Access to work in Republican China : technology, patronage and industrial conflict

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between industrial conflict and the organisation and technology of manufacturing industry in Republican China, between 1911 and 1937. It investigates the characteristics of industrial disputes and strikes in diverse industries in two economically contrasting cities, Suzhou and Tianjin. It argues that the introduction of modem manufacturing technology to China in the early twentieth century, because it made skill and experience irrelevant as criteria for employment of workers, because at that time there were no satisfactory institutions for recruitment of labour on the scale imposed by the new industries, and because of the social environment in which neither pre-modern nor state-run social welfare systems operated, gave rise to a distinctive type of workplace power relations in which the workers depended on networks of personal patronage to find and keep employment, could not move easily from one place of employment to another, and were particularly concerned with job security. It concludes that particularistic recruiting practices and native place affinity networks in Republican Chinese factories, sometimes represented as a Chinese cultural characteristic, was not an impediment to industrialisation but a consequence of it. The first four chapters examine industrial organisation and industrial disputes in three modern factory industries: cotton spinning and weaving, flour milling and match manufacturing. Common characteristics are pointed out; significant wage diversity between factories in the same industry and the same city, which suggests that labour mobility was low; inconsistency in the way that particular jobs are rated as skilled or unskilled by the management; and the workers' tendency to protest against sackings relatively more often that workers in handcraft industries, and to claim rights to future employment when factories closed. This is contrasted with the situation in the handcraft industries, where there was greater wage uniformity, a more mobile and independent workforce, and where wage claims made up a much higher proportion of matters at stake in disputes and strikes. Chapter 5 examines the importance of enterprise size by investigating industrial conflict in the Tianjin carpet weaving industry and the Suzhou silk industry, both of which were established handcraft industries undergoing a transition to the factory system. It argues that these workers' more overt hostility to foremen and supervisors arises from their comparative economic independence. Chapter 6 examines Communist and Guomindang trade union membership in Tianjin and Suzhou. It argues that the persistence of Guomindang unions in factory industries while the social policy of the Guomindang became increasingly conservative in the 1930s, when they tended to disappear from the handcraft industries, derived from the same factors - lack of marketable skill and absence of labour exchange institutions and social welfare - that caused the networks of personal patronage and dependence to exist. Show more