Understanding Contentious Collective Action by Chinese Laid-off Workers: the Importance of Regional...

94 Studies in Comparative International Development / Summer 2004

Understanding ContentiousCollective Action by Chinese

Laid-Off Workers: The Importanceof Regional Political Economy*

William Hurst

Episodes of contentious collective action involving laid-off workers have eruptedthroughout China in recent years. With few exceptions, studies of Chinese laid-offworkers’ contention have attempted to generalize from field research in very few—or even single—localities. This limitation has led to several debates that can fre-quently be addressed by examining differences in political economy among China’sindustrial regions. Based on 19 months of fieldwork and over 100 in-depth inter-views with workers, managers, and officials in nine Chinese cities, this article offersa systematic, sub-national comparative analysis of laid-off workers’ contention. Thearticle also addresses broader issues in the analysis of social movements and con-tentious politics, a field that has too often failed to take such regional differencesinto account.

Introduction

Over the past 15 years, more than 30 million workers (Zhongguo Laodong TongjiNianjian, various years) have been involuntarily cast out of the Chinese state’s

embrace, laid off1 from state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Incidents of contentiouscollective action by displaced workers have erupted in various parts of the country,most recently grabbing headlines in March of 2002 (Eckholm, 2002a; 2002b;Pomfret, 2002a; 2002b). No public quantitative data exist on the frequency, inten-sity, or types of workers’ protests in China, but from sporadic media reports, schol-ars’ field interviews and observations, and leaked internal estimates and reports(Hurst and O’Brien, 2002: 346; Chen, 2000a; Lee, 2000a; The General Office of

William Hurst is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at the University of California, Berkeley,where he is completing a dissertation on the politics of China’s state-sector lay-offs. His previouspublications include “Analysis in Limbo: Contemporary Chinese Politics Amid the Maturation ofReform” (with Lowell Dittmer; Issues & Studies, December 2002/March 2003), and China’s Con-tentious Pensioners” (with Kevin O’Brien; The China Quarterly, June 2002).

Studies in Comparative International Development, Summer 2004, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 94-120.

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the Henan Federation of Trade Unions, 1999), we know that there are at least hun-dreds, and probably thousands, of contentious episodes in China every year. Thetrend, if anything, has also been toward increasing numbers, greater intensity, andmore cohesive organization over the past 10 years (Solinger, 2003a: 87; Shih, 1994).

Despite the paucity of data on workers’ protests and the difficulties of conduct-ing field research about these events, various explanations of observed patterns ofcontention have been posited recently by China scholars. These explanations havefocused on grievances, frames, mobilizing structures, claims, tactics, and targets ofprotest (Chen, 2003; Hurst and O’Brien, 2002; Blecher, 2002; Lee, 2000a, 2002;Cai, 2001: 243–251; Cai, 2002; Solinger, 2000). These aspects of mobilization,with the possible exception of grievances, are also traditional foci of broader litera-tures on social movements and contentious politics. The China literature still re-quires a more complete picture of the causal processes behind these facets of workers’contention. With few exceptions (Lee, 2000b; Solinger, 2001), studies of Chineseworkers’ contention have attempted to generalize from field research in single or avery small number of localities. This practice has led to several debates which, infact, can often be largely explained by differences in the political economy, forgedthrough divergent processes of industrialization, of China’s industrial regions. Re-gional political economy, long a focus of research on other aspects of Chinese his-tory and politics (Skinner, 2001), is a key variable (left out of most analyses, todate) in explaining workers’ contention in China, and quite possibly elsewhere, aswell (Crowley, 1997; Kimeldorf, 1988; Tilly, 1964; Tarrow, 1967).

My findings are based on over 150 in-depth interviews that I conducted betweenJuly 2000 and July 2002. The interviewees were workers, SOE managers, and offi-cials in the cities of Benxi, Chongqing, Datong, Luoyang, and Shanghai, as well asin Beijing.2 Although it is difficult (and often impossible) to obtain reliable Chi-nese local-level data on employment, population, and other important variables, Itook every step to ensure that interviewees were chosen systematically and that myinterview data present as accurate a picture as possible of Chinese political andsocial reality. In each fieldwork site, I included worker interviewees from all majorsectors present, and from a variety of educational backgrounds and job-grades, aswell as a rough balance of male and female workers distributed between the ages of25 and 55. Finally, I interviewed workers residing in each major district or area ofthe city, managers from as many different SOEs as possible, and local officialsfrom as many different local government branches as possible.

Regional political economy and the regional legacies of industrialization thathave helped produce it are central influences on the nature and severity of workers’grievances, as well as on the shape of workers’ tactics, frames, targets, claims,political opportunity, and mobilizing structures. This article examines these rela-tionships through the lens of systematic sub-national comparative analysis (Snyder,2001), the conclusions of which can be specified in the framework laid out in Fig-ure 1.3

The following sections focus on defining each of the variables in the frameworkand explaining how they are shaped by regional legacies of industrialization andcontemporary political economy. My arguments here are meant only to explaincontention by laid-off SOE workers and do not directly discuss the actions of ruralmigrants, retirees, or SOE workers still employed.


Regions and Regional Political Economy

There are four main regions where SOE lay-offs have been a serious problem inChina (Guowuyuan Fazhan Yanjiu Zhongxin, 2001): the Northeast (Liaoning, Jilin,and Heilongjiang), North-Central China (the provinces of Henan, Shanxi, andShaanxi, plus the cities of Baotou and Lanzhou), the Central Coast (Tianjin,Shandong, Jiangsu, and Shanghai), and the Upper Changjiang (Hubei, Hunan,Chongqing, and Sichuan). Industrialization in all of these regions occurred prima-rily during the 100-year period from 1880 to 1980. Each region has a distinctivesectoral distribution of SOEs, timing and manner of industrialization, relative pres-ence of commercial centers, and transportation infrastructure, as well as a distincthistorical relationship with the central government, and its own particular politicaleconomy. Each region thus faces a unique employment situation, as reforms haveintensified the underlying divergent development patterns. Specifically, three typesof regional political economies can be observed today across these four regions: the“Stalinist rust belt” of the Northeast, the “booming market” of the Central Coast,and the tentative transition political economies of the North-Central and UpperChangjiang regions.

The Northeast became an industrial base during the period of Japanese occupa-tion between 1931 and 1945 (Chao, 1983; Kong, 1986; Duara, 2003: 41–69), withan additional burst of large-scale industrialization on the Soviet model (and withheavy Soviet involvement) during the first Five Year Plan between 1953 and 1957(Smyth and Zhai, 2003: 177). The principle sectors were steel, railroad equipment,

FIGURE 1

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mining, and petroleum. While rail infrastructure within the Northeast is relativelygood, the region has always been a borderland; it was not fully under Chinesecontrol until its Manchurian kings conquered the Ming Empire in 1644, and evenunder the Japanese was still a frontier that drew migrants with its open lands andindustrial jobs. As a boom economy of both militarist/colonial and communist plan-ning, the Northeast has never been the site of any appreciable commercial centers,and the market has always been marginal.

The Northeast since the 1980s has been unable to realize any gains from unfold-ing economic reform. Rather, its heavy industrial behemoths have consistently lostout at every stage of China’s move from plan to market. Today, the Northeast facesby far the worst difficulties of state sector lay-offs (at least in relative terms) andhas the fewest tools to combat the resulting problems. Jobs outside of SOEs areextremely scarce. Local governments lack resources to take care of laid-off work-ers or to keep them from protesting. Many Northeastern officials feel betrayed bythe central state; once the darlings of central planners, they feel that their region hasbeen abandoned by the very state that in earlier days created its success. The decay-ing cities of the Northeast, filled with crumbling socialist industrial giants, can thusbe characterized as the Stalinist rust belt of contemporary China. For my research,I chose the city of Benxi, a steel and mining town of 750,000 in Liaoning province,as representative of this Northeastern political economy.

The contrast between the Northeast and the Central Coast is stark. The CentralCoast began industrializing rapidly in the mid-nineteenth century, largely throughforeign direct investment from countries with concessions in its “treaty ports,”4 andhas continued to the present. Every sector is represented, from steel and automo-biles to textiles and shoes to precision parts and jewelry. This region, and Shanghaiand Tianjin in particular, became the center of consumer manufacturing and muchof China’s higher-end heavy industry during the 1950s and 1960s (G. Tian, 1996;X. Tian, 1999). The Central Coast has been one of China’s richest regions andcontains many of the country’s largest centers of trade and commerce, and mostports of entry.

Today, the Central Coast is the center (along with Guangdong) of China’s mar-ket development, and as such can truly be called a booming market economy. Inmany analyses Shanghai even rivals Hong Kong as a center of finance and com-merce and the primary entrepot at the interface of China’s domestic economy andthe outside world. Rather than being abandoned by the central state, many CentralCoast local officials have strong links to Beijing; Jiang Zemin himself entered thecentral leadership immediately after serving as mayor of Shanghai. Already pros-pering with market development, Central Coast cities have also received huge sharesof central investment in infrastructure projects, from new airports and magneticlevitation trains to skyscrapers, bridges, and even new cities. Despite large-scalelay-offs, Central Coast cities have become national models for their handling of thecrisis. According to a variety of sources, most laid-off workers in this area actuallydo find re-employment and nearly always receive generous welfare subsidies andbenefits that can exceed employed Northeastern workers’ salaries (Tang, 2003;Solinger, 2002 and 2003b; Hurst, 2002 and 2003a). I include Shanghai among myfieldwork sites as representative of the Central Coast political economy.

North-Central China’s economy is dominated by coal mining, as the region con-


tains some of Asia’s largest and richest deposits. Besides coal, this region is a cen-ter for manufacture of agricultural machinery (e.g., tractors and combines) and suchlight-industrial goods as textiles and glass. While coal has been mined in North-Central China since at least 1900, mines were greatly expanded and most otherindustries were established during the 1950s (Pomeranz, 1993; Goodman, 1999;Watson, Yang, and Jiao, 1999). Although the market is small and this is one ofChina’s poorest regions (in terms of per capita GDP), there have been significantcommercial centers in North-Central China since at least the Bronze Age. It is alsoone of the best-connected regions in the country, with many important rail hubs.

North-Central cities today present an amalgam of these aspects of their in-dustrialization. There have been proportionally fewer lay-offs among the mostlyresource-extractive and light-industrial workers of North-Central cities than in theNortheast or Central Coast regions. The region also has some programs to assistlaid-off workers with re-employment and, unlike in the Northeast, self-employ-ment in the newly emerging market sectors is a real possibility for many. Althoughthe booming markets and abundant opportunities of the Central Coast are still outof reach, there are signs of market growth at key transport hubs and in lower-endsectors. Moreover, North-Central SOEs are not beset by quite such severe difficul-ties as those in the Northeast. Still, this is a region balanced on a knife’s edge,uncertain of its future and fearful that its progress could be erased overnight. Localelites feel tension in their relations with the center they depend on for assistance inkey areas and during crises, but which generally has given little help to their region’sdevelopment. The economy of North-Central China is thus one of tentative transi-tion, in which market reforms have not failed as in the Northeast, but have suc-ceeded at best only halfway. Included in my fieldwork as representative of thisNorth-Central political economy are Luoyang and Datong, cities of between 1 mil-lion and 2 million in Henan and Shanxi provinces, with large coal mines, tractorfactories, textiles, and other light manufacture.5

The Upper Changjiang region has many important commercial centers along theYangzi River (i.e., Changjiang) and its tributaries, but developed industries—mostlyin defense-related sectors and textiles, but also in mining, steel, machine building,and some light manufacture—in two spurts: first in the 1930s and 1940s as thelocation of the Nationalist (Kuomintang) Government’s wartime capitol, and withthe building of the Beijing-Guangzhou railroad; and then in the late 1960’s andearly 1970’s, following a period of significant but less intensive development dur-ing the First Five Year Plan, as the focus of the CCP’s “Third Front” policy to buildup defense-related industrial capacity in regions shielded from attack by either theUnited States or the Soviet Union. The rivers of the Upper Changjiang providegood transportation networks within the region, with commercial centers at theirbottlenecks. Parts of the region are also traversed by major rail lines. Other partsare off the main rail corridors, however, making overall transportation access some-what uneven. Markets and informal trade have long flourished in the UpperChangjiang.

Like North-Central China, the Upper Changjiang today has a political economyof tentative transition. Self-employment is an option in emerging market sectorsand large commercial centers. Local elites have important yet strained ties to thecentral state, and SOEs in military, resource extractive, and light industries have

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faced relatively more stable employment environments than in the Northeast (eventhough the rate of lay-off here has been somewhat higher than in the North-Centralregion). I selected Chongqing, a city of over 30 million, as representative of theUpper Changjiang for my fieldwork.

Both the North-Central and Upper Changjiang regions belong to a middle cat-egory of tentative transition between the political economic collapse (or near col-lapse) of the Stalinist rust belt in the Northeast and the prosperity and rapiddevelopment of the booming market on the Central Coast. These three categories ofregional political economy are key to the arguments that follow, as summarized inTable 1.

Grievances and Claims

Previous scholarship on grievances of Chinese laid-off SOE workers—particularlythose grievances concerning subsistence issues, corruption, welfare or pension pay-ments and back wages, and the restructuring or closure of firms (Lee, 2000a and2002; Hurst and O’Brien 2002; Solinger 2000)—has not systematically addressedthe effects of regional political economy. The most direct influence of regionalpolitical economy is on determining the direct obligations to workers on which thestate and SOEs are likely to have reneged. Unpaid wages, for example, appear tosurface much more regularly in the Northeastern Stalinist rust belt than anywhereelse, due to the poor state of the market, the predominance of aging heavy-indus-trial firms, and the relatively remote location of most industrial cities. In the tenta-tive transition political economies of North-Central China and the Upper Changjiang,unpaid wages seem to be a common grievance of workers in smaller firms, but notin larger ones, and often are an especially big problem in particular sectors—nota-bly textiles. In the booming market on the Central Coast, unpaid wages do not seem

TABLE 1

Regional Primary Primary PoliticalPolitical Type of Type of Dominant Opportunity Overt HiddenEconomy Grievances Claims Frame Structure Target Target

Stalinist Subsistence General, Maoist Relatively Local CentralRustbelt Subsistence, Moral Open/ Govern- State(Northeast) Restorative Economy Sympathetic ment

Tentative Opportunity Specific, Head Relatively Local LocalTransitional Opportunity, Down & Closed Govern- State,(Upper Regulatory Muddle ment CorruptChangjiang Through Officialsand North-Central)

Booming Contractual Specific, Market Malleable Firms or FirmsMarket Legalistic Hegemony Local(Central Enforcement Govern-Coast) ment


to be an issue for most workers. Other such grievances, such as lack of payment ofbenefits or subsidies, follow a similar regional distribution.

Regional political economy also shapes “grievances of opportunity.” Grievancesover a lack of re-employment or self-employment opportunities for laid-off work-ers appear to be much more common in the Northeast (Si, 2003: 167) and much lesscommon along the Central Coast than in the Upper Changjiang or North-Centralregions, where such problems are persistent but rarely severe. This variation isclosely tied to the strength of market sectors in the cities of each region. Transpor-tation links play a role, in so far as their relative presence or absence discourages orpromotes long-distance trade.

One partial exception to this pattern is grievances related to local state corrup-tion and managerial malfeasance that seem to exist in all types of firms and acrossall regions. Even these issues, however, appear to be more pronounced in someregions (in the tentative transition areas) than in others. Feng Chen has pointed outthe significance of corruption grievances in his work on Henan and the North-Central region (Chen, 2000a), and it indeed appears that these sorts of grievancesare more common there than in the Northeast and far more common than in CentralCoast cities (Chen, 2000b). In the Upper Changjiang, my interviews revealed per-vasive corruption-related grievances, and a knowledgeable central government of-ficial singled out the Upper Changjiang provinces and municipalities as the centerof the most severe of such problems (Interviewee 5; Chen, 1998; Xie, 1994).

This severity can perhaps be explained by the fact that most Northeastern firmsare so badly off that they struggle just to stay in production (and even then oftenrequire heavy subsidies), whereas the wells of graft may not yet have run dry forNorth-Central coal mines or Upper Changjiang automotive plants with still-viablerevenue streams. Central Coast cities are frequently subject to much closer over-sight, by both provincial and central governments, than cities in other regions. High-profile corruption stings, harsh penalties (frequently death), and a desire by officialsat various levels to put a good face on the cities most likely to be scrutinized by thecentral government or outside observers also contribute to the lower incidence offlagrant corruption triggering collective action on the Central Coast.

Regional political economy also influences the severity and acuteness of griev-ances. On the Central Coast, workers’ most basic subsistence is almost never indoubt. In all other regions, however, sincere cries of “we want to eat” and “give usfood” are hallmarks of workers’ protests (Lee, 2000a; Chen, 2000a; Perry, 1999).Of course, the frequency of subsistence grievances varies within these regions,with workers in certain sectors (again textiles, as well as agricultural implementmanufacture), in small firms (Morris, Sheehan, and Hassard, 2001: 701), or in theNortheast (Si, 2003: 165) being much more likely than others to experience genu-ine subsistence crises. The same is true of unpaid wages and subsidies; while work-ers in other regions sometimes receive no wages or subsidies at all, workers on theCentral Coast often complain that they do not receive all that they are owed by theirfirms or the local state, but with few exceptions, they nearly always get something.The booming-market political economy of the Central Coast gives rise to griev-ances related to fairness or degree, whereas the tentative transition and Stalinistrust belt political economies often produce grievances of both opportunity and sub-sistence of varying frequency and severity.

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Although often discussed separately as part of “repertoires of contention” (Tilly,1978), claims articulated in the course of collective action are frequently basedclosely on grievances. Chinese laid-off workers’ claims are also shaped by aspectsof regional political economy. Although many interviewees in Benxi expressed opendispleasure with the central leadership and its reform policies, I uncovered no evi-dence that personal attacks on central leaders, outright denunciations of the reformproject, or open calls to restore the Maoist order have been among the claims ofprotesters in this Stalinist rust belt political economy.

The roughly 100 steel workers I observed blocking the entrances to the TradeUnion headquarters in downtown Benxi on November 19, 2001, for example, madeexplicit claims about their inability to subsist, since their living subsidies had notbeen paid for many months. Some of them carried signs with slogans such as “TheChinese Communist Party is the Vanguard of the Working Class” and “Socialism isGood,” but said nothing directly critical of current leaders or specific reform poli-cies. Coal miners, who had participated in a large protest at the Benxi City Govern-ment compound in June 2000, said their claims had been purely subsistence-related,and that they used “old ways of thinking from before reform” to phrase their com-plaints, conscientiously refraining from directly attacking current policies or politi-cal leaders, even though they held strong opinions that today’s leaders and policieswere to blame for their circumstances (Interviewees 12, 13, 14). Some strategyclearly went into translating their grievances into claims articulated in their collec-tive action.

Workers in the booming market city of Shanghai, who have clearly benefited (atleast in absolute terms) from 25 years of economic reform and generally have noproblems insuring their basic subsistence, do not make claims about being unableto eat—rather, they often advance claims regarding school fees (and their inabilityto pay them), unpaid subsidies, or rare incidents of flagrant corruption or embezzle-ment in their firms (Interviewees 30, 35; Gu, 2002). While the claims of Northeast-ern workers are likely to be general, moral-economic, and subsistence-related, thoseof Central Coast workers tend to be legalistic, contractual, and related to specificfailure to deliver promised benefits.

One laid-off worker from a fish-processing plant in Shanghai told of how shewas able to handle all the hardships of being sent to the countryside as a youth, ofbeing laid off, and of working long hours in the collective-sector supermarket whereher work unit was able to place her. She has never had trouble feeding her familyand always received some subsidies. When her job didn’t pay full wages for threemonths, however, she and her co-workers protested, blocking traffic on the fash-ionable Nanjing East Road until the city government stepped in to enforce theircollective contract (Interviewee 36). Similar to some retirees, a laid-off Shanghaichemical worker on the verge of retirement said that, although she has had diffi-culty making ends meet since losing her job, she would never consider protestingunless her pension were withheld after her formal retirement. Upon further ques-tioning, she responded that she had a “formal contract” with her firm to supply thispension, and so it is “legally protected” in a way that other subsidies are not (Inter-viewee 37; Hurst and O’Brien 2002: 350–351, 353). Protests in the tentative transi-tion political economies of the Upper Changjiang and North-Central regions oftenrely on a different sort of claims. Although Feng Chen is right to point out that


subsistence and corruption claims often predominate in these regions (Chen, 2000a),the story seems to be more complex than starving workers being pushed over atipping point by corruption scandals. When workers have subsistence problems inthese areas, they tend to attribute them, through the prism of the “keep your headdown and muddle through” frame (to be discussed later), to a lack of particular jobsor specific instances of corruption or misguided regulation, rather than to failingsof the reform project as a whole. Their claims often make reference to problems,blamed on the local state or corrupt officials, that they have encountered in ekingout their subsistence, as opposed to the root causes of their hardships or simplytheir acute subsistence problems.

