Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing

Narrative on the Labour Question

Anand Parappadi Krishnan

Institute of Chinese Studies, Delhi, India
anand.p.krishnan@gmail.com

With the ideological undergirding of Marxism–Leninism, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has
claimed representation of peasants and workers in its vanguard role in actualising the socialist revolution.
However, as China has developed economically over the past four decades, there has been an erosion in
the status of workers and peasants as legitimate stakeholders in governance and ruling practices. This
article attempts to map how labour, once a critical component of the CPC’s political–ideological
invocation, has become peripheral as China transitioned to a market economy with an emphasis on
economic rationale for growth and reforms. It examines the changing contours of the CPC’s discourse
and practice over the past 100 years on the labour question, sandwiched as it is between the need for
continued economic growth as a legitimating tool and the continued reiteration of being representative
of the working class.

Keywords: Labour, workers, workplace relations, Party-state, trade unions, All-China

Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU)

Even as the constitution of the Communist Party of China (CPC) has been fre-
quently updated so as to make the Party stay relevant to the times, what has remained
more or less unchanged is the unfailing reiteration of being the vanguard of the work-
ing class. Without doubt, there have been changes in terms of semantics to describe
the working class, but representing the working class has continued to be a promi-
nent feature, as evidenced in the opening lines of the constitution.1 Marxism–
Leninism, the ideological anchor of any communist party, characterises the working
class as the central force in actualising a socialist transformation, and therefore, the
CPC’s continued pronouncements through the years make perfect sense.

1  
The constitution adopted at the 9th Congress of the CPC on 14 April 1969 begins by describing the
CPC as the political party of the proletariat (Marxists.org 2008).

CHINA REPORT 58 : 1 (2022): 60–74

Sage Publications Los Angeles/London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington DC/
Melbourne
DOI: 10.1177/00094455221074247
 Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour 61

However, ‘commodification and casualisation have spawned a precipitous decline

in labour standards’, as the ‘Chinese leadership has sponsored a historic overhaul of
the socialist employment system since 1980s’ (Friedman and Lee 2010: 507). This
has been paralleled by the retreat of the state as a direct actor from its interface with
labour. The labour system is faced with various divides and disparities—based on
regions, income levels, residential locations, and more. Precarity and exploitation have
become the norm in workers’ social lives, sharpening conflicts between labour and
capital (both domestic and foreign), with the post-reform Party-state choosing to side
with the latter. That ‘screaming and suicides are bodily acts of resistance’ by workers,
signifies the intensification of labour unrest that carries human costs (Pun and Chan
2008: 76). From once holding a privileged position as the fundamental class in the
country, ‘disenfranchisement’, or change in the political status of Chinese workers,
has led to the collapse of ‘industrial citizenship’ (Andreas 2019).
The fundamental social base of the Party itself is undergoing transformation, from
workers and peasants to technocrats, urban professionals and entrepreneurs. In the
centenary of the CPC, this article seeks to contextualise the changes for China’s labour
class and to explain how the Party has pushed it from the vanguard to the periphery.

LABOUR AND THE COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA BEFORE

THE 1978 REFORMS

Seeded through artisan guilds and native place associations in the late nineteenth
century, labour politics and organised labour movement in China predate the formation
of the CPC (Barnett 1963; Chan 1975; Shaffer 1981; Perry 1993). The first major
political impact of labour was felt during the May Fourth Movement in 1919, with
active worker participation from factories in Shanghai and other industrial centres in
the south (Chesneaux and Kagan 1983).
It was the founding of the CPC that provided ideological impetus and
organisational basis for the labour movement. The first resolution passed at its first
Congress ‘proposed that the basic task of the CPC was to dispatch party members to
workers to establish industrial unions, organise workers, and educate them’ (cited in
Ma 2018: 566). The formation of trade unions was in keeping with any communist
party’s programmatic principles and organisational functioning, of operating through
mass organisations, which, in turn, was based on the Leninist idea of transmission
belts, to connect the party and masses (Lenin 1922; Stalin 1954; Harper 1969). In
May 1922, the first All China Labour Congress was organised by the communists
in Guangdong, which was attended by 162 delegates, representing some 200,000
workers in over 100 unions in 12 Chinese cities (cited in Pringsheim 1965: 112).
Taking a leaf out of the Bolsheviks, the CPC Central Committee also adopted the
‘system of appointing special commissioners’—mostly young, foreign-educated
men—who were ‘dispatched to some key areas’ to handhold and ‘develop the labour

