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G2: Striking Chinese workers are using 21st-century tools to fight poverty and sweated labour: The perennial excuse that 'China is different' no looks hollow(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Ten years ago, when I first started reporting on China's migrant labour force, they were not hard to spot. Peasant hairstyles, cheap clothes, corralled into concrete dormitories and marched, military style, into and out of the factory. But labour shortages, rising skill levels and better wages have changed the sociology of the Chinese factory. Now it's spiky hair and, in their leisure time, fast fashion. Though many still live in dorms, taking their meals in the canteen, since the mid-2000s, many of the industrial districts have had estates of family apartments. This year, there has been a rash of strikes in the Chinese export industry - headlined by the strike of 30,000 shoe workers at Yue Yuen Industrial Holdings, in Dongguan, southern China. Two factors make conditions ripe. There is a labour shortage, with better jobs available in the service sector, while a slowing economy is forcing managers to claw back perks and benefits; at Yue Yuen, it was the underpayment of contributions to a retirement fund that sparked the trouble. But there's a third factor at work: the internet, which has exploded into Chinese life. Workers at Yue Yuen used messaging apps to get each other out on strike. He Yuan-Chiang, a lawyer who represents workers in Shenzhen, talked me through the process: "They used QQ - an instant messaging service - to create numerous overlapping groups. These were quite diverse, and often contradicted each other, but everybody could join. But the real organising was done on Weixin." Weixin is a mobile messaging service similar to WhatsApp. It is zonal - so you can search for people you know nearby. But its attraction was that strikers could create invite-only groups. "That's where the core organisers were," says He. On top of that, the strikers used Weibo - a service similar to Twitter - to disseminate news about the strike. Though the strike was settled, its significance has not been lost on China's government. In an industrial landscape that often looks more like the 19th than the 21st century, the internet is rapidly changing workplace dynamics. In the late 2000s, internet penetration leapt from 10% to 30% in four years. Internet cafes with hundreds of screens opened up in the workers' districts. Sociologists who interviewed the young migrant workers back then found them using the web for two things: to build connections with other workers from their home towns, and to let off steam by playing games. But that now feels like prehistory. We've got the mobile internet - which has been bigger than the desktop internet in China for two years and involves more than 600 million people. On top of that there is social media. With a combination of Weibo, QQ and Weixin you've got the atmosphere of the internet cafe in your pocket. The group messaging service allows you a better chance of hiding your already heavily coded and euphemistic strike calls behind a surge of information too big even for the thousands of internet police to find. Now, on top of technology and a changed economic situation, there is the example of Occupy Central. This peaceful mass movement for democracy in Chinese-administered Hong Kong has brought hundreds of thousands to the streets, mobilised different sections of society, and used the same tools - internet, social media and occupied space - as the horizontal movements in Europe and the US. "China is different", the perennial excuse of Sinologists for the population's failure to rebel against Communist party rule, looks hollow since Occupy Central began. In the 1990s, when the Chinese government was still dealing with the remnants of an old, industrial, relatively privileged working class, concentrated in heavy industries, worker unrest was treated as tantamount to treason. The initial years of rapid expansion brought chaos and brutality. But before long, official Chinese unions began to organise the migrant workforce, and workers were given basic legal rights. This "normalisation" of labour relations is not threatened by the outbreak of strikes this year. But information technology injects a new dynamic. In the west, the phenomenon of the networked individual began in San Francisco and spread via the middle classes to the tech-savvy youth. Manual workers, and trade unions, were late to the game. In China, you have a factory workforce with harsh, hierarchical conditions and very little free time, accessing their devices in toilet breaks or on the train home. The contrast between hierarchy at work and the relative freedom of the internet is stark. China is experiencing 21st-century conflicts over what look like 19th-century issues: poverty, sweated labour, corrupt management. There is one board, for example, that specialises in anonymously submitted photographs of Communist bureaucrats wearing luxury watches. If this was only about factory workers versus corrupt bosses, the implications would be interesting but not dramatic. But if you accept that the main faultline in the world is between networks and hierarchies, then China is sitting right on top of it. And China's workers - who look like digital rebels, but analogue slaves - are right at the heart of the phenomenon. Paul Mason is economics editor at Channel 4 News. Follow him @paulmasonnews (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |