The formation of the modern proletariat in China

In pre-revolutionary China, before the 1949 Revolution, it is undeniable that the working class, strengthened by the military, strategic and financial support of the Communist International, had a long history of struggle against the nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) and the Japanese imperialist occupation, exploitation and plunder. However, it is also evident that the modern proletariat cannot be considered independent of the present level of industrial development. In the first half of the 20th century, China was a country with little industrialization, under the control of the United States, Great Britain, Japan and other imperialist powers. Most of its industry was light. It lacked its own heavy industry; Most of the existing enterprises consisted of repair shops, docks, foreign-owned railway repair shops, and relatively primitive mines that produced raw materials and semi-finished products for the developed capitalist countries.

The machinery industry, on the other hand, was poorly developed and consisted mainly of the repair and assembly of machines imported from capitalist countries. Ports and railways were developed to the extent necessary for imperialist exploitation. Mining was extremely poor. In addition, bombings and sabotage during the Japanese occupation and the civil war with the Kuomintang had caused great destruction in the more or less developed industrial areas. By 1949, industrial production, which had suffered more than agriculture, had been reduced by half. In a country of approximately 550 million inhabitants, the vast majority (between 400 and 450 million, according to approximate estimates) lived in the countryside, where feudal relations of production prevailed.

This level of economic development determined the main tasks of the 1949 revolution, which took control of a semi-feudal and semi-colonial country. In the first years of the revolution, the land, shares and means of production confiscated from the big landowners in collaboration with imperialism were distributed, through land reform, among the landless and small peasants, while the rich peasants had not yet been dispossessed. In the urban and coastal areas, the properties of the comprador monopoly bourgeoisie were also confiscated, while the means of production of the national petty and middle bourgeoisie remained intact. While the non-dispossession of the rich peasants and the national bourgeoisie was understandable given the demands of economic development, what was unacceptable from the point of view of socialist construction was to turn these classes into partners of political power. This approach did not change during the First Five-Year Plan (1952-1957), when policies of rapid industrialization were introduced. The national bourgeoisie, some of whose members worked directly in state enterprises, was integrated into categories of property such as "state capitalist", "state-private", "public-private", etc., with categorical variations (cooperative, collective, communal, etc.) specific to each period. This situation lasted until the end of the 1970s. In short, nationalization was not carried out on a socialist basis, so private property developed in various forms in contradiction to labor.

Certainly, this does not invalidate the fact that, starting with the First Federal Five-Year Plan (FFYP), a process of massive industrialization was undertaken. In addition to the enterprises confiscated from the comprador bourgeoisie, priority was given to heavy industry and the construction of related infrastructures throughout the FFYP, which was created with the financial, technical and human support and guidance of the USSR.

Parallel to industrialization, the development of the modern proletariat was inevitable. In the pre-revolutionary period, the vast majority of total employment was made up of self-employed artisans, and workers worked mainly in small workshops with an average of 10 to 15 employees; a smaller proportion worked in large companies with an average of 500 employees. Between 1949 and 1952, the total number of wage earners increased from 8 million to 15.8 million, while the number of industrial proletarians increased from 3 million to almost 5 million (31.25% of the total number of wage earners). At the end of the Third Five-Year Plan period, 9 million (37%) of the 24.5 million wage earners were industrial workers.

Interestingly, the number of wage earners and industrial workers increased dramatically in the official data for 1958. The total number of wage earners almost doubled compared to the previous year, reaching 45,323,000 in 1958, of whom 25,623,000 were industrial workers. This apparent quantitative leap was, in essence, a manifestation of a change in the policies of industrialization. This is because the prioritization of heavy industry and the reconstruction of all other sectors of the economy on this basis, which constituted the essence of the Five-Year Plan, were discussed even before the end of the plan period. Within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under the leadership of Mao Zedong, the idea that investment in heavy industry (and therefore in the production of means of production) should be reduced in favor of agriculture and light industry dependent on agriculture, arguing that this was the basis of the economy, gained prominence. Aside from infighting within the party, this was the framework that guided all industrial and agricultural policies of the Second Five-Year Plan. The policies implemented thereafter created an environment conducive to the flourishing of free market relations, both rural and urban, and from agriculture to industry, weakening central planning.

