Download The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China Pun Ngai and Chris

The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China
Pun Ngai and Chris King-Chi Chan
Introduction
A worker, bearing no hope of survival, jumped from a dormitory corridor after three years of working in the city. She died without leaving
a reason, not even a letter to explain her death.
—A story told by a migrant woman who worked in a small town in
the Pearl River Delta, July 4, 2004.
Five women migrant workers, ranging in age from 14 to 17 years old,
were found in the dormitory of their textile factory on the morning
of December 23, 2004, apparently dead from inhaling the fumes of
charcoal that they had burned in a metal bucket.
—A report released by Human Rights in China, March 22, 2005.
Stories of death in the dormitories of China's workers proclaim
epochal tidings of the life struggles of a new worker-subject in China, the
peasant-worker, or dagongmei/zai in Chinese, whose class subjectivity is
Unless otherwise indicated, ail translations are our own.
boundary 2 35:2 (2008)
DO110.1215/01903659-2008-004 © 2008 by Dui<e University Press
I
76 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
yet to: be born but who is already severely subdued in today's China. Death,
the ujtimate destiny of life, signifies a surrender of its own—the refusal of
any attempt at living, not to mention an act of resistance. We are not yet
sure if the rural migrant workers have had a chance to go through reincarnation or remain as ren (human beings).' The political ideology of neoliberalism currently prevalent in China has given a death sentence to "class
analysis," and hence has refused to recognize the materiality of the formation of a new class while China has been aiming to become the "world's
workshop," providing more than 120 million rural workers for global production. Screaming and suicide are bodily acts of resistance of the new
worker-subject in reaction to the subsumption of class subjects into the grip
of power and the forces of domination in the process of incorporating China
into the global economy.
! This essay attempts to unravel a paradox: at a time when China is
trying to turn itself into the "world's workshop," we see a tendency to emulate a|process of class subsumption at the expense of the rise of a new class
of dagongmei or dagongzai, who are expropriated to serve global production. We strive to tease out the subtleties of the hegemonic project undertakeni by a "quest for globality" driven by neoliberal political ideologies that
intend to unmake a new class.^ This paradoxical process is nevertheless
embodied in a historicity of "class and revolution," a specific Maoist practice
of class struggle taken from China's socialist period. The abrupt denunciation of Mao's class struggle paved the way for the twisted subsumption
of class discourse in the globalizing period. Hence, we observe a double
alienation, if not trauma, of class formation in China: first, an articulation
of "class" or "class struggle" from above in Maoist China, and, second, an
abrupt subsumption of "class" discourse in the reform period. This double
alienation is an outcome of political arbitration and a disembodiment of
structurality—a negation of the production of relations in the rapidly changing Chinese society. The recent discourse on social stratification and social
inequality acts as a negation of the Maoist concept of "class struggle" by
further subduing the discourse on class, which, at the same time, echoed
1. YanlHairong, "Specialization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural
Young Women in Post-Mao China," American Ethnoiogist 30, no. 4 (November 2003):
578-9ß.
2. The word dass in this article is used as a singular noun. Though we do not intend to
neglect the complexities and variations of the new working class emerging in different
regions of China, rural migrant workers in China nevertheless share many of the same
characteristics not only in terms of "mode of production" but also "mode of life."
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 77
the Western declaration of the death of class analysis since the 1980s.
Weberian analysis seems to be a neutral and logical choice, implying an
awareness of "social problems" and "social tensions" inherent in the current political regime, as well as a confirmation of the reformist regime to
tackle them. A genuine fear of a return to Chinese socialism, which means
"equal poverty, political turmoil, and totalitarianism," motivates this "natural" reversion from Marxist to Weberian analysis of class and stratification.
The new working class, at the moment of its birth, experiences a struggle
between life and death, is a specter flowing here and there without a voice,
an identity, or a place to locate itself.
The Hollowing Out of "Class"
If it is the death, and not life, of the factory worker that speaks out
against the fact that Chinese workers will be the beneficiaries of the new
global economy in its international division of labor, and that compels us to
make sense of the formation of a new class and of its struggles in contemporary China, we immediately face an irony: the language of "class" has
been paradoxically emptied out; it is a phantom of the past, yearning to be
alive even though it is dead. We were perplexed to understand a strange
but cruel life experience: the lived experience of class is very acute for Chinese workers; however, the discourse of class is seriously subdued. The
discourse of class has not only been displaced by the hegemonic project of
neoliberal China, but it is also widely abhorred by the common people, not
only the newly emerging urban middle class, but sometimes the working
class itself. The self-denunciation of class subjects themselves further suffocates a class discourse, which may work to articulate class identity and
collectivity.
