Labor Legislation in China: Cyclical Competition between the State and the Market

Abstract

Abstract China’s first labor law was passed in 1995 in order to protect the legitimate rights and interests of laborers. It also was the superstructure created to match the developing labor market and employment reform of the Reform Era by “establishing and safeguarding the labor system suited to the socialist market economy.” In 2007, the prc then passed the second foundational labor law, the Labor Contract Law, which took as its purpose the establishment and development of harmonious and stable labor relations. A major distinction between these two laws is that the 1995 Labor Law emphasized market-oriented flexibility while the 2008 Labor Contract Law, by strengthening the role of labor regulation, emphasizes a state-oriented stability. Since the 2008 lcl, all labor legislation and amendments have those two laws as their origin, creating cycles between reliance on the bottom-up spontaneous power of the market and the top-down regulatory power of the state. So far, there have been 3 cycles of legislation and revision of China’s labor legislation; each five years apart in 2008, 2013, and 2018. This cyclical contest reveals the basic realities of China’s political economy. I use the last twenty years of data on labor disputes to highlight the cyclical nature of China’s labor legislation and the social and political forces that drive these cycles.