State and Society in China: The Consequences of Reform by Arthur Rosenbaum & Chae-jin Lee

Author:Arthur Rosenbaum & Chae-jin Lee [Rosenbaum, Arthur & Lee, Chae-jin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Asian, Political Science, World
ISBN: 9781000313000
Google: 8TKtDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 52887636
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-09-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Future

Despite the bloody suppression of the movement, workers' active involvement in the democracy protests of 1989 will reverberate through the Chinese political system for some time to come. However unorganized and dependent upon openings created by elite dissensus and government paralysis, workers for the first time played a major role in independent street protests. More ominously, some workers for the first time made highly visible steps toward the creation of a workers' insurgency that spoke not for or against elite factions but on behalf of workers as a class. The workers' evidently widespread dissatisfaction with the recent leadership of the Communist party and the strong streak of anti-elitism displayed by many may serve to paralyze future party leaders of whatever faction, when and if future economic reforms are contemplated.

If economic reform is some day to continue, the currently massive subsidies of urban food consumption and housing will need to be phased out, a labor market capable of transferring labor to the most dynamic sectors of the economy will have to be created, and unprofitable firms will begin to close or cut back their work forces at a pace far greater than we have seen so far. All of these changes, of course, will also entail more serious threats to worker job security and living standards. Yet the reservoir of support that reformers had hoped would be created by rising living standards in the 1980s clearly was not there even before June 4. After witnessing worker activism in spring 1989, even the most ardent future reformer will be very hesitant to introduce more far-reaching economic changes. Elite memories of 1989—on both sides of the political divide—will likely induce policy paralysis in this area for years to come.

Observers often ask whether industrial workers in Communist regimes are proreform or are more conservative in their political orientations. . In China the Deng era showed the potential of economic reform and international openness for speeding economic growth and living standards, but inflation served to take away many of these gains, and future reforms promised to threaten workers' vested interests. Workers' mass reaction to the student democracy movement, however, suggests a new way of posing the question. For in all three of their patterns of activity, workers were neither proreform nor antireform. They exhibited a clear frustration that the opportunities for decisive advancement were available only to other segments of Chinese society, and they exhibited a clear anger toward party officialdom from top to bottom for arrogating so many of the opportunities for advancement for themselves, their families, and friends. But it is evident that workers fully appreciate the opportunities for greatly enhanced living standards that only a policy of reform and openness can promise. Workers, in other words, are very much for the opportunities promised by reform but are very much against the institutional conditions that illegitimately, in their view, give those opportunities almost exclusively to other groups and leave workers unprotected against the ravages of inflation.

Perhaps more than the participation of any

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