Here we observe a brief genealogy of class, from Mao's China to the
postsocialist period, contrasting the struggles of peasant workers in urban
industrialized areas in order to make sense of the trope of "the unmaking"
of the Chinese working class and the struggle of its own making in the
global age. We argue that this discursive dyslexia of the language class has
a tremendous effect on policy and institutional controls on population and
labor issues in China, and it not only constrains labor mobility, work opportunities, and settlement communities but also the formation of the working
class itself. The "unfinished" class composed of the new worker-subjects
who have been officially and politically identified as peasant workers (mingong) represents a process of proletarianization that could never be com-
78 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
pleted in today's China. We see a new Chinese working class struggling
to be born at the very moment when the language of "class" has been
silenced. The formation of a new working class in contemporary China
has been held in check structurally by these discursive and institutional
effects.
The process of "proletarianization" In Maoist China was unique in
that political forces rather than market forces dictated the whole process.
In the first place, Maoism provided a reinterpretation of Marx's class analysis in Chinese society by highlighting class struggles in rural societies as
well as in urban cities. As early as 1926, Mao Zedong, in his famous article
"Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society," argued that the reason for
offering an analysis of classes in Chinese society was to identify enemies
and friends of the Communist Revolution: "Who are our enemies? Who
are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution."3 Mao stated that "the leading force in our revolution is the industrial
proletariat." However, in early twentieth-century China, the modern industrial proletariat numbered only about two million, and "these two million
industrial workers are mainly employed in five industries—railways, mining, maritime transport, textiles and ship-building—and a great number are
enslaved in enterprises owned by foreign capitalists."* Mao understood that
the industrial proletariat still comprised a small number in prewar China,
even though he had high expectations about the participation of this class
in the revolution. The subsequent revolution and the wars against Japan
and the Guomingdang actually relied on the vast peasantry in the rural
areas, who, nevertheless, were classified by Mao as semi-proletariat and
the surest allies of the proletariat.^
However, after the liberation, it was the urban subjects, not the rural
masses, who were proclaimed as the avant-garde of the Chinese proletariat,
and thus they were the owners of the new China. One of the revolutionary
goals of this new Chinese proletariat was to keep class struggles alive in
order to safeguard the socialist revolution. The Chinese working class in
the Maoist period, unlike its embryonic form in the 1920s, was formed within
a short period; within a few years, it was under a command state econ3. Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1 (Peking: Foreign Language
Press, 1965), 13.
4. Mao, Selected Works, 1:18-19.
5. On the controversy between the role of the peasantry and the working class as the
leaders of revolution, see Stuart R. Schräm, The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969), 236-37.
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 79
omy, in contrast to the English or other European working classes, whose
formation, dictated by the market economy, took at least half a century.^
State-owned and collective enterprises were rapidly built, with an emphasis on the construction of heavy industry in order to safeguard China from
the West. Not only were jobs allocated to urban workers who held urban
hukou (household registry), state-owned and collective enterprises were
formulated as "units," which served as encompassing social institutions to
guarantee the new working class employment, housing, education, and
medical care. The role of the party-state—omnipotent, as it were—was to
intervene in production, reproduction, and consumption, and hence when
the planned economy was "accomplished," the process of "proletarianization" was also complete in Maoist China. The irony here is that when China
entered into an era of socialism, which had as its ultimate goal to erase
"class," it had to construct a prior working class to legitimate the political
power of the Communist Party, which proclaimed to be the avant-garde of
the Chinese proletariat. The party machine was hence trapped in a selfcontradictory practice of making and remaking the working class to constitute a project of socialist construction. Chinese subjects were interpellated with a "class identity," or "status," by the Maoist ideology of class. The
politics of articulation was so forceful that it had no difficulty producing an
obvious "misrecognition" of class-in-itself as class-for-itself.
