Charlie Hore: China Risen

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Charlie Hore

This year will see the thirtieth anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s announcement of
China’s “Four Modernisations”, the economic reform programme that laid the basis
for China’s economic boom. This summer’s Olympic Games, planned to be among
the most spectacular ever, will underline the extent to which China has become a
major economic and political power. But 2008 may also be the year when the long-
predicted recession finally hits world capitalism—and that would have a profound
effect on the Chinese economy. One way and another China will be much in the news
this year.

One constant theme in that news coverage is the “threat” of China overtaking the US
to become the world’s dominant economic power. The most obvious aspect of China’s
recent economic growth has been its sheer speed, and it is this that largely fuels the
idea of the “threat” (with a barely hidden undercurrent of “yellow peril” racism).
However, what has less often been recognised is the unpredictability of China’s
economic development. Time and again the direction and pace of China’s economic
growth have taken Western capitalists and academics, as well as China’s rulers, by
surprise. As the introduction to one academic survey ruefully noted:

Where in 1989 the consensus appeared to urge a policy of rapid privatisation, trade and
foreign exchange liberalisation, and rapid stabilisation through drastic cuts in subsidies
and the money supply, China’s economic dynamism appeared to result from strategy
that ignored such advice.1

In this compendium review of a number of new and recent books on China I aim to
do three things: to give an overview of China’s current position in the world economy
and how it got there; to look at the limitations and constraints on China’s future
growth; and to give a sense of what the past 15 years of breakneck growth have
actually meant for peasants and workers in China. Readers should be aware that this
is a very small selection of what has been published on contemporary China in the
past couple of years. I have chosen these books because I think they are both
interesting and accessible accounts of particular aspects of China, and all are worth
reading for getting a greater sense of the scale, effects and limitations of China’s
growth.

China risen
James Kynge and Ted Fishman are business writers concerned with China as a
competitor with Western manufacturers. Their books, China Shakes the World and
China, Inc, are both works of reportage, rather than deep analysis, and their
treatments of Chinese history are spotty and often inaccurate. But they are worth
reading, both for snapshots of China’s industrial growth and for a sense of how China
both fascinates and frightens Western capitalism. As Fishman explains:

Since China set about reforming its economy a generation ago, it has grown at an official
rate of 9.5 percent. Countries in the early stages of economic reform often come up fast,
but not like China. The country is closing in on a 30-year run during which its economy
has doubled nearly three times over. The surge has no equal in modern history.2

Both rightly identify exports of manufactured goods to the US as the motor of China’s
growth, and Kynge underlines the sheer range involved:
Seventy percent of the world’s photocopiers, 70 percent of its computer motherboards,
55 percent of its DVD players, 30 percent of its personal computers, 25 percent of its TV
sets and 20 percent of its car audios—to name but a handful—are made in largely
brandless factories.3

Both also acknowledge that foreign investment is central to the expansion of the
Chinese economy, and Fishman in particular is good on the manifold contradictions
that this poses for US companies. His focus is almost entirely on US-China relations,
while Kynge’s book also covers China’s relations with Western Europe. Kynge also
gives useful pictures of some of the costs of industrialisation, in particular
environmental damage and the conditions of migrant workers

But while both are useful in focusing on the central dynamic of China’s growth,
neither book places this in the context of the Chinese economy as a whole. Nor do
they really try to explain why China has expanded so fast, beyond suggesting that the
“innate” Chinese flair for entrepreneurialism inevitably flourished once state
restrictions on private enterprise were lifted.

Interestingly, they do not really argue for Western governments and businesses to do
anything in particular about the “threat”—because, they imply, nothing can be done.
The books’ subtitles, The Rise of a Hungry Nation and The Relentless Rise of the
Next Great Superpower, carry their essential message: China’s sheer size and energy
mean that such growth can carry on indefinitely.

