Continuation of the second chapter of the book: Critique of Late Social Reformism
Hassan Abbasi
Although the following text was previously published as a report to the workers of Iran, the purpose of including it in this book is not to settle accounts with David Harvey, Esteban Mezroş and their like-minded people in Iran, because the data contained in this writing is also available to all of them, but rather the purpose is still the same as stated from the beginning, namely the mass of Iranian workers in general and future workers, namely the children of working-class students, in particular. The subject of this article is to examine the living conditions (wages and benefits) of the Chinese working class and the movement of this huge class in the twenty-first century. This study, which includes research from global institutes such as the ILO, China Labor Bulletin (CLB), and NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) on wages for comparison, includes all different parts of the world from Europe, Asia to America.
In 2014, factory strikes and protests in China were more intense than ever before. The same number of strikes remained at 656 in 2012. In 2014, 1,378 strikes were reported, while this figure increased to 2,765 in 2015. The trend of strikes and protests by workers in China in 2016 shows 2,663 (a comparison of the growth of the movement between 2011 and 2016 is shown in Figure 5).
China Labour Bulletin
Figure 1 Number of strikes by month in 2015
In addition to the increase in the number of strikes, the type of strikes has also changed recently. Previously, the motivation and cause of strikes were low wages and long working hours, but now (since late 2015 and 2016) they are often over unpaid wages. This has led to violent protests and street demonstrations with clashes with the police. In March 2016, thousands of workers protested in front of the office of China’s largest mining company (Long mays) in the northeast of the country, coinciding with the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
The placards carried by the workers read: “We want to survive,” “We need food,” and “The Communist Party should pay our wages.” The protest was sparked by the state-owned mining company’s failure to pay its workers for two months and the company’s plans to lay off 100,000 workers. But since late 2015 and throughout 2016, there has been a significant increase in strikes and protests aimed at compensating for unpaid wages or increasing wages among workers in enterprises and factories with more than 1,000 workers. This itself promises the growth of the labour movement in making demands and attacking capital in the heart of large-scale industry, which will gradually spread to smaller capital enterprises. Everything in Chinese capitalism has other dimensions compared to other capitalist countries. First, no one imagined until a few years ago that workers would dare to protest openly, especially in the sacred presence of the “communist” government!! and the Chinese Congress. Second, in modern capitalism, when workers first offer mass production of surplus value to capital, capitalists shamelessly avoid paying the minimum wage to workers. We thought these were issues specific to Iranian capitalism. But as is evident, when capital in any form of ownership no longer provides sufficient profits through conventional means, attacks on workers’ minimums, i.e. their meagre wages, also become common and normal. Third, the scale of dismissals and layoffs of workers, like the amount of surplus value and profit produced by them, is astronomical. We will come across even more serious figures later. Now let’s return to the strike of workers in the Chinese state-owned capitalist mining company.
After a week, the factory authorities declared the strike illegal and threatened the workers with fines and imprisonment. Hundreds of police were sent to the site to prevent the workers from entering the factory. They tore down the placards and asked the workers to return to their jobs. This led to clashes between the workers and the police, which resulted in the local government backing down. They promised to pay the arrears of wages and even to attach the workers’ debts to the shopping malls. The story did not end there. After it was revealed that the company bosses had lied to the local government officials about the arrears of wages, the workers apologized. Strikes like this have not been met with victory by the workers everywhere. At the same time as the strike, the working masses of Sichuan Province (in central China) also held demonstrations for arrears of wages, and after clashes with the police, eight migrant workers (this is the name given in China to workers who come from other provinces to work) were sentenced to long prison sentences of 6 to 8 years. According to journalists, the trials of these workers are reliving scenes from the Cultural Revolution trials. Some labour protests have led to increased despair and misery among protesters. For example, in January 2016, in Ningxia province, after migrant workers protested over unpaid wages, one worker set a bus on fire, killing 17 people. Labor strikes and protests are a relatively new phenomenon in China, with only 185 such incidents in 2011. In the past, they were more likely to be student protests for democracy. Now, in daily practice, workers are imposing their power on the capital police system. They do not ask any government agency for permission to protest but rather do so by their own class decision. This is a real manifestation of the workers’ presence as a class. The first labour protests and strikes took place in the summer of 2010 in southern China, in the large industrial province of Guangdong and the capital, Guangzhou. When a 23-year-old worker at the Honda factory loudly protested the harsh working conditions while working, he was joined by a number of workers. This same summer, several labour protests led to higher wages and better working conditions. Despite the fact that the police regime has almost complete control over the communication system, the results of the strikes spread quickly and reach other workers in other areas of production. The increase in strikes and protests coincides with a slight decrease in production and exports in China, and this is especially evident in the south of the country, in the ports and Guangdong state.
