As with any other country, there are certainly factories with sweatshop conditions in China. But the motorcycle delivery driver and the burned-out office worker are more representative of Chinese employment today than a migrant worker on an assembly line making shoes or electronics for export. Sweatshop work is rightly abhorred for deplorable conditions, low pay, and long hours, but these features aren’t unique to factory work, nor is manufacturing the major site of worker resistance in China. Manufacturing played a bigger role in China’s economy a decade or two ago, in terms of employment and output. This is the period that most of our images of Chinese “sweatshops” come from, since it was the time when much of the world’s most labor-intensive manufacturing work was concentrated in the country. Today, however, Chinese manufacturing has grown more automated, and many of the most labor-intensive occupations are being relocated to poorer countries (for example: textile factories moving to Cambodia and Bangladesh, or low-end electronics assembly to Vietnam), meaning that industry continues to be a major source of economic output for China (as it is for all “postindustrial” countries) even as the country “deindustrializes” in the sense that a smaller share of overall employment is involved in manufacturing. This is a general pattern in capitalist development, reproduced again and again in different times and places.
But if this is something that has happened in other countries before, then why do we tend to associate images of sweatshop manufacturing with China? The first and most obvious reason is simply because a lot of the world’s low-end manufactured goods were, for about twenty years, “made in China.” This is beginning to change (just take a look at the tags on your clothing, likely made somewhere else) and it’s likely that we’ll begin to associate these images more with South and Southeast Asia in the near future, just as it was once common to associate the same images with tags reading “made in Mexico” or “made in Taiwan.” On the other hand, there is a second important reason that this image is so salient: The idea that Chinese workers are “iSlaves” dying to make your iPhone is also the result of years of propaganda by the NGO industrial complex, designed primarily to guilt consumers in the US or Germany and to shame Apple and its suppliers into more “ethical” production chains. The anti-sweatshop movement in the wealthy countries emerged as a poor substitute for organizing workers at the point of production, since offshoring had effectively undercut the power of existing unions. The ultimate impact of the movement on labor conditions has been negligible. Instead, it has mostly served as a way to recruit idealistic college students into institutional politics via non-profit activism.
There’s no ambiguity about the brutal labor practices that still prevail in the electronics assembly sector, which still employs millions of workers in China. The iPhone production chain became a topic of attention, in part, because there was a spate of worker suicides at the Shenzhen production plant where the phones were produced. But the reality is that work kills, in every country, and across many industries. The construction industry is far more deadly than manufacturing, and simply by reading Chinese news one can find reports of parcel or food delivery worker deaths at least once a month in recent years.[1] The image of the Chinese sweatshop entered the imagination of people in the wealthy countries because it was a convenient target for consumer politics campaigns. These campaigns are common in rich countries because they play on people’s “first world” guilt, invoke orientalist fantasies about a brainwashed or helpless Asian populace, and are also relatively toothless—even helping to rebrand the monopoly corporations of the rich countries as “ethical” by comparison. But there is no substantial difference in the degree of enslavement between Chinese workers making iPhones, European warehouse workers at Amazon, and the immigrant workers in American meatpacking plants.
Many of those who believe China is full of sweatshops also tend to believe other outdated and inaccurate portrayals of China and its dynamics of class struggle. Some believe, for example, that workers in sweatshops, or factory workers in general, are the leading class fraction of China’s proletariat (or even that “proletariat” = factory workers), and that developing a “labor movement,” rooted in this fraction, is the key to any progressive or revolutionary change. This view is common among a wide range of people inside and outside China, from enthusiastic left-wing activists to academics studying labor relations, or NGOs like China Labor Bulletin. For decades, they expected that factory strikes in the Pearl River Delta might turn into a wave of unionization, enable collective bargaining with employers, or even produce independent left-wing labor parties. But these things never came to pass and the “labor movement” in China died before it was born. In reality, there is no single “leading fraction” of the working class as a whole or within China. The basic idea here is chauvinistic, rejecting the struggles of certain proletarians in favor of “proper” struggles that fit a pre-determined ideological schema that bears little relationship to reality. The labor movement perspective has always obscured the full spectrum of the real, changing cadence of class struggle in China. Reliable and comprehensive data on social protests can be hard to come by, but we have done our best to illustrate what we do know in our articles “No Way Forward, No Way Back” and “Picking Quarrels,” in issues 1 and 2 of the Chuang journal (2016 and 2019).
More careful analysis of the actual data shows that not only is the employment structure of China shifting away from labor-intensive factory work toward a more nebulous array of services and higher-tech production, but also that protests and social struggles are shifting away from the patterns of the 2000s and early 2010s, which had been defined by rural protests against state appropriation of land and labor struggles in the cities. Labor actions in manufacturing have fallen precipitously as a portion of all labor actions, according to Wickedonna data and other records of labor struggles such as China Labor Bulletin. At the same time, other forms of social unrest, like protests over housing by more affluent social strata, are growing, and have often outnumbered labor disputes in recent years. Meanwhile, the forms taken by class struggle have diversified. The introduction of flexible employment contracts and various forms of “gig” labor have worsened precarity and intensified working hours across a wide range of sectors, bringing new issues to the forefront of struggles.
As we state in our summary of these dynamics in “Picking Quarrels”:
Rather than coalescing under an affirmative “worker” identity, subjectivities of a different kind are forming in relation to the present structure of the Chinese economy. A communist prospect, if possible at all, must be collectively constructed, rather than imported from insular activist or academic circles. Moreover, it must stretch across deeply fractured segments of the proletariat despite their conflicting interests, and today seems unable to rely on a single, hegemonic subject said to represent the interests of the class as a whole, as the mass industrial worker did (briefly and with questionable results) for the labor movement of old. If this communist horizon arrives, it will almost certainly take on a form initially alien to our expectations, adapting pre-existing identities in unpredictable and even unpalatable ways.
These trends in unrest are also a reflection of changes in China’s job structure, which in the near future is going to look more and more like those of “more developed,” “postindustrial” countries—many of which are still major producers of the world’s industrial goods, even though they are no longer major employers of the world’s industrial workers. Shit jobs in the service industry already dominate the economy, and employment is becoming increasingly precarious and low-paid, amid rising costs. China’s job structure is becoming more dependent on the service sector and moving away from agriculture, mining, manufacturing and construction. As in wealthier countries, the labor market in major Chinese cities is also bifurcating, with a majority of residents employed in lower-paying, lower-skill services and logistics work, and a minority employed in higher-paying, higher-skill jobs.
This doesn’t mean that everything about our image of the “sweatshop” is wrong. Ideas about Chinese sweatshops have their roots in the real economic developments of the 1990s and 2000s. Jobs in the manufacturing sector grew dramatically in the years after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. Foreign manufacturers poured into coastal regions, drawing people out of the agricultural sector and into manufacturing, alongside industries like construction. Many of the first major labor strikes and protests in the manufacturing sector were indeed against sweatshop conditions such as unsanitary canteen food, low wages, and military style management. The worst conditions were found in the most labor-intensive sectors such as textiles. Again, though: none of this was unique to China. Similar sweatshops had operated (and often continue to operate) in earlier garment production hubs, even within the wealthy countries. Over the course of the 2000s, however, the phasing out of the “Multi Fibre Arrangement” (MFA), which had mandated quotas that limited the amount of garment exports to wealthy countries, ultimately saw garment production even more heavily concentrated, with China winning out over most other competitors. This confluence of factors ensured that Chinese industrial zones would become the face of “sweatshop” labor for much of the world.
But after a decade of mass migration into coastal production zones, labor costs began to rise. When this happens, employers are faced with two choices: technological upgrading to increase productivity, or relocation to sources of cheaper labor. Both of these trends began to accelerate in China over the course of the 2010s. The expansion of manufacturing jobs peaked in the first years of the decade and has since declined (both in terms of the total number of workers in the sector and as a share of total employment). This was matched by a smaller decline in manufacturing’s share of total economic output: From 2010 to 2019, the sector’s contribution to GDP dropped from 31.61% to 27.17%. At the same time, many of the more labor-intensive industries, with stereotypically “sweatshop” conditions, either moved out of China or deeper into the Chinese interior where labor and land are cheaper, environmental regulations more lax, and local governments more willing to subsidize industrial capital. Other industries took a different route, making expensive technological upgrades and shedding workers as they entered into more high-end production lines. For a more comprehensive illustration of the industrial development of China in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, see our data briefs: “The Changing Geography of Chinese Industry,” and “Measuring the Profitability of Chinese Industry.”
These very broad statistics understate just how dramatically the structures have changed for working people in China, and how far employment has moved away from “sweatshop” manufacturing toward precarious service jobs. According to the latest migrant worker surveys, jobs in manufacturing, while decreasing in number each year, have also seen both the highest pay compared to other sectors and the highest growth in pay rates. In contrast, the service sector, which now employs the most people, also has the lowest wages and the slowest rates of wage growth. Wages for migrant workers grew fastest in manufacturing, at a rate of 3.5 percent, while service sector jobs in sales or food service grew at 1.7 and 2.1 percent respectively.
And in terms of labor time, of course stereotypes about sweatshop workers conjure up images of grueling hours performing monotonous tasks on assembly lines. While workers in manufacturing surely work long hours, those in service jobs work by far the longest, in a country where working hours are reaching unprecedented levels. And whereas it was common ten or twenty years ago for migrant workers in construction and manufacturing to die from exhaustion or overwork, nowadays it is more common to hear about such incidents occurring in the tech industries. The lengthening of the working day is one of the primary forces behind internet buzzwords like “lying flat” (tangping躺平), or the “996” system where employers expect employees to work from 9am to 9pm six days a week.
China’s own National Bureau of Statistics data show a clear increase in working time over the years, according to surveys on average weekly working hours for all employed persons. The hours climbed steadily in the 2000s, in the years following China’s accession to the WTO, reaching an initial peak in 2005. They dipped during the global financial crisis and its immediate aftermath of 2008-2009, and then began climbing again, first gradually then more steeply in recent years. The bureau began releasing figures on a monthly basis in late 2019, which showed that weekly working hours hit their highest figure on record in October of 2021, when China’s economy had flown into overdrive during a brief surge. Other data tell a similar story and show that the slow and steady increase in