Since the capitalist market reforms of Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 in 1978, China's proud reputation of being a “workers' state” has become tarnished, if not obsolete.Footnote 1 “Defenceless workers” is seemingly a more appropriate description for many in market-reformed China. The labour issues of laid-off (xiagang 下岗) state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers in “rustbelt” regionsFootnote 2 and migrant workers (nongmingong 农民工) in coastal “sunbelt” regionsFootnote 3 are well-documented in the literature.Footnote 4 SOE workers' privileges have been stripped away, and many peasants have become poor migrant workers living away from their hometowns. However, little mention is made of the fact that local village workers (bendi gongren 本地工人) are also defenceless workers. Although the foreign factories that hire mostly migrant workers have received a great deal of attention in the media, foreign factories that employ local workers have received little exposure and have been overlooked in the literature. This is partly owing to the fact that local workers' attempts to protect their labour rights from factory owners have not grabbed the attention of labour watchers in the same way as the issues confronting SOE laid-off workers and migrant workers.Footnote 5 Despite this lack of attention, it is critical to understand the successful strategies used by local village workers and their underlying logic in order to answer the pressing questions concerning China's enigmatic labour politics. How can workers protect their jobs, labour rights and other benefits during the fiercely competitive and exploitative marketization process without reliable trade unions and other rigorous governmental protections? What are the “weapons of the weak” used by local village workers against foreign factories?Footnote 6
This article uses a simple theoretical framework to put forward arguments which are supported by a case study of one village [Village X] and its foreign factories in Chengyang 城阳, a suburban district of Qingdao 青岛 city in Shandong province. It concludes with a brief comparison of local village workers and migrant workers. The analysis is based on a large volume of data collected through intensive fieldwork carried out in Qingdao and in other coastal regions in 2007, 2008 and 2011–2013.
Local Village Workers' Political and Economic Resources
Despite being caught up in similar marketization processes when dealing with foreign-funded factories, local village workers find themselves in a different position to that of other groups of defenceless workers. In this article, local village workers are defined as workers who are villagers and who work for a factory built on their village's land. They were previously peasants, and some of them still farm. However, commonly, these local workers neither work for SOEs nor leave the village to become migrant workers. Their villages are usually situated in close proximity to big cities in coastal provinces (and more recently, in inner provinces) or suburban areas. This is where the majority of foreign-funded factories are located in order to take advantage of the infrastructure, transportation to the city, and sea ports for exporting products.
The labour rights of these local workers are better protected than those of migrant workers. This is possibly because local workers have access to two unique political resources unavailable to migrant workers. The first is the village's collective land ownership and land-use rights. Second, they are able to make use of political organizations based on informal institutions (affective networks), formal political institutions (village government), and village physical forces, such as vigilante groups (zhi'andui 治安队) and gangs. In support of this argument, this article applies a theoretical framework of patron-clientelism to the strategies used by local workers against foreign-funded, and Korean in particular, factories which are often identified as evil exploiters in coastal China.Footnote 7 It is important to note that the relations between village leaders and villagers (i.e. village state–society relations) in this framework can be approached from a different viewpoint to that used by the conventional “contentious politics” frameworks.Footnote 8 Villages with collective interest protection based on working patron–client relations, such as the villages in the case studies, tend to have more cooperative and peaceful state–society relations than supposed by theories of corporatism.Footnote 9
Villagers make the best use of their rights to village collective-owned land by trading with foreign companies for factory jobs, labour rights, and other auxiliary business opportunities. Despite the rapid marketization of the Chinese economy, land remains state-owned in urban areas and collective-owned in rural areas.Footnote 10 Under such a system, suburban villages are categorized as rural areas despite their proximity to cities, providing villagers with the huge benefit of being able to manage the land. Some villages develop the land themselves for industrial and commercial purposes, while others use their land-use rights to obtain jobs and protect labour rights in the foreign-owned factories established on village land. Some villages accomplish both. A village's strategy depends on the changing nature of the market, and its proximity to expanding cities.Footnote 11 Some villages build factories and rent them out to foreign companies, making villagers collective landlords.Footnote 12 Others, as the following case study of Village X demonstrates, simply sell and/or rent their land-use rights to foreign factories. Whether suburban villages are keen to attract foreign firms or not, once a firm sets up a factory in a village, it comes under pressure to hire local villagers and to treat them relatively well.Footnote 13
A village's political organizations also play a critical role in protecting local workers’ labour rights and other profit-making opportunities. Although some believe that foreign firms are largely exempt from the host village's political magnetic fields, this is not the case. Foreign factories belong to a village's physical territory, along with the local workers and other villagers who also want to seize profit-making opportunities. Whether they want to or not, foreign factories must constantly interact with villagers and village political organizations. Thus, foreign factories are highly influenced by the dynamics of village politics and so treat the local workers decently in order to avoid coming under further political pressure from the village. A village's political organizational resources spring largely from three political elements: village government, affective networks, and village physical force.