In 2014, more than one strike per day was reported in this province. Strikes have now become a daily occurrence in China, with major strikes occurring in all 31 provinces (Figure 4). The movement is characterized by its focus and leadership in the construction and manufacturing industries, i.e., China’s entire manufacturing sector. While the majority of strikes have occurred in private companies, state-owned companies have also witnessed labour movements, and the numbers show that the trend in this sector, which accounts for about half of industrial production, is expanding. Economic forecasts from Hong Kong indicate that as many as 6 million state-owned enterprise workers will be laid off over the next three years (2015-2018), with most of this happening in northern China, where the steel, mining and coal industries are concentrated. This is mainly due to the high organic composition of capital in these areas, which has led to their overcapacity. This situation has not only made workers worried about the future of work but also forced the capital government officials to prepare harsh conditions for workers. China’s Minister of Economy Luo Jiwei said at the recent congress that “labour laws are on the side of workers, which makes it difficult for capitalists to easily fire workers.” The Minister of Social Affairs and Labor Security of the capital government also said that “labour laws have taken away the manoeuvring power of employers and have led to an increase in production costs.” Both ministers talk about the need to change labour laws in Favor of capitalists, both private and public, while workers everywhere, including inside all factories, complain about low wages and harsh working conditions. The official organization of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which is directly under the government and the party, is the largest official labour union in the world. This organization, which is an integral part of the Chinese capitalist bureaucracy, is rightly considered by all workers to be the organ of the owners of capital and those in power. This union has imposed its recent movement on workers through government regulations to challenge it. This has led labour activists to prefer to join unions formed outside of central China (generally registered in Hong Kong). These organizations are even engaged in the training of labour activists. In December 2015, 18 activists of these organizations were arrested in central China. NGO Non-Government Organization and other self-proclaimed labour organizations are also increasing in number, while the government is cracking down on them. In March 2016, the central government required these organizations to formally apply for funds and assistance from outside China. A new law also allows the government to fully investigate the activities of these organizations. In this way, the capital state officials are trying to prevent the formation of organizations outside the state body, the ACFTU. Coverage of labour strikes and protests in newspapers and mass media is very rare, except in some cases involving foreign companies, and thus workers in different provinces are rarely informed of each other’s movements through official channels, but this does not mean that they are not in touch. I will mention such cases.
Strikes in 2015 were most common in the construction sector (36%). This manufacturing sector witnessed economic growth of 25%. Other industrial sectors witnessed 32% of strikes. Together, these two sectors accounted for 68% of strikes across China. In its interpretation of the relationship between the increase in strikes and the slowdown in China’s economic growth in the last quarter of 2015, the CLB organization points to the devaluation of the Chinese currency Yuan, which was announced on August 11, 2015 (Figure 1). This is while 75% of strikes during this period were related to unpaid wages and 168 strikes (6%) were related to demands for wage increases. According to the CLB, most strikes begin during a period when wages are falling. In 2012, when China’s economy was still booming, nearly 75% of protests and strikes were centred around wage increases, driven by capital’s thirst for labour. The majority of strikes in 2015 took place in Guangdong Province, China’s largest industrial manufacturing centre (30% of all strikes). It was also the province that saw the first strikes against state-owned enterprises. It also saw the largest number of arrests (a quarter of all arrests) in connection with strikes and street protests nationwide in 2015. On December 4, 2015, provincial police arrested seven labour activists belonging to NGOs. In January 2016, China’s State Council decided to cut steel production by 100 to 150 million tons, which is expected to result in hundreds of thousands of layoffs. The China Metal Industry Organization has announced that about 400,000 steel industry workers will be laid off in a planned layoff. At the same time, China International Capital announced that the country’s economic planning to reduce production in the fields of steel, coal, cement, aluminium and glass will lead to the dismissal of 3 million workers in the next 2 to 3 years. It is said that this information is deliberately released to prepare the situation in the minds of workers. This is in a situation where Chinese steel companies are experiencing a decline in profits and are now forcing workers to take leave. Working conditions are also getting worse in terms of safety. Steel prices fell by 37% last year, which was due to increased production capacity, which means a decrease in the value of this product. The saturation of the market with iron and steel products is also the result of high labour productivity in this internationally competitive field of capital advance. Competition among steel companies (even among state-owned companies) has reached such proportions that planning to control production has become difficult because every capitalist is worried about losing the market. The Indian newspaper India Today called the situation in China extraordinary and predicted a wave of protests. This assessment was made after the strike of Xinglong’s Steel workers in December 2015, when 1,000 workers walked out of the factory and marched to the local government office in Tangs hang. A few days earlier, the same company had announced that it would shut down parts of its production, and workers who had not been paid for seven months went on strike. In the southern Chinese city of Dongguan, the world’s largest shoe factory (Yue Yuens), which produces for Nike and Adidas, last year (2014) saw the largest strike in Chinese history.
Thousands of factory workers took to the streets and demanded higher wages. The workers told the CLB journalist that in recent years the number of workers has decreased from 9,000 to around 4,000, while the employer considers their monthly salary of 4,000 Yuan ($656) to be too high and plans to move the factory out of China. The workers of this company produce more than 300 million pairs of shoes a year, and it is already seen that shoe production in Vietnam and Indonesia for the two companies mentioned above is increasing. In 2014, the Chinese economy fell from the expected 7.5% growth to 7.4%! It seems very strange that a 0.1% decrease in growth has such a big impact on the unemployment of workers. That because of such a large economic slowdown, so many factories are closed, wages are not paid, and even labour costs are not transferred to the state coffers. According to reports, the number of strikes in 2014 has doubled compared to 2013, reaching 1378. This is while in 2013 we witnessed a doubling of worker strikes compared to 2012 (Figure 5).