Will Hutton’s latest book, The Writing on the Wall (now out in paperback), is in part
written as an explicit polemic against such a view. He gives a more rounded view of
China’s recent growth than either Kynge or Fishman, in part through crediting three
factors which they don’t really acknowledge.

The first is the continuing role of the central and local state. Much writing on China
today wrongly assumes that the entire state sector is moribund, and growth only
comes from private capital, whether Chinese or foreign. The village industries that
powered economic growth through the 1980s, and whose success attracted most of
the foreign capital invested in the 1990s, were almost all operated by one level or
other of the local state. Privatisation played no part at all in China’s industrial growth
before 1997 and is far less important today than usually assumed. Hutton cites a
World Bank study from 2001 of enterprises listed on the stock exchange:

At first sight it seemed that the state had relinquished control of more than 90 percent.
However, once the labyrinth of the share structure had been unravelled the opposite was
the case: the state had de facto control of 84 percent of the listed companies. 4

The second is the importance of economic development prior to Deng Xiaoping’s


“modernisations”. As he notes, “Today’s China could not have started from nothing
in 1978”.5 The economy was not a complete failure under Mao Zedong. There was
substantial industrial growth, and both living standards and life expectancy rose
substantially after 1949.6 In particular, the decentralisation of industry under Mao
was crucial to the growth of village industries in the 1980s.

The third factor highlighted by Hutton is what he calls “a significant element of luck,
which has then been cleverly exploited”.7 For instance, he cites the rise of
“globalisation” and in particular the outsourcing of industrial production by Western
countries, which happened just as China was recovering from the crisis of 1989 and
actively seeking foreign investment. “Contingency” might be a better word, but there
is no doubt that China’s rulers have been adept at taking their opportunities when
they found them—in large part because they have been determinedly pragmatic
about how to achieve industrial growth, rather than blinkered by neoliberal ideology.
Another factor that Hutton might have mentioned was the ready availability of
capital from the Chinese diaspora, both in Hong Kong and in South East Asia, which
provided most of the foreign investment before 2002.

The limits to growth


The most valuable parts of Hutton’s book, though, are those where he confronts
head-on the arguments about endless growth. It is worth quoting the central passage
at some length:

If the current structure of growth continues, by 2020 Chinese exports would constitute
nearly $5 trillion, or some 100 percent of its then GDP—and approaching half the likely
merchandise exports of the world at that time. Since China’s export growth has mainly
been driven by non-Chinese companies, to reach this total we have to suppose that
there are sufficient non-Chinese companies with the capacity to transfer production on
such a scale to China, and that Western markets have the capacity to absorb such
enormous flows of imports… So far, some 400 of the Fortune 500 in the United States
and a comparable number of European and Japanese producers have invested in China.
In other words, most of those who could move production to China have done so
already. Growth projections that extrapolate current trends have to suppose that over
the next 15 years Western multinationals in China are going to be able to continue
increasing Chinese production and exports at six or seven times the rate of growth of
their domestic markets. This is both a mathematical and an economic impossibility. 8

And he argues that the same is true for the American market, which simply cannot
carry on absorbing Chinese exports at its current rate, because of consumer
indebtedness and the size of the US trade deficit.9 This was written before the credit
crunch of 2007, sparked by the crisis in the US “subprime” mortgage market, but
Hutton’s central point is that saturation point would be reached even without an
economic slowdown.

Any slowdown in China would have widespread repercussions across the rest of the
world, and in particular South East Asia. The growth of processing and assembly
industries has led to a huge rise in imports, as the domestic economy has not been
able to supply the necessary parts or materials. So China runs a trade deficit with the
rest of the world apart from the US.10 The scale of China’s trade with the US has
drawn in many other countries across the region, which now trades as much with
China as with the US.11