The free market and openness to international monopolies: the transformation of the rural proletariat

As a consequence of decentralization, the period of "Reform and Opening-up" was announced in 1978, under which the state, under the CCP, organized and consolidated the dominance of capitalist relations of production. Various "reforms" were carried out in both rural and urban areas, which amounted to commodification in both areas. The best known is the de-collectivization of agricultural production. The dissolution of collective property in agricultural production was legally framed in the "Family Responsibility System". Land and the means of production were divided and privatized among the households. Control of production was transferred to family ownership, thus formalizing small-scale rural agricultural production. During the 1980s, with the gradual dismantling of the communes, state monopoly on the buying and selling of agricultural products was ended, and households that had been buying and selling with the state through contracts were able to offer their surpluses on the market. All private property rights, such as the right to lease, sell, or inherit land, were formally recognized during this decade. Outsourcing practices emerged, as well as a growing salaried workforce in agriculture.

In the rural areas, where 80% of the total population (790 million) still resided in the 1980s, another consequence of the commodification of agricultural production was the growth of the surplus population. However, this labor force could not migrate en masse from the countryside to the city due to the population registration system (hukou). This meant that tens of millions of people were available as labor for capitalist industrialization in the countryside. Municipal and Rural Enterprises (MREs), which were, on the one hand, privately owned joint ventures and, on the other, enterprises belonging to administrative units that were not directly owned by the State, but were classified as "publicly owned", propelled this workforce to the forefront of industrial production. Throughout the 1980s, there was a boom in the number of MREs, focused on labor-intensive production of individual consumer goods, outside of the production of state-owned enterprises. It should be noted that the number of enterprises belonging to administrative units did not vary significantly, while the number of individual enterprises increased exponentially. In 1978, of the 1.525 million MREs, 79% belonged to villages and the rest to municipal administrations, with no individual companies existing. By 1987, 91% of the 17.5 million EMRs were owned by individual companies. These "covert private enterprises" were ones in which local government leaders appointed their own managers and controlled the distribution of profits, while foreign capital maintained control.

This rapid development of capitalist industrialization in the countryside naturally triggered a rapid proletarianization. While in 1978 the number of people employed in these small and medium-sized enterprises producing goods was just over 28 million, in 1996, the so-called golden year of the MREs, there were 135 million workers in 23.4 million enterprises, that is, one in five workers throughout the country and one in three in the countryside. They joined the ranks of the Chinese proletariat in these sweatshops, whose share of exports reached 33.7%.

Towards the end of the 1990s, some of these, supposedly classified as "public property", were privatized outright, and others became corporations, marking the end of the miracle of the MREs, which had already fulfilled their function. Tens of millions of migrants, driven by this phenomenon, flocked to foreign-owned factories in the cities and coastal areas.

This was also the period during which labor exploitation was opened up to foreign capital in the "Special Economic Zones" (SEZs) established in China's coastal regions. East Asian capitalists, who were granted the right to set up factories and who were mostly suppliers to monopolies in Western Europe and the United States, brought their means of production and technologies to these areas, along with the cheapest labor in the world.

The first generation of workers who made up the workforce of the SEZs were children of families who still resided in the villages and who, in turn, were small entrepreneurs in the countryside. They saw work in the city as a temporary way to save money. Considered "temporary workers" due to the hukou system, they were deprived of social rights. Thousands of them were unable to obtain this status and emigrated without registering, so they could not leave the company where they worked. The capitalists, who kept their labor force inside their factories through practices such as building dormitories in factory complexes, confiscating identity cards, and demanding deposits during hiring, resorted to various punishments, including physical violence, so as not to disrupt production. By the 2000s, a totally dispossessed, cheap, and unorganized proletariat had permanently settled in these regions.

