Put together, these factors create a dilemma for these workers: dire need of cash income keeps propelling rural parents, who make a significant portion of the workforce, to come to work at Foxconn; the family’s demand for caring and emotional labor, on the other hand, is pulling workers, especially mothers, back to the family. In the end, many of the workers end up turning this job a seasonal gig.
A long-standing element of the Chinese revolution since the 19th century is the liberation of women, especially from patriarchy, and the related physical bondages and family/social obligations. Naturally, the communists and their allies have always focused on moving women out of the tiresome and disciplining household labor. Chairman Mao [...]
The communicative space, such as WeChat and TikTok is another arena for social reproduction, where female platform drivers organize cooperative child-care arrangements with other female drivers so that they can drive longer, or work at a particular time. Nonetheless, the communicative space also forges mutual support and creates a community of shared responsibilities in the absence of a shared workplace, thereby creating the potential for women workers to resist platform control, sexual exploitation and harassment, and gender-based violence in the workplace.
From an employer’s perspective, keeping information about the pay system, such as the composition of a pay package, parameters of each pay component, average pay levels, pay ranges etc., under control is to their advantage. It is not to say that employers would prefer keeping workers completely in the dark about the incentive structure. Rather, employers tend to ensure that ‘just enough’ is known to workers for motivational purposes.
Even if China manages to move up in global value chains, without a paradigm shift and reorientation toward more balanced development focusing on peoples’ livelihoods, labor rights, social equity, and ecological sustainability that goes beyond the conventional developmental state, the prospects for China to escape the pitfalls of the energy-intensive, mass-consumption model remain dim.
Under the gig platform, technological control and management leads to grievances and perceived injustice. This dimension of control and management overlaps at times with, and is reinforced by, legal and organizational control and management, generating moments of escalation. The contractual design enables intense algorithmic control and management by giving platforms unbridled legal and technological power.
Therefore, it is even more imperative for both the academia and activist communities to interrogate and deconstruct the ideological and ethnic essentialism inherent in analyses of diaspora politics, making visible those efforts that challenge our parochial imagination of transnational social movements. Even social movements purposely mobilised in a local setting could have unintended global impacts, and it is these previously unarticulated transnational lessons that form the radical potential for future activism.
The new Chinese land reform and the attendant countermovement have given rise to a new round of rural struggles over land and livelihood security. These constitute an integral part of the movement of the Chinese working class, of which the 290 million rural workers are a major force.
The dynamics of US-China rivalry is an inter-imperial rivalry driven by inter-capitalist competition. Competition for the world market could soon turn into intensifying clashes of spheres of influence and even war. It is not new. It resembles a lot of the dynamics as described in Lenin's Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism. In the book, published in 1917, Lenin talked about the competition between German and British banks to lend to Latin American countries to build railroads and to ensure the projects would rely on German or British supplies. This is just like talking about the competition between China and the U.S. to offer credits to Belt and Road countries to build infrastructure. In the early twentieth century, inter-capitalist competition led to inter-imperial rivalry culminated in two world wars.