As Wang Hui rightly puts it, the concept of class embodied a double
meaning in Mao's ideology: as a radicalized imagery for reactivating a socialist Utopia in a perpetual class struggle, and as a signifier of class status
to identify every Chinese subject, which resulted in a process of depoliticization.^ This political articulation, if not arbitration, of Mao's class concept led to "an essentialized discourse of class identity, it proved incapable
of stimulating political transformation from below. Rather, it became the
most oppressive kind of power logic, the basis for the merciless character
of subsequent faction fights. The increasing predominance of a class discourse of identitarianism, 'family origin' or 'blood lineage' was a negation
and betrayal of the subjectivist and activist outlook that was the core of
the Chinese revolution."» Thus, after the Chinese Liberation in 1949, the
whole population was interpellated with a class identity/status according
to a classification from preliberation "class" backgrounds: landlords, rich
6. Schräm, The Political Thought of Mao Tse Tung, 236-37.
7. See Wang Hui, "Depoliticized Politics, from East to West," New Left Review 41 (September-October 2006): 29-45.
8. Wang Hui, "Depoliticized Politics," 37.
80 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
peasants, middle peasants, poor peasants, and farm laborers in the rural
areas; and revolutionary cadre, revolutionary military men, professionals,
workers, store sales, bourgeoisie, industrial and commeroial capitalists,
small merchants, handicraft workers, poor people, vagabonds, and so on in
urban areas. After the socialist reform in 1955 and 1956, these class categories were radically simplified into two major class identities in the city:
cadres and workers.^ Until the end of the Cultural Revolution, there were
two major official categories of class (working class and peasantry class)
and one stratum (the intellectuals), with the meaning of class and stratum
not clearly defined.
For many Chinese subjects, especially the intellectuals who had been
classified as "rightists," it was the "radical" side of the class concept—the
perpetual class struggle that germinated into the antirightist movements in
1957 and the subsequent Cultural Revolution in 1966—that unleashed an
unimaginable and also unmanageable chaos of merciless faction fights,
euphemized as the "class struggle." The "radical" part of the class struggle
originated from a belief in self-transformation living up to the socialist construction project, a subjective foundation for a radical social transformation.
The "conservative" side of the class concept further restricted victims of
class struggles to a reified class classification that worked along with an
identitarianism discourse of birth origin and blood lineage to create a sense
of fatalism due to nothing but class. The destructiveness of Maoist class
practices was hence not hard to imagine. The double articulation of "class,"
whether in the sense of "class struggle" or "class identity," resulted in a
totalized stripping off of the structural textuality of class, that is, the classin-itse|f became a class-for-itself, a negation of its materiality. "Class" in
China became a specter stripping off its own "struggle" but using "politics"
as its agent and location. The gap between the signifier and the signified
was simply too big. The specter of class, without an embodiment of its own,
could not even find its shadow to look at.
In reform China, the textuality of "class," as construed by Mao, was
rapidly shattered when Deng Xiaoping launched the reform and open-door
policies at the beginning of the 1980s. After the June Fourth Movement,
especially after the Southern Tour of Deng Xiaoping to Shenzhen in 1992
to reaffirm his reform policies, Deng openly declared that the party-state
9. Sun Li Ping, Duaniie: Ershi shiji jiushi niandai yiiai de zhongguo shehui [Cleavage:
Chinese society since the 1990s of the twentieth century] (Beijing: zhongguo shehui chubanshe, 2004).
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 81
had to guard against radicalism from the Left more than from the Right.
The Chinese working class, previously made by "politics" and then fed with
a structural content by state enterprises or collective enterprises with a job
and a class position, was forced to go.'" Together with state bureaucrats,
the newly emerging bourgeoisie and urban middle class looked to a neoliberal discourse of modernity to create a "step down" for this working class.
The Maoist language of "class struggle" was permanently abandoned and
the privileged position of the Chinese working class denounced. The paradox of class history in China is that at this particular moment of denunciation, a new workforce was quickly formed by rural migrant workers who
poured into the newly industrialized or development zones. These regions
constituted the base for global capital, which wanted to tap into the huge
quantities of cheap labor in China. Thus, a new working class comprised of
vast numbers of peasant workers from rural China was about to be born.
This newly formed Chinese working class, however, met obstacles at the
very moment of its birth as a class force. When the class-in-itself was structurally germinating, the hegemonic blocs had no mercy for this working
class and attempted to contain it by various techniques of power. The class
struggle lay again in the creation of a "class-for-itself."