In the past few years, the information system between workers in different sectors of the capital and between different regions of China has grown enormously, which has led to the growth of class struggle. This was one of the reasons for the largest strike in modern Chinese history, the strike of 4,000 workers at the Yue Yuens shoe factory in April 2013. The largest centre of workers’ class struggle is in Guangdong province, which accounted for only 22% of all strikes in China in 2014, a decrease of 37% compared to 2013. This is not due to the growth and expansion of a few strike centres in provinces such as Heilongjiang, Shandong, Jiangsu, and Henan, but rather to the fact that strikes have occurred throughout the vast country of China with factories and production establishments spread throughout the country (Figure 4). 22 of China’s 31 provinces increased their number of strikes in 2014. The growth of capital accumulation and the increase in factories across the country thanks to cheap labour, and then the cessation of this economic growth, has a significant impact on the promotion of class consciousness among workers. They understand how, as soon as capital reduces its need for labour, it immediately twists the lives of the people who sell labour, sacrificing everyone for a single riyal of additional profit. Manufacturing industries still have the highest number of strikes (559, 41%) among the production and distribution sectors. But the growth of strikes is not in this sector but in the construction sector. Here, the number of strikes has increased from 20 in 2013 (3%) to 254 in 2014 (18%). Throughout 2009, housing and construction were carried out with the direct and indirect participation of the Chinese capitalist state. But this growth stopped at the beginning of 2014, and now this sector is faced with deep problems such as a decline in sales of manufactured buildings, weak guarantees and financial credits for buyers, and the inflation of empty buildings and rents and non-sales in the hands of owners and manufacturers. For this reason, more than 90% of labour strikes in this sector during 2014 were related to non-payment of wages and benefits. This is most evident in the northeastern and central regions of the country, where the construction sector’s growth bubble burst. In the transport sector, there were 251 strikes in 2014, up from 185 in 2013. The increase was most pronounced towards the end of the year. Truck drivers in the port cities of Yantian, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Beiluns, Ningbo, and Zhejiang, and taxi drivers began their strikes in a coordinated manner, which later spread to more cities in early 2015. These strikes demonstrate the calculated and coordinated nature of the workers in this capital-intensive sector.
A new sector that has joined the strikes and is rapidly developing is teachers. In 2013, there were 43 strikes and demonstrations by teachers, which doubled the following year to 82. The largest of these took place later that year, with 20,000 primary school teachers taking part in one of the largest in Heilongjiang province in northeastern China. They took to the streets in various cities in the province, including Harbin, to protest low wages and poor retirement conditions. The strikes were also well-coordinated and organised. Another sector that has seen a growing class struggle is the mining sector. After two years of production cuts in coal mines, half of the mines are unable to pay their workers’ back wages, according to the head of the China Coal Producers’ Association, so the strikes are focused on unpaid wages and the threat of lockouts and layoffs. In all sectors, the most important demand for workers is now the payment of wages and, in some cases, an increase, which accounts for almost 73% of the strikes registered in 2015. Some labour groups, such as the shoe factory mentioned above, have included the payment of social security benefits for workers in the form of housing in their list. The central and local governments of capital used to try to play the role of mediator between workers and employers and even government managers, but this tactic quickly lost its effectiveness and now the scene has changed, and they are directly engaging with workers by threatening and sending police to demonstrations and strikers. In the case of the shoe workers, the police entered the factory with the support of their dogs to force the workers to work. But in all these cases, the violence of the police and government officials is not comparable to the action of the military against the student demonstrations in Beijing’s Sky Square in 1989; they are now acting more cautiously. At the same time, the central and local governments are trying to direct the mass movement of workers towards the official union and cooperation with this institution by arresting strike leaders, pressuring them and increasing their prison terms, so that they can perhaps control the process of escalating the struggles. The future will see the emergence of harsher working conditions and worsening wages. New masses of workers will be drawn into the struggle, as since the beginning of 2016, workers in the sales sector have begun to protest about their wages and working conditions.
Figure 3: Labor strikes have been steadily increasing between 2011 and the first quarter of 2015. The massive presence of the Chinese working class on the scene is evident as the workers’ struggle continues with all its might, as we saw in Figure 1.
Figure 4. Labor strikes spread across China between 2011 and 2014, especially in the industrial centres of the south and east, where the concentration of capital has brought the greatest profits to global capitalism. Various areas of capital advance are the scene of workers’ struggle, and this is especially evident in industrial production. But the construction sector is making progress.
Figure 5: Workers’ strikes and protests over the past 6 years. 2016 continued with all the intensity of the previous year, with the intensity of workers’ struggles doubling every year between 2011 and 2014. One of the characteristics of the expansion of the labour movement in China is the increase in the number of strikes in the sales sector in 2016. After the uproar of China’s industrial workers, it is now time for the workers’ struggle in these areas of capital advance to gain strength.
