Topic 5 Globalization and China: Shenzhen

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Topic 5Globalization and China Shenzhen
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I. The Case of Shenzhen SEZ

• Questions
• What is the glocalizing process in China?
• How is the glocalizing process revealed in the
  building of SEZ?
• Theme
• how SEZs are built as glocalized landscapes in
  illustrating the process of China entering the
  global economy

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Building Glocalized Landscapes

• SEZs are the outcomes of Chinas engaging into
  the global economy. SEZs are already a formidable
  presence in the global economy

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Building Glocalized Landscapes

• The process of glocalization- how the SEZs
  develop themselves into glocalized landscapes
  that serve to bring China into the world economy
• Focus on the development of Shenzhen SEZ

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Shenzhen is an immigrant city, built quickly with
  a borrowed population.
• In 1979, the Central government and the Guangdong
  Government decided to upgrade a small town,
  Baoan county, to the status of a city named
  Shenzhen.

Shenzhen before 1979
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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• In May 1980 the Special Economic Zone was set up.
  
• Shenzhen SEZ was erected as a test case as an
  economic development zone open to the global
  capital.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Shenzhen thus was the specific place where global
  capital and the socialist state encountered each
  other and worked hand in hand, though not always
  in harmony, in shaping a new economy.
• Shenzhen is on the east of the Pearl River Delta.
  In the north it is connected to Dongguan,
  Weiyuan, in the south to Hong Kong, and in the
  east it faces Daya Bay.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• The Shenzhen SEZ is only part of Shenzhen city.
  It occupies one sixth of the whole city.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• The SEZ is special not only in its economic but
  also in its political and social aspects.
• There is a long iron curtain from east to west
  separating the SEZ from the non-special zone of
  the whole country those who wanted to enter the
  SEZ require special permission from the Public
  Security Branch in their local regions.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Before the setting up of the SEZ, Shenzhen was
  only a small town with 310,000 residents and less
  than 30,000 workers.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• The total population of the whole Shenzhen now
  was over 8.27 million and the total population of
  SEZ is over 2 million.
• In its population composition, less than 20 are
  categorized as permanent residents who have come
  from major cities and become state officials,
  entrepreneurs, technicians and skilled workers.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Over 82 are temporary residents, which means
  they do not have the official household
  registration entitling them to recognized
  citizenship in Shenzhen.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• When they lose their jobs in Shenzhen, they are
  not officially permitted to stay in Shenzhen.
• It is clear that the expansion of Shenzhen and
  its Special Economic Zone is based on the
  mobility of migrants as temporary residents.

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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• In Shenzhen all workers and staff members are
  categorized into three kinds
• Guding zhigong(????), regular workers and staff
  members,
• Hetong zhigong(????), contract workers and staff
  members,
• Linshi zhigong(????), temporary workers and staff
  members.

Key concept to remember!
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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Guding zhigong refers to those employed by
  state-owned enterprises or government organs and
  they enjoy all the state welfare such as housing
  and food provision.
• Hetong zhigong refers to those employed on a
  contract basis by all kinds of enterprises the
  contracts may last for three or five years. Most
  contract workers in Shenzhen are university
  graduates who are employed as technicians,
  skilled workers or management staff

Key concept to remember!
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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Linshi zhigong, temporary workers are the most
  disadvantaged in Shenzhen not until 1988 were
  they officially given temporary contracts on a
  yearly basis.
• In the second half of the 1980s, the number of
  temporary workers increased rapidly and surpassed
  the total number of regular workers and contract
  workers.

Key concept to remember!
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Shenzhen as an immigrant city

• Most manual labour in the SEZ is undertaken by
  these temporary residents from rural areas. In
  Shenzhen, as soon as one becomes a legal
  temporary worker, one is then entitled to be a
  temporary resident.
• A rural laborer can get a temporary hukou(??) in
  Shenzhen only if he/she is hired as a temporary
  worker.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• Encouraged by the Open-door policies and the
  economic reforms, the local state of the villages
  greatly transform themselves by turning into
  companies.
• The local state of Blue River not only merely
  formed a company, but completely turned itself
  into a company in 1984.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The former name Blue River Peoples Commune was
  changed to Blue River Manufacturers Chief
  Company, under which it owned or joint-ventured
  over thirteen companies.
• The old government offices building remained, but
  it was expanded to include a new wing of four
  storeys connected to the old one.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The bureaucratic structure of the Chief Company
  was changed and expanded as well.
• Now there was a General Office, an External Trade
  Department, a Finance Department, an
  Administrative Department, a Population and Birth
  Control Department, a Labour Regulation
  Department, and a Mass Organization Division
  which included a Youth Committee, a Womens
  Federation and Trade Union.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The Company itself was a mixture of pre-existing
  socialist politics and a reform market
  economy, a hybrid reflection of the ongoing
  development of the socialist market economy.