The Specter of Class
If we say that it was Mao's revolutionary ideas that engendered the
"class struggle" and hence "class" in China, then it was Deng's reforms that
announced the death of class by replacing a "modernity" discourse with a
promise to allow "a proportion of people to get rich first"—the stratum that
was capable of climbing up the social ladder to become rich. "Speaking
trauma" in the early 1980s, first as an intellectual project of the victimized
"rightists" to disclose the "evils of the Cultural Revolution," helped denounce
Mao and his belief in "class struggle" in making history. A farewell to "Mao,"
and thus a farewell to "Marx," rapidly became the common motto for the
political ideology of power and the reconfigured elite. There is no doubt that
the postsocialist party machine turned its hegemony upside down by targeting the "class" language when the society itself was undergoing a rapid
process of capitalization, and when "class," no longer an empty signifier,
10. See Andrew Wälder, "Factory and Manager in an Era of Reform," China Quarterly,
no. 118 (1989): 242-64; and Sally Sargeson, Reworidng China's Proietariat (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1999).
82 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
was going tiirough a rapid process of making and remaking. The historical
paradox is obvious: the Chinese Communist Party, once proclaimed as the
avant-garde party of the working class, now turned the sword against its
constituency. The party machine now openly and "sincerely" invited capitalists, businessmen, and managers—the new social strata that emerged in
the reform period—to become part of the Chinese working class and also
to join its membership at the turn of the twenty-first century."
New hegemonic blocs are forming, self-consciously pitted against
the language of "Marx" in general and "class struggle" in particular, that
may still shape the popular memory and history of Chinese socialism. At the
end of the 1990s, the whole intellectual circle in China was overwhelmed by
a displaced class analysis—a study of China's structure and social strata
in its contemporary period. A large research project titled "The Evolution
of the Contemporary Social Structure" carried out by a research group at
the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was tasked with the political duty
of fashioning a new social discourse on the social structure. This project
openly rejected Marxist class analysis and replaced it with a Weberian
analysis of the "structure of social strata" by arguing that "the word 'class'
(jieji) often refers to the traditional Marxist concept of class, that is, those
groups that are divided according to whether or not they own the means
of production, the groups that have mutual conflicts in their interests and
are related to each other by antagonisms and struggles. The word reminds
people of severe social conflicts, turmoil, and fights between men and
men, and some scholars and people are hostile to such a word and tend to
reject It."^^ The resulting study found that contemporary Chinese society is
divided into ten major social strata—state and social managers, managers,
private entrepreneurs, professional and technical workers, clerical workers,
the self-employed, salespersons and service workers, industrial workers,
agricultural laborers, and the unemployed and under-employed. Happily for
everyone, a modern social structure was formed, and "unlike the traditional
society, the modern structure of social strata is not pyramid-like, but olivelike, in which most members of society belong to the middle and uppermiddle positions, a minority group belongs to the upper or relatively upper
positions, and another minority group belongs to the lowest positions.""
11. People's Daily, July 2, 2002.
12. Quoted in Li iVlinqi, "China's Ciass Structure in the Worid System Perspective" (paper
presented at the Socialist Scholars Conference, New York City, IVIarch 16, 2003).
13. Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Social Science, Dangdai Zhongguo she-
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 83
Not a single use of the word class appeared in the report. Instead,
Chinese society was fetishized as an olive-like wealthy society that is blind
to an ever-growing working class created as a result of China being the
world's factory. Co-opted by a neoliberal discourse of modernity, the new
hegemonic machine was geared to denouncing "class" as a relevant social
discourse and to refuting Maoism, especially its tenet of "perpetuating class
struggle" as an obsolete and harmful mode of thought. Not all Chinese
sociologists agreed with the statement that Chinese society had already
become an olive-like society and hence transformed into a wealthy and
harmonious state. Within a framework of stratification, many more argued
that China has a pyramid-like society, which was shaped during the course
of reforms, and that the vast majority of the middle strata are still missing
in today's China. Social inequality and social tensions are the inevitable
result, since there is still no political safety valve called the middle strata
to balance the highly stratified society with the newly emerging working
class. As Li Qiang, a leading sociologist, puts it, "because of the lack of the
middle strata for a long time, the 'social tensions' cannot be easily erased
within a certain period of time. For this reason, we have to actively nurture
the social conditions for the middle strata to grow."^" Li's ultimate concern
is to create social stability for China's reforms so that the course of reforms
would not be interrupted by any social conflicts, especially class conflicts.