| Year | Reasons for strikes (percent of protests) | |
| Not receiving wages | Low wages, long working hours, and efforts for better working conditions | |
| 2011 | 54% | 21% |
| 2012 | 37% | 28% |
| 2013 | 24% | 19% |
| 2014 | 52% | 12% |
| 2015 | 75% | 5% |
| 2016 | 76% | 7% + 3% Wage increase |
Table 1 One of the acute issues that Chinese workers, like Iranian workers, are struggling with is the production of surplus value and profits for capitalists without wages. Table 2 clearly shows that Chinese workers have become increasingly miserable in the last six years. But this has not diminished their struggle, and they are even thinking about better working conditions and better wages. Although this has been constantly declining since the beginning of the rise of the Chinese labour movement (2011), it grew by 3 percent in 2016. At the beginning of the uprising of Chinese workers, in addition to not receiving wages for long months, about 20% of the protests and strikes revolved around low wages, long working hours, and efforts for better working conditions. But since late 2014, protests and shutdowns, rising class anger that has led to clashes with factory guards and police, are the result of resentment and hatred over unpaid wages. In modern capitalism, when workers first mass produce surplus value to capital, capitalists shamelessly avoid paying workers the minimum wage, which creates the most anger among workers. One reason why individual capitalists avoid paying workers’ wages is that they compensate for the decline in the rate of profit by making more profit. That is, they not only appropriate the unpaid labour of workers (surplus value) for themselves but also try to add work that should be paid (in the form of wages) to the unpaid labour. This is a phenomenon that Iranian workers share with their Chinese counterparts. The anger evident among Chinese workers is just like that of Iranian workers, with the notable difference that Chinese workers take action into their own hands and do not wait for fate, they disrupt the production process and thus make capital and its state unable to produce profits, they hold demonstrations and are not afraid of getting involved with the police. Perhaps the next move of Chinese workers when the capitalist prevents production, closes the factory doors and dismisses the workers will be to occupy the factory and establish a workers’ council of power.
A brief but inadequate explanation of China’s economic situation is that the economic growth of the capitalist world after the global crisis of 2008-2009 to date, despite all the efforts made by the powerful capitalist governments and despite all the illusions created by capitalist institutions to pretend that the crisis is over and the period of economic prosperity has arrived, is still miles away from reality and the real growth is very weak and insignificant. Meanwhile, the economy and production in China are no better than in other capitalist countries, which has a very serious impact on the economy of the entire capitalist world due to the dimensions of production and import and export of goods. The fall in the prices of metals, coal, and various types of capital goods, which occurred as a result of the enormous growth of these industries, under the control of the growth in the productivity of labour in these areas of capital advance, has created suitable fodder for commentators on popular economics, including those who consider themselves reformist socialists and supporters of the working class and who have the illusion that they are busy criticizing capitalism. They stare in a primitive and childish way at the fluctuations in the prices of goods, especially these capital goods, in the market, and base all their interpretations on the fall in the prices of iron, pig iron, coal, and oil, etc., as if their fall is the basis of the crisis. They do not understand enough of the fundamentals of capitalist political economy to understand that the price of a commodity, which rises and falls in relation to supply and demand and is apparently unbalanced, has a fundamental basis in the value of the commodity, which is also determined by the socially necessary labour time. This basis is constant under the given conditions of production, that is, the degree of development of the social productive forces and the given productivity of labour and does not change daily under the same conditions. The changes in the price of a commodity are something else and vary according to supply and demand, but somewhere they reach a relatively constant price which is a reflection of its value. It is the value of the commodity that causes the value of the commodity to decrease in the growth of the productivity of labour and the reduction of the labour power exploited in proportion to the constant capital employed. The value of a commodity is entirely dependent on the labour force that produces it, and when capital uses less labour for production, it leads to a decrease in the value of each unit of production. Heavier capital, by producing more labour, that is, less labour, uses a larger volume of fixed capital per unit of time, and this causes less surplus value to be hidden in the unit of commodity. This is the basis of the decline in the value of the commodity. The capitalist’s solution in this process is to produce more of the same commodity in order to achieve greater profits by selling more commodities. And this challenge of capital is among the industries we mentioned above. This is the factor of the capitalist crisis, which manifests itself in the fall in the rate of profit. The crisis begins in the production process, while the narrow and limited vision of bourgeois critics of capital seeks it in the fall in the price of the commodity, its lack of consumption, and such effects. The price of commodities may fall, but it is not a sign of a crisis in production. The continued fall in the price of oil is not only due to its surplus production, but also the growth of labour productivity in this area of capital, which in terms of the size of capital, the progress in production techniques is not comparable to other areas of capital advance, has provided the conditions for its producers to mass produce whenever they want and drive competitors out of the field, this is the main factor in the fall in the unit value of oil and, of course, the fall in its price. The technique of fracking and other techniques of oil extraction with minimal labour requirements ultimately determines the price of oil. Moreover, the new technique that causes higher labour productivity reduces the value of old fixed capital and therefore, in this way, the value of the capital goods that are transferred to the manufactured goods through their depreciation as a result of their use in production is also reduced. This is the basis and reason for the dismissal of 5 to 6 million workers in China’s mining industries. Capital has no choice but to do this because it is part of its being that if it stops moving, its competitors will skin it alive. That is why the congress of the so-called Communist Party of China, the country’s largest capitalist, decided last year that China’s mining industries must be modernized and equipped with advanced and connected techniques. Therefore, the Chinese working class movement is only taking its first and elementary steps in its rise, and there is a long and winding road ahead.
