Reform Campaign of 1951:

"The campaign form thus squeezed staff and management...between the mobilized workers below and municipal and central Party authorities above. By institutionalizing and legitimizing worker participation, the Party centre established a powerful means of disciplining lower-level cadres who might be less than enthusiastic in following the centre's guidance."

As historian Robert Marks concludes,
"Imperialism created the conditions under which collective action along the vertical lines of lineage and Flag would be replaced by collective action along the horizontal lines of social class."

I remember being taught in high school history about injustices done to Chinese emigrant workers in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. That history should be known. But what I don't remember hearing *anything* about is their WW1 role---specifically the Chinese Labour Corps. 140,000 men did thankless work, filling sandbags, unloading ships...freeing up thousands of British troops for the fighting.