There is an additional reason why China’s growth cannot simply continue as it has,
which Hutton does not really investigate. The export processing industries have
operated on the assumption of a bottomless pool of cheap labour from the
countryside, which may now be drying up. A 2006 survey by a government research
institute found that in 74 percent of the villages surveyed there were “no longer any
surplus labourers available to work in distant cities”. 12 In the past couple of years
seasonal shortages of migrant labourers have led to minimum wage increases in most
of China’s coastal provinces, but it now seems as though the problem is a structural
one. I will consider workers’ conditions and the possibility of a fightback below.
Unfortunately, Hutton’s book is only in part a polemic against the dominant view of
China’s prospects. The useful sections are contained within a rather confusing
structure—some chapters read like separate articles which have simply been dropped
in—and an overarching polemic in favour of “Enlightenment values”. This leads him
to adopt, at times, a simplistic Cold Warrior view of China as “a Communist
authoritarian state… If China came shopping for companies and assets in the United
States in a major way, the reaction would be ferocious. And, unless China changes,
such a reaction would be partly justified”. 13

Essentially, the argument is that it was the victory of “Enlightenment values” that led
to Western capitalism spreading across the globe in the 19th and 20th centuries.
China’s half-turn to the market has allowed it to develop only so far, but state control
of the economy now blocks further development. Only if China abolishes Communist
Party rule and becomes a genuine democracy can it develop any further.

The argument about the divergent paths of European and Chinese history lies
outside the scope of this review, though I will note that Giovanni Arrighi’s recent
Adam Smith in Beijing offers a much richer and more stimulating view of this debate
than in Hutton’s sketch.14 The argument that China needs to open up politics and
society in order to stimulate further economic development is an old one, and fairly
definitively refuted by China’s economic progress over the past 30 years. Chinese
society has evolved considerably in this period, away from the all-pervasive control
and repression of the Maoist era, to allow a considerable degree of economic and
social freedom (including, in practice, the right to strike), while keeping political
power firmly in the hands of the Communist Party. The model has been the
“authoritarian market states” of East Asia, such as South Korea, Taiwan and
Singapore, all of which grew rapidly through the 1950s and 1960s by combining state
direction of the economy, a dictatorial political regime and lax economic controls on
petty capitalism.15 The subsequent arrival of parliamentary democracy in South
Korea and Taiwan had far more to do with social movements than any perceived
economic bottlenecks, and the state remains a powerful player in both economies.

Indeed, Western capitalism has no intrinsic interest in increasing social and political
freedom in China. As Fishman notes, “China is not home to the cheapest workforce
in the world… China is the world’s workshop because it sits in a relatively stable part
of the globe and offers the world’s manufacturers a reliable, docile and capable
industrial workforce, groomed by government enforced discipline”. 16 As an
illustration of this, when the government first proposed a new labour law giving
workers some minimal rights (which came into force on 1 January 2008), it was
actively opposed by practically every US company investing in China. 17

China’s internal market


When the Chinese economy first opened up to the world market in the early 1980s,
the expectation was that this would primarily benefit Western capitalism by opening
up a huge consumer market. When this did not happen, the explanation given was
“excessive state controls” imposed by the Chinese government. China’s accession to
the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001 removed most import restrictions, and
an import boom was again anticipated. It is now fairly obvious that the WTO
accession made almost no difference to the prospects for Western businesses in
China. The books referred to so far make only passing reference to the WTO, but do
not really ask where the elusive “Chinese market” went.

One fairly obvious answer is that it was never there. In late 2007 the World Bank
announced a new estimate for the size of China’s economy that was 40 percent
smaller than previous estimates.18 This was not the first such re-evaluation—in 1998
the World Bank made a similarly huge adjustment.19 In both cases, this was because
the World Bank had used a method called “purchasing power parity” (PPP) to work
out the size of China’s economy. Essentially, this is an attempt to work out the
relative size of national economies by looking at what a unit of the national currency
will actually buy, rather than translating local prices into dollars. As such, it has its
uses in trying to estimate real wages, but at the scale of a national economy there are
far too many variables for it to be any more than computer aided guesswork. 20