Some of the roughly 250 workers I observed blocking the gates of the DatongCity Government on July 8, 2002, for example, carried signs saying, “We want toeat” and shouted about the lack of benefits. No old socialist slogans were displayed,however. Further observations and casual conversations with several protesters re-vealed that their specific claims had much more to do with regulatory issues thanwith other state failures. Specifically, more than 50 protesters were bicycle taxidrivers, protesting because the city threatened to prohibit the trade they had de-pended on since losing their jobs in a machine plant. Several workers from a brew-ery objected to the local government’s recent closure of numerous informal labormarkets around town, where they had found work as day-laborers. Finally, severalpharmaceutical plant workers said they were protesting because embezzlement bytheir factory director had used up all the money that was intended for their badlyneeded subsidies. Several participants in past protests in Chongqing also said thattheir claims had been related to local crackdowns against motorcycle taxis, ped-dlers, and other occupations in which they had found informal employment afterlosing their jobs in military enterprises, and textile plants (Interviewees 41, 42, 43, 44).

Laid-off workers’ grievances and claims in the Northeastern Stalinist rust belttend to be moral, general, restorative, and subsistence-related, even with some fil-tering of the most inflammatory grievances in the process of claim articulation. Inthe booming market of the Central Coast, workers’ grievances and claims are nearlyalways contractual, specific, and even legalistic. Finally, in the North-Central andUpper Changjiang tentative transition political economies, corruption grievancesand claims, along with gripes over regulatory assaults on laid-off workers’ liveli-hoods, predominate.

Frames

Using a concept that originated in the study of other outcomes (Goffman, 1974),many have observed that how grievances and collective action are framed can sig-nificantly influence the course of contention. Ching Kwan Lee has paid particularattention to framing of Chinese workers’ protests and presents a picture, based onher research in the Northeast, of Chinese workers’ frames that emphasizes both theprimacy of nostalgia for the Maoist era on the one hand and modern, almost liberalconceptions of citizenship and legal rights on the other (Lee, 2000a and 2002).From a different angle, Marc Blecher, based on interview data from Tianjin on theCentral Coast, argues that a Gramscian hegemony prevents Chinese laid-off workers

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from framing their grievances in a way conducive to collective action (Blecher,2002).

Neither Lee nor Blecher lack data—indeed, both authors present detailed inter-view data and draw on many Chinese sources. The main problem is that neithersufficiently accounts for the role of regional political economy. Frames are notinfinitely malleable—they must, to some degree, conform to the grievances at handif they are to achieve any mass appeal. Also, not all frames resonate equally well inall contexts; conditions on the ground, and perceptions of these conditions in lightof individuals’ expectations and past experiences, help decide which frames pro-mote mobilization, which frames can convince workers to remain quiescent, andwhich frames are simply ignored by the vast majority of actors.

Another issue in the Chinese context is that frames cannot be openly dissemi-nated by movement leaders in the way often described in the social movementsliterature (Tarrow, 1998). Chinese workers’ contention occurs in a context wherepublic debate is not an option, protest leaders are quickly repressed by state agents,and the media typically does not even acknowledge that episodes of contentionoccur. Framing thus takes on a more mass-based, spontaneous, and informal char-acter than in many classically conceived social movements (Chen, 2003: 239–240;Thornton, 2002). Leading scholars of social movements have also recently admit-ted that their conception of framing may be too narrow (McAdam, Tarrow, andTilly, 2001: 16–17). In my analysis, I focus on what could be called “mass frames”—that is, frames not deliberately propagated or strategically employed by leaders, themedia, or other intervening actors or institutions, but that are far closer to mecha-nisms of “collective interpretation and social construction” (McAdam and Sewell,2001: 118–120) and to Goffman’s original concept.

In the Stalinist rust belt of the Northeast, one frame that resonates particularlywell could be called “Maoist moral economy” (Pripstein Posusney, 1993; Thomp-son, 1971) and closely fits what Lee describes in Liaoning Province (Lee, 2000a).This frame sees China’s entire reform project as being to blame for destroying ahealthy socialist order that existed prior to the 1980s. The Maoist golden age wasone dominated by patron-client relationships, but also one in which a general promiseof equality (or at least equity) prevailed, living standards were stable (at least forurban workers), workers’ rights were protected, and patrons fulfilled their obliga-tions to clients. What has replaced this order since 1980 is political breakdown andsocial chaos in the context of suddenly imposed severe scarcity. Responsibility liessquarely on the shoulders of the central leadership and the reform agenda it hasadvanced in recent decades, according to this frame.

As one laid-off chemical worker in Benxi said, “Workers have the right to pro-test and riot if local officials are not able to act, are incompetent, or refuse to listento workers’ legitimate demands. Chairman Mao said so himself, I remember study-ing this when I was young” (Interviewee 15). One retiree (Interviewee 18) mincedher words less:

Reform has brought nothing but problems. Political reforms have taken away rights fromthe people and undermined the revolution’s victories. Economic reforms have broughtlay-offs and poverty and have made Benxi’s economy collapse. I have been “on vaca-


tion” since 1988 and have protested many times because I often do not have enough toeat.

A miner on “long vacation” since 1993 (Interviewee 13) explained,

“Reform and opening started around 1985. Since that time, everything has consistentlygotten worse and worse. Wages don’t get paid, people lose their jobs, inequality hasbecome worse than it was before liberation [1949]. Even the Japanese managed things inthe Northeast better than today’s government. Managers and officials are all corruptnowadays and they get away with everything. There is nothing ordinary people can do.The Northeast is dying and the Communist Party does not care about socialism anymore.During the planned economy we were all poor. But we were poor together. We were allproletarians. We all ate the food from the common pot. Now, the rich people get richerwhile we all get poorer. The special characteristic of Chinese socialism is that it is espe-cially unfair!

Elements of this frame have turned up elsewhere around the country (Chen,2003: 257; Hurst and O’Brien 2002: 355–357). Even in Beijing, one laid-off chemicalworker, now working as a taxi driver (Interviewee 6), said,

When I was young, I was a Red Guard, one of the vanguard of the proletariat. Now, I amthe modern Xiangzi.6 I go here and there around Beijing and can never earn enough tolive in peace. The taxi company boss is just like the boss in the story as well—by day hedrinks my sweat, at night he sucks my blood. One day I’ll die of exhaustion. No onecares about us workers anymore. Things were much better when Chairman Mao wasalive and I was in the factory.

Although sentiments like these are shared by many (particularly older workers)across other regions (Hung and Chiu, 2003), the whole frame fully comes togetherand sparks widespread collective action in the Northeast. It is, however, undeniablethat cohort and socialization effects play some role in predisposing individuals to-ward adopting particular frames (Cai et al., 2002: 187–189; Mo, 2003: 43–44; Hurstand O’Brien, 2002).

In contrast, a frame that emphasizes the fact that workers could be worse off thanthey are, that blames individual mismanagement and petty corruption for problemsin particular firms, that sees finding a job to be the responsibility of each individual,and that recognizes the overwhelming benefits of reform has clearly been acceptedby many workers in the booming market of the Central Coast. This frame, whichcould be called “market hegemony,” is essentially what Blecher uncovered fromhis interviews in Tianjin. It is also the primary template promoted by the officialmedia (which has even gone so far as to blame laid-off workers for their poor workethic or inability to adapt to new conditions) and by many academics and officialsthroughout China (Li, Hu, and Hong, 2001; Wen et al., 2002), although it seems tofind a much more accepting audience along the Central Coast than elsewhere.