China’s economic growth is accompanied by rising wages
It is surprising that the wage growth of China’s migrant workers (Chinese agricultural workers who come to cities either permanently or seasonally to find work, as they are called, and their numbers fluctuate from about 20 million in 2012 to 260 million in 2017) has averaged 17.3% per year from 2001 to 2009 (Figure 6). But it should be noted that the wage base is very low (Figures 7 and 10), especially when compared to labour productivity, which has been enormous over the period. In February 2011, the Financial Times reported that China had the highest wage growth of any Asian country, according to the World Bank. The ILO report also found that China’s average annual wage growth was 12.6% between 2006 and 2009, while Indonesia’s was minus 2.5% and Thailand’s was 1.5% for the same period (Figure 8). The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also estimates that the average Chinese industrial worker’s wage (nominal wage excluding price increases) grew by 140% between 2002 and 2008. In the same period, the wage growth of the US industrial worker was 19%. Most bourgeois economists considered this growth to be the end of China’s economic growth at this time. The head of the Morgan Stanley Foundation in Asia says that according to the World Bank’s assessment, production growth in China’s industries, labour productivity and wages have grown simultaneously. For example, the textile and clothing sector experienced a production growth of 13% per year between 2003 and 2010, and the same number is also reflected in the growth of wages!!! The constant deception and fraud of the bourgeoisie, which tries to convince workers that the growth of accumulation and capital profits also ensures an improvement in their lives!!! No one talks about the fact that wages have fallen sharply compared to the growth of production because the astronomical profits of companies are not taken into account in these calculations. Moreover, the surplus values produced by Chinese workers feed all global capital. The history of capitalism is the history of the development of accumulation, the expansion of the market and the globalization of the areas of capital accumulation. To limit the development of capital accumulation in China to the borders of this country is to limit the inherent tendency of the capitalist mode of production. The exploitation of the cheap labour force of the Chinese worker arises from the value nature of capital, which, in pursuit of value addition and preventing the fall of the rate of profit, sweeps the entire planet. Mass production, relying on cheap labour, which is the result of the collapse of the Chinese peasantry, a collapse that has led to the influx of hundreds of millions of them into the cities, has led to the growth of cheap exports to Europe, America and other parts of the world. The sale of these goods and the resulting surplus values of billions have led to the saturation of global capital. In addition, China’s economic growth has been accompanied by a shortage of labour despite the country’s large population, which has generally lived in rural areas. (Figures 12 to 14 show the points mentioned in these lines in figures).
The rise of labour struggles in China coincides with a significant slowdown in the pace of wage growth. Wage growth has recently even stopped. In some cases, it has reversed. In many places, workers work without receiving any wages for months. We are now witnessing the rise and development of a labour movement for wages, better working conditions, and the recovery of back wages. Chinese workers realized their class strength when they faced capitalist pressure to retreat in everyday reality, when the era of individual bargaining over wages ended and the worker’s confrontation with the capitalist over a living wage alone proved ineffective and ineffective. The collective movement of Chinese workers, like all the experiences of the working class around the world, is the inevitable result of difficult living conditions. Social changes always result from collective activities and actions, and since individual action does not produce results, collective action only leads to change with shared awareness, and shared awareness emerges when individuals communicate with each other in the social process and their actions based on common and class interests, the result of which is class awareness. So, the secret of class consciousness and understanding the sense of common interests is collective activity and action. Meanwhile, the working class is the first class in history to realize its own consciousness and its power to transform society. The working class is the only class that needs class consciousness to abolish wage labour relations and thereby any class relations and eliminate the exploitation of man by man. Communism and socialist revolution are the only transformation of production relations in human history in which the class consciousness of the proletariat is formed along with the process of abolishing any class relations. Therefore, the Chinese working class also realizes its power and appears as a class only in its movement and action against the relations of production based on wage labour. The fact that self-proclaimed organizations outside China pretend to lead or even guide this movement is due to their arrogance and desire to lead. The Chinese workers’ movement began long before they existed. These organizations are at best merely reporters of the class struggle of the Chinese workers. One important stratum of the Chinese workers who are increasingly playing a role in the class struggle as the number of workers grows is the construction workers. Part of the class struggle and the Chinese labour movement rests on the shoulders of 260 million migrant workers (temporary and permanent migration of agricultural workers to the cities) who work mainly in the construction industry. The book (China on Strike), prepared by a number of students who have followed some of these movements and sometimes interviewed workers in the struggle, looks at the struggle and flight of workers over wages, food and a place to sleep. What the workers mention in this book is unpaid wages, reduced wages, increased work intensity, long working days, and a harsh and inhumane work environment that takes the life force out of people, especially these young immigrants. To all this must be added the staggering unemployment and the fear of unemployment. In this book, he describes in detail the formation of strikes and demonstrations and shows how they are formed spontaneously and suddenly on motives such as arrears of wages, dismissals, unemployment, poverty and displacement and end with short-term actions and often without results. These actions, which are themselves the result of a lack of horizon and lack of organization, due to their limited content and short life, cause no stable, stable and powerful organization to be established. This in turn. leads to a lack of experience and the movement does not progress and stagnates. But in the same book he clearly says that any movement spreads quickly and spreads to other factories and institutions. Workers gather in canteens, dormitories, and rest houses, exchanging experiences and deciding on their next moves. The Chinese labour movement, with all its enormous dimensions and all its gigantic awe, is moving forward blindly. For example, there are strikes and demonstrations by thousands of coal miners in the northeast of the country. Chinese workers, like Iranian workers, are making efforts to recover their back wages and even to maintain their wage levels, which are efforts to maintain the value of their labour, efforts against poverty, hunger, homelessness, and homelessness that are necessary in the daily struggle against capital. But even if the struggle over wages continues, this will not shake the body of capital because the workers are fighting the disabled and have left the cause, which is capital, to its own devices. When the wage labour system emerges from the daily and scattered struggle of healthy and undamaged workers, it is in fact the workers who have been defeated because they are reacting to changes in the labour market and production, and this is not a fundamental solution. Chinese workers, like their Iranian comrades, do not go to war with capital with the head of anti-capitalism and the fight against the wage labour system. Make no mistake, the workers are nevertheless anti-capitalist in their core, in their being, and in their every move. Talking about organizing against capitalism, organizing that can and is capable of at least planning the strike, expanding it, contacting other workers, and maintaining morale and continuing work. The vicious circle that Chinese workers have been going through for six years is causing frustration among those workers who have the least trust and reliance on class power. The lack of results and the lack of progress in labour struggles in China has caused the phenomenon of suicide and suicide threats in the form of threats to fall from buildings and suicide by unemployed, homeless, and economically disadvantaged workers to grow rapidly. This phenomenon has grown from 1.8 percent of all protests in 2015 to 6 percent in 2016. These are reasons for the lack of a strong labour organization, the lack of a workers’ council organization that can organize their class anger against capital, collect and apply their experiences, and transform the powerful force of this huge mass of working people into a history-making class power, and through this, the light of hope shines on its inexperienced and young part, so that instead of helplessness, despair, and helplessness, it can feel pride and power.
