Labour geographies in China: economic transition, worker struggle, and enabling conditions of agency

Gengzhi Huang

Chapter 12 in Handbook of Labour Geography, 2025, pp 224-237 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: This chapter considers labour protests at three moments of the post-1978 reform era to chart the emerging labour geographies of transitional China: state-owned enterprise reform in north-eastern China; global capital-driven industrialisation in south-eastern China; and industrial relocation to central-western China. Drawing upon the concept of constrained agency, it focusses on cultures of labour solidarity, forms of associational power, and how space has been mobilised to examine how Chinese workers’ collective agency has historically, socially, and spatially been enabled. It highlights the embeddedness of worker agency in spaces of production and social reproduction. The chapter suggests that studies of labour geographies in developing countries like China should pay attention to the enabling conditions of collective worker agency, as formal union agency is usually absent in these countries. Rather than taking unionism or community-unionism as a given conceptual tool in understanding workers’ collective activism, attention should be paid to the generation of actually-existing forms of agency.

Keywords: Commodification of labour; Collective actions; Economic transition; Labour unrest; Agency; Globalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781785363399
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