World factory without workers? The new facet of Chinese workers' strikes

Currently nicknamed the ‘world factory’ China has been notorious in allowing investors (both foreign and domestic ones) to exploit her labour force at extremely cheap price. Previous rich literature in relation to Chinese workers mostly indicated that Chinese workers were obedient and silent to take unconditional exploitation. It has also been argued that most of Chinese workers’ strikes were sporadic and workers merely demanded to have ‘a bowl of rice’ rather than any structural change.

First part of this paper is to review structural level of Chinese production in the global economic chain. It has been debated rigorously that although China accumulated huge amount of foreign direct investment (FDI), those transnational companies invested in China only took advantages from Chinese cheap labour but did not transferred research and design (R&D) skills to China. This paper aims to review whether this situation has any possibility of change, and whether China is on the way to provide goods which entail R&D.

 The second part of this paper focuses domestically on the new trend of migrant labours in China. This paper argues that those silent and obedient workers are the first generation of migrant workers, people who left their hometowns to coastal cities after 1978 economic reform. Nevertheless, when the second generation of migrant workers (people who were born after 1980s or even 1990s) emerged in the market, their demands are different. Second generation of migrant workers are more active, with more courage to strike out. Both Honda strike in 2008 and Tai-Hsing Strike in 2004 are good examples of this.

        Taking into account the anchoring of Chinese production in the global economic chain and the new emerging spirit of the Chinese labour movement, this paper will also try to uncover the role that Chinese workers might play in transnational labour movement.