Emergence of the Interns' Collective Actions

This paper looks at the protests at both collective and individual levels taken by student interns in Chongqing in the summer of 2013. Drawing on a 5-month participant observation of the protesters’ school life and their internships in the electronic manufacturer IYD, this article examines the favourable factors, features and outcomes of the interns’ collective actions. The author first argues that the emergence of collective action by these student interns could be attributed to the injured self-esteem during their placement and the culture of solidarity emerged from their lives in school. Regarding the first reason, those student interns from the occupational school had higher self-respect and expectations for the future than their counterparts of previous generations. Meanwhile, the student interns have encountered “coercive discipline” which aimed at eliminating students’ humanity during their internship. These two factors contributed to the injury of students’ self-esteem in their internship and their resentment towards the factory managers. Second, it is found that the students’ collective actions tended to take the form of violent fighting rather than strike due to their previous school experiences. The students usually resorted to violence such as fighting to resolve individual or collective disputes in their school. Third, the author suggests that school violence not only determined their action repertoire, but also help to nurture a sense of solidarity and brotherhood, which in turn provided a supporting network to students, particularly to those who lacked support from their family and teachers, flavouring their workplace resistance. Fourth, the student interns’ collective actions tend to be generally scattered and transient. Last but not least, most students who participated in the collective actions were later expelled from factories and schools, negatively affecting their prospects after the internships. This paradoxically consolidated their sense of solidarity, sowing the seeds of future resistance against capitalist exploitation.