The first element comprises the formal village government institutions, village committee and village Party branch. A village government and its leaders negotiate or mediate with foreign firms, both before and after they set up in the village. Among all the negotiable issues, factory jobs for villagers and the protection of local workers’ labour rights take priority. When a villager or a group of village workers encounters unfair treatment in the factories, village leaders tend to advocate for local workers' rights. Patron–client relations in village politics have contributed to a greater degree of political protection for local workers. Following the dissolution of the production team, agricultural decollectivization and the implementation of market reform,Footnote 14 patron–client relations in the village have been partly restored with a new set of favour exchanges.Footnote 15 There is no widely accepted definition of the patron–client relationship, or clientelism,Footnote 16 and the term is flexibly applied to diverse political contexts.Footnote 17 However, it can be defined as a quid pro quo relationship between an individual of higher status (patron) who uses his or her resources to provide protection and/or benefits to a person of lower status (client), who reciprocates by offering support and assistance to the patron.Footnote 18 Village leaders exchange their ability to protect villagers’ economic interests and to distribute welfare benefits for the villagers' support in political decisions such as village committee elections. Additionally, villagers will often overlook village leaders' corruption and private wealth accumulation. The patron–client relationship has a more solid foundation in suburban villages housing foreign factories, which provide many economic resources and political opportunities, than it does in rural villages.
Along with formal political institutions, various village affective networks, including family, lineage, school and neighbourhood ties, provide the local workers with political resources for dealing with foreign employers. The authority of these groups is based upon norms, expectations and moral obligations. These networks give village communities political power, internal compromise and unity. Since the dissolution of production teams in the 1980s, revived village communities and affective networks have played significant roles as informal institutions that can make some village officials, at least partly, accountable to villagers.Footnote 19 The patron–client relationship is also enmeshed in this political mechanism. In many cases, affective networks connect village leaders and local workers to higher level government officials and policemen through family members and friends. Beyond formal requests to intervene as upper-level government officials, villagers can also ask their “connections” in township and county governments to exert political pressure on foreign owners to yield to local workers’ demands. Through engendered mutual obligations or peer pressure, affective networks also help disgruntled local workers to resist foreign factory owners collectively. During labour disputes between foreign factories and local workers, moreover, relatives and friends support the workers in their struggle.
The last resource is a village's physical force, which is provided by village vigilante groups and gangs. These largely informal organizations are behind a village's ability to protect its local workers against foreign factories through physical or violent force, an important power source in many Chinese villages. The role of physical force in village politics has not been extensively studied in the literature because of its secret nature and the difficulty of obtaining information. Nevertheless, violence is important in village politics and can be a useful resource for local workers, as shown by the remark of one foreign factory manager in a Qingdao suburb: “Once you leave a big city, you immediately enter a jungle. The fist is stronger than law here.”Footnote 20 Not surprisingly, village vigilante groups are closely connected to village governments and affective networks, as the case studies below vividly demonstrate.