When the West met the East again in the late twentieth century,
the "death" of class, however, had to occur in duplicate. Western scholarship, preoccupied with a declaration of the death of "class" analysis in the
fields of social sciences since the 1980s, quickly and naturally slipped in a
Weberian analysis of social stratification. Karl Marx's class theory had died
not only in postsocialist China but simultaneously in postindustrial Western societies, where academics claimed that consumption, leisure, sport,
gender, race, and so on should be the new foci of social investigation. A
study of class or labor would become obsolete in the academic circles in
the United States and Britain in the 1980s and 1990s; whoever insisted on
working on the issue could not escape being depicted as a die-hard Marxist, implying an egghead who misunderstood historical progress. A Western society without a critical mass of industrial workers seems to mean a
hui jieceng yanjiu baogao [A report on the study of contemporary China's social strata]
(Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002), 124.
14. Li Qiang, "Dangqian zhongguo shehui jiegou bianhua de xinqueshi" [The new trend
on the change of the Chinese social structure]," Jingji jie [Economic affair] 1: 35-42.
84 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
society without class and labor. Class was never the pertinent problem of
society. The trends of poststructuralism and postmodernism further shifted
the focus from the sphere of the relations of production to the sphere of civil
society and consumption, at best, a study of middle class and consumption. It is an obvious misunderstanding that poststructuralist studies could
not enhance our understanding of class and labor, especially regarding the
issues of agency and subjectivity. The death of "class analysis" was, however, prevalent everywhere in the West.^^ Fewer and fewer studies on class
and labor were published. Departments of history, sociology, and political
science once considered class to be the crucial area of focus, but by the
end of the twentieth century, hardly a course on class or labor studies was
to be found. It was no use lamenting, of course. Mainstream Chinese scholars instead were happy to discover this "fact" and sought shelter in the declaration of the death of class analysis in the West to affirm the local project
of Chinese reformist transformation.
' Greatly influenced by Western scholarship, the study of social stratification and social inequality in Chinese society was booming after the
new millennium, especially among Chinese sociologists. With a legacy of
a double death of class from East and West, two terms, social inequality
and social strata, were used to replace the concept of "class." The four representative discourses became Sun Liping's ruptured society. Lu Xueyi's
middle-class society, Li Qiang and Li Pei Lin's Chinese society's fragmentary tendency, and Li Lu Lu's structuration theory. With the exception of
Lu Xueyi's discourse on middle-class society, which provides conceptual
guidahce on social harmony and social mobility for a research project titled
"The Evolution of the Contemporary Social Structure," the other three all
work to articulate a structural deficiency, a breakdown or fragmentation
of the reformed society resulting in an impossible crux of social inequality
between the rich and the poor. Surfacing as progressive discourses, these
debates center on the market reforms and how they create problems of
wealth distribution and social conflicts. However, all of these discourses
revert to seeking solutions from above and focus particularly on the role
of thé state in resolving social conflicts, since the state is still the most
powerful and resourceful political mechanism to keep check of the economic mechanism of the market, which, to Chinese scholars, is in need of
legal and political regulation.
15. Nelson Lichtenstein, ed., American Capitalism: Sociai Thought and Poiiticai Economy
in the Twentieth Century (Philadeiphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 85
In an interview in the Far Eastern Economic Review, Wang Shaoguang, a famous political scientist whom Western journalists have called
a prominent New Left scholar in China, states: "I call it [the reform] the
'great transformation.' In addition to economic policy, for the first time China
now has social policies. . . . Economy and society were embedded during
socialist times, then became disembedded and now they are becoming reembedded. You see this in health care and education especially." Wang is
happy to see the reintervention of the central government into the social
sphere, because "state withdrawal from areas like health care and education during the heady economic reform of the 1980s and 1990s left huge
inequities that are now beginning to be filled."^^
The concepts of "society" and "social resistance" are all but missing
in these articulations of a "problematic" society germinated from the market
economy. Social policy is what the Chinese sociologists and intellectuals
have advocated to strike a balance with economic reforms. The voice given
to social inequality granted in these discourses created in recent years a
so-called public sociology, which, we argue, is an inherent part of the history of Chinese sociology. Public sociology is in fact a characteristic of Chinese sociology that was created when the party-state asked sociologists
to take part in the reforms.^^ The paradox lies in the fact that it is "public"
without a society, just like the "republic" is without its people. In the name of
"public," most Chinese sociologists or intellectuals could only speak about
power and hope for good government (not even good governance) in the
context of economic reforms and globalization. The concept of "class" is, of
course, often subsumed in the practice of public sociology in articulating a
discourse on social inequality.^«
However, it is against this paradoxical historical moment that the
specters of Marx, in Jacques Derrida's words, are returning. They have to
come. As Derrida puts it, "The objection seems irrefutable. But the irrefutable itself supposes that this justice carries life beyond present life or its
actual being-there, its empirical or ontological actuality: not toward death
16. Leslie Hook, "The Rise of China's New Left," Far Eastern Economic Review, March/
April 2007, 8.