One laid-off fish-warehouse worker in Shanghai stressed that even though thingshad been more stable in the past, her family has acquired a television, refrigerator,and air conditioner over the past ten years—unthinkable luxuries in the 1970s, when

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she recalled pining for a radio or a wristwatch. She spoke of the manager of her oldSOE with expletives and harbored resentment against local officials (while admit-ting that things are better in Shanghai than anywhere else), but also said protestingwould not be worth the trouble and that her problems were probably unique to herexperience (or at least to her work unit) (Interviewee 38). A laid-off chemical workerand a laid-off sanitation worker in Shanghai echoed similar points of view(Interviewees 39, 40).

Both of these frames also appeal to certain audiences in the tentative transitionpolitical economies of the Upper Changjiang and North-Central regions. Workersbelonging to large firms in still-viable sectors—mines, some defense plants, andcertain other heavy industrial firms—often tend toward the market hegemony frame,whereas those from small firms or certain hard-hit sectors, like textiles, often tendtoward the Maoist moral-economy worldview. More widespread, however, amongworkers from all types of firms and sectors in these regions, is a third point of view.

This perspective could be called the “keep your head down and muddle through”frame. It is a way of viewing recent events and changes in Chinese society whichholds that reform has caused many problems—including widespread job losses andcorruption—but also affords the dislocated new opportunities. In line with Solinger’sfinding that many workers in Wuhan were too busy working odd jobs to protest(Solinger, 2002), adherents of this frame maintain that one must work exceedinglyhard to find the new opportunities that exist in the market, but there is little doubtthat such opportunities do exist. However, these opportunities are sufficiently frag-ile that political or social upheaval on any scale could snatch them away.

As one laid-off textile worker in Chongqing said, “protest is of no use for uslaid-off workers. No one ever gets anything from stirring up trouble and people likeme can’t stop working [in odd jobs] and go protest. We have to feed our children”(Interviewee 41). A laid-off coal miner in Datong (Interviewee 47) also observedthat,

I am afraid of what would happen if I were caught protesting. Some of my co-workersfrom the mine have protested violently and have been arrested. I am able to find enoughwork around town to feed my family, but I have no health insurance or pension. If I getin trouble, I don’t know what would happen.

The party secretary of a large SOE in Luoyang also claimed that workers in hisfactory generally remained quiet so long as they were able to find temporary work(as supposedly most of them could) because of the benefits of working combinedwith the threats of repression and lost income (Interviewee 53).

Mobilizing Structures

Mobilizing structures have received much attention in the broader literature on so-cial movements and contentious politics. They have recently also been a primaryfocus of Yongshun Cai’s research on protests by Chinese laid-off workers (Cai,2001 and 2002). One problem with looking at this aspect of collective action in thecase of Chinese laid-off workers is that they do not have very many options when it


comes to mobilizing structures. Attempts to form independent unions or associa-tions have been quickly crushed (New York Times and Chan, 2000; Jiang, 2001)and, even within the factory, Chinese workers do not have the organizational re-sources or political space to mobilize openly or even to do the equivalent of puttingup posters demanding raises as Solidarity activists did in Gdansk’s Lenin Ship-yards in 1980—and even under martial law, the political opportunity structure forPolish workers, in many important respects, remained far more open than that whichChinese workers face today.

The influence of regional legacies of industrialization on mobilizing structuresis quite simple since the only mobilizing structures clearly available to most work-ers are social networks of neighbors in apartment blocks and housing projects (Read,2003; Lee, 2000a). The intra—or inter-firm dynamic of protests is shaped by work-ers’ reliance on these weak, informal, and spatially bounded mobilizing structures.In certain sectors and localities, where large firms with self-contained housing com-pounds separated from the rest of the city are dominant, intra-firm protests arelikely all that workers can organize. Where smaller firms are the rule, and apart-ment blocks house workers from a cross-section of many firms, inter-firm collec-tive action becomes a stronger possibility. This spatial logic of workers’ mobilizationis not altogether different from that of Chinese student protesters in 1989 (Zhao,1998). The manner, location, and timing of industrialization in each particular re-gion are key in determining housing patterns of SOE workers7 and, thus, the typeof mobilizing structures available to those seeking to engage in contentious collec-tive action.

All of the protests I have observed or heard of in the Northeast (except the Spring2002 Liaoyang protests) have involved workers from single firms. The protest Iwitnessed in the North-Central city of Datong on July 8, 2002, was quite different.It involved roughly 250 workers from at least seven different firms, who were allapparently neighbors in the same housing complex. One protester I spoke with saidthat those gathered had made an effort to mobilize a wide swath of workers fromtheir neighborhood because otherwise they would be too few to make an impact,since they all came from small firms, and then cited the example of a large protesthe had heard of in Baotou (in Inner Mongolia) where 100,000 workers from ten ormore factories allegedly held the local government hostage for ten days and even-tually achieved all of their protest aims. The reliance on neighbor networks as primarymobilizing structures may also explain why certain groups of workers—pensionersand men—seem more likely to protest than others, since they are said to morefrequently remain within housing compounds after losing their SOE jobs and lessfrequently find re-employment outside the neighborhood than younger workers orwomen (Li and Zhang, 2002).8

The nature and severity of grievances can also influence how many workersmight be “swept up” in the course of collective action. Workers with particularlysevere or acute grievances may also be more likely to cobble together more high-risk, formal, or boundary-spanning mobilizing structures like independent unionsor organizations—as occurred recently during the 2002 Liaoyang protests—eventhough the dangers of doing so are generally prohibitive (O’Brien, 2003; Pan, 2002;Eckholm, 2002a). Grievances, however, mainly help determine how many sponta-neous participants can be swept up into already initiated contentious actions.

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Political Opportunity Structure

I define “political opportunity structure” as “consistent—but not necessarily for-mal, permanent, or national—dimensions of the political struggle that encouragepeople to engage in contentious politics” (Tarrow, 1998: 19–20). This definition isconsistent with earlier formulations of this variable (McAdam, 1982; Eisinger, 1973).China’s political opportunity structure, especially for SOE workers (as opposed tostudents, artists, or workers in foreign-invested firms), is much more closed thananything the social movement scholars of the 1960s and 1970s had in mind. Chinascholars have perhaps over-played this point, and have mostly, but not universally(Cai, 2001 and 2002; Wright 2001), shied away from discussion of political oppor-tunity structures and their role in promoting or discouraging workers’ contention(on political opportunity structures in the countryside, see O’Brien and Li 1995;Bernstein and Lü 2003). Political opportunity, like many other facets of contentionin China, varies by region. In some places, local elites sympathize with workers andall actors seem able to agree that central policy and reforms have jeopardized theeconomic survival of the whole region. In other places, the local state is very likelyto repress workers and has an overriding goal of preventing protests in the future,even if this means paying higher costs to repress them in the near-term. In still otherplaces—along the Central Coast—the state usually buys off workers engaging incollective action with one-time payments.

There are three primary factors that shape the political opportunity structure forworkers’ contention in each region: the extent of local state economic resources,how close the relationship is between the local state9 and the central bureaucracy,and the degree to which local officials share the workers’ frame (the presence orabsence of local elite allies). Each of these factors is largely dependent on aspectsof regional political economy.

