In the Name of the Working Class: Narratives of Labour Activism in Contemporary ChinaHolland Prize Winner

2019 ◽  
Vol 92 (4) ◽  
pp. 643-664
Author(s):  
Ivan Franceschini ◽  
Christian Sorace
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Public Interest ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Labour Disputes ◽  
Party State

Since their appearance in the mid-1990s, Chinese labour NGOs have mostly focused on disseminating labour law and guiding labour disputes through official channels. In so doing, they have assisted the Chinese Communist Party in achieving its paramount goal of maintaining social stability. In line with this approach, activists in these organizations have traditionally framed their work in terms of "public interest" or "legality," both of which resonate with the hegemonic discourses of the Party-state. However, earlier this decade a minority of Chinese labour activists began to employ some new counterhegemonic narratives centred on the experience of the labour movement and the practice of collective bargaining that attempted to recode the proletarian experience outside of its official representation. In this paper we analyze this discursive shift through the voices of the activists involved, and argue that the rise of these new counterhegemonic voices was one of the reasons that led to the Party-state cracking down on labour NGOs.

Nation, Locality and Radical Identity

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Malcolm Petrie
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Election Campaigns ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
General Elections ◽  
Political Left ◽  
National Model ◽  
Selection Of

Concentrating upon the years between the 1924 and 1929 general elections, which separated the first and second minority Labour governments, this chapter traces the rise of a modernised, national vision of Labour politics in Scotland. It considers first the reworking of understandings of sovereignty within the Labour movement, as the autonomy enjoyed by provincial trades councils was circumscribed, and notions of Labour as a confederation of working-class bodies, which could in places include the Communist Party, were replaced by a more hierarchical, national model. The electoral consequences of this shift are then considered, as greater central control was exercised over the selection of parliamentary candidates and the conduct of election campaigns. This chapter presents a study of the changing horizons of the political left in inter-war Scotland, analysing the declining importance of locality in the construction of radical political identities.

Law According to the Chinese Communist Party: Constitutionalism and Socialist Rule of Law

Modern China ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-352 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ding Xiaodong
Keyword(s):  
Communist Party ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Political Concept ◽  
The People ◽  
State Regime ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Socialist Rule Of Law ◽  
Party State

This article argues that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted a unique understanding of law. Unlike the liberal view and the unwritten constitution view, which generally consider law as positive norms that exist independently of politics, the party understands law as a reflection of the party’s and the people’s will and a form of the party’s and the people’s self-discipline. In the party’s view, liberal rule of law theories are self-contradictory, illusive, and meaningless. This article argues that the party views the people as a political concept and itself as a political leading party, marking a fundamental difference from a competitive party in a parliamentary system. The legitimacy of the party’s dominant role and the party-state regime, therefore, depends on whether the party can continue to provide political momentum to lead the people and represent them in the future.

scholarly journals Mummifying the Working Class: The Cultural Revolution and the Fates of the Political Parties of the 20th Century

2016 ◽  
Vol 227 ◽  
pp. 653-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alessandro Russo
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Working Class ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Cultural Revolution

AbstractA number of prolonged political experiments in Chinese factories during the Cultural Revolution proved that, despite any alleged “historical” connection between the Communist Party and the “working class,” the role of the workers, lacking a deep political reinvention, was framed by a regime of subordination that was ultimately not dissimilar from that under capitalist command. This paper argues that one key point of Deng Xiaoping's reforms derived from taking these experimental results into account accurately but redirecting them towards the opposite aim, an even more stringent disciplining of wage labour. The outcome so far is a governmental discourse which plays an important role in upholding the term “working class” among the emblems of power, while at the same time nailing the workers to an unconditional obedience. The paper discusses the assumption that, while this stratagem is one factor behind the stabilization of the Chinese Communist Party, it has nonetheless affected the decline of the party systems inherited from the 20th century.

Deconstructing the Construction of the Party-State: Gulin County in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Border Region

1994 ◽  
Vol 140 ◽  
pp. 1052-1079 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph W. Esherick
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
World History ◽  
Border Region ◽  
Chinese Revolution ◽  
The Social ◽  
Peasant Revolution ◽  
Party State

It used to be a truism that 20th-century China witnessed one of the great peasant revolutions of world history. The Chinese Communist Party built a popular base in the countryside, and eventually a massive army of peasant soldiers surrounded the cities and drove the urban-based Kuomintang from the Mainland. In the comparative literature, the Chinese revolution was classified as a peasant revolution, and a number of important studies sought to explain the social origins of that phenomenon.

