Today's post is the fourth installment in my series of posts on precarity as a feature of 21st century life and the precariat as a global cultural phenomenon. For context, please also read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3. In the third post in this series, I wrote the following:
But the precariat has also arisen outside of the West. What has been striking is its origin and spread in those regions which withdrew themselves from global capitalism in the early 20th century only to return to the capitalist fold near the end of the 20th century . . .
Today's post will consider the emergence of the precariat in China during the last forty-five years. And it must be said that while precarity is a definite sign of economic inequality in a society, it is also true that there have been unequal societies in which precarity did not exist. Chinese history spans both cases. In fact, according to a paper titled, "Understanding Inequality in China" (Yu Xie, University of Michigan, 2010), ". . . inequality has been a part of Chinese culture since ancient times." Historically, this inequality did not contribute to precarity among the poor in Chinese society. However, this culture of inequality was a contributing factor in the precarity that emerged after the death of Mao Zedong. So let us consider the evolution of inequality and class mobility in China from ancient times to now.
Ancient China
In ancient China, the emperor was the only person with a permanent hereditary position of wealth, privilege, and power. According to Yu Xie's paper, the emperor governed by two means: first, by the promulgation of the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius who taught that the mission of rulers is to work for the public good; and second, by the use of a vast corps of semi-autonomous administrators and bureaucrats scattered throughout the provinces of the Chinese empire. The relationship between ordinary peasants and the emperor and his bureaucrats was therefore shaped by two points of propaganda: first, that the emperor and his administrators were actually working for the public good, and second, that for the emperor and his administrators to do their job, structural inequality was necessary. According to Mencius, "‘There are those who use their minds and there are those who use their muscles. The former rule; the latter are ruled. Those who rule are supported by those who are ruled.’ This is a principle accepted by the whole Empire . . ." Therefore, the mission of the peasants was to use their labor to provide material support to this cadre of rulers.
In order to make sure that the peasants did their part to support their rulers, a system of taxation was developed, and as part of that system, a system of personal registration (hukou (户口)) and household registration (huji (户籍)) was developed. According to a paper titled, "Governing neoliberal authoritarian citizenship: theorizing hukou and the changing mobility regime in China" by C. Zhang, Queen's University Belfast (2018), this household registration system ". . . continuously served important social and political functions, including military conscription, taxation, local policing, social security and mobility control, for about two millennia in the centralized bureaucratic empire . . ." Note especially the mention that from time to time, the huji system was used to limit the ability of subjects to move around from region to region in the empire. This is corroborated by a mention in another paper of how the Qin dynasty used the huji system to limit movement of individual subjects from region to region: "The Qin people [sic] could not freely move outside an administrative unit to which he or she belonged; thus, they had to use credentials for traveling and transfer certain personal documents when moving from one unit to another." ("In the Government's Service: A Study of the Role and Practice of Early China's Officials Based On Excavated Manuscripts," Daniel Sungbin Sou, University of Pennsylvania, 2013)
Even with this system of registration in place, however, social mobility was still possible in ancient China. For the rich, whose riches under the existing economic and cultural system were not easily inheritable, there was always the possibility of downward economic movement. According to Yu Xie's paper cited above, ". . . except for the emperor, the aristocratic and privileged classes were not stable . . . In fact, the emperor did not want the inheritance of the aristocratic and privileged class." People who got too rich could in fact be repressed and have some of their possessions confiscated. Also, poor people could advance their family prospects by investing in the education of their sons. By this means the next generation could climb the rungs of the Chinese meritocracy and become administrators themselves.
By these arrangements, ancient Chinese society was conditioned to accept inequality as the "inevitable" price of the promotion of the social welfare of the entire society. The system worked and was acceptable to all as long as emperors and their administrators actually ruled for the benefit of all, and as long as there was some room for social mobility among the poor. However, between ancient times and the present, China underwent subjugation by Western powers, followed by a revolutionary fight for independence. As a result, its internal systems went through a period of readjustment.
Maoist China
Maoist China inherited most of the existing cultural institutions which had endured from ancient times. Maoist China also inherited the toxic mess which Western colonialist powers had made of Chinese society. However, the responses of the government of Mao Zedong to this mess created new challenges. One of Mao's early goals was to transform China from a primarily agrarian society to a modern industrial society as quickly as possible. This led to such disasters as the Great Leap Forward which was launched in 1958.
In 1958 the system of internal household registration was also transformed into a much more rigid modern hukou system modeled on the Soviet Russian system of propiska (пропи́ска). It is interesting to note that in its original form, the Russian propiska system, hundreds of years old, was designed to prevent the upward social mobility of Russian serfs. The Chinese system, borrowing from the Russian system, thus created a society which was the opposite in certain key aspects from the socialist promise of a "classless" society.
The hukou system had the following elements:
- Starting in 1958, all people had to be registered according to birthplace.
- The person's birthplace was the determinant of whether the person received State welfare services and what kind of services would be received.
- Those whose birthplace registration was urban received State services.
- Those whose birthplace registration was rural received no State services. Any welfare services they received had to come from communal social arrangements in their village of registration.