17. See Pun Ngai, "Pubiic Sociology in China" (paper presented at a thematic panel organized by Michael Buroway, "Public Sociology on the Global Scale," International Sociology Association, Durban, South Africa, July 23-29, 2006).
18. Exceptions are Shen Yuan's article, "Shehui zhuanxing yu gongren jieji de zai xingcheng" [The social transformation and reformation of the Chinese working class], Shehuixt/e yan//u [Sociological research] 2 (2006): 13-36.
86
boundary 2 / Summer 2008
but toward a iiving-on."^^ This had the "visoreffect: we do not see who looks
at us," but "this spectral someone other iool<s at us."^° A new Chinese working class is struggling to be born at the very moment when the language of
"class" is curtailed and becomes inarticulate. This spectral other is haunting and gazing at itself, but expecting no one else to see it.
A Historical Farce? The Return of Ciass Discourse in Hu's Era
I
With the new leadership of Hu and Wen in 2002, the political discourse shifted to create a new hegemony of the "harmonious society" in a
now highly polarized China. Plagued by a cacophony of social grievances
on the issue of social polarization, and a booming of collective actions in
both rural communities and newly developed export-processing zones in
the cities, the new leadership was no longer able to rely on a neoliberal
discourse to boost its economic development policies that were negligent
of social costs. To strike a balance between economic development and
social equality has become a political fiat; otherwise, the legitimacy of the
party-istate will be seriously questioned. Political showbiz, such as paying
visits to revolutionary sites, remote villages, and coal mines in recent years,
made appealing the return of the party-state, long criticized as elitist and
corrupted but now touted as the party that could rebuild the legitimacy
of the working class and the rural poor. Building a "harmonious society"
hence required a new "imagineering" of urban societies and rural communities, and a reunion of the brokenhearted working class, comprised of
retrenched urban workers and rural migrant workers, with the party-state.
Social stability, after all, has become the backbone of economic development in China, the only justification for the unruly market and the authoritarian state.
It is exactly under this new turn of hegemonic discourse that we have
observed recently a return of class discourse. This creates another irony:
the party-state proclaimed that the vast number of rural migrant workers
was part of the army of production workers and hence for the first time recognized them as part of the working class in the official discourse in 2003
and 2004. At the beginning of 2004, the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee and the State Council issued a "No. 1 Document," entitled
"Opinions on Policies for Facilitating the Increase of Farmers' Income,"
19. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), xx.
20. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7.
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 87
in which Hu and his regime publicly state that "peasant workers are the
important component of production workers" and hence deserve state protection and basic civil rights.^^ A harmonious society with recognition of the
new working class looks self-contradictory, but the party-state now intends
to soothe this long-subdued working class by firmly circumventing it with
state protection and a liberal discourse of civil rights.^^
A few Chinese scholarly studies on the formation of a new working
class, long overdue, ironically coincide with this hegemonic turn. Wu Qingjun's 2006 article "Theoretical Review on the Formation of the Working Class
in the West: A Rethinking of the Chinese Society in Transition"23 first raises
a question: Can a transitioning socialist country formulate a new working
class similar to the working classes formed in England and France in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries? If a new working class is formed, what
will be the long-term impacts on Chinese society? By providing an answer
to this question, Shen Yuan offers a macro-discourse on the formation of
two modes of working class in today's China—one was formulated following
Polanyi's thesis on the tyranny of a disembedded market over society and
the encompassing process of the commodification of labor, and the other
was shaped by Marx's class theory on capitalism organized through the
expropriation of means and relations of production and hence the inevitable
result of labor exploitation. The former was construed to understand the
labor struggles of state-owned enterprise workers whose life experiences
were under serious attack by an increasingly disembedded market and the
rapid process of commodification of labor in Chinese society. The latter was
used to understand rural migrant workers who were now working in foreigninvested or privately owned companies in the coastal areas of China, forming a Marxist sense of the working class, whose lives were dictated by the
new dormitory factory regime and who had nothing but their own labor to
be sold to capital.