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62 Anand Parappadi Krishnan

movement from top to bottom’ (Ma 2018: 568). In the early years, the CPC had to
compete with the Kuomintang, in mobilising the workers, and it even had to work
jointly in a United Front (Brandt 1958).
The effort of the CPC during the revolutionary phase was to embed itself in the
labour movement, in line with its ideological–political moorings of being the vanguard
of the working class, and to claim leadership in the protracted struggle to break the
‘twin mountains of imperialism and feudalism’, in achieving socialist transformation
(Mao 1965). A rewiring of the revolutionary strategy by the communists, based on the
assessment of the actual conditions and Mao Zedong’s early perceptions, saw a shift
of the axis from the proletariat to the peasantry. Post the establishment of the People’s
Republic in 1949, the CPC, under Mao, was straddled with the responsibility of
nation-building, in transforming the country weighed down by a backward economy
and feudal social relations. Emphasising socialist construction, the development of
a modern industrial sector, especially heavy industry, was prioritised, along with
raising the wage levels, ensuring labour protection and job security (Walder 1984).
By creating a Party organisation in each factory and workshop, by dispatching cadres
to forge concrete links with the industrial workers, the Party sought to make them the
key part of its urban constituency—‘sympathetic and capable workers would serve as
the nucleus of the factory party organization’ (Andreas 2019: 27). This was realised
through recruiting a small portion of the workers into the Party, while incorporating
all workers into the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).
By mobilising the workers through a series of mass political campaigns—Democratic
Reform Movement, 1950–53; Three-Anti (san fan) Movement, 1951–52; and Five-
Anti (wu fan) Movement, 1952—the Party consolidated its control over the industrial
enterprises and, in the process, changed the position and relationship of the workers
within the factories, making employment stable, increasing wages and ‘enfranchising’
the workers as stakeholders in the system, through their participation in factory
management and politics. In turning from ‘hired hands to industrial citizens’, the
workers were empowered and brought under the patronage of the CPC (Andreas
2019: 28). The industrial enterprises in the first decade of the Mao era were governed
by the CPC’s control mechanisms from above and factory workers’ supervision from
below. The foundations for industrial citizenship were laid through the broad range
of workplace-based welfare provisions for all members of the work units (danwei).
This ‘cradle-to-grave welfare system’ for the workers and their dependents, along
with the institution of the first labour insurance programme in 1951, helped in
crafting ‘participatory paternalism’, that combined robust citizenship rights with little
autonomy, and was ‘based on norms of public ownership, permanent job tenure and
relatively egalitarian distribution, ending up cultivating a collectivist ethic among
workers’ (Andreas 2019: 53). Throughout this period, the Party maintained a tight leash
over labour before the Cultural Revolution shook the social and political foundations
of China. Industrial production was disrupted—despite Mao’s calls to the rebels to
only take charge of politics in factories and leave the business functions to the original

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 Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour 63

staff—with a reign of ad hocism in labour relations following as Revolutionary

Committees replaced existing organisational–institutional mechanisms on factory
floors.

