Abstract
In the concluding chapter, I extend my comparison to include the conditions of the working classes in England, Japan, and Russia in the nineteenth century. What has occurred in China since economic reform represents the transformation of modes of domination from using coercion to promoting self-control and non-coercive means in a parallel to what Foucault observed about the nineteenth century. I argue the post-socialist state’s policies inadvertently play a key role in transforming Chinese migrant workers’ lives and in the formation of a new generation of working-class migrants. All these comparisons allow me to re-examine the concepts of power and domination critically, re-theorize Marx’s crucial concept of labor power, and suggest a new power analytic approach to study modes of domination over workers in China.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Steven Lukes (2005) explicitly recognized the relational, probabilistic and dispositional character of power and criticizes social scientists who commit the “vehicle fallacy” by believing “power must mean whatever goes into operation when power is activated” (pp. 63, 70).
- 3.
This point is nicely articulated by Chandra Kumar (2007).
- 4.
- 5.
Roth and Wittich have a very clear description on how Weber masterfully revised Georg Jellinek’s definition of power (Herrschen) in his Allgemeine Staatslehre so that the concept of domination can be liberated from a Kantian categorical imperative. Jellinek’s definition of power was propounded in Jellinek (1905, pp. 169, 172).
- 6.
Marx (1976, p. 450).
- 7.
For discussion about recent conceptualizations in labor process theory, see Smith (2006, pp. 389–402).
- 8.
See Burawoy (1985, Chapter 2, pp. 85–121).
- 9.
See Burawoy (1985, p. 108).
- 10.
With factors of politics of production as sufficient conditions and workers’ daily life practices, tactics and strategies as necessary conditions to a particular factory regime and mode of domination in the labor process, this expanded framework of the politics of production fits well with my suggested agency-structure scheme put forth in the Introduction.
- 11.
- 12.
See also Silver (2003, p. 13).
- 13.
Special thanks are due to Chris Smith for addressing this when he reviewed an earlier version of this manuscript.
- 14.
See Thompson (1966, pp. 12–13).
- 15.
Similar observation can be found in Yan Yunxiang’s study about rural youth culture in north China. He argues that “rural youth attempt to follow the mainstream culture of the cities, and to imitate the life style of urbanities” (see Yan, 2009, p. 117). Yan also argues that the household registration system and the implementation of an identity card system in the 1980s pushed Chinese individuals to leave their family and kin groups and thus formed the basis of individualization of Chinese society. But I disagree with Yan’s point that “once freed from these [family, community, workplace and the state] constraints, many [Chinese] people were able to leave their villages or work units, to change their jobs or occupation, and to reinvent themselves through their achievements” (Yan, 2009, p. 277). As shown in this chapter, migrant workers in the late 2000s, though they stayed in urban areas, familial relationships, kinships, and related constraints still existed and were extended in their everyday lives. In addition, it is far too optimistic as Yan suggests that workers could freely change their jobs or occupation and “reinvent” themselves through their achievements, as revealed in the cases of Zhangxiong and Xiaojun in this chapter.
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Siu, K. (2020). Conclusion. In: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination. Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_7
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