It is often forgotten that China in 1978 was desperately poor, and part of the reason
for the stunning percentage growth figures is precisely that very low starting point.
But those growth figures have not been matched by a corresponding increase in the
living standards of the mass of Chinese people. Elizabeth Croll, who died tragically
young last year, was a sociologist who wrote a number of insightful books about the
impact of the economic reforms on everyday life. Her last book, China’s New
Consumers is an invaluable, highly detailed study of living standards, showing that
the key trait of the past 30 years has been a huge rise in inequality. She quotes a
government survey from 2005 showing that the richest 10 percent of China’s
population owned 45 percent of the country’s personal wealth, while the poorest 10
percent had just 1.4 percent.21 As she points out:

Chinese society is more accurately represented by an income or wealth pyramid showing


a very small minority at the top, the majority at the base and a small and burgeoning
middle class sandwiched between. Not only are those between fewer than commonly
imagined, but many are more likely to be downwardly than upwardly mobile. 22

The crucial gap is still between town and country. The early years of the economic
reforms saw a dramatic rise in peasant incomes, but by the mid-1980s this had
stalled, and in the 1990s many peasants experienced falling incomes. A 2003 study
estimated that over 22 percent of peasants lived below the (very low) government
poverty line, and Croll notes that a much greater number, possibly the majority, live
only just above this.23 But she adds that there are also huge differences between
different regions of China, with rural poverty concentrated in the most remote
western provinces.

While urban areas are less poor than the countryside, the gap between rich and poor
is greatest in the cities. Despite the emergence of a highly visible Westernised middle
class, urban poverty has grown as state-owned industries have closed or shrunk.
Croll quotes various estimates of between 9 and 12 percent of urban residents living
below the poverty line.24 None of those estimates include the tens of millions of
migrant workers. Since the mid-1990s urban incomes, apart from those of the very
rich, have grown more slowly, and disposable income has grown slower if at all, as
workers have had to meet greatly increased housing and medical costs because of
privatisation.

Her conclusion is that “in 2005, it cannot be said that the mass of China’s population
have become consumers in the accepted sense and it would be premature to speak of
mass demand [or] mass consumption”.25 As the world economy slows down in 2008,
more and more economists are looking to China’s growth to offset the start of
recession in the West. But as this book suggests, any serious increase in Chinese
consumption can only follow real and sustainable increases in workers’ and peasants’
incomes.

Peasant protests
Although most writing on the Chinese economy focuses on industry, there are still
some 325 million peasants, and most Chinese still live in the countryside. 26 Since the
early 1990s there has been a huge upsurge in peasant protests unparalleled since the
early 1950s.27 At the root of many of these is a double squeeze—on the one hand
stagnant or shrinking incomes, as detailed above, and on the other local officials
levying extra taxes and other charges essentially to boost their incomes.

Rightful Resistance in Rural China and Will the Boat Sink the Water? both give
accounts of some of these protests, though in very different ways. The first is a
mixture of a theoretical intervention into the field of “resistance studies”, pioneered
by James C Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, and an account of specific types of peasant
struggles. They define “rightful resistance” as villagers “struggling to defend rights
they had already been granted, or rights they believed could be derived from the
regime’s policies, laws, principles and legitimating ideology”. 28 There are clear
parallels here with EP Thompson’s concepts of “the moral economy” and “collective
bargaining by riot”,29 though the authors exclude violent protests from their analysis.

One crucial point is that local taxes are mostly illegal. From the central government’s
point of view, excessive taxes that just pay local officials’ wages are a drain on
productive resources, and a disincentive to peasants to stay on the land. The central
government’s dilemma in agriculture is that food production per head of population
is declining, which adds to import bills and threatens greater inflation in the cities. 30

Most of the anti-tax protests described here began with activists publicising central
government policies to persuade villagers not to pay. This meant photocopying
government documents and reading them out through loudspeakers, or in one case
taking over a traditional dragon dance chanting anti-tax messages in rhymed verse as
they paraded through the village!31