POST-1978 ECONOMIC REFORMS, GROWING LABOUR CONTENTION AND

COMMUNIST PARTY OF CHINA’S RESPONSES

The turbulence and uncertainty inflicted by the ‘Ten Years of Chaos’—the CPC’s
official pronouncement of the Cultural Revolution (Communist Party of China
1981)—played a big part in charting the course of realignment and reprioritisation in
the post-Mao period under Deng Xiaoping. Revitalisation of the Party and economy
was of utmost priority for Deng, and his political consolidation enabled the forging
of a consensus on the need for putting economics in command for China’s future
growth and development.
The inseparability of the 1978 ‘reform and opening up’ (gaige kaifang) from China’s
development model has been consistently underlined throughout the past four decades
by the CPC leadership, rationalising that the country was still in the ‘primary stage of
socialism’, and China continued to be a developing country (Hu 1982; Zhao 1987;
Jiang 1992, 1997, 2002; Hu 2007, 2012; Xi 2017b). The breakneck pace of reforms
turned China into the workshop of the world, as active promotion of industrial
diversification and financial–infrastructural incentives encouraged the establishment of
a multitude of manufacturing enterprises with vast global supply chains in the country.
The Chinese success story has, however, also produced fault lines and different forms of
disparities. The industrial restructuring measures and profit maximisation goals under
the reforms recast workplace relations and labour politics in factories and industrial
enterprises, resulting in heavy social and human costs for labour (Hsu 1985; Huang
and Yang 1987; Lee 1991; Korzec 1992; Chan 2001; Wu 2005; Andreas 2009, 2019;
Mohanty 2018; Chan et al. 2020).
Empowered by the reforms, regimented work practices introduced by enterprise
managements and chronic deficiencies in labour standards have heightened workers’
discontent, and sharpened workplace conflicts. With no tangible worker-centric
avenues for collective voice, workers have resorted to radical autonomous actions,
such as wildcat strikes, work stoppages, walkouts and road blockades.2 Workers’
protests continue to dot the country’s landscape even though the intensity has
undergone troughs and crests. According to the last documented number of mass
protests by China’s Ministry of Public Security, the number stood at 87,000 in 2006
(China Daily 2006). While the Party-state has ceased to release any more statistics,

In transnational supply chains where production processes are tightly integrated, if the workers leverage
2  

their power through proper coordination, ‘a localised work stoppage in a key node can cause disruptions
on a much wider scale than the stoppage itself ’ (Silver 2003: 13).

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64 Anand Parappadi Krishnan

unofficial figures between 2006 and 2020 put workers’ protest actions close to 15,000
(China Labour Bulletin 2021).3 Workers have also been increasingly ready to use all
available and appropriate channels for redressing their grievances. As the Party-state
encouraged the resolution of labour disputes through legal arbitration, the number
of cases reached 828,410 in 2016 (China Labour Statistical Yearbook 2017 2018).
However, rather than developing into more substantive, broad-based mobilisations, the
labour contention in China has remained largely cellularised, as workers’ insurgency,
with economic grievances remaining the core of demands though it has also been
gradually raising workers’ consciousness (Pun 2005; Lee 2007; Chan and Pun 2009;
Friedman 2014a). The expansion of workers’ resistance and their autonomous,
insurgent protests is a challenge to the CPC, including rising concerns of law-and-
order for the local governments, when they extend beyond the confines of workplaces.
The maintenance of stability and industrial peace is essential to ensure unhindered
economic production. The high number of labour protests in the 2000s—especially
the wave of strikes in Guangdong in 2010—occurred even as the Party-state itself
under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao was undertaking a reorientation from the single-
minded pursuit of economic growth that had ended up causing ecological degradation,
aggravating disparities and exacerbating social conflict. With workers’ protests being
central to social conflict, the Party-state enacted a series of policies and legislations
seeking to reduce conflicts and provide avenues to address workers’ grievances. The
passage of labour legislations such as the revised Trade Union Law (amended twice in
2001 and 2009), Labour Contract Law (passed in 2007), Employment Promotion
Law (passed in 2007) and Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Laws (passed
in 2007) along with earlier labour-related legislations in the 1990s, was intended to
provide legal and institutional channels for the workers to address their grievances
(Social Law 2011; State Council, People’s Republic of China 2021). This raft of laws
was the first attempt to streamline and formalise legislations and regulations that were
either earlier largely absent or were lying scattered in a maze of ad hoc government
notifications. Equally, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001 also
necessitated the need to create a legal framework through a bundle of laws to govern
commerce and investments. Responding to the Party-state’s calls, encouraging workers
to ‘use the law as a weapon’, the workers—mostly in state-owned enterprises—have,
indeed, participated in dispute mediation and arbitration (cited in Gallagher 2005: 98).
Through legal absorption of workplace disputes and grievances that marked the shift
‘from a social contract to a legal contract’ (Friedman and Lee 2010), the Party-state
has been able to individualise labour conflicts, thus continuing to thwart possibilities
and avenues for autonomous, coordinated and durable collective mobilisations, in

3  
The available data from the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin’s online interactive Strike Map
(that collates reports of labour strikes collected from online news archives and other digital sources),
captures only a small subset of population, on account of high censorship, especially in the regime under
Xi Jinping (Crothall 2018).

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 Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour 65

the process. The seeming advances made through the endowment of a growing array
of individual rights for workers are, however, undermined by the continued absence
of collective rights, namely the right to organise and strike (Chen 2007). In addition
to this legal fix of ‘rule by law’, the Party-state also uses its ‘responsive and repressive
capacities’—welfare concessions and some experimentation with democratic elections
to trade unions (such as in Guangdong), on the one hand, and the use of public
security apparatus and agencies to quell protests, on the other—to meet labour unrest
(Elfstrom 2019b).
The pro-labour concessions and moderate redistributive measures of the Party-
state, while emerging from the impact of workers’ resistance, is nevertheless, still a
top-down responsive mechanism enacted unilaterally and paternalistically, without
any organic or substantive participation of workers or articulated demands from
below. Such paternalism of the central Party-state also strategically shields it from
workers’ ire and disaffection, which, in effect, gets directed towards employers
and the local governments, who are tasked with law enforcement. This ‘alienated
politics’ (Friedman 2014b) that marks an important characteristic of the political
economy of Chinese labour today, along with the ‘good cop-bad cop’ strategy of
the central state and local state, reinforces the CPC’s firm control, dominating
the narrative and preventing the development of alternate, autonomous forms of
political articulation. Since the beginning of the Xi Jinping era, repression has only
increased, with crackdowns on labour activists, their support groups, and on labour
NGOs (Franceschini and Nesossi 2018; Hui and Friedman 2018; Tiezzi 2018; Elmer
2019; Elfstrom 2019a; Howell 2021; Lin 2019). Nowhere is this preponderance
and dominance of the CPC more visible than in its relationship with the primary
trade union, the ACFTU.

CPC AND ACFTU: ONLY ONE WAY TRANSMISSION?

The ACFTU is the only collective entity in the labour system, recognised by the CPC
to represent the workers and their interests. Following the second National Labour
Congress in Guangzhou in 1925, the ACFTU was founded, to represent the Chinese
working class as a national entity. The Trade Union Law of 1950 anchored the union’s
organisation and functioning, with the undergirding being the Leninist principle
of a ‘transmission belt’ to bring about the two-way connection between the Party
and the masses. Trade unions are seen as ‘intermediaries’, deemed by the Party to be
‘indispensable, for rebuilding state–society relations, while preventing or cushioning
serious breakdowns and preserving the nation’s harmony’ (Zhang 1997: 148).
The unions remain weak, however, at the enterprise levels, and they are incapable
of playing a critical role in either enforcing regulations or supervision of labour
standards. The ACFTU faces legitimacy issues of the constituency it represents—the
workers and, especially, migrant labour. While its failure to reach out and absorb the