Religious Regulation in China

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence C. Reardon
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Mao Zedong ◽  
Religious Organizations ◽  
Moral Standards ◽  
Party Elites ◽  
Party State

Establishing a totalitarian state after 1949, Chinese Communist Party elites formulated religious regulations that ensured strong national security and guaranteed the Party’s hegemonic control of the state. The party state eliminated all foreign religious connections and established Party-controlled religious organizations to co-opt the five recognized official religious beliefs. By the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong prohibited all religious beliefs except in himself. As the post-totalitarianism of the 1980s evolved into consultative authoritarianism of the 1990s, Communist elites resurrected the Party-controlled religious organizations and implemented a new series of religious regulations in 1994 and 2005 that permitted the operation of officially recognized religions to strengthen moral standards and to supplement the state’s social welfare functions. Facing perceived challenges from foreign religions and fearing the growing popularity of religious belief, the party state adopted a third set of religious regulations in 2017 to strengthen Party hegemony.

The Civil Governance of Death: The Making of Chinese Political Subjects at the End of Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Huwy-Min Lucia Liu
Keyword(s):  
End Of Life ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
The State ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Funerary Rituals ◽  
Chinese State ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Party State

This article discusses how the Chinese Communist Party governed death in Shanghai during the first half of the People's Republic of China. It examines how officials nationalized funeral institutions, promoted cremation, and transformed what they believed to be the unproductivity of the funeral industry into productivity (by raising pigs in cemeteries, for instance). I show how each of these policies eliminated possible sources of identity that were prevalent in conceptualizing who the dead were and what their relationships with the living could be. Specifically, in addition to the construction of socialist workers, the state worked to remove cosmopolitan, associational, religious, and relational ideas of self. By modifying funerary rituals and ways of interment, the Chinese state aimed to produce individualized and undifferentiated political subjects directly tied to the party-state. The civil governance of death aimed to produce citizen-subjects at the end of life.

The architecture of modern anti-unionism in Canada: Class struggle and the erosion of workers’ collective freedoms

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 459-481
Author(s):  
Charles Smith ◽  
Andrew Stevens
Keyword(s):  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Labour Law ◽  
Labour Movement ◽  
Labour Relations ◽  
The Past ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Labour Legislation ◽  
The Relationship

Over the past four decades, governments have backed away from the promotion of collective bargaining in Canada resulting in a tendency towards anti-unionism. Examining this new reality, this article investigates two interrelated trends in Canadian anti-unionism over the last two decades in an effort to conceptualize the role of the state in regulating labour relations. First, we investigate legislative attempts to undermine or eliminate the ability of workers to collectively bargain and strike. Second, the article unpacks the political economy of anti-unionism in the private sector by focusing on the role of lobby groups that have shaped labour legislation. These two interrelated threads allow us to expose the relationship between employers and governments, which has threatened the strength of organized labour in the private and public sector and shaped a uniquely Canadian anti-unionism. Finally, we conclude by examining both the strengths and limitations of the unique fight-back strategies used by the labour movement, which has sought to elevate aspects of Canadian labour law to be protected by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This, we argue, offers restrictive possibilities for advancing collective bargaining rights in the existing labour relations framework.

scholarly journals The changing political identity of the "Overseas Chinese" in Australian Politics

2011 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 121-138
Author(s):  
Chongyi Feng
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Chinese Communist Party ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Australian Society ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Chinese Migrants ◽  
National Values ◽  
Party State

This paper explores the role played by the Chinese communities in the Australian politics of multicultural democracy from the perspective of political socialisation and resocialisation. It argues that there is no such a thing as inherent “cultural values” or “national values” that differentiate ‘the Chinese” politically from the mainstream Australian society. This paper focuses on the Chinese nationalism of Han Chinese migrants in Australia. Within the “new mainland migrants” who have come to Australia directly from the PRC since the 1980s, nationalism is much weaker among the Tiananmen/ June 4 generation who experienced pro-democracy activism during their formative years in the 1980s. Nationalism is much stronger among the Post-Tiananmen Generation who are victims of the “patriotism campaign” in the 1990s when the Chinese Communist party-state sought to replace discredited communism with nationalism as the major ideology for legitimacy.

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