In Hegemonic Transformation, Elaine Sio-ieng Hui addresses what is perhaps the central political question associated with China's marketization: how, despite reneging on the Mao-era social contract and presiding over economic development marked by yawning inequalities, has the Chinese state avoided destabilizing social movements from below? In focusing specifically on migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta, Hui deploys a Gramscian theoretical framework in arguing that the state has been rather successful in securing consent to CCP rule and capitalist labour relations via the implementation of legal reforms. While she is careful to point out that the political situation is dynamic and socially uneven, the consequence of China's hegemonic transformation has been to pre-empt the emergence of anti-capitalist or anti-state movements.
Integrating concepts from Gramsci as well as Nicos Poulantzas, and based on qualitative fieldwork in a number of cities in Guangdong, the crux of Hui's argument is that the Chinese state has enacted a “passive revolution.” In contrast to bourgeois revolutions in Western Europe in which there was a robust social basis for capitalist rule, the Chinese state has, in a top-down manner, guided the transition to capitalism and developed means for securing consent to private property, labour exploitation, and incorporation of the emergent capitalist class into the state. Hui is primarily concerned with the role that law has played in constructing double hegemony, i.e. consent to both capitalist relations of production and CCP rule, and meticulously walks the reader through the series of legal reforms over the past three decades. These reforms include not only a formal inclusion of capitalists into the CCP and recognition of private property rights, but also material concessions to workers, albeit within the general framework of private relations of production and generalized wage dependence. This hegemonic transformation has constituted an effort to secure consent from the working class and to diminish the need for the kinds of coercion the state used in ending the 1989 democracy movement.
The consequences, however, have been uneven, with varying levels of success among different groups of workers. The real empirical meat of Hui's book is in chapters four, five and six, in which she details, respectively, workers’ active consent, passive consent and refusal to consent. These responses to the state's efforts at constructing legal hegemony more or less map onto levels of radicalization. Those workers who give active consent affirm the justness of the legal system and trust the state as an impartial enforcer. Indifferent workers, ambivalent workers and critical workers are all categorized as giving passive consent, which is to say that they accept the reality of engaging with law, even if they are not true believers. Finally, the radical workers reject the legitimacy of the legal system, and see the state as siding disproportionally with capital. The typology is refined still further as Hui empirically details examples of each kind of worker, differentiated based on their experiences with labour activism: those who have no experience, those who have experienced individual conflicts, and those who have experienced collective actions. The result is a rich mosaic of the various ways in which Chinese migrant workers respond to and negotiate emergent hegemony.
There is much to be applauded in this work, first and foremost the sustained and systematic engagement with Gramscian theory. While much attention has been given to how material concessions, administrative competency, state structure and policing techniques have pre-empted broad-based social mobilization, labour scholars have paid scant attention to the ideological component of domination. Hui builds on Ching Kwan Lee's earlier scholarship on how workers interact with the law, but with greater attention to the ideological components of China's legal reforms. Furthermore, Hui approaches with great nuance the debate over the question of labour movement formation in China. Neither overtly pessimistic nor Pollyannaish, she carefully elucidates the wide variety of possibilities. Although the hegemonic transformation has, up till now, prevented the emergence of a politicized worker movement, the section on radical workers indicates the fragility of hegemonic rule.
I was, however, left wondering as to why some workers are radicalized while others meekly consent. One might hypothesize that greater experiences with labour activism would lead to radicalization – but Hui presents evidence of affirmative workers who have in fact participated in strikes. On the other hand, we are introduced to a worker with no experience of labour disputes, but who fully rejects consenting to legal hegemony. So while the organization of the book suggests that experience with labour disputes is of importance, it is not clear how it matters. Other potential factors such as age, education and interactions with NGOs are mentioned. But we never get a clearly articulated effort to explain the wide variation in worker response – something that would presumably be helpful in assessing the durability of emergent legal hegemony.
Nonetheless, Hui has produced an important contribution to the literature on labour politics, civil society, and legal reform in China, and her deep and systematic theoretical engagement brings fresh perspective to these issues. Hui's work should be required reading for anyone interested in the academically and practically crucial question of why Chinese workers submit to their own exploitation.