- Those whose birthplace was urban were categorized as non-agricultural. Those whose birthplace was rural were categorized as agricultural.
- The children of the people registered in 1958 inherited the hukou status of their parents. The children of these children, in turn, inherited their parents' hukou status. Thus even if you were a child born in the 1990's in a city, if your parents had a rural hukou status, you inherited the same rural hukou status.
The Maoist hukou system created a social hierarchy in which the members of the Communist Party were at the pinnacle. Immediately below them were the city dwellers who were involved in industrial production. Below them were the rural peoples, whose mission was to provide food to the industrial urban centers and the leadership of the country in order to fulfill the mission of rapid industrialization. Therefore, the social mobility of the rural, agricultural hukou holders was severely restricted. Anyone who held an rural agricultural hukou who tried to move to a city without permission was likely to be severely punished. Moreover, anyone from the countryside who moved to the city without permission would be denied access to the social services available to the residents of the city who held urban, nonagricultural hukou status. And the Chinese government made it very hard for anyone with a rural hukou status to change to an urban hukou status. (See "China's Household Registration (Hukou) System: Discrimination and Reform", Fei-Ling Wang, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2005.) According to "China’s Hukou System: How an Engine of Development Has Become a Major Obstacle" (Martin King Whyte, Harvard University, 2009), the holders of rural, agricultural hukou comprised 80 percent of the total Chinese population in Maoist times.
One last feature of note in the Maoist system was the danwei (单位) system. A danwei was a work unit organized in Maoist China. According to Wikipedia, the workers assigned to a danwei were the bottom rungs of the social hierarchy whose head was the central Communist Party. Danwei referred not only to the place of work but also to the organization of the work unit. The danwei also served the purpose of dispensing social welfare benefits to their subjects. Thus things like health care, schooling and day care for children, and other benefits were dispensed to workers through their danwei. Once assigned to a danwei, it was very hard for a worker to be fired, because the danwei provided an "iron rice bowl" to their workers, a system of social welfare and livelihood that, while often not comfortable, at least prevented them from having to live a precarious existence. While this security had its good features, it was part of a system that did not deliver prosperity and national advancement as rapidly as was wished by some of the more forward-thinking members of the Chinese Communist Party. Therefore, after Mao's death, Chinese social arrangements were again altered in order to attempt to harness capitalism as an accelerator of growth and advancement. While the alteration did produce results, it also accelerated the increase of inequality in China and began to introduce a rapidly-growing element of precarity in Chinese society.
From The End of Maoism to Today
The changes wrought by the reforms begun in 1978 have been profound. Two changes are especially relevant, as they have contributed most greatly to the emergence of the precariat in China. The first is the smashing of the "iron rice bowl" danwei system. According to Wikipedia, when individual private enterprise became possible once again, private enterprises and foreign multinational corporations were able to out-compete state-run danwei. This led to the weakening and shrinkage of the danwei, and the increasing number of workers who were thrust out of stable careers with guaranteed benefits into an uncertain labor market. Thus these refugees from the danwei system became an element of today's precariat in China. In losing their danwei, these displaced workers lost the social units that once gave them status, identity, and access to benefits.
The hukou system was also changed. The changes have been coordinated between the Chinese government and large holders of capital in the Chinese economy, and their goal has been to create and expand a large, flexible, and cheap workforce. The elements of this change are as follows:
- Restrictions on physical movement under the Maoist hukou system have been relaxed somewhat but definitely not eliminated.
- Hukou status has largely remained unchanged in the sense that it is still difficult for holders of rural hukou to change their status to urban.
- Legal migration of rural residents to urban centers is more possible now than in Maoist times. However, rural residents who do migrate are still denied access to the social welfare services and legal citizenship rights granted to holders of urban hukou.
- This arrangement has therefore created a very large class of migrant workers who are paid very cheaply and have few or no rights.
- Those who migrate legally are more likely to be integrated into the formal economy of the cities to which they migrate, whereas those who migrate illegally tend to wind up in the informal economy.
- Whether formally or informally employed, these migrant workers are not granted stable, long-term employment contracts. Therefore they comprise another very large sector of the Chinese precariat.
- Many of these people are forced to work like dogs, as evidenced by the "996" schedule imposed by many employers, a schedule which was only recently ruled illegal by the Chinese Supreme Court.
- Those who migrate illegally are subject to the threat of violence either by the State or by their employers.
One other thing to note is that in China as elsewhere, education is no longer the guaranteed road out of precarity into a more stable life. A 2021 paper titled, "After the Foxconn Suicides in China: A Roundtable on Labor, the State and Civil Society in Global Electronics" describes the exploitation of young Chinese students by the tech industry, thus highlighting the struggle of the large percentage of youth in the Chinese precariat. This is also pointed out in another paper titled, "The Chinese Race to the
Lastly, it should be noted that although the precariat in China is expanding, expressions of resistance to exploitation are beginning to appear as well. For further information on these, you can read the first pages of Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat by Sarah Swidler.
I have one or two more global regions to examine in sketching the precariat as it exists in the world today. Those will require more research, so the next post in this series may need to wait a couple of weeks.
