Surprise... An International Labor Center In China

Difficulties accompany the establishment of an International Labor Center in China - political restrictions, historical antagonisms, and logistical opacity. Yet such a Center is now in its flourishing infancy at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, having found a conceptual “space” in which to thrive.  One opportunity for an academic center is to create a space where labor exploitation and resistance can be recognized and analyzed, while not transgressing on the official mandate of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Owing to the particular legacy of state socialism in China, workers facing the relentless coercion of capitalism may neither organize themselves nor be organized by a union; the space for this is “occupied” by the ACFTU, but remains largely empty. Similarly, the space for ideological development is occupied by formalistic theory (“socialism with Chinese characteristics” in word; free-market fundamentalism in practice). Yet, increasingly, critical thinking is arising at universities, as students insist on finding a lucid explanation for the contradictions exploding in the middle of their own lives. A Labor Center should help ground this inquiry in the broader intellectual world.  Seeking to meet these needs we established the International Center for Joint Labor Research, following several years of relationship building among academics and practitioners in the U.S., Germany and China. This Center now maintains a steady pace of research, analysis, inquiry, outreach, publication, skill development, and exchange. We help cross-fertilize ideas between some of the world’s leading labor scholars and the most anonymous, grass-roots level activists, between PhD candidates from remote Chinese villages and battle-scarred trade union officials from former Eastern European socialist states. In short, we provide a platform of mutually respectful engagement between the full spectrum of actors in the global labor family, in the milieu of the world’s rising capitalist hegemon.