Key concept to remember!
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The Transformation of Local Community

• the Blue River government gained complete
  independence in regulating foreign investment and
  local trade without any intervention from the
  upper levels.
• Blue River was not an exceptional case.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• It was the state, or political forces rather than
  capital, which served as the locomotive of
  economic development.
• Land was distributed to the families for less
  than two years in Blue River and requisitioned
  again in 1984 for the use of industrial
  development.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• Every household, according to the number of
  household members, was to be allocated a share
  each year in the yearly profit made by the Chief
  Company, formerly their village government.
• Every year, households obtained share dividends
  ranging from RMB 15,000 to 20,000.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• A local cadre proudly told,

It was almost ten times what the family could
earn before. Nowadays people dont need to do
anything but just wait for their share dividend
at the end of the year. Whats more, the family
can free hands from farming and they can choose
to do business.
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The Transformation of Local Community

• The local residents suddenly became rich, with
  their official identity changed from rural people
  to urban citizens and, with their economic status
  or class position totally altered.
• In terms of occupation, almost 80 of the local
  working population was self-employed persons.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• 10 were managerial or supervisory staff in the
  companies newly set up in the village.
• 10 worked outside the village, some holding a
  position in the District government or employed
  in big companies in Central Shenzhen or
  Guangzhou.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The living standard of the village was
  comparatively higher than any other cities in
  China. Every family was well furnished with
  electric appliances, a color TV set, hi-fi disc
  and air-conditioners.
• not without worry - an economic recession in
  Shenzhen from 1997 till, as more and more foreign
  capital moved out of the SEZ to the much cheaper
  area in the internal cities.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• Foods, goods and daily necessities here were
  relatively very expensive. The prices were
  one-third higher in Guangzhou and probably double
  those in other northern cities.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• Yet as long as a family could afford it, they
  still preferred to buy imported foreign-labeled.
• Shenzhen ren- the people of Shenzhen, a broad
  cultural identity signifying a modern
  cosmopolitanism attached to the space and the
  people who lived there.

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The majority of economic producers, or the
  working class in the village, on the other hand,
  were not local residents.
• Of the total population, over 75 were temporary
  residents, migrant workers who had moved in from
  outside the village

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The Transformation of Local Community

• The socio-economic structure of Blue River
  village was thus conditioned mainly by a
  two-tiered system
• One tier was local urban residents who not only
  possessed the means of production but also the
  space, the right of abode.

Key concept to remember!
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The Transformation of Local Community

• The other tier consisted of rural migrants who
  had to sell their labor to the factories in which
  they worked, while having no right to stay
  permanently where they worked.
• These migrant temporary labour were three times
  the number of the local residents, and were the
  lowest status workers in the community.

Key concept to remember!
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HK Company in Shenzhen

• The HK company, named Meteor, is located in
  Blue River in Nanshan District, Shenzhen,
  within the confines of the Special Economic Zone.
  
• The history of the HK Company in Shenzhen has
  demonstrated the development of the industrial
  village, Blue River village in SEZ, and the
  changing social relations of the local community
  for more than one decade.

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Hong Kong Company in Shenzhen

• The Meteor was set up in 1985, a year after the
  village, formerly a rural commune, had undergone
  a dramatic change.
• It was an electronics enterprise which produced
  mobile phones and electronic route-finders for
  Phillips.

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Hong Kong Company in Shenzhen

• Headed by five HK managers in each department,
  there were almost no communications between HK
  and local staff and workers.
• Huge income gaps and class status created
  mistrust among each other.

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Hong Kong Company in Shenzhen

• Except for most of the engineers, technicians,
  managers, supervisors and some office clerks who
  came from urban areas, more than 80 of the work
  force formerly held a rural hukou.
• The work force in the Meteor, and in
  manufacturing industry as a whole was mainly
  made up of the rural population.

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The Dormitory Labor Regime

• A new theorization on spatial politics of
  production and globalization
• Taylorism and Fordism to flexible accumulation is
  problematic
• The transnational political economy of production
  that links not only a new scale of the economic,
  but a new economy of scale

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The Dormitory Labor Regime

• Mass production and the space of work-residence
  are extensively reconfigured for capital
  accumulation on a global scale.
• Transnational processes require intensive
  reconfiguration of time rapid re-organization
  of space.
• Neglected- a more micro study to see how the
  spatial factor influences the production
  politics.
• Transnational re-organization gives birth to a
  new form of labor regime the dormitory labor
  regime in China

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The Dormitory Labor Regime in China

• Use of dormitories to accommodate migrant labour
  is a systemic feature of global production.
• Irrespective of industry, location, or nature of
  capital, Chinese migrant workers, are
  accommodated in dormitories within or close to
  factory compounds in China.
• We theorize this phenomenon as a dormitory
  labour regime to capture the recurrence of
  dormitory factories as the hybrid outgrowth of
  global capitalism and the legacies of state
  socialism.

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The Dormitory Labor Regime in China

• Historically dormitories appeared in China, other
  Asian countries, US and European countries in
  early 19th and 20th Century
• Forms of living with the employer had occurred,
  as household and labour processes were more
  unified than under factory systems.
• Divisions between factory forms in Eastern and
  Western patterns of industrialization also reveal
  variability.
• In Japanese, Korean and pre-communist Chinese
  factories (especially textile industries)
  dormitory accommodation was typically provided by
  employers or contractors.
• Similar focus on young, single, migrant female
  workers

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What is specific and noteworthy in China?