Local Village Workers, Foreign Factories and Village Politics in Qingdao
This empirical section supports the main argument that village workers are able to protect their labour rights through the use of the two political resources of village collective land and local political organizations. It presents a case study of a village (Village X) in Chengyang, a surburban district of Qingdao city, Shandong province, and examines its relations with the foreign factories set up within its vicinity. The case study is complemented with additional analysis of three other nearby villages.Footnote 21
Village X's economic development and foreign factories
Village X is a relatively large and old traditional Chao lineage-dominated village with a population of about 3,000. Many of its villagers were poor peasants before the market reform, when it was not part of Qingdao city. Qingdao is a port city with a vast territory and population on the eastern coast of China. Owing to its geographical closeness to the developed countries of South Korea and Japan, Qingdao attracts foreign investment. South Koreans have been especially aggressive in investing in and building factories, and have been producing goods for export here since 1992, the year when diplomatic relations were normalized between China and South Korea.Footnote 22 Village X is approximately 60 kilometres from the city centre and 15 kilometres from the district centre.
After witnessing the development in and around Qingdao city in the early 2000s, Village X actively wooed foreign investors. Many foreign investors and firms were looking for cheaper land because there was a shortage of land for industrial purposes in the district centre. The village sold some of its collective land to higher level governments, which then became state-owned land, but still retained a large amount of land both in and outside of the newly established industrial park K. Firms from South Korea, Japan, Germany and the United States set up factories in the village. Many of the peasant villagers seized the opportunity to become factory workers. Both individual villagers and the village collective naturally pursued economic benefits through the foreign factories. Most of the foreign managers, workers and villagers interviewed during the fieldwork agreed that the village workers’ political and economic power to negotiate with the foreign factories stemmed from village collective land, political organizations and physical force. As one foreign manager put it, “They have land, family, village leaders, and that violence against us. They are the cause of headaches!”Footnote 23
Using village collective land as a political resource
In terms of land-use rights, there are two types of foreign factories in Village X (and villages A, B and C): those on village collective land and those on state-owned land. Korean Factory A's entry into Village X is illustrative of the complicated land issues. This factory manufactures parts for electrical kitchen appliances such as rice cookers. Owing to high production costs in Korea, the firm decided to build a small factory in China in 2003, and after a two-year site search, negotiated with township and village governments to set up a factory in Village X in 2005. The manager, the executive in charge of production in China, had two options when buying the land-use rights for the factory site: village collective land or state-owned land. After carefully studying many cases and relevant land laws, he decided to buy state-owned land in industrial park K. The village and township wanted him to buy village collective land because little state-owned land was available. The manager recounted that, “They [village and township cadres] always said that there was ‘No problem’ (mei wenti 没问题) with the village collective land for agricultural use, but I knew that I could not trust them. Village collective land is risky because I heard that it can be taken away if they don't like us. Of course, they'll threaten us with it someday. This is a communist country.”Footnote 24 The township eventually agreed to expropriate a chunk of village collective land for state-owned land and re-zone it for industrial use.
Throughout the negotiations and factory construction, village leaders demanded that the factory hire the local villagers as manual labourers and guards. The manager complained, “They pushed us very hard to employ their villagers, and especially their relatives and friends. They even implied that they would do something otherwise. We hired about 150 workers from the village – 90 per cent of the entire work force – from the very beginning [in 2005], and 120 villagers are still working here [in July 2012]. Some of them have been good workers for us, but there were some troublemakers, too. But, we couldn't fire them, unless they wanted to leave, because they're the villagers.”Footnote 25 Although Factory A was on state-owned land with land-use documents officially endorsed by the Shandong provincial government, the village still felt some ownership of the land, causing constant uneasiness. The manager and his Korean colleagues acknowledged that, regardless of their legal documents, anything could happen.
In fact, Factory A is an exceptional case among the many Korean factories in Village X and its three neighbouring villages (A, B and C). The other Korean factories, most of which arrived in Village X in the early and mid-2000s, naïvely ignored the concerns of Factory A's manager. These factories bought the land-use rights of village collective land because the township and village cadres promised to expropriate the land and convert it to state-owned land with full payment and related taxes. One interviewee stated, “We didn't know that ‘keyi 可以’ [of these officials] is not a promise.”Footnote 26 However, they have recently discovered that the land still belongs to the village as the township did not submit the necessary documents to the higher authorities. The factory owners have not received official property ownership certificates (fangchan zheng 房产证) and their factory sites are still zoned for agricultural use, not industrial use. This type of land can be confiscated at any time if higher level governments overrule the contracts and expel the factories. The villagers can also “do something about it,” if they so wish.Footnote 27 The factories are on village land and the villagers, including hundreds of factory workers, are the collective landlords. These Korean factories – and other foreign factories in similar situations – do not dare to be late paying the wages, or force employees to work without pay, or physically or mentally harass the workers.
