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Voices from Below |
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—China’s Accession to WTO and Chinese Workers (Executive Summary) |
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There have been a lot of discussions in the mainland and overseas on the impact of China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. However, these discussions focus overwhelmingly on the positive impacts from a business perspective. The discussions are also dominated by government officials and pro-neoliberal academics. Six years have passed but the situation remains the same. The discussions rarely take note of the fact that in the period of 1996-2002, a total of 40 million workers were sacked because of restructuring and privatization, and probably 10 million of them were directly related to China’s accession to WTO. However, workers and farmers, who have suffered a lot because of the conditionality of China’s accession to WTO, have been practically denied the right to be heard on this issue. This work intends to highlight the voices of the rank-and-file workers, and facilitate the workers’ expression of their own comments on the accession and what it will mean for the country, their enterprises and industry, and themselves. It will record the hopes, fears and aspirations of the Chinese working class in the context of China’s deeper integration into the globalization web. We selected thirteen in-depth interviews from the sixty interviews we had had with workers from the manufacturing and service sector in Beijing, Qingdao, Shanghai, Xuzhou, Chongqing and Guangzhou. As might be expected, the workers generally knew very little about WTO, yet still, many of them were instinctively aware of the relationship between job losses and the opening of the markets under WTO conditions. They had a lot to say about the inside stories of their workplace as well. Some of them, even though largely kept in the dark by propaganda, have been able to put pieces together and hit the nail on the head when making comments on the direction the government is heading, or on the WTO, or on the great wave of un-pronounced privatization. It is beyond dispute that workers’ responses have often been mixed, or even self-contradictory. This sort of thinking suggests a split based on what workers see going on around them, and government rhetoric informing people of the need to join in and the benefits that will accrue. In spite of that, there is a common thread which runs through all these interviews: their worries of downward mobility, and their resentment against privatization and corruption.
The second part of the essay, base on literature review, is a preliminary study on the impact on jobs by China’s accession to WTO, with special emphasis on those hard-hit sectors like the auto industry, the oil industry and the banking industry etc. It also aims at de-mystifying the proposition that some industries would experience growth both in sales and in jobs because of China’s accession to WTO, for instance, the textile and garment industry. The proposition is only true if one confines one’s study to the period after China joined the WTO, as did the World Bank report in 2004. It is absolutely untrue if we look at the fact that, prior to the accession, Half of the labor force in the textile and garment industry were sacked in order to compete in the global market. However, this severe job loss is left out by the World Bank report when it claims that the industry will be benefited by China’s accession to WTO.
This work is about the cries of the exploited workers. Hopefully it will help to alert the public and the government to the negative impacts of China's accession to WTO on workers' livelihood.
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