Abstract
China has undergone rapid and sustained economic transformation in the last three decades. From 1978 to 2013, China’s annual average real GDP growth rate was nearly 10 percent and the country is currently the world’s second-largest economy, largest trading economy, second-largest destination of FDI, largest manufacturer, and largest holder of foreign exchange reserves (Morrison 2014). Within 30 years, China has transformed from a poor, backward third world country to an economic powerhouse of the world. China’s developmental experience is actually ambiguous and does not fit any conventional label in the literature. Different from the “one bang” approach in Eastern Europe, the reform in China has been a gradual, adaptive process without a clear blueprint. China’s developmental path has been a hybrid and uneasy combination of contradictory elements, including capitalist versus socialist, state versus market, export-led versus import-substitution economy (So 2012). To understand the structural factors shaping the dynamics of labor activism in China, it is necessary for us to revisit the transformation of China’s developmental path in the past 30 years.
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