City governments on the Central Coast rarely run short of funds. Central Coastcities, in the context of the region’s booming market political economy, depend oncentral transfers to a much smaller extent than do most cities elsewhere, and havebeen said (although this is sometimes disputed, e.g., by Interviewee 10) to paymuch more to the center than they receive in return (Interviewees 3, 7, 31, 32, 33,34).

In most provinces, particularly following China’s centralizing fiscal reforms in1994, most local government funding is transferred first from the central govern-ment to the provincial government, and then from the provincial government tolocalities (Bahl, 1998; Guowuyuan Fazhan Yanjiu Zhongxin 2002; Interviewees 1,3, 5, 9, 10, 51, 52, 55; numerous interviewees in Luoyang, Benxi, and Datong).Often, the needs of the provincial capital are met first, before funding is distributedfurther down the chain, even if smaller cities then receive inadequate funds to com-plete projects, meet spending obligations, or pay full wages to city employees(Interviewees 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 46, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55). The revenue prob-lems of many local governments outside of the central coast and away from provin-cial capitals have become so severe that many central officials acknowledged ininterviews that internal reports show that nearly all such localities are facing severefiscal crises (Interviewees 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). Western scholars have also de-tected severe fiscal crises at “subprovincial administrative levels” and “real harm”


to localities after the 1994 fiscal reforms (Bernstein and Lü, 2003: 107). The sever-ity of these fiscal crises is not uniform—cities in the tentative transition politicaleconomies of the North-Central and Upper Changjiang regions face much less acuteshortages than those in the Northeastern Stalinist rust belt.

The contrast across regions in the apparent attitudes of local elites toward work-ers’ collective action is striking. A Benxi police officer stated his view bluntly: “thelaid-off workers who make disturbances are our neighbors and classmates, our par-ents and relatives. How could we repress them? We know very clearly that they arehaving very severe difficulties” (Interviewee 19). Although other city officials ex-pressed different degrees of sympathy for workers versus retirees (Hurst and O’Brien,2002: 353), the officer’s view seems widespread among officials in Benxi.

A public security official in Zhengzhou (capital of Henan Province in North-Central China) spoke very differently about how the local state there responds toworkers’ protests, “cutting the heads off both sides is a very effective means tostopping protests. We have reduced the number of protests by 80 percent in the pasttwo years using this method and have also observed that their scale and severityhave been reduced” (Interviewee 56).10 City officials in Datong and Luoyang ex-pressed no sympathy for contentious workers nor understanding of their grievances.One city official in Chongqing stressed that, although reform has clearly hurt theworkers, they still enjoy opportunities for entrepreneurial development or re-em-ployment and contentious collective action is completely unacceptable. Differentstill was the view of a labor official in Shanghai, who stressed that workers’ pro-tests were a loss of face for the city and that the local government always tried tobring disturbances to a close as quickly as possible by paying the protesters to gohome.

While detailed analysis of local state responses to workers’ contention is an im-portant topic beyond the scope of this article (Hurst, 2003b), there seem to be threebasic attitudes Chinese local elites take toward laid-off workers’ contention. In theStalinist rust belt of the Northeast, local officials often sympathize with workers; inthe tentative transition political economies of the North-Central and UpperChangjiang regions, local officials look very unfavorably on protests and seek toquell any unrest as quickly as possible; while in the booming market along theCentral Coast, local elites try to buy off protesting workers and clear up any prob-lems that may have led to the protest to avoid embarrassment.

These differences are attributable to variation among local governments’ resourcesand their relationships with the central state. In Central Coast cities, local govern-ments have enough resources to buy off protesters and have strong incentives tocover up or quiet down contention to prevent any weakening of their close ties withthe center. In North-Central and Upper Changjiang cities, local governments withtight budgets and tenuous relationships to the central state take a hard line on work-ers’ protests, both because they do not have the resources to buy off restive workersevery time they mobilize and to prevent their delicate relations with the center fromdeteriorating further. Although the one-time costs of repression are higher than thoseof buying off protesters would be, local officials in North-Central and UpperChangjiang cities stated that they were seeking to “send a strong signal” to “let theworkers know that there is nothing to be gained from causing trouble” and to dis-courage future contention. In the Northeast, local governments are nearly bankrupt

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and often have difficulty meeting basic fiscal obligations but have little to lose intheir relationships with the center. Actually, several local officials in Benxi claimedthat, at least sometimes, workers’ protests can induce the center to transfer neededresources to the local government that would not otherwise have been forthcoming(Interviewees 2, 17, 22, 28, 29).

Northeastern workers face a relatively open political opportunity structure. Alongthe Central Coast, workers face a political opportunity structure that is malleable orsomewhat malleable, to the extent that they can force local officials into an embar-rassing situation (Yu, 2000: 113–134; Zhang, Qi, and Zhao, 2001; Chen, 2000b). Inthe Upper Changjiang and North-Central regions, workers face a closed and poten-tially quite repressive political opportunity structure, as officials there are keen tohead off future protests but lack resources to buy off contentious workers.

Targets and Tactics

Targets and tactics constitute the remaining main components of what are oftencalled “repertoires of contention.” The distinct repertoires of workers protestingagainst firm restructuring have received recent attention from Feng Chen (Chen,2003), but otherwise the China literature has been mostly silent on this topic. Al-though neither targets nor tactics exhibit the same sort of relatively neat regionalvariation as other aspects of Chinese laid-off workers’ contention, they are none-theless essential elements of workers’ collective action.

There are three potential targets available to protesting laid-off workers: theirfirms, the local state, and the central state or its direct agents. Likewise, there arethree basic tactics employed in Chinese contentious politics: non-disruptive peti-tioning (Thireau and Hua, 2003); non-violent blockage of roads, railways, or build-ing entrances; and violent action (e.g., riots, looting of property, physical attacks onmanagers or government officials). While there have been a few famous incidentsof collective violence by laid-off workers (Waldron, 2000), this tactic surfaces veryrarely and never appeared in any of the protests about which I was able to collectfirst-hand observations or interviewee accounts. Similarly, non-disruptive petition-ing does not seem to be a tactic widely employed by laid-off workers, except onrare occasions when formal labor disputes are filed or when workers travel to Beijingto present petitions to central officials.11 At least from the fragmentary and incom-plete data at hand, it appears that the non-violent blockage of transportation, gov-ernment, or production facilities is the most common tactic for workers’ protests.

Of course, workers often employ hidden or “everyday” forms of resistance (Scott,1985; 1990), sometimes even going as far as self-immolation (Sui, 2003). Manylaid-off workers move into criminal activity, causing researchers to remark that, “itis striking that workers often express a preparedness, even an intention, to turn tocrime to provide for themselves and their families if they lose their jobs” (Morris,Sheehan, and Hassard, 2001: 709; Interviewees 24, 25, 45). Famous criminals alsosometimes become folk heroes among laid-off workers. The case of “Hong Ren” inDatong during the 1990s is one example (Interviewee 48). It is difficult to deter-mine the extent to which any of this individual activity is intended to challenge thestate; thus, I have not included these among the tactics analyzed here.


