[TEASER] China Ep. 10: The Dialectics of Chinese Labor w/ Immanuel Ness

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In this episode, Immanuel Ness joins us to discuss trade unions in China and the landscape of Chinese labor more broadly. Immanuel Ness is Professor of Political Science at the City University of New York and Visiting Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg. He's the author of Migration as Economic Imperialism: How International Labour Mobility Undermines Economic Development in Poor Countries (which we had him on to discuss last year) and most recently, Dialectics of Chinese Labor: Trade Unions under Market Socialism, which we'll be discussing today.

Our conversation begins with an introduction to Immanuel's new book and why he chose to write a book on Chinese labor. Before turning our focus to China, we first outline many of the ways in which unions in the United States and the global South have failed—highlighting extremely low union density and a number of other perpetual challenges that have not been overcome by the Western trade union model.

We then introduce the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) as a stark contrast to the trade union model under bourgeois democracies. We explore how the union functions holistically from the top down and the bottom up and its relationship to the Communist Party of China (CPC). From Shanghai to Guangzhou, from glass-workers to logistics workers to app drivers, Immanuel provides examples from his research on the various benefits that the ACFTU has provided workers in China, giving us an overall sense of its successes and its challenges.

We then discuss the overall labor landscape in China, particularly in the context of the migration of hundreds of millions of people from rural China to urban centers, before launching into a more organic, back-and-forth discussion around some of the most common myths surrounding China's labor landscape.

Further resources:

• Dialectics of Chinese Labor: Trade Unions under Market Socialism, Immanuel Ness

Related episodes:

• Our ongoing series on China
• Our ongoing series on Cuba
• Our ongoing series on Venezuela
• Migration as Economic Imperialism w/ Immanuel Ness

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