Emergence of Shop-Floor Industrial Relations in China

Throughout the history of China’s industrial relations, the state has played a dominant role. Employers, although diverse in forms of ownership, size, and history, have tended to be rather passive players in shop-floor industrial relations, making the relationship between workers and the state of primary importance. Workers, who have often been characterized as passive prior to the twentieth century, have pushed for improvements through widespread and escalating conflicts, which bypass employers and ‘negotiate’ directly with the government. The Chinese Communist Party has mobilized or suppressed workers through direct government apparatus to promote changes meant to maintain hegemony. The planned period’s use of ritualized workplace participation has given way to a combination of simple wage labor relations and high turnover of insecure labor, interposed with labor struggles.