If tactics are relatively constant across regions, targets clearly vary. It is useful todistinguish between “overt targets” and “hidden targets.” In contentious acts thereare two possible types of targets: the entity being directly or explicitly barricaded,denounced, attacked, or criticized (the overt target), and the entity that the conten-tious actors actually desire or expect to respond to their grievances. When these twoare not one and the same—which is sometimes true for contentious workers inChina—the latter may be referred to as a hidden target. A more proximate exampleof such a distinction is anti-war protests in Berkeley, California, in which demon-strators often block the doors of city hall or university buildings, not to convincethe already mostly anti-war (although powerless over U.S. foreign policy) politi-cians or administrators to act, but to garner wider attention and promote change infederal policy.

Northeastern workers may see central leaders and policies as responsible fortheir hardships, but the central government is politically unassailable and a non-viable target of collective action. As one irate laid-off miner in Benxi (Interviewee26) put it,

We deeply hate Jiang Zemin and the other central leaders! They have destroyed theeconomy of the entire Northeast. But it is of no use to criticize them directly. If you dothat, you will just be arrested; but it will not put food in your child’s stomach! Whenthere is a protest here, we always say that it is against problems with the Benxi citygovernment or mining bureau. That way, sometimes the central government—for ex-ample the Ministry of Civil Affairs—distributes money to help us.

For him and other Northeastern workers, in contrast to the “rightful resisters”that Kevin O’Brien and others have found in the Chinese countryside (O’Brien,1996)12 but much like the Berkeley peace activists, the local government is merelythe overt target of collective action, while the central state is the hidden target.Contentious workers in China’s Stalinist rust belt attempt to cajole or compel thecentral state to provide assistance to a region battered by its reform policies, wherelocal governments and firms are unable to relieve the workers’ suffering. A Benxicadre (Interviewee 27) summed this up by saying,

Workers are not foolish. They know that work units [SOEs] here have no money. If theyhad money, they would pay wages. They also know that our local government resourcesare very limited. They block roads and cause disturbances in front of the city govern-ment, hoping that higher-level officials will notice and give us more resources so we canhelp the workers.

For workers in the booming market on the Central Coast, firms are most oftenboth the hidden and overt targets of collective action. Only after collective actionwith the firm as their sole target has failed do they protest to force the hand of thelocal government. In both contexts, the choice of overt target may be strategic, butin each region this choice is shaped by differing sets of incentives rooted in facetsof the regional political economy. The Shanghai fish-warehouse worker mentionedearlier indicated that she and her co-workers protested on Nanjing Road only after

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smaller protests within the firm had failed to produce any results. Even when theovert target became the local state, the goal was always to make the firm obey thelaw (or what the workers believed was the law) (Interviewee 36). One Benxi man-ager (Interviewee 16) summarized such thinking (while lamenting that Northeast-ern workers don’t follow this logic),

Laid-off workers who don’t get benefits should first directly confront enterprise leadersand managers to ask for assistance. If this proves unsuccessful, they should take theirgrievances to the relevant local state bureaus. If enterprise leaders or local officials areclearly corrupt or incompetent or completely refuse to listen to workers, workers onlythen have the right to cause a disturbance.

In the Upper Changjiang and North Central tentative transition political econo-mies, local governments, and sometimes individual corrupt officials, are the mostcommon targets of laid-off workers’ collective action. As workers mobilize to pushfor redress of their grievances of opportunity, in support of regulatory reform, oragainst corruption, the local state is the most logical target (both hidden and overt)of their actions.

Conclusion

Regional political economy and regional legacies of pre-reform era industrializa-tion significantly influence Chinese laid-off workers’ grievances, frames, targets,claims, mobilizing structures, and the political opportunity structures they face inmobilizing contentious collective action. Regional fragmentation is probably thesingle most important variable to understand for assessing possible trajectories ofthe working class’s changing position and role in the Chinese polity as reform pro-ceeds. So long as laid-off workers remain divided along regional boundaries, itappears unlikely that any meaningful labor movement will arise at the nationallevel. Apparently looking to prevent even a regionally bounded labor movement,the central government recently launched a major campaign aimed at extending theCentral Coast’s booming market to the Stalinist rust belt of the Northeast (Reuters,2003; Xinhua, 2004).

It also appears unlikely that the state could cover all regional elements of theworking class with common national regulations or pull all segments of the prole-tariat together under any coherent corporatist umbrella. In terms of both mobiliza-tion and control, regional fragmentation stands in the way of the Chinese workingclass becoming a meaningful unified political actor—whether in opposition to be-ing pushed out of its “leading role” or in support of any new class coalition as-sembled by the Party as part of its realignment following Jiang Zemin’s July 1,2001 speech (Ben Shu Bianxie Zu, 2001).

Labor and unemployment are not the only aspects of contemporary Chinese poli-tics that could benefit from subnational comparative research. Issues such as mi-gration, rural taxation, and entrepreneurship have all been fruitfully subjected tojust this sort of analysis. Besides these areas, studies systematically addressing theregional political economies and legacies of the planned economy in the Zhujiang


Delta, Changjiang Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin corridor could shed great light on thepolitics of foreign direct investment and China’s integration into global productionnetworks, for example. Additional topics—such as bank lending, financial regula-tion, infrastructure development, fiscal policy, and corporate governance—wouldalso clearly benefit from regionally informed analysis.

Rather than thinking at either the macro-level of the central state or China in theinternational arena; or at the micro-level of the village, neighborhood, or individualresearch site, China scholars could usefully apply such regional analysis to fit to-gether micro-level observations and make measured generalizations at a “middlelevel” (Dittmer and Hurst, 2002/2003). It is at this level that there exists particularpotential for advancing our understanding of China and for adjudicating in whatrespects China may or may not be comparable with other societies.

Beyond the study of China, my findings suggest that social movement conceptsmay not be completely alien or inappropriate to the study of contentious politics inauthoritarian or communist contexts like China. Such concepts do, however, likecomputer software, require some degree of “localization” or refinement before theirpower can be unleashed. In contexts where “social movement organizations” arenearly always repressed, movement leaders are frequently jailed as soon as theyappear in public, and the media are tightly state-controlled, the concepts of framesand mobilizing structures must be fine-tuned. Our understanding of targets mustalso be refined if we are to comprehend contentious collective action in an authori-tarian context where direct assault on certain targets may be out of bounds andoblique angles of attack often produce better results for participants on the ground.

Besides looking for mobilizing structures in social realms (like housing com-pounds) that do not exist for the explicit purpose of facilitating collective action,and allowing for the possibility that the overt and hidden targets of collective actionare not always the same, more challenging conceptual modifications must be madeto the ideas of frames and framing processes. Beginning with the basic insight that“grievances or discontents are subject to differential interpretation, and . . . variationsin their interpretation . . . can affect whether and how they are acted upon” (Snow,Rochford, Worden, and Benford, 1986: 465), a benchmark definition of frames canbe specified as: patterns of interpretation, through which individuals or organiza-tions perceive their circumstances and influence their propensity for collective ac-tion. Based on this definition, frames deliberately shaped by leaders and formalorganizations that are given prominence in the work of most social movement theo-rists are but one possible sub-type of frames that could be called “liberal frames.”