Using political organizations as a political resource
Village X is dominated by the Chao lineage, the members of which have historically made up 70 per cent of the entire village population. The village committee chief and Party branch secretary is a member of the most powerful family in the Chao lineage. Of the five sons in this family, the eldest son is the village chief, the youngest son is the boss of the village gang, and the other sons all hold important village positions. Through the affective networks of lineage, neighbourhood and school ties, and by developing patron–client relations with villagers, this village chief has won three consecutive village committee elections in the last ten years. There have been suggestions of vote-buying; allegedly he has spent an average of 2 million yuan per election to secure his post and to ensure that almost all eligible voters in the village participated in the elections.Footnote 28 One Korean manager reported, “On the election day, we gave half of the local workers the morning off, and the other half the afternoon off, so that they could vote. Many workers told me that they must cast their vote because they received money and all kinds of favours from ‘the boss’.”Footnote 29 Many interviewees described the village chief, in hushed tones, as a “local emperor” (tu huangdi 土皇帝).Footnote 30 This type of vote buying is also very common in other nearby villages and the money spent by the successful candidates has allegedly ranged between 1.5 million and 10 million yuan.Footnote 31
The village chief, his business partners, and vigilante groups and gangs have dominated village decision-making on the village economy, including management of village collective land and dealings with foreign factories.Footnote 32 These village “leaders” form another set of patron–client relations with ordinary villagers, comprising a kind of pyramid-shaped exchange mechanism within the village. In this scheme, a person's “status” or “ranking” in the village is important. Most villagers acknowledge this ranking and know roughly where someone belongs. Another Korean manager, Choi, in Village A, reported an awkward management problem in which a middle manager could not issue orders to some of his production-line staff: “You know what? It is because he is a lot lower ranked than those subordinates in the village strata. He just can't order them to do something for him.”Footnote 33
This political system boosts the power of the local factory workers when dealing with any work issues. One Korean factory owner in Village X explained a typical local worker's behaviour to describe these power dynamics: “In cases of labour disputes, we [the factory owners and managers] do not just deal with one problematic local worker, but also with her or his entire family, the family's powerful friends like village leaders, vigilante groups, family members in township government and the police station, and even gangs! They come together and do whatever works to put pressure on us.”Footnote 34 However, it is a two-way game. A local village worker said, “Our Korean boss sometimes pushes us too hard to fulfil the quota day and night. But we have many ways not to work in a factory of blood and sweat (i.e. sweatshop, xuehan gongchang 血汗工厂) and to be easily fired.”Footnote 35 Many other interviewees, both managers and villager workers, described similar situations in neighbouring villages.Footnote 36 When a strike occurs, the factory must not only deal with the local workers, but also with their supporters, who often use verbal threats and physical force. Several of the foreign managers I interviewed had been personally threatened by an aggrieved worker's patrons and felt that their safety was in jeopardy.Footnote 37 In a similar vein, managers were also concerned about leaked information regarding the factory's internal matters. Production-line workers, office staff and guards routinely share information about the foreign factories with fellow villagers and village leaders. According to one interviewee: “They [village leaders] usually know what is going on in my factory.”Footnote 38
The following episode demonstrates the symbiotic and clientelistic relationship between a localized Korean manager, Kim, and the head of Village X's vigilante group. The manager gave the following account:
Last year, the village gangs crashed into my factory, broke facilities, and threatened me because I did not give them waste paper from packaging and some other useful waste, which they can collect and cash in for quite a healthy amount of money. So, I called my friend, the head of the village vigilante group, to help. He came to my office in ten minutes and slapped one of the gangs in the face. Those jerks disappeared immediately. Well, I hired his son and gave him some petty things from time to time. He paid back at that time. In a sense, I'm suspicious that probably he ordered them to do it [in the first place] to show off his power.”Footnote 39
There have been many other similar episodes involving the physical force of villagers in Village X and its neighbouring villages. A former Korean manager of an accessories manufacturing firm in a neighbouring village said, “When you fire workers from outside (of the village), they usually go quietly. But, I have never met any local worker who doesn't put up a fight with me when they are fired. They bring all the villagers they know to make trouble for the factory. They block the main entrance, break into the factory or office, and threaten managers. No exception.”Footnote 40