Privatization and corporatization: transformation of the urban proletariat

The transformation of state-owned enterprises, which constituted the core of industrial production in the large cities, took place in a similar, though more gradual, manner. From 1978 onwards, the policies applied during the 1980s culminated in the process defined by the rulers as "the separation between ownership and management". Decentralization was deepened and a relationship was established between companies and the State based on contracts that regulated the distribution of profits. State-owned enterprises, whose share of total tax revenue was around 75% and which had hitherto transferred 80 to 90% of their profits to the central government, obtained "privileges" such as the holding of profits according to the percentages set out in these individual contracts, offering products above a fixed quota, and fixing prices and wages. The management of each company could determine the terms of its own contract through negotiation with the State authorities. This commodification, known as the "contractual responsibility system", was extended to all state-owned enterprises in 1993. While the CCP leadership described these measures as "diversification of ownership types," the "state ownership" of these enterprises was merely formal. The law of value was in force and surplus value was exploited.

In 1989, the protests that erupted in Beijing's Tiananmen Square and spread to 400 cities arose in reaction to this transformation. On the one hand, there were student marches against corruption and bureaucracy, while on the other, workers took to the squares in groups to protest against inflation, growing productive pressure and mistreatment, especially in the workplace. During the month-and-a- half of this uprising, Beijing was reportedly transformed into a city virtually controlled by the workers. It was the first time that the idea of workers organizing independently of the only official union with authority (the National Federation of Trade Unions of China) had been discussed on such a large scale. However, these attempts were suppressed by the state apparatus in order to pave the way for commodification. From then on, local privatization, which began in the early 1990s with the sale of small state-owned enterprises by local governments, was given a nationwide legal framework in 1995 with the practices formulated by the CCP center under the slogan "Acquire the big ones, get rid of the small ones." Until the 2000s, small and medium-sized enterprises were transformed into capital cooperatives, their shares were quickly put up for sale, and the process of transfer to domestic and foreign capitalists was completed. With the enactment of the Companies Act in 1993, large state-owned enterprises were also organized as joint-stock or limited liability companies. Starting in the 2000s, the transfer of shares in these companies to local and foreign capitalists began. The numerical expression of the drastic decline in the share of state-owned industrial enterprises in the total number of industrial enterprises (from 24.1% in 1978 to 0.8% in 1998) points in fact to their extinction.

A complementary privatization formula is expressed in the slogan "reduce the workforce to increase efficiency". The CCP leadership openly stated from the outset that it would use "capital as collateral" and that, "through the market, it would assemble large business groups with a relatively high degree of competitiveness, multi- regional, multi-sectoral, multi-owner, and multinational," at the cost of "annexations, bankruptcies, layoffs, and staff departures, reducing the workforce to increase efficiency." The number of workers in state-owned enterprises fell sharply, from 75 million (78 per cent of urban employment, approximately 19 per cent of total employment) at the beginning of the reform to 64 million (21.9 per cent of urban employment, 8.3 per cent of total employment) in 2007.

Legal Framework of the New Labor Market

One would expect that labor legislation would be developed along with all these transformations. In 1982, at the beginning of the "reform" process, the right to strike, recognized for the first time in the constitutions of 1975 and 1978 but which remained only in words, was eliminated. From the second half of the 1980s, along with privatization, an unemployment insurance fund was created and the burden of layoffs fell on workers.

In the same period, state-owned enterprises began to hire on a "fixed- term basis", replacing older workers with lifetime job guarantees with young hires, undermining employment and job security. By 1994, when the new Labor Law was adopted, the proportion of workers employed in state-owned enterprises had risen to 26.2 per cent. The law generalized individual contracts, covering about 90% of the workers of all companies. The few collective labor agreements were merely a complement to individual contracts.

The Labor Law, enacted on January 1, 1995, defined the "employment relationship" in such a way as to exclude migrant workers, rural industrial and commercial workers, civil servants, domestic workers, vocational training students, subcontracted workers and retirees; that is, a large part of the Chinese workforce working in the labor-intensive and export-oriented manufacturing, construction, and service sectors during the 1990s and 2000s. In fact, only a limited number of workers in state-owned enterprises were included. Even in these cases, disputes could first be resolved at congresses of company managers and trade unionists; if they were not resolved there, before the labor arbitration body of the local government; and if they were not resolved there either, before the courts. This lengthy and costly process itself led to deterrence. Although the CCP and the Chinese government attempted to control growing labor discontent with the Labor Contract Law and the new Labor Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law of 2007, no substantial change occurred. However, the 17-fold increase in the number of cases submitted to arbitration in the 20 years between 1996 and 2016 (from 48,121 to 828,410 cases) shows that a significant number of workers have not given up on this route.

