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Prominent scholarly work in China labour studies has been dominated by two distinct approaches. The first is influenced by the tradition of institutional analysis and has made trade unions the centre of enquiry. Studies taking this approach show that after China's transition from a state-socialist to a market-driven economy, trade unions have been subordinate to both the party-state and enterprise management owing to the legacy of state-socialism and the burgeoning capitalism taking root in the country.1The second approach reflects the concerns of sociologists and focuses mainly on the day-to-day processes of managerial control and labour resistance in the workplace. One major focus of this approach is how identity politics, such as the workers' gender or place-of-origin, have influenced their individual and collective resistance.2In recent years, scholars using these two approaches have started paying more attention to common themes, such as the rising patterns of migrant workers' protests. Still, these approaches to China labour studies retain their separate emphases. Scholars taking the institutional analysis approach are primarily interested in the roles of trade unions and state authorities in mediating labour conflicts,3and those taking the sociological approach introduce the framework of class formation to examine labour protests.4This pair of foci has left an important research gap in the field of China labour studies by ignoring the effect of labour protest on the institutional settings for Chinese industrial relations. We endeavour to fill this gap by combining and applying the insights of both the institutional analysis of trade unions and the sociological analysis of workers' struggles to study a little explored subject - workplace collective bargaining. On the one hand, we assess the extent to which labour strikes have shaped the institutions regulating labour relations, especially the collective bargaining mechanisms; on the other hand, we investigate how trade unions and the party-state attempt to mediate conflicts between labour and management via wage bargaining.
Across China, 2010 was a turbulent year for labour relations. The wave of strikes sparked by the Honda workers in Foshan ... city in Guangdong drew the concern of Chinese policymakers and scholars, and caught the attention of the Western media. These strikes have highlighted the urgent need to carry...