Two counter-intuitive mechanisms are added to village politics. First, political power from village resources is also directed against migrant workers. Many foreign factories require more labour and hire migrant workers to avoid the problems that come with hiring local workers, and even to counter the power of the local workers. In many cases, local workers discriminate against the migrants, who are fellow Chinese but who compete for jobs and other benefits. Local workers threaten migrant workers and sabotage their employment chances as they believe the migrants harm their interests. Individual migrant workers usually submit to threats from villagers, which can range from disturbing a migrant worker's sleep to actual physical abuse.Footnote 41 Second, local workers do not enjoy the same advantages working for local Chinese factories as they do with foreign factories. This is because local factory owners are from the same locality and can form a strong clientelistic relationship with formal and informal political institutions because they are Chinese.Footnote 42 Local owners can neutralize the local workers’ political resources with their own. Several villagers confirmed that, in recent years, local workers have preferred to work in foreign factories than in local Chinese factories.Footnote 43 This is because foreign factories supply social insurance and other benefits, have cleaner and safer working environments, and cannot easily mistreat local workers. In addition, the average salary offered by foreign factories (2,000 yuan) is 500 yuan more than that offered by the Chinese-owned factories in Chengyang district. Almost every worker and manager interviewed during fieldwork agreed with this uncomfortable paradox.
Conclusion
The above accounts indicate the general logic of villages and local village workers in maximizing their interests in foreign factories on their soil. Collective unity and action are critical political resources resulting from the long-standing territorial strongholds of village collective land ownership, and the political organizations of village government, affective networks and physical force. To be sure, there is internal friction and conflict within village communities owing to competition and uneven distribution of limited resources. Once improvements are made through rapid industrialization and foreign investment, however, political organizations are more likely to cooperate for greater expansion. Patrons and clients emerge because there are more resources to exchange, creating a “virtuous circle” that empowers a village's cooperative state–society relations. If local workers do not have reliable trade unions and official government protection, they mobilize their locality against foreign employers. Certainly, these Qingdao villages are also subject to the malfeasance of village leaders and powerful families, including electoral fraud, embezzlement and corruption. The key difference is, however, that these villages form inclusive clientelism to ensure the economic welfare of a majority of villagers.Footnote 44 These villager clients do not attempt “rightful resistance,”Footnote 45 but rather try to climb up their village's social ladder to obtain more lucrative opportunities.
In contrast, migrant workers have none of the political resources held by local workers. They are strangers with neither village collective land ownership nor political organizations to protect themselves from foreign or local exploiters. The rigorous New Labour Contract Law is a strong pro-labour push to improve the general labour situation by raising the minimum wage and providing compulsory social insurance. However, migrant workers are still the weakest, most exploitable workers in industrializing China. During fieldwork in Dongguan 东莞, Shenzhen 深圳, Beijing, Shanghai, and even Qingdao from 2007 to 2013,Footnote 46 I found many cases in which local villagers (bendi ren 本地人) exploited migrant workers, both directly and indirectly. Local entrepreneurs, who have made the transition from peasant or production line worker to factory manager and owner, are notorious for exploiting migrant workers. Indirectly, local villagers form strong alliances with foreign factories and gain from the increased business opportunities that come from hiring migrant workers. Anita Chan agrees: “Villagers, as a group, have become a rentier class. The very direct personal gains that can be made from foreign investors using migrant workers from poorer provinces contribute to the villagers’ unconscionable disregard for the exploitation of the migrant workers by foreigners.”Footnote 47 This political economy partly explains the “exodus” of migrant workers.Footnote 48 In recent years, an increasing number of informed migrant workers have become disillusioned as a result of the labour problems in the coastal factories. Even though numerous peasant-workers still migrate from their villages to the cities and industrial areas, more and more are choosing to stay in their own localities or migrate to regions close by if there are production line jobs available there. It is possible that they prefer to remain local village workers, with their land ownership and political organizations, rather than run the risk of becoming “defenceless” migrant workers. In truth, the “proletariat” is hardly a monolith in China.