The course of the labor movement from the 1990s to the present day

The Chinese proletariat, to be sure, has not remained silent in the face of the policies of commodification, privatization, and opening up to foreign monopolies. According to official statistics, the number of workers' acts of resistance multiplied nine or ten times between 1992 and 2000. The "measures" taken by the Chinese government in 1999 against this growing movement are irrefutable proof of the class character of the state: for gatherings of 200 people or more, the authorization of the local public security authorities was required, and for gatherings of 3,000 people or more, the authorization of the top security commanders.

Despite all these attempts at prevention, of the 58,000 "mass events" in 2003, in which three million people participated, the largest group was made up of 1.66 million workers (laid-off, retired and active). Given that, according to official trade union statistics, the total number of unpaid workers in state-owned and collective enterprises increased from 2.6 million in 1993 to 14 million in 2000, it is understandable that the most massive and well-organized protests occurred among workers in heavy industry and infrastructure. For example, in 2002, at the height of the labor protests, 50,000 oil workers in Daqing city in Heilongjiang province started a mass protest and tried to form an independent organisation, the Daqing Provincial Union of Dismissed Workers, which managed to extend its influence first to the provincial level and then lead oil workers from other provinces in organizing strikes and solidarity actions. That same year, in Liaoning Province, a strike by 3,000 workers at the Ferroalloy Factory spread to 30,000 workers in 20 factories in the city in just one week. The 2007 strike by workers at the Yantian International Container Terminal in Shenzhen, one of the world's busiest ports, is illustrative of the struggle for union representation and collective bargaining. This struggle, led by experienced crane operators, culminated in the important achievement of an annual collective bargaining system in the workplace. This experience, which is held up as an example of "unionism in the workplace", proved to be sustainable when they were able to go on strike in 2013, this time demanding a wage increase.

Among the workers from rural backgrounds in the Special Economic Zones (SEZs), strikes in foreign-owned enterprises have been frequent. In the Pearl River Delta, the spring of 1993 witnessed a wave of spontaneous strikes. Strikes by workers at a Japanese-owned Canon factory soon spread to other factories owned by Japanese, Taiwanese and Hong Kong capitalists, triggering twelve consecutive strikes, half of which had the full participation of the workers.

In the 2000s, when the Chinese economy reached double-digit growth figures, the high profitability rates announced by the companies in this region continued to provoke a series of strikes demanding a proportional increase in wages. In 2004, strikes involving 16,000 Uniden Electronics workers in Japan, 3,000 Haiyan Electronics workers, and 5,000 workers at the Changying plant were the most prominent. Strikes were often accompanied by signature campaigns, roadblocks, disruptions of government offices, or attacks on checkpoints that became repatriation centers for migrant workers. In this mobilization, basic solidarity actions were observed, such as raising funds for striking workers or presenting petitions to local authorities, as well as the dismantling of strikes by skilled workers for the sake of social advancement. Inexperience in the selection of representatives and poorly prepared strikes were the main weaknesses of the movement.

The case of the Danish-owned Ole Wolff Electronics factory in Shenzhen in 2006 deserves to be mentioned because of the need for the workers to overcome all these weaknesses and fight against the capitalists and the union bureaucracy. As a result of a strike against subminimum wages, cutbacks and layoffs, the workers, mostly women, managed to form a works council affiliated to the official federation, despite its hostile attitude. However, two years later, the company laid off the representatives elected by the workers. The official leadership of the union did nothing and had the audacity to congratulate the company for acting in accordance with the law. One can see the impact of the Labor Contracts Act, enacted over the objections of the foreign monopolies, on the strikes of 2007. China's Huawei monopoly and the U.S. retail monopoly Walmart, as well as several companies that followed suit, forced the workers to quit or fired them outright to avoid indefinite employment contracts that would include severance pay, triggering a new wave of strikes. However, with the 2008 crisis, some companies went bankrupt and left, while others demanded a fixed minimum wage "to stay in China", and the government responded favorably to the capitalists' demand. These events led to a fall in wages, unemployment and, consequently, greater competition among the workers. The post-crisis resilience has been defensive, geared towards protecting economic gains.