When this didn’t work (and it usually didn’t), some campaigns folded, but others
turned to mobilising much larger numbers of people, either in the village or lobbying
the next higher level of government. Numbers were crucial, the authors suggest,
quoting a popular rhyme: “A big disturbance leads to a big solution, a small
disturbance leads to a small solution, and no disturbance leads to no solution”. 32

The idea that “the emperor is fair, but his officials are corrupt” has been around in
China for more than 2,000 years, and its usefulness for the central government is
obvious. But it’s double-edged—while it can deflect peasant anger, it does nothing to
prevent the expressions of that anger. And there is a very interesting discussion of
the extent to which activists actually believe it, as opposed to using it as a mobilising
tool.
Near the end of the book the authors quote a Chinese researcher suggesting that
“since 2001 the focus of rural activism has shifted from tax to land disputes and from
central China to more developed coastal areas”.33 More recent protests have posed a
greater threat to local officials, as they have often been larger and attracted much
more publicity. One example was the 2005 riot in Huaxi, Zhejiang province, where
some 20,000 peasants attacked police and local officials at the end of a long
campaign against a polluting factory. The village then became a “tourist destination”,
with tens of thousands of people coming from nearby towns to learn from the
fightback.34 While the particular type of protest that the book focuses on may have
waned, it will be both useful and thought provoking for understanding the dynamics
of future peasant struggles.

Will the Boat Sink the Water? is utterly different. It is a gritty and often grim series
of reports from Anhui province, one of the poorest in central China, which focuses on
the greed of local officials and their repression of any opposition. It became an
instant best seller when it was first published in China in late 2003, was banned a
few months later, and went on to sell millions in pirated editions. It became so
popular because of the sheer level of detail that the authors recorded about rural life.
In one section, for instance, they try to list all the different taxes that peasants may
be subjected to, in a list that goes on for four pages. These include five separate taxes
on keeping pigs (which in some villages are charged to everyone, whether they
actually own pigs or not), and an “attitude tax”, levied on those who “dare to
challenge or resist the tax collector”. 35

The level of detail about rural life may make it difficult going for Western readers—as
indeed it did for many urban Chinese readers. But it is well worth reading, not least
for the powerful sense it gives of why so many peasants leave the village to become
migrant workers in the cities and export processing zones. While the numbers going
may have peaked, there are still tens of millions of migrants, usually working in
insecure and dangerous conditions. This recomposition of the working class is one of
the most important developments of the past 20 years.

China’s new (and old) workers


Several hundred million rural dwellers have moved to the cities and the new
industrial areas since the early 1990s, in what must be the biggest internal migration
in human history, though for many this has been a temporary rather than permanent
move. Hutton quotes a recent estimate of 150 million migrants in China’s cities
(against an official figure of 112 million),36 but the real figure is unknowable. These
migrants have become essential to the new export processing industries of the south
eastern coastal provinces, working very long hours in atrocious conditions.37

At the same time, traditional state owned industries have been “restructured” in a
process that has made at least 50 million workers (and possibly as many as 80
million) redundant since 1996.38 In large cities such as Beijing or Shanghai the
impact of this was softened to some extent by family support and other job
opportunities (though usually precarious self-employment). But in China’s
hinterland, particularly in the north east where much traditional heavy industry was
located, the devastation was much greater, with real unemployment rates of up to 80
percent.39
Both processes have given rise to the biggest upsurge in working class militancy since
the 1920s, with some movements of laid-off workers becoming almost
insurrectionary.40 Against the Law is, as far as I know, the first book length account
of this upsurge. The author draws a clear distinction between two very different sorts
of protests: “protests of desperation” in the “rustbelt” (the old industrial areas) and
“protests of discrimination” in the “sunbelt” (the new export processing areas). 41

In the old industrial areas workers essentially accepted factory closures—there are no
recorded instances of factory occupations or work-ins. The protests were over the
failure of management or local authorities to pay pensions or other benefits. For the
most part, these were restricted to individual workplaces, though she details one
important exception, when around 100,000 workers from workplaces across the city
of Liaoyang demonstrated after a local politician went on national television to deny
the existence of unemployment in the city.42 She concentrates here on protest
movements in Liaoning province, though she has written elsewhere in more detail
about similar protests elsewhere, which included a number of attempts to form
independent unions.43