A different but equally legitimate (and probably more common) sub-type is “massframes,” or “informal frames.” These are not shaped or deployed by leaders ororganizations, but rather are widely held by individuals in similar social situationsand contexts. They can affect behavior just as strongly as liberal frames do, and arethe only frames available in most authoritarian contexts. Looking at informal framescan open up large new sets of outcomes and cases to social movement analysis andpromote a more rigorous understanding of collective action and contention outsideof its traditionally associated liberal democratic political context.

Finally, disaggregation by region is a useful step toward understanding how in-dividuals mobilize for contentious collective action in complex contexts where pre-viously there existed various competing, contradictory explanations. This suggestion

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should not appear untoward to scholars of social movements and contentious poli-tics who often disaggregate actors by such variables as race, gender, class, cohort,and religion (e.g., Eisinger, 1974; Fonow, 1998; Paulsen, 1991). The disaggrega-tion of structural contexts is a logical next step, necessary to understand conten-tious collective action by Chinese laid-off workers, and likely useful elsewhere foranalysis of similar phenomena and for promoting a more refined analysis of con-tentious politics generally.


Appendix

Interviewees Cited or Quoted:

Beijing (June 2000 to July 2002)

1. State Council Ministry Official (2000).2. State Council Ministry Official (2000).3. State Council Ministry Official (2001).4. State Council Ministry Official (2001).5. State Council Ministry Official (2001).6. 51-year-old male, laid-off chemical worker (July 2002).7. State Council Ministry Official (2002).8. State Council Ministry Official (2002).9. State Council Ministry Official (2002).

10. State Council Ministry Official (2002).11. State Council Ministry Official (2002).

Benxi (November 2000 and November 2001):

12. 42-year-old male, laid-off coal miner (2000).13. 43-year-old male, laid-off coal miner (2000).14. 38-year-old male, laid-off coal miner (2000).15. 47-year-old female, laid-off chemical worker (2000).16. Manager of SOE (2000).17. Official in a City Bureau (2000).18. 58-year-old female, retired coal miner (2001).19. Police Officer (2001).20. Official in a City Bureau (2001).21. Official in a City Bureau (2001).22. Official in a City Bureau (2001).23. Official in a City Bureau (2001).24. Official in a City Bureau (2001).25. 36-year-old male, laid-off ore miner (2001).26. 46-year-old, male, laid-off coal miner (2001).27. City Party Committee Cadre (2001).28. Official in a City Bureau (2001).29. Official in a City Bureau (2001).

Shanghai (October 2000 and April/May 2002)

30. 38-year-old, male, laid-off chemical worker (2000).31. Official in a Municipal Bureau (2000).32. Official in a Municipal Bureau (2000).33. Official in a Municipal Bureau (2000).34. Official in a Municipal Bureau (2000).35. 37-year-old female, laid-off textile worker (2002).36. 48-year-old female, laid-off fish processing plant worker (2002).37. 49-year-old female, laid-off chemical worker (2002).

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38. 45-year-old female, laid-off warehouse worker (2002).39. 47-year-old female, laid-off chemical worker (2002).40. 49-year-old male, laid-off sanitation worker (2002).

Chongqing (October 2001 and March 2002)

41. 44-year-old female, laid-off textile worker (2001).42. 37-year-old male, laid-off steel worker (2001).43. 32-year-old female, laid-off chemical worker (2001).44. 33-year-old male, laid-off chemical worker (2002).45. Official in a Municipal Bureau (2002).

Datong (December 2000 and July 2002)

46. Official in a City Bureau (2000).47. 41-year-old male, laid-off coal miner (2002).48. 22-year-old male, laid-off railroad worker (2002).49. Official in a City Bureau (2002).50. Official in a City Bureau (2002).

Harbin (January 2002)

51. Member of the Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee.52. Member of the Heilongjiang Provincial Party Committee.

Luoyang (June 2002)

53. Party Secretary of Large SOE.54. Official of a City Sectoral Industrial Bureau.

Zhengzhou (June 2002)

55. Member of the Henan Provincial Party Committee.56. Public Security Official.


Notes

* This article benefited from the assistance of many Chinese friends and colleagues in Beijing,Benxi, Chongqing, Datong, Harbin, Luoyang, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Zhengzhou. KirenChaudhry, Calvin Chen, Ruth B. Collier, Kenneth Foster, Mark W. Frazier, Douglas Fuller, MaryE. Gallagher, Thomas B. Gold, Kun-chin Lin, Chung-in Moon, Kevin O’Brien, Dorothy Solinger,Jaeyoun Won, as well as Judy Gruber and all the participants in her Spring 2003 seminar, and twoanonymous reviewers offered extremely helpful comments. For their generous financial supportduring various stages of my research and writing, I wish to thank: the Fulbright Institute ofInternational Education Program, the National Security Education Program, the Yanjing Insti-tute at Harvard University, the University of Hawai’i, Beijing University, the Lewis MumfordCenter for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at SUNY-Albany, the University of Cali-fornia Institute for Labor and Employment, as well as the Graduate Division, the Institute forInternational Studies, the Institute for East Asian Studies, and the Center for Chinese Studies atthe University of California-Berkeley.

1. I use the term “laid off” to indicate any worker who has been involuntarily separated from his orher work unit and not yet re-employed in a formal job. In official Chinese terminology, thiswould include all state and urban collective sector workers classified as “xiagang,” as well asthose in informal arrangements like “liang bu zhao,” “maiduan gongling,” or “long vacation;”and most of those classified as “dengji shiye” or “bu zai gangwei,” except those on genuinedisability leave or of retirement age.

2. I deliberately avoided selecting provincial capitals as principle fieldwork sites because thesecities have industrialized and developed along largely separate trajectories from other cities intheir respective regions. I supplemented research in my primary fieldwork sites with more thanforty interviews across the three provincial capitals of Harbin, Shenyang, and Zhengzhou.

3. For probably the most thorough and articulate critique of this general framework, see Piven andCloward 1992.

4. Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Neth-erlands, Norway, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the UnitedStates had treaties establishing consular court jurisdiction over their nationals in China and wereinvolved in concessions and “international settlements.”

5. I divided my fieldwork in North-Central China between the two cities of Datong and Luoyang inorder to provide a rough test of the internal coherence of the regions as I define them.

6. This is a reference to the title character—a rickshaw puller in turn-of-the-twentieth-centuryBeijing—in Lao She’s famous tragic novel of brutal exploitation, “Luotuo Xiangzi” (CamelXiangzi).

7. These patterns have remained relatively static in each region since its initial industrialization,even despite recent developments such as the commercialization of housing in some areas.

8. For evidence to the contrary, see Mo, 2001: 222.9. Or sometimes key SOEs—e.g., oil fields, power plants, certain military enterprises, and other

“leading firms”—that can overshadow local governments.10. “Cutting the heads of both sides” is an allusion to a strategy of dealing with workers’ protests

known as “double repression”: arresting or repressing the leaders of collective action as well asmanagers of the relevant firms in an effort to deter future contention. This topic demands furtheranalysis but is beyond the scope of this paper.

11. Many interviewees stressed that non-disruptive petitioning had been widely employed by laid-off workers prior to about 1997. After that, most people came to consider it as less effective than,but potentially just as dangerous as, other tactics.

12. Rural rightful resisters make use of the rhetoric or regulations of the center to criticize localabuses. The Northeastern contentious workers use action against the local state as leverage to getthe central state to act to remedy some of the harm its policies allegedly have caused.

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