The year 2010 deserves a special place in the history of the modern Chinese proletariat, replete with lessons, as it was a year of both relatively organized actions and strikes and unorganized individual sacrifices. The Honda strikes and the suicides at Foxconn are symbols of these two trends. From January to December, 18 workers committed suicide at the Taiwan-based Foxconn factories, located in special economic zones (SEZs) in China. Behind these consecutive suicides, known as the "suicide train", hides a custom-designed work hell. This hell, which factory managers prefer to call a "campus," was designed as a multi-story city where workers were imprisoned: factories, dormitories, warehouses, as well as numerous commercial and social spaces such as hospitals, libraries, schools, shops, cafeterias, and restaurants. The daily life of the workers was organized in detail. The production line did not stop for a second.

The workers' mistakes were instantly reflected on digital screens, and they are forced to take salary deductions and suffer insults by managers. The dormitories, where one bunk bed was assigned per person, was like an extension of the factories; there were no common spaces and the "private space" was reduced to the bed. The roommates came from different parts of China and spoke different dialects.

Above this graveyard of "dead labor" in every sense of the word, stands a paradise of profits not only for Foxconn, but also for its buyers, such as Apple, Amazon, BlackBerry, Cisco, Dell, Fujitsu, GE, HP, IBM, Intel, LG, Microsoft, Nintendo, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, and the Chinese Lenovo state-owned joint venture groups, Huawei and Xiaomi, all of them converted into international monopolies. In the face of this extreme exploitation, one million workers employed by Foxconn were generally deprived of any possibility of organizing. At the time of the suicides, the union representative was a woman who also held a managerial position in the company.

In the spring of 2010, during which these suicides occurred, the nationwide strike of the new generation of migrant workers at the Nanhai Honda plant in the Pearl River Delta represented an entirely different example. Despite the 2008 crisis, the Chinese automotive industry set a new record by increasing sales by 46%. In contrast, wages did not increase significantly. The 1800 workers, 80% of whom were vocational training students and the rest permanent employees, presented their demands in 108 issues. Wage increases and the right to form independent unions were the two main demands common to all workers in the automotive sector. Despite attacks by local government officials, as well as scabs such as vocational teachers and rural workers who were given "union membership cards", the workers managed to maintain their unity and the strike continued throughout the factory. Having learned from numerous experiences that they could not rely on the union bureaucracy, the workers called for solidarity across the country. Strengthened by the support at hundreds of workplaces, the striking workers elected their own representatives in the company and achieved a substantial wage increase through de facto collective bargaining. However, in line with the Chinese government's policies, the only concession Honda was reluctant to make was to recognize the company union of the workers' self-elected representatives. In its place, an official union committee was created. This did not mean the end of the struggle for an independent union; in 2013, Honda workers went on strike again demanding a wage increase, despite the official union committee and all pressures, and made partial progress.

This strike by Honda workers in Nanhai triggered strikes both within this sector, in the factories supplying automobile monopolies such as Toyota, Ford and BMW, and in other sectors such as electronics, machinery, textiles, ceramics, etc., owned by national capital, as well as U.S., Japanese, Taiwanese and South Korean capital. Although there are no consistent statistics on the quantitative magnitude of the strike wave, of which 95% occurred in the manufacturing sector, it is estimated that there were between 200 and 1,000 strikes throughout the year. Faced with the firm will of millions of workers, the reform of the collective bargaining legislation was on the table, but international monopoly capital, which expressed its opposition through the chambers of commerce of the United States and Hong Kong, prevailed and the reform was suspended.

What is certain is that, in the 21st century, the right to independent trade union organisation and collective bargaining have irreversibly become the central axis of the class struggle. While it has been commented that the class struggle after the 2010 strikes is evolving into a stage of so-called "party-state-led collective bargaining" with the coming to power of Xi Jinping in 2012, it is also true that the Chinese proletariat, considering the limitations of its current possibilities, is now moving towards a line of struggle that progresses cumulatively at the level of the workplace, company and sector, instead of spontaneous, unplanned and disorganized reactions as in the 1990s. Of course, it is clear that Xi and the domestic and international capitalist class he represents will do everything possible to keep this situation under control. However, the Xi era is also a period in which the possibilities of dividing the labor movement between rural and precarious workers, who have so far focused on wages, on the one hand, and urban and permanent workers, who have focused on protecting their pre-privatization rights, on the other, are relatively weakened. The generation of rural migrant workers who have been massively incorporated into industrial and commercial enterprises in recent decades have reached sufficient maturity to focus on their pension rights.