Figure. 6 Real wage growth (purchasing power) of migrant workers (migrant villagers, who numbered about 20 million in 2012) in China from 2001 to 2009, from various economic institutions.
Figure 7 Annual growth of wages (nominal wages) in China from 2006 to 2015 in Chinese currency. It should be noted that wages for Chinese workers historically started growing from a very low level. In 1952, this amount was 445 Yuan per year.
Figure 8: Relative growth in average annual real wages in Asian countries between 2006 and 2009. Chinese workers had the largest wage growth (12.5%), while Korean and Indonesian workers saw wage declines (note that this figure shows wage growth for all workers).
Figure 9 Real wage growth (purchasing power parity) in Asia and the rest of the world between 2006 and 2013. Figure 11 shows that a very large part of Asian wage growth is attributable to Chinese workers, and when this growth starts to slow down, overall Asian wages also fall. Annual Growth (%) in Real Wages, Asia vs. Global Average, 2006-2013
Source: ILO Global Wage Report 2014/15 | Asia and the Pacific
Figure 10 Average monthly wages of workers (nominal wages) in Asian and Pacific countries in US dollars (2013).
Source: ILO Global Wage Report 2014/15 | Asia and the Pacific
Figure 11 The bulk of the wage increase for Asian industrial workers is attributable to Chinese workers. As is evident from this figure, and as is necessary to explain Figures 9 and 10, the average annual real (purchasing power) wage of Chinese industrial workers has increased by an average of 6 percent per year over the past six years. Notably, wage growth is slowing.
Data as of December 31, 2012. Source: Global Wage Report 2012-2013 ISBN 978-92-2-126237-4
Figure 12 Labor productivity has been the key to the rise of capital in China at the beginning of the last century. An increase of 9 percent per year during this period leads to an annual growth of 10 percent over the same period. While the available labour force is not very high, which is itself a factor in the increase in wages. Let us not forget that capital always needs a reserve army of labour to keep wage pressure under control.
Data as at December 31, 2011. Source: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Statistic (GBE), China National Bureau of Statistics, India Central Statistical Organization, International Labour Organization (ILO), World Bank, IMF, KKR Global Macro and Asset Allocation analysis.
Figure 13 Labour productivity in China has been accompanied by real wage growth except in brief instances in China’s thirty-year history of capital economic growth.
Figure 14 compares China’s labour productivity growth and real wages with Thailand’s. It is clear from this comparison that Thai workers’ wages have been following their labour productivity growth since the early 2000s.
Figure 15. Average annual real wage growth of all European workers between 2007 and 2013. As can be seen, during this period, most of Europe had a negative growth (purchasing power decreased). Relatively densely populated countries such as Britain, Italy, and Spain have had negative growth, and countries such as Germany and France have had negligible growth. The growth of the purchasing power of Chinese workers compared to their European peers is significant, although the wage base in China is at a low level and in Europe it started from a high level.