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66 Anand Parappadi Krishnan

multitude of rural migrant workers alienates it from the new labour subjectivities, the
chief cause of its inefficacy lies in its complete subordination to the CPC, with little
to no autonomy in initiatives or functioning. The ACFTU’s responsibility to promote
maintaining economic production, on the one hand, and protection of workers’ rights
and interests, on the other, has meant that it is ‘an organization that is situated in
both the state and society’, acquiring a ‘double institutional identity of being a state
instrument and a labour organisation in new industrial relations’ (Chen 2003: 1007).
This dilemma for the ACFTU puts it in a bind, as there prevails ambiguity regarding
the sections that the trade union actually represented, and a lack of clarity on the
modalities of representing a differentiated and diffused workforce. The control of
the CPC is strictly enforced, as there is no space provided for taking up independent
initiatives in line with its identity as a mass organisation. Thus, rather than a two-way
transmission belt, what results is a one-track, top-down process of command by the
Party that governs the trade union’s policies and practices.
This constriction of operational space for the ACFTU, however, is a legacy that
extends from the pre-Liberation period. There have been phases where the ACFTU
faced with legitimacy crisis among its constituency, had tried to move out of the
ambit of the Party, debated its views for operational autonomy within the Party
organisational fora or taken worker-centric initiatives. In 1951, for instance, Li Lisan
held the reins of the ACFTU and sought more autonomous space for the union; in
1957, under the Hundred Flowers campaign; and, in 1989 during the student protests
at Tiananmen when there was a brief period of workers’ involvement, including
the formation of a short-lived workers’ union (Harper 1969; Franceschini 2015).
However, on each of these occasions, the CPC was quick to clip the union’s wings,
discrediting such tendencies as economism and syndicalism,4 and reasserting the
dominance of the Party. As a result, while there may be variances at the local level,
the ACFTU remains completely subordinated to the Party and does not inspire
confidence among the workers, who view it as largely irrelevant. In his meeting with
the ACFTU’s newly elected officials after its 17th National Congress in October
2018, Xi Jinping did not fail to remind that ‘trade unions should be loyal to the
Party’s cause and put the principle of upholding Party leadership and the Chinese
socialist system into the practice of workers’ (Xinhua 2018). Not only does this
highlight the CPC’s command and control over the union, it also underlines the
Party’s animosity towards workers’ self-organising.

‘Economism’ in Marxist discourse refers to the tendency of the working class to attach decisive
4  

importance to economic goals or interests (such as wages, pensions and similar emoluments), and thereby
becoming narrow-minded, getting diverted from the larger revolutionary goals (Lenin 1901). ‘Syndicalism’
is a current in the labour movement that calls for direct action by the working class themselves to establish
local unions/organisations to advance their demands. Communists championing the cause of socialism
critique syndicalism as being anarchic and being antagonistic towards forming multi-class alliances led by
a vanguard party (De Leon 1909).

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 Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour 67

CLASS POLITICS, LABOUR, AND THE PARTY IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES

The ‘reform and opening up’ strategy, which was even equated with ‘revolution’ by
Deng Xiaoping (1984, 1985) and its subsequent intensification impacted the CPC’s
class analysis, leading to the declining importance of class struggle in the traditional
Marxist sense and to alternate explanations. In the late 1970s, even before formal
discussions in Party fora, opinions and ideas were shared in official publications on
‘expanding the scope of class struggle’ to ‘centre it around socialist modernization’
(Beijing Review 1979). Thus, the intention was to de-emphasise class antagonisms,
properly handle contradictions and channel politics to serve economic interests.5
The political report of the CPC’s 12th National Congress noted that ‘following the
elimination of the exploiting classes, most contradictions in society do not have
the nature of class struggle, and class struggle no longer constituted the principal
contradiction’ (Hu 1982). Moving a step further in its evolving formulation, at its 13th
National Congress, the CPC taking up the development of productive forces as the
central task, emphasised, ‘whatever is conducive to this growth is in keeping with the
fundamental interests of the people and is therefore needed by socialism and allowed
to exist. Conversely, whatever is detrimental to this growth goes against scientific
socialism and is therefore not allowed to exist’ (Zhao 1987: XXVI).
This marked the beginning of de-ideologisation of China’s political economy,
standing in sharp contrast to Mao’s proposition of the continued possibility of class
conflicts, even under socialism. This de-ideologisation resulted in the ‘state using its
symbolic power to de-emphasise class categories’, and instead encouraged a whole range
of incentives centred on individualism (Friedman 2014b: 1003). From the pre-1978 era
of official descriptions comprising two main classes—workers and peasantry—Chinese
society post-reforms has become a more complex structure. Marketisation, the resultant
de-collectivisation and integration into the world economy have created new classes or
re-engendered some classes—such as a foreign capitalist class, rich peasant class and a
new middle class (the latter, incorporating working professionals, university graduates
and entrepreneurs, on account of expansion of higher education institutions and the
services sector). With trends of class differentiation, and increasingly, class polarisation,
‘post-1978, China is a class divided society embedded in a strong Leninist Party-
state’, and thus, ‘social classes and class conflict are mediated through the state and
shaped by the state’ (So 2003: 367). However, there is now ‘increasing downplaying
of social polarisation, the shift of interest from class analysis to stratum analysis and
the emergence of a middle-class fetish’ (Guo 2009: 1). The severe social conflicts,

Deng, in fact, specifically called upon the whole working class ‘to play a selfless, vanguard role’ in the
5  

Four Modernisations programme ‘in the interest of socialism’. He declared that ‘the workers should carry
forward their glorious traditions of working hard and selflessly, maintaining strict discipline, readily accepting
work assignments and loving their enterprises as they do their own families’ (Deng 1978).

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68 Anand Parappadi Krishnan

turmoil and acute antagonisms that were witnessed in pre-1978 China, condition and
constrain the terminology of class in public usage. In intellectual–political discourses,
the ‘language of class is subsumed so as to clear the way for an economic discourse
that emphasises individualism, professionalism, equal opportunities, and the open
market’ (Pun and Chan 2008: 90).
The inconsistencies that appeared through the adoption and practice of reforms
have been rationalised by the CPC ‘through a sleight of hand’ (Guo 2009: 5–6). Hence,
socialism is no longer characterised by public ownership and a commitment to class
struggle (or the primacy of the industrial working class) but by ‘three advantages’—it
should be ‘advantageous to the development of productive forces, to increasing the
comprehensive strength of a socialist nation, and to raising people’s standards of living’
(Deng 1992: 372). Hence, the amalgamation of the entrepreneurial class into the folds
of the Party, under the ‘Theory of Three Represents’ propounded by Jiang Zemin,
can also be fitted into this formulation. The whole gamut of contradictions emerging
from China’s development model and the justifications/rationalisations imparted
by the CPC also shows the deep integration into the world economy and thereby,
economic globalisation. This is best illustrated by Xi’s speech defending globalisation
at the World Economic Forum in Davos (Xi 2017a).
As the pace of economic reforms has intensified, it has impacted the CPC’s
membership and cadre recruitment strategies, marking the turn from ‘a mass to elite party’
(Brødsgaard 2018). The traditional social base of the Party—peasantry and industrial
proletariat—has been gradually shrinking. While in 1994, almost two-thirds of Party
members were in agriculture or industry, by 2011, they made up only 38.6% of the Party
membership (China.org.cn 2012). There has been a steady absorption of new classes of
entrepreneurs, urban professionals and university graduates. The technocratic turn of
the Party, as reflected in the top leadership, is also being replicated at the lower levels.
With the emphasis on the recruitment of young talent, who are also motivated by career
incentives and upward mobility, the focus has been on urban areas, where the modern
sectors of the economy are located and where the population is growing fast (Dickson
2014: 45). Though the CPC continues to maintain that workers and peasants remain
its majority (Xinhua 2021), empirical research suggests that the classification has been
broadened to include white-collar professionals (Li et al. 2021).
Meanwhile, despite being critical engines in China’s economic rise, rural migrant
workers have largely remained excluded in Party membership. In 2008, only 2.5% of
migrant workers were Party members nationwide (cited in Dickson 2014: 45), and of the
2.1 million new members recruited in 2018, less than 5,700 were migrant workers (Yu
and Mitchell 2021). It is interesting to note that while recruitment patterns have been
changing, in the higher echelons of the CPC leadership itself post-1978, the national
chairman of the ACFTU had also simultaneously been a member of the Politburo—and,
in the case of Ni Zhifu, of the Politburo Standing Committee. However, for the first time,
the present ACFTU chairman, Wang Dongming, is only a Central Committee member
(China Vitae 2021). While it is convenient to view the representation of the trade union

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 Vanguard to Periphery: The CPC’s Changing Narrative on the Labour 69

leadership in the CPC’s higher echelons as providing importance to labour, this can also
be seen as the Party exerting its tight control to ensure that labour does not have any
line of thinking or plan independent initiatives incongruent with the CPC’s interests.

Conclusion

In the centenary year of the CPC, it must be acknowledged that notwithstanding its
rhetoric, the political status of China’s industrial proletariat has diminished, with the
intensification of market reforms leading to irreversible changes to production relations.
From once being active participants in factory management and production processes,
workers have been increasingly moved to the periphery of decision-making. There has
been an erosion of industrial citizenship, as the work-unit-centric system of guaranteed
employment and a range of welfare benefits—the ‘iron rice bowl’—have been replaced
by contract-based employment, under the logic of minimising labour costs to create
competitive, profit-maximising, modern industries. As the CPC withdrew from the
everyday administration of factories and enterprises, factory directors/managers were
provided with decision-making powers in augmenting production and maximisation
of profits.
In his political report at the CPC’s 19th National Congress in 2017, Xi proposed to
‘build an educated, skilled, and innovative workforce, foster respect for model workers,
promote quality workmanship, and see that taking pride in labor becomes a social
norm and seeking excellence is valued as a good work ethic’ (Xi 2017b). However,
these lofty formulations also put the onus on the workers for self-improvement and is
reminiscent of the corporate human resources management parlance under capitalism.
In imparting such a vision, the Party-state elides responsibility for workers-centric
reforms at a systemic level. Furthermore, local governments, while seeking to curb
labour costs and reduce wages, have also been at pains to explain how ‘supporting
businesses was in the interest of workers in the medium and long-term’ (Takashi 2021).
It is telling that the disenfranchising of labour has coincided with China’s rise as a
global industrial powerhouse—built on industrial restructuring since the 1980s and
domestic and foreign investments that embedded it completely in transnational supply
chains. The lived experiences of workers in this ‘workshop of the world’ are brutal and
exploitative, entailing social and human costs—despotic managements, regimented
work arrangements, coercive disciplining, low pay and next to no social entitlements,
and second-class status in the cities they inhabit. ‘Increasing precariousness of
employment and fall in workers’ power is a mutually reinforcing relationship—workers’
power falls as their position in the factory becomes more precarious, and their position
becomes more precarious as their power falls’ (Andreas 2019: 435). Over the decades,
China’s workers have been disenfranchised to being hired labour under policies and
processes crafted by the CPC.
The rise in labour discontent, arising from the deficits and deficiencies of the
reforms, is a reality that poses a challenge to the CPC, and its responsive strategies

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70 Anand Parappadi Krishnan

have also evolved over time. Since the 2000s, through the enactment of a raft of pro-
labour legislations, the Party-state has chosen to go in for legal absorption of workplace
conflicts and thereby, individualise workers to thwart possibilities of more sustained
collective actions. Besides paternalistically offering ‘concessions’ from time to time,
ensuring that workers’ resistance remains cellularised, the Party has also deployed
its repressive capacities to ensure that autonomous trade union activities are strictly
discouraged and repressed. The CPC’s crisis mitigation approaches now view labour
contention as more of a law-and-order problem that needs careful management.
Given that the CPC monopolises the interpretation of Marxism–Leninism in
asserting its political control, and strictly dissuades any alternative renditions or
readings, it has ensured that the labour question does not pose any ideological
challenges, at least domestically. Therefore, Xi’s continued emphasis on ideology in
the path of China’s rejuvenation may generate interest but in reality, from the
perspective of labour that is precariously placed in the balance of power, the ideological
narratives woven by the CPC now ignore the emancipatory promise and politics that
were integral to classical Marxist philosophy. Shearing away the project of emancipation
of the working class by modern-day interpretations of Party ideology in the name of
pragmatism, extinguishes even the hope for a possible change in the status quo. Such
adherence to status quoism can be considered antithetical to the programme and
policies of a vanguard party. Viewed from this perspective, it is highly doubtful whether
the Chinese proletariat today see themselves as an integral part of the ‘China Dream’.

DECLARATION OF CONFLICTING INTERESTS

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship and/or publication of this article.

FUNDING

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.

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