Abstract

The Social Marginalization...In the “enterprise restructuring” process begun in the late 1990s, China’s medium and small-scale state-owned enterprises rapidly converted themselves, through massive sell-offs, mergers and the forming of share-holding cooperatives, into private enterprises, while the larger-scale SOEs strove to reinvent themselves as “modern enterprise systems” through the issuance of shares, by company mergers and sell-offs, or via declarations of bankruptcy. During this process, SOE workers who had retained their jobs and also those who had been “laid off” in the restructuring staged frequent and repeated collective protest actions. Using primary data, this paper seeks to portray the profound social marginalization of workers that has occurred during the SOE restructuring process, and it identifies this factor as being the primary cause of the increase in workers’ collective protests in China in recent years. In the author’s view, the rights to which Chinese workers are entitled under the country’s labor laws have been steadily eroded and diminished by the impact of enterprise restructuring. In a clear case of “closing the stable door after the horse has bolted,” the central government began issuing instructions to safeguard workers’ rights only when the restructuring process had been underway for several years. The wholesale loss of their rights has triggered intense indignation on the part of the workers, and the groundswell of collective protest actions around the country nowadays represents a heart-felt cry for help by an increasingly socially marginalized constituency of many millions.