[P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] China: From Analogue Slaves to Digital Rebels

Michel Bauwens michel at p2pfoundation.net
Fri Sep 19 22:32:36 CEST 2014 

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From: peter waterman <peterwaterman1936 at gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 2:08 PM
Subject: [Networkedlabour] China: From Analogue Slaves to Digital Rebels
To: networkedlabour at lists.contrast.org





   -  Comment is free <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree>

  China’s workers are turning from analogue slaves into digital rebels
With a wave of strikes co-ordinated on social media, the migrant workforce
is using 21st-century tools to fight poverty, corruption and sweated labour

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   -  [image: Paul Mason] <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/paul-mason>
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      -  Paul Mason <http://www.theguardian.com/profile/paul-mason>
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      - The Guardian <http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian>, Sunday 14
      September 2014 20.00 BST
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  [image: Protests organised by Occupy Central in Hong Kong show that the
'China is different' excuse is finis] Protests organised by Occupy Central
in Hong Kong show that the 'China is different' excuse is finished.
Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

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 most of their meals in the factory 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. At the same time, a slowing economy is forcing managers to try to
claw back certain perks and benefits; at Yue Yuen, it was the underpayment
of contributions to a retirement fund that sparked the trouble.

But now there’s a third factor at work: the internet, which has exploded
into Chinese life. Workers at Yue Yuen used two popular 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 in the west. It is
zonal – so you can search for people you know nearby. But its attraction
for the strikers was that theycould create invite-only groups there.
“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.

It’s hard to imagine, if you’ve not been inside the regimented and
stressful atmosphere of a Chinese factory, what an internet cafe first felt
like to someone who has only ever slept on a farm or in a factory dorm.
“Our foreman is a tough guy. But when I meet him in the internet cafe I am
not afraid of him,” one female worker told researchers in 2012. “He has no
right to control me here. He is an internet user. So am I.”

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.

It is not clear how much people inside mainland China know about Occupy
Central. But at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangdong last year, students
organised a mild, mainly cultural response to it – printing T-shirts with
the slogan “Not only birds are free” and launching discussions around
related issues. The students involved included some who had previously been
factory workers – and who were now involved in advocacy work for factory
workers in mainland China.

At the very least, we can assume the worlds of Occupy Central and the world
of the Guangdong province factory workers are not hermetically separated.

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 relatively 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 now experiencing 21st-century conflicts over what look like
19th-century issues: poverty, sweated labour, corrupt management. There is
one bulletin board, for example, that specialises only 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*
<http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/>*. Follow him **@paulmasonnews*
<https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews>


-- 

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   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/>.  [A
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   Explorations http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/
   <http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/> *
   3. *Interface Journal Special (co-editor), November 2012: For the Global
   Emancipation of Labour <http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/>*
   4. *Blog: http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.
   <http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.> *
   5. *Interface Journal Special (Co-Editor) Social Movement
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   (Deadline: May 1, 2014). *
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*Needed: a Global Labour Charter Movement (2005-Now!)
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   7. *Under, Against, Beyond: Labour and Social Movements Confront a
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   pages of Working Papers, free, from the 1980 <1980>'s-90's.*
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