Workers in the construction industry in China continued to see their wages remain unpaid in 2024, with residential projects being the main targets of protests. Although the Strike Map (see Figure 16) recorded fewer incidents in the construction industry in 2024 (733 incidents) than in 2023 (945 incidents), the sector continued to have the highest proportion of protests among industries. Across the country, Guangdong (134 incidents), Shandong (78) and Henan (46) – provinces that have seen significant investments in real estate and infrastructure in recent years – recorded the highest numbers of protests, a proportion similar to that in 2023 with Shanxi dropping out of the top 3. Among the types of projects targeted that CLB could identify, 50 percent were related to residential projects, around 30 percent in infrastructure projects followed by 20 percent in commercial projects. In 2024, CLB recorded just four labour strikes involving over 1,000 workers, with more than 95% of reported incidents involving fewer than 100 participants. This trend has remained consistent since 2017 (see CLB analysis). Probably the biggest strike of the year involved thousands of state-owned forest farm workers in Heilongjiang protesting for fairer working conditions last winter in 2024, China’s economy was challenged by domestic as well as international developments. A total of 1,509 incidents were recorded in CLB’s Strike Map in 2024, a small decrease from 2023 (1,794 incidents) but still higher than the pandemic years (2019 to 2022). Worker unrest has remained at high-pre pandemic levels. 2023 was an exceptional year, as worker unrest came roaring back on the tail end of the pandemic. As developers struggled with the depressed market conditions, the pressure was eventually transferred to workers. One of the major developers that had a tough year was Vanke. The Strike Map recorded at least eight protests against unpaid wages related to Vanke. For example, construction workers in Shenzhen blocked the entrances of newly built residential apartments in December as they had not received any payment for the work they had completed the previous month. Meanwhile, buyers of the apartments were already receiving the keys for their new homes. In a social media post, commentators referred to the news about Vanke’s financial problems implying that it would be unlikely that workers would receive their wages. The expressed frustration demonstrated the uncertainty that construction workers were facing given the declining property market. However, not long after the protest, the social media commentators said workers had received “a little bit” of their wages. Financial pressures on Vanke continue to grow in the new year as it is scheduled < /a>to repay more bonds than in 2024. Given the challenging real estate market, workers for other developers such as Country Garden and Evergrande also faced hardships in getting their wages paid in 2024 and this situation is expected to continue in 2025. Unlike in the property market, investments in infrastructure increased by 4.4 percent nationwide in 2024. Investments in air transportation recorded a 20.7 percent increase and railway transportation 13.5 percent rise.
Figure 16.
Figure 17.
In 2024, CLB recorded just four labour strikes involving over 1,000 workers, with more than 95% of reported incidents involving fewer than 100 participants. This trend has remained consistent since 2017 (see CLB analysis).
In the context of drawing conclusions from the workers’ struggles in general, whether they are successful or not, it should not be limited to increasing wages, reducing daily working hours, having legal guarantees to continue working, and such everyday labour issues, but rather its progress and taking root among the workers, creating confidence in their own strength, creating links between workers in different areas of capital, learning from their own experiences in the process of increasing class awareness of the interests of the class, and how this awareness can be incorporated into anti-capitalist organizing on the basis of the abolition of wage labour. Workers can become captives of capitalist illusions and limit their fate in submission to the relationship of buying and selling labour. They can sell their future and that of their children to the bourgeoisie for a meagre wage, while accumulating ever-increasing mountains of capital, and forever submit to wage slavery relations, or, as the radicals and anti-capitalists of the nineteenth century and before that rebelled against wage relations and even reached the stage of overthrowing and destroying them in the Paris Commune. The level of growth of the labour movement does not result from the low demands of the workers. The fact that the workers of Iran and a significant part of the workers of China are fighting for arrears of wages does not indicate their backwardness in their struggle. Every year, we witness some labour strikes in Europe and America, whose motivation is to increase wages and better working conditions, but none of them are based on the spontaneous struggle of the workers, but all of them are planned, targeted, and pursued and pursued under the leadership of degenerate capitalist unions and reformist parties. These goals are entirely based on the survival of capitalist relations, so that all these efforts ultimately lead to the strengthening of wage labour relations and workers become more and more accustomed to their fate in these relations. The naivety of the European worker, who, in the circle of capitalist illusions, has tied his fate to the survival of capital and has absolute trust in the bourgeois organizations of unions and its colourful parties that supposedly defend his class interests, has reached a point where if these capitals do not extract huge profits from the workers, if even the minimum that the capitalists have considered as their wages, insurance premiums and pensions does not create a clear perspective for reducing the decline in the rate of profit in front of the capitalists’ eyes and does not practically guarantee the prevention of this decline, capital will compensate for this not only by increasing the intensity of work, lengthening the working day, but also, as we have witnessed many times in capitalist crises, by increasing the working age (increasing the retirement age), making working days more fluid, and even reducing the level of wages.
Social insurance system in China
Social insurance in China has a turbulent history. After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, a state-owned insurance organization called the People’s Insurance Company of China (PICC) was established, and by 1952, its offices were operating in all provinces. The capital state power ordered all its organizations and organs to purchase various types of insurance services from this organization. Between 1956 and 1977, all social insurance activities were suspended because the government announced in 1953 that all expenses for medical treatment, death, old age and retirement, loss of property in accidents, etc. would be covered by the state. From December 1956, all activities of the PICC (People’s Insurance Corporation of China) were gradually stopped, and this process intensified with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution (1966) until Mao’s death (1976). After this history, there is no organization with these functions. After Mao’s death, when the period of “reform” began, the Social Insurance Corporation began to operate again from 1979 with full powers as a private company (in the conventional sense) and by the end of 1993 it had offices in all provinces of China. The company (4,000 offices) has 10,000 employees and more than 200,000 contractors. In 1996, the company was divided into smaller units (life insurance, property, labour, pension, accident, etc.) and at the same time (from 1980 onwards) private companies started operating and started competing with the units separated from the People’s Insurance Organization of China. From now on, selling insurance services became one of the most profitable areas of capital investment in China. According to the report of China Social Insurance Corporation (CIRC), at the end of 2008, the growth of this capital advance sector increased by 40% compared to the previous year, so that at this date the total income of this sector reaches 170 billion dollars per year, with the increase in income in the last quarter of 2008 alone being about 43 billion dollars. Its sub-sector growth has been between 12 and 45 percent (minimum 12 and maximum 45) over the past century, which is much higher than the overall economic growth of China during the same period. For example, the income of this capital sector in 2008 was six times that of 2000. The reasons for this huge growth are as follows. In this year, China had 800 million workers, and a significant part of the surplus value produced by this mass, plus a huge amount of their paid labour, went to this sphere of capital, but the way it works is as follows:
1. When the Chinese capitalist state abolishes social insurance, it generally means that the working masses must bear the bulk of the cost of social insurance themselves. The influx of millions of workers to company centres in a short period of time to register and pay the entrance fees to the insurance system to compensate for lost insurance coverage leads to the rapid accumulation of capital in this area.