21. See Central Committee of the CCP and State Council of the People's Republic of
China (2004), Guanyu cujing nongmin zengjia shouru zhengcede yijian (Yihao wenjian)
[Opinions on policies for facilitating the increase of farmers' income (No. 1 Document)];
the full document is available (in Chinese) at http://www.china.com.cn/chinese/pi-c/
493311.htm.
22. See Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt {Ber\ie\eY. University of California Press, 2007).
23. See Wu Qingjun, "Xifang gongren jieji xingcheng lilun shuping li Zhongguo zhuanxingqide sikao" [Theoretical review on the formation of the working class in the West: A
rethinking of the Chinese society in transition], SA)e/7u/xueyan//u [Sociological research] 2
(2006): 182-203.
88 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
The year of 2006 marked a recurrence of class studies in mainland
China. While Wu and Shen are eager to articulate the new rise of a working
class in today's China, others are prone to argue for an unmaking of the
newly emerging working class. The most representative work, published in
2006 by Yu Jiangrong, The Plight of China's Working Class: An Analysis
of Anyuan, argues that the Chinese working class, historically and politically formed, is a lost one. Based on a historical and ethnographic study of
workers in Anyuan over more than four years, Yu provokingly argues that
the collective actions carried out by Anyuan miners were not organized
along class lines and hence those workers' actions could only be characterized as "non-class collective actions.''^"
While Yu Jiangrong sympathetically calls for political legitimacy for
Chinese workers and urges them to organize themselves legally and to
formulate their class consciousness and hence to transform from a classin-itself into a class-for-itself on its own, he basically underestimates the
capability of the Chinese working class to make sense of its class positions
in relation to capital, state, and its counterparts—in this context, the newly
emerging middle class and urban elites. A "lost" class is how Yu's describes
contemporary Chinese society, which he understands as a scientific conclusion from his in-depth empirical studies on Anyuan miners' struggles.
His good intentions of protecting the fruition of the Chinese working class
by not being hijacked by some Utopian intellectual project have trapped
him in a theoretical and empirical cul-de-sac from which he argues that
the Chinese working class was ontologicaliy a lost one and that its current
struggles are existentially non-class oriented. The unexpected result of this
depoliticization process is probably not Yu Jiangrong's intent, for he is anxious to protect the "authentic" formation of the working class on its own.
Two other mainland scholars, Xu Yeping and Shi Xiuying, have
overtly suggested that the new Chinese working class can be unmade if its
collective actions and labor organizing can be co-opted within the existing
political system. They argue:
The working class can be formed. It can also not be formed. What
determines its formation or not depends on if the society can coopt the workers into the existing system, letting the workers achieve
a relative fairness comparable to other strata through a regulative
implementation of the existing system. If the workers can't be co24. See Yu Jiangrong, Zhongguo gongren jieji zhuangkuang: Anyuan shilu [The plight of
China's working class: An analysis of Anyuan] (Hong Kong: Mingjing Publisher, 2006).
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 89
opted into the existing system, or if they are only co-opted through
formality without substantially achieving what the workers consider
as fairness, then the formation of the working class in the Marxist
sense is inevitable.^^
Appearing to sympathize with workers' demands and to recognize
the right of the workers to organize themselves legally, Xu and Shi's detour
to protect workers' rights results in a justification of the existing system and
the deprivation of the right of the working class to create its own class.
Concluding Discussion: A New Class Subject?
In this essay, we have observed a few of the historical paradoxes
in class politics and class discourse in China. We first witness a dyslexic
process in the language of class in the 1980s and the 1990s in mainland
China when a new working class was structurally forming. The concept of
class was subsumed in local scholarship. It was replaced by the concept
of stratification, a concept gaining popularity in the 1990s and in the new
millennium, leading to an inevitable process of depoliticization in today's
China. We have also tried to historicize this subsumption of class and to
tease out the subtleties of its structure of continuity and rupture rooted in
Mao's period of "class and revolution." The current practices of Chinese
intellectuals and their studies on the issue of social stratification and social
inequality further stifle a class discourse and thus cancel out a new understanding of class conflicts that are emerging in the rapidly changing Chinese society. The denouncement of the "class" concept in China coincided
with the Western declaration of the death of "class analysis" since the
1970s and hence served the reform ideology. Recent recurrence of the
analysis of class, except by a few, also prolongs a depoliticized discourse,
erasing a possible critique of China's transformation into global capitalism.
