<div dir="ltr"><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">peter waterman</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:peterwaterman1936@gmail.com">peterwaterman1936@gmail.com</a>></span><br>Date: Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 2:08 PM<br>Subject: [Networkedlabour] China: From Analogue Slaves to Digital Rebels<br>To: <a href="mailto:networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org">networkedlabour@lists.contrast.org</a><br><br><br><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-size:small"><br><br><div>
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<h1>China’s workers are turning from analogue slaves into digital rebels</h1>
<div>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</div>
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<span><span><a rel="author" href="http://www.theguardian.com/profile/paul-mason" target="_blank">Paul Mason</a></span></span> </div>
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian" target="_blank">The Guardian</a>,
Sunday 14 September 2014 20.00 BST
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<img src="http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/9/12/1410539585481/Protests-organised-by-Occ-011.jpg" alt="Protests organised by Occupy Central in Hong Kong show that the 'China is different' excuse is finis" width="460" height="276">
<span>Protests
organised by Occupy Central in Hong Kong show that the 'China is
different' excuse is finished. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images</span>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><em>Paul Mason is </em><a href="http://blogs.channel4.com/paul-mason-blog/" title="" target="_blank"></em><em>economics editor at Channel 4 News</a><em>. Follow him </em><a href="https://twitter.com/paulmasonnews" title="" target="_blank"></em><em>@paulmasonnews</a></p><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888">
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</font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br clear="all"></font></span></div><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>-- <br><div dir="ltr"><ol><li><b><font><span></span><font size="1"><span><span>EBook, November 2012:</span> <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/recovering_internationalism/" target="_blank">Recovering
Internationalism</a>. </span><span><font color="#ff0000">[A compilation of papers from the new millenium. Now free in two download formats]</font></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span><span><span><a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></span></span><span style="background-color:rgb(255,0,0)"><span></a></span></span></font></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span><span>EBook (co-editor), February 2013: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations <a href="http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/" target="_blank"></font>http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/world_social_forum/<font color="#ff0000"> </a></span></span><span><span><br></span></span></font></b></li><li><b><font size="1"><span>Interface
Journal<span> Special (co-editor), November 2012:</span> </span><span style="font-weight:normal"><a href="http://www.interfacejournal.net/current/" target="_blank">For the Global Emancipation of Labour</a></span></font></b>
</li><li><b><font size="1"><span lang="NL">Blog:</span><span lang="NL"> <a href="http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman." target="_blank">http://www.unionbook.org/profile/peterwaterman.</a>
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