Abstract
This paper offers a preliminary analysis of Chinese non-elite knowledge workers, their use of information technologies as tools of employment as well as worker organisation, and the emergent process of network labour formation. It opens by presenting a conceptual framework for understanding non-elite knowledge workers, their social contexts, types, and the interrelationships among these types, paying special attention to new types of digital work (call centres, SMS authoring, and online game gold farming), their process of emergence and patterns of spatial distribution. It then sketches out the main linkages between grassroots workers’ groups in mainland China and labour organisations outside showing that, even though bottom-up transnational labour organisation is still quite limited at the present stage, informal networking through new digital tools is full of potential. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for a new informational politics.
Highlights
Knowledge work in China is an understudied topic deserving more attention from both academic scholars and social movement analysts
There are links to official Chinese agencies such as ACFTU as well. Only two of these links are devoted to building more crossborder connections between China and the outside world, namely ChinaLaborWatch. org and China Labor News Translation (Clntranslations.org). This suggest that, even outside mainland China, where there is little institutional constraint imposed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the website-based network nodes are still underdeveloped, at least compared to the QQ networks
Special attention was paid to new types of digital work and their process of emergence and patterns of spatial distribution within the country and in relation to other key markets of the Asian Pacific region and worldwide
Summary
Knowledge work in China is an understudied topic deserving more attention from both academic scholars and social movement analysts. Before delving into descriptive accounts, it is important to define a few key terms to enable us to understand the Chinese reality These include ‘knowledge workers’ (zhishi gongren), ‘network labour’ (wangluo laogong), ‘information have-less’ (xinxi zhongxia jieceng) and ‘grey-collar’ (huiling). In the case of China, the extensive influence of transnational Chinese business networks (Cartier, 2001 & Hamilton, 2006) and the resurgence of the Chinese ‘civilization-state’ above and beyond the traditional notion of the nation-state (Jaques, 2009) both mark societal transformation in a networked era This transformation is impossible, incomplete, and would be unsustainable, without the rise of network labour, whose members come from both the high-end and the non-elite categories of Chinese knowledge workers. In both internal and external organisation, China’s non-elite knowledge workers hold central, strategic importance for the rise of network labour overall
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