These protests essentially ended in 2001, in large part because they won substantial
national reforms. As she records in another essay, “by 2001, nationwide, 98 percent
of pensioners received their pension through the bank rather than through the
employer”.44 Using a combination of repression and concessions, the government
could (at some considerable cost) bring such movements to an end. They have far
greater difficulty in holding down strikes and other forms of workers’ protests in the
new industrial areas.

The crucial difference between the two forms of protests is not about defensive
versus offensive struggles. The vast majority of struggles in the new industrial areas
are defensive, triggered by things like employers’ failure to pay wages, violence
against workers and layoffs. The author here concentrates on the city of Shenzhen,
on the border with Hong Kong, but it is a reasonable assumption that Shenzhen is
typical of other such areas.

As with the peasant struggles against illegal taxes, many workers’ movements start
with simply demanding what the law entitles them to. One striker told the author
about being drilled by management in advance of an inspection:

Workers were given model answers about the Labour Law and they had to memorise
them so that when customers come and ask they will deliver the line, “Five-day work
week, eight-hour day, Sunday off, two hours maximum overtime each day and not more
than five nights per week. We are all very satisfied with our work schedule.” It’s the first
time we learnt the details of the Labour Law and what we were not getting. 45

Shenzhen’s development model was once described as one where “capitalism


becomes barely distinguishable from piracy”,46 and the author details the many ways
in which Shenzhen employers fail to meet even the minimal legal standards laid
down by the government. This is not simply a matter of particular capitalists being
nasty individuals, but rather a structural fault in the export processing industries.
The law is designed to allow for the normal operation of capitalism, both by ensuring
that workers receive sufficient wages to reproduce their labour power, and by
ensuring that capitalists compete with each other on a level playing field. But because
of systematic overproduction and cut-throat competition leading to very low profit
rates,47 there is a pressure on all capitalists to lower costs to the absolute minimum.

But while the law promises better, it does not deliver. As the author puts it, “the law
both empowers and disenchants migrant workers”, 48 because when workers try to get
what they see as “justice” through the legal system, they find it is systematically
biased against them. She quotes one lawyer specialising in industry cases:

At the end of a court hearing, the judge said to me in public, “Lawyer Zhou, if the court
adheres to all the laws and regulations of the provincial government, all these factories
would move elsewhere and the local economy would collapse”.49

Strikes, demonstrations and riots usually explode after the legal route has proved to
be a failure. Migrant workers have effectively won the right to fight such battles,
provided that they are restricted to particular factories, and do not raise political
demands or try to organise independent unions. There are some fascinating
descriptions of such explosions, though there are only a few glimpses of how these
are organised inside the workplaces—a greater focus on the mechanisms behind
“spontaneous” outbursts would have sharpened her analysis.

Too many accounts of migrant workers see them as simply the victims of
globalisation, and that is where this book is different. While the author is clear-
sighted about the many obstacles to organisation, and the numerous divisions
between different groups of workers, she balances these against the real victories that
have been won, and the capacity of workers to transcend their divisions.

Conclusion
Over the past 15 years the exceptionally dynamic growth of the Chinese economy has
tied both China and Eastern Asia into an excessive dependency on the American
economy. But it has also tied the US and Western Europe into a very particular
dependency on China. While cheap imports have helped both the US and Europe to
sustain shallow growth, China’s boom has not stabilised world capitalism—quite the
reverse. China’s arrival as a major economic power has only increased the volatility
and unpredictability of the world economy.