Maoism in socialist China placed great emphasis on human agency
and creativity and thus was the antithesis to the orthodox Marxist analysis
of class and society. The notion of "class" was no doubt alien to the Chinese
peasantry, who formed the base of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and
yet the Communist Party persistently proclaimed itself the vanguard of the
Chinese proletariat. The arbitrary relationships between political symbol25. Xu Yeping and Shi Xiuyin, "Gongren jieji xincheng: tizhi nei yu tizhi wai de zhuanhuan
[The formation of the working class: The transference inside and outside of the existing
system]," Xue hai [Academic worid] 4: 27-39; our translation.
90 boundary 2 / Summer 2008
ism and class subjects were too conspicuous, making the Chinese Communist Revolution look like a "postmodern project" long before postmodernism came into play in the field of social analysis. There was too great a
gap between the signified and the signifier, and the discrepancy sustained
and yet at the same time defeated the language of "class" as a meaningful signification, while the language persistently and seriously affected the
configuration of the Chinese subject status. It is no wonder that the political
signification of socialist China required mass mobilization from time to time
to cover up this discrepancy. The Chinese subject in terms of "class" identity thus was not understood as a distortion, but the interpellation of subject
positions demanded a force if anything was to be greater than the economic or material. The dialectics of class relations, Mao believed, required
a cultural revolution.
The formation of the new Chinese worker-subjects, dagongmei or
dagongzai, with all their struggles, unique color and vibrancy, and multiple
locations, can no longer be described or politicized as a mere Maoist "class
struggle," as the subjects experience, make sense, react, and project their
life trajectories in contemporary China. This does not mean that class analysis is simply outdated because the language of class is now diluted by the
hegemonic discourses of state and capital in the search for a global China.
It is not that simple. Restructuring class structures and relationships is a
contemporary project for capitalists and the newly emerging elite in Chinese
society. And yet the subsumption of class analysis in order to hide class
positions and social privileges is the political strategy of the new hegemon.
The language of class is subsumed so as to clear the way for a neoliberal
economic discourse that emphasizes Individualism, professionalism, equal
opportunities, and the open market. Thus, the history of "class" in China is
doubly displaced, first by the Chinese party-state, and second by the market. The hallucination of class as a "signifier" is very political in the sense
that it helps to truncate the signification of the class experience in rapidly
shifting contemporary Chinese society. The recurrence of class studies in
recent years, still very limited and confined in academic circles, looks like
a historical farce, since the term class reappears as part of the hegemonic
project of the new leadership of the party-state, whose political aim is to
trade off state and legal protections to the new working class in order to
gain a "harmonious society," the new political slogan of the party-state.
As a weapon of social struggle, class analysis, if useful, can only
be reactivated by rooting it in class experience from below, that is, in the
everyday micropolitics of a dormitory labor regime in which the Chinese
Pun and Chan / The Subsumption of Class Discourse 91
workers themselves confront capital and the market.^^ The new Chinese
dagong subjects have to live out their own class experience as part of their
life struggles in concrete, lived spaces. And if the Chinese subject was
once traumatically interpellated by an alien language of class from above,
then the dagongmei/zai, as the new subjects that have emerged at the
intersection of global capitalism and the Chinese modernity project, invoke
a desire for a return to "class analysis" at the workers' shop floors and
dormitories, spaces where the workers live out their own complexities and
their conflicted life experiences.^' We take care to note that it was not "class
analysis" as such that grafted onto the Chinese subject the effects of a
hegemonic discourse but instead the very nature of its political arbitrariness from above. If "class analysis" is already a dead language in today's
China, the rearticulation of the new "dagong" subjectivity in postsocialist
China is, nevertheless, a timely project. We hope that the workers' dormitories, which serve as the microspace of domination and resistance, can also
create a space of alterity for this new working class.
26. As Elizabeth Perry rightly puts it, "Labor politics begins with the laborers themselves:
their geographical origins, gender, popular culture, education attainments, work experiences, and the like" (in Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor [Stanford,
Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993], 4-5).
27. See Pun Ngai and Chris Smith, "Putting the Transnational Labour Process in Its
Place: The Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China," Work, Empioyment and
Society 2\, no. 1 (2007): 27-46; and Chris Smith and Pun Ngai, "The Dormitory Labor
Regime in China as a Site for Control and Resistance," International Journal of i-iuman
Resource Management 17 (August 8, 2006): 1456-70.