2. Economic growth, along with the annual increase in wages, provides new conditions for workers, which insurance companies make the most of.
3. In 2001, when China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), large insurance companies from other parts of the capitalist world, which have much more experience than domestic companies, began to sell their various insurance services here. (Many insurance services that are common in other developed parts of the world are still not offered in China).
4. The one-child family policy has led to a significant increase in child insurance, medical insurance, and accident insurance. Many families are worried that relying on one child’s income during retirement is not a safe way, so ensuring and providing pension insurance is almost a Chinese Labor Day obligation. The number of social insurance companies is very limited compared to even a European country with a population of ten million, so it was natural that their growth would be staggering in a short time. In 2008, there were about 48 foreign insurance companies and 64 domestic companies in China.
5. Life insurance, which includes pension, unemployment, medical, accident and parental insurance, is provided by the government almost only to urban residents, and half of the Chinese population living in rural areas is not covered. Unemployment insurance, which was created in 1986 and took its current form in 1999, also covers job search and further education. Financial assistance is paid for only one year, and its amount depends on the amount of savings the worker has in the unemployment insurance fund. When this period ends, only a small amount of allowance is paid by the social welfare office. Retirement insurance is available for men from the age of 60 and women from the age of 55 (in March 2015, the Chinese government announced that it would raise this age limit in 2017), but the insured person must have paid into the pension fund for at least 15 years. The state pension is only 20% of the average wage. In addition, 0.8% of the person’s total savings is added, depending on the amount of savings. In the best-case scenario, a retired worker receives about half of their monthly salary. Lawyers, managers, government officials, university administrators, and the like generally receive 100% of their monthly salary upon retirement. For agricultural workers, if they comply with the one-child rule, $100 per year is paid as a retirement benefit after age 60 (for women, after age 55).
6. Workers’ health insurance is financed by employer taxes and direct government deductions from workers’ wages. The maximum medical expenses can be paid up to four times the worker’s monthly salary. The above amount must be paid by the worker himself or by a previous agreement with a health insurance company. This is a setback for public sector workers, who previously had free insurance. The state assumes responsibility for accident, sickness and retirement benefits for those who are temporarily or permanently disabled in connection with work. A committee made up of government officials, an official trade union, an employer representative and a doctor decide on this. Parental insurance in China only covers women and only in cases of abortion and childbirth, and according to estimates, only 10% of women in the country are covered.
The conclusion of this study is that as a result of the dismantling of the state insurance system and the transfer of most of the social insurance costs to the workers while the wage tax has not been reduced, there is only one winner, and that is the state and private insurance companies that are climbing the Himalayan peaks with their huge accumulations. (The government’s income from wage taxes has increased more than tenfold over the past ten years, from 41.4 billion to 483.7 billion RMB between 1999 and 2010). On July 30, 2011, the Chinese government decided to exempt wages of less than 3,500 RMB (the Chinese currency, this amount was about $525 in 2011). Of course, this was done with the justification of compensating for inflation and price increases and the great generosity of the Chinese capitalist government!! In the same month, inflation (price increases) was 6.5%, while in reality what the workers suffered in the same month was 14.8%. It is estimated that there are 60 million workers with wages below this amount. This limit is RMB 4,800 for foreign workers working in China. At the same time, the government also passed the Social Insurance Law. Of course, this did not change what had been done so far. The government also takes responsibility for five social insurances: pension, medical, unemployment, work injury and maternity insurance. In addition to the aforementioned points about the deprivation of the vast masses of rural poor from these social insurances, there are other problems, such as the fact that social insurance that can be used in one province is rarely valid in another. For example, when a worker was born in Shanghai, registered there and has worked there for a while, it is difficult to get his health insurance from there when he works in Beijing. This is true even for personal retirement savings. Or, according to Chinese law, a migrant worker must pay all five social insurance contributions to the insurance fund, but whenever such a worker becomes unemployed, fired, or in some way cannot continue working, his residence permit is automatically revoked, and thus he is deprived of even what he has paid. In general, the insurance payment system in China is one of the most expensive in the world of capital. The total payment by the employer is set at 31% of the worker’s salary and by the worker at 11%. As for the employer’s payment, this amount is 9.7% in the United States, 19.61% in Germany, and 23.43% in Sweden of the worker’s salary. In addition, there are significant differences between states. In Beijing, this amount is 32% and 11% from the employer and worker, respectively, and in Shanghai it is 37% and 12%. It should be noted that what is referred to as the employer’s payment for worker insurance is nothing more than a portion of the workers’ wages that the capitalist separates in this way and pays directly to the insurance fund or any other institution.
Table 2 Percentage of monthly payment of pension, unemployment, medical, work accident, maternity insurance costs by employer and employee to the Social Insurance Fund in China.