Inside China, too, greater dynamism has led to greater instability. Worker and
peasant protest movements have multiplied as the economy has grown, reflecting
both greater confidence and the fact that promises of prosperity have not been kept.
This is not an inevitable upward trend—strikes and protest movements are rooted in
very specific grievances, are usually quite isolated and die away as they are either
repressed or achieve partial victories. But the cumulative effect is important.
Workers and peasants have won greater space to resist than at any time since the
1920s, and the spread of television, mobile phones and the internet means that
millions of people can quickly learn about particular struggles. Globalisation cuts
both ways.

Notes
1: Walder, 1996, p vii.
2: Fishman, 2006, pp12-13 (emphasis in original).

3: Kynge, 2007, p160.

4: Hutton, 2007, p146.

5: Hutton, 2007, p90.

6: Mackerras, 2001, pp203-205 and 222. Gittings, 2005, is the best general book to
read on China under Mao, though see Hore, 2006, for a more critical perspective.

7: Hutton, 2007, p96.

8: Hutton, 2007, p31.

9: Hutton, 2007, pp335-342.

10: www.uschina.org/statistics/tradetable.html

11: Fishman, 2006, p190. See also Harman, 2006, for a very good summary of the
faultlines in the Chinese and US economic relationship.

12: www.atimes.com/atimes/China_Business/IF19Cb01.html

13: Hutton, 2007, p232.

14: Arrighi, 2007.

15: See Harris, 1987.

16: Fishman, 2006, p7.

17: www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3824

18: “China, India economies ‘40% smaller’”, Financial Times, 18 December 2007,
available from www.ft.com. My thanks to Chris Harman for this reference.

19: Studwell, 2003, p162.

20: Studwell, 2003, pp158-165, provides a cogent critique of this PPP methodology,
though without proposing an alternative.

21: Croll, 2006, p314.

22: Croll, 2006, p22.

23: Croll, 2006, p137.

24: Croll, 2006, p123.

25: Croll, 2006, p317.

26: www.adb.org/Documents/Books/Key_Indicators/2007/pdf/PRC.pdf
27: For a longer description of these and further references see Hore, 2004.

28: O’Brien and Liangjiang Li, 2006, p xii.

29: For these, see Thompson, 1993, especially chapter 4.

30: In January 2008 the government was forced to revive price controls on basic
foodstuffs to try to curb very high levels of inflation. See “Govt Intervenes To Curb
Price Rises”, China Daily, 17 January 2008, available from www.chinadaily.com.cn

31: O’Brien and Liangjiang Li, 2006, p70.

32: O’Brien and Liangjiang Li, 2006, p62.

33: O’Brien and Liangjiang Li, 2006, p114.

34: http://zonaeuropa.com/20050601_1.htm and (for the tourists)


http://zonaeuropa.com/20050416_2.htm. A report on thousands rioting in the south
western province of Chongqing suggests this is not limited to the coastal provinces-
see “Thousands Protest At Land Seizures”, the Standard, 6 July 2007, available from
www.thestandard.com.hk

35: Chen and Wu, 2006, pp151-155.

36: Hutton, 2007, p116.

37: One excellent early account of the reality of such work is in Chan, 2001.

38: See Fishman, 2006, p74, and Croll, 2006, pp110-113.

39: Most accounts of China’s “economic miracle” simply ignore the north east. For a
rare exception see Becker, 2000, pp138-148.

40: For previous coverage of these movements in this journal, see Hore, 2004, and
Gilbert, 2005.

41: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007a, p9.

42: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007a, pp106-111.

43: See Ching Kwan Lee, 2003.

44: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007b, p21.

45: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007a, p170.

46: Becker, 2000, p74.

47: See Harman, 2006, for a discussion of this often overlooked facet of China’s new
industrialisation.

48: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007a, p199.


49: Ching Kwan Lee, 2007a, p186.

References
Arrighi, Giovanni, 2007, Adam Smith in Beijing (Verso).

Becker, Jasper, 2000, The Chinese (John Murray).

Chan, Anita, 2001, China’s Workers under Attack (M E Sharpe)

Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, 2006, Will the Boat Sink the Water? The Life of
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