The Yue Yuen strike of 2014 is a turning point in this context. This Taiwanese company, supplier of leading brands such as Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma and Timberland, is the largest footwear manufacturer in the world, having 20% of the global market in this sector. While employing 100,000 workers in the 2000s, the company laid off 40,000 in an unprecedented downsizing due to cost pressure, until the strike broke out in 2014. Wages were cut to half the state average. During this period, and drawing on the experience of small- scale work stoppages, 43,000 of the 60,000 workers who participated in the 2014 strike managed to organize a formal strike. Although the company agreed to make partial concessions to the workers who discovered that their pension contributions had not been paid, the union leaders insisted on a new collective agreement and representation at the company level through self-elected union committees. However, the division caused by the partial gains weakened the commitment of the workers to take the struggle one step further. Nonetheless, the Yue Yuen strike is considered the first case in the history of the Chinese proletariat's struggle in which migrant workers focused on pensions and social benefits, and constitutes the largest collective action in a single enterprise.

The relative decline of the labor movement can also be attributed to the fact that other countries with lower wages (such as India) have joined the competition to attract foreign capital. At the same time, China's pace of economic growth has slowed. Beset by factory closures and production cuts, Xi's administration planned mass layoffs, including laying off 1.8 million steel and coal workers, accounting for 15% of jobs. In 2016, the Chinese proletariat immediately responded with a new wave of strikes led by miners and steelworkers. The repression of these strikes led to several years of stagnation.

This temporary silence was broken by the Jasic protests, which lasted for two months in 2018. The 1,000 workers at Jasic Electronics, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer of welding machine, faced a variety of common problems, including non-payment of insurance premiums and housing benefits, arbitrary wage cuts, and verbal and physical harassment by management. Attempts by union leaders to unionize in the workplace led to the creation of a puppet committee. In case of a conflict, the union leaders were arrested. Jasic's actions began with spontaneous and disorganized speeches by the workers at the gates of the police station where his colleagues were detained, more typical of an act of civil disobedience than a mass demonstration, and gradually turned into marches in which workers carried banners with the slogan "Unionizing is not a crime." These actions, which were violently repressed, captured attention first at the national level thanks to the growing support of students organized in Marxist reading groups in universities, and then at the international level, with the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) urging the government to support the actions in Europe and the United States. However, the magnitude of the movement did not prevent Xi's government from taking advantage of these repressed protests to launch a persecution against the workers, students and intellectuals.

The Jasic protests failed to trigger a wave like the one in 2010. The outbreak of the pandemic two years later delayed a similar movement in China, as in many other parts of the world. Following the mass mobilizations at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou in 2022, a new wave of strikes was reported in 2023. The impact of dismantling and relocation of factories is undeniable. Looking for forms of dismissal without compensation, the capitalists imposed wages of 80-90% of the minimum wage in some places. On the other hand, it should be noted that numerous tactics persist such as work stoppages, demonstrations, sit-ins, blocking access to factories, taking over the machinery and even suicide attempts.

It is indisputable that the Chinese proletariat has a long history of struggles against the national and international capitalists since its formation. For the moment, although the struggles that are continuing in one form or another in the labor and business spheres may manifest themselves in waves that erupt every six or seven years, a permanent organization has not been achieved at the regional or national level. Undoubtedly, the two greatest obstacles to this are the inability to achieve an independent political organization facing the bourgeoisie and the existence of a union bureaucracy integrated into the capitalist state to a degree rarely seen in other countries. All experience has shown that, from the perspective of the Chinese proletariat, the Chinese economy, the capitalist character of the Chinese state, is not an enigma. The Chinese proletariat feels to the core the excessive exploitation that lies behind the disguise of "state ownership" or "public ownership," which has now become a mere formalism.

Labor Party (EMEP) – Türkiye