• The re-emergence of these types of dormitories on
  a systemic basis.
• The recurrence of this old form is the hybrid
  outcome of global capitalism and state socialism.
• It reinvigorated through foreign-invested and
  private companies, local states and the central
  government in a globalising economic context.
• Virtually all companies utilize dormitories,
  whether rented from local authorities or
  increasingly provided privately within the
  enterprise.

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Features of Dormitory

• Such dormitories are communal multi-storey
  buildings, housing several hundred workers.
• Rooms are shared, with typically between 8-20
  workers per room. Washing and toilet facilities
  are communal between rooms, floors or whole
  units.
• living space is intensely collective, with no
  area, except within the closed curtains of the
  workers bunk, for limited private space.
• These material conditions do not explain the role
  of the dormitory as a form of accommodation or
  living at work.

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Features of Dormitory

• Central to the dormitory form is a political
  economy of grouping of migrants, typically
  single, young and female workers.
• Such workers are separated from families, the
  customary locale, and daily practices and
  concentrated in a factory and workspace as
  homogenized labourers.
• Alienation of labour is therefore significantly
  more than the lack of ownership of product, tools
  and control of skills sufficient to support
  independent production.
• Workers in dorms are alienated from their
  hometowns, their parents, working within
  factories dominated by unfamiliar others,
  languages, food, production methods and products.

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Labor Process of DLR

1. Tied employment
2. Extending the working day - just in time labour
3. Labour allocation easier in more volatile product
   markets
4. Young workers, employers control skill definition
   
5. Greater control over workers job search
6. Inhibits labour organisation
7. Fresh supplies of young workers

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Features of DLR

• Extends labour market
• Market is not just local area
• Circulatory migrants
• Labour costs can be depressed
• Recruitment networks
• Advantages of networks for management
• Market versus network recruitment
• In-province constraints on management choice
• Worker network constraints on management

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Types of Workers Dormitory in China

• Enterprises purchase land and build their own
  dormitory premises (often with factory
  buildings).
• These enterprises are usually large or
  transnational companies which possess a workforce
  of several thousands.
• A room of 30 sq. m. will be housed by eight to
  twelve persons.
• Accommodation is often free of charge, while some
  companies will deduct reminbi (30 to 50) from
  workers monthly salaries

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Types of Workers Dormitory in China

• Enterprises house their workers by purchasing
  their dormitories premises from the local
  government or private owners.
• Purchases of workers dormitories from a third
  party are not frequent unless the dormitories
  premises are very close to their factory
  buildings.

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Types of Workers Dormitory in China

• Enterprises rent dormitories from the local
  government or local residents
• This type roughly accounts to 80 of all
  dormitory provision
• These enterprises range from small to medium
  size, and usually have a workforce over a few
  hundreds
• A dorm room will be shared by eight to sixteen
  persons. It ranges from 20 to 80 each month
  inclusive or exclusive to the electricity or
  other expenses.

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Types of Workers Dormitory in China

• Workers themselves rent dormitories from the
  local residents in the city or in the industrial
  town
• A room will cost as high as 300 and be shared by
  four to six persons.
• single-sexed, and only a few would have dorms for
  married couple.
• Couple rooms for husband and wife working in the
  same company
• These rooms will be charged with a range from
  100 to 200.

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Types of Workers Dormitory in China

• Enterprises rent apartments, hotel rooms and even
  villas as accommodation for their senior
  managerial staff.
• Renting apartments or flats from residential
  areas is the usually practice.
• An apartment will cost 1-2000 Reminbi depending
  on the quality of the housing.

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Dormitory as Lived Site for Struggle

• Institutional and power analysis Dormitory
  labour regime as coercive control
• Return to Actor dormitory as lived site for
  struggle
• Common fate in a common house nurtured the
  basis for collective action
• Kin and ethnic enclaves formed in the dormitory
  enhanced workers bonding and solidarity

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Dormitory as Lived Site for Struggle

• Dormitories as gendered space bound working women
  into a collectivity
• In times of crisis or strikes, the workers turned
  soft spaces - the kin networks, ethnic
  enclaves, sisterhood, and collectivities - into
  hard struggles
• Petition letters circulated from dorm to dorm
  with signatures collected in a single night.
• Strategies against the management in times of
  wage arrears, bodily punishments, insults or
  lay-offs were intensively discussed.

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Dormitory as Lived Site for Struggle

• On strike, workers were efficiently organized and
  spontaneously participated without any
  organizational help such as trade unions or
  labour organizations.
• Compression of time for production in this
  dormitory labour regime, in return, works against
  itself by shortening time for generating workers
  consensus and forming strategies for collective
  actions.

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Conclusion

• Shenzhen is a dual city.
• A hukou is attached to employment, and once a
  migrant worker was dismissed, or left the job, he
  or she was not granted the right to stay in
  Shenzhen.
• As a dual city, Shenzhen is contributed to the
  dormitory labor regime
• Shenzhen is a place by them, contributed but not
  for them.

Key concept to remember!