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As a result of 30 years of reform, today China has become a "world factory" giving a sense of pride to a nation which was once conceived as a developing country and now poses a challenge to the global economy. A factor that has been little considered is the formation of a new working class whose life struggle has been continuously part of the process of making China a "world factory." The process of proletarianization in reform-era China has contributed to a new working class which is now increasingly conscious of and participating in various forms of collective action. Spontaneous strikes by migrant workers in South China have been multiplying since the mid-1990s.1 Even though it is difficult to estimate the true number, official statistics reveal that between 1993 and 2005 the number of mass incidents rose dramatically from about 10,000 to 87,000 - a 20 per cent annual increase on average - and 75 per cent of these protests were launched by workers and peasants.2 According to national statistics, the number of labour disputes at arbitration soared from 135,000 in 2000 to 314,000 in 2005, an average increase of 18.4 per cent per year. In 2003, the number of employees involved in labour arbitration reached 801,042.
Through looking into the collective actions of migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta, this article sets out to make sense of the realities and complexities of the making of a new class. It argues that most of the recent collective actions involve workers' conflict with management at the point of production, while simultaneously entailing labour organizing in workers' dormitories and communities. These collective actions are mostly interest-based, accompanied by a strong anti-foreign capital sentiment and a discourse of workers' rights. They are not only organized on bases of locality, ethnicity, gender and peer alliance in a single workplace, but also attempt to nurture workers' solidarity in the broader sense of a labour oppositional force moving beyond exclusive networks and strong ties. Cross-factory strike tactics are sometimes used to invite workers from the same industrial region to participate in marches, street protests or highway blockages.
This study looks at the recent development of collective actions using two cases of labour...