Industrial Restructuring and Workers’ Resistance in China

Abstract

The Fifteenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in September 1997 formally sanctioned a radical reshuffling of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Since then, numerous smalland medium-sized SOEs, in the name of enterprise restructuring (qiye gaizhi), have been converted into shareholding companies with mixed public and private ownership, sold or leased to private individuals (either domestic or foreign), merged with one another, or just allowed to go bankrupt. The state is carrying out the restructuring program for a twofold purpose. It wants to rid itself of the financial burden of sustaining smalland medium-sized SOEs that are strategically unimportant, and it wants to transform them into market players by changing their ownership and management. While it may still be too early to assess the economic effect of the program, its social consequences are troublesome. One of these consequences, as some scholars note, is a rapid transfer of state assets into the hands of managerial nomenklatura and other private individuals (Ding, 2000), a process similar to has been called spontaneous privatization in former socialist countries. But the illicit asset stripping of state firms does not constitute the whole picture of who gets what in the divestment process (Ding, 1999). The restructuring program has led to a systemic erosion of labor interests, as it has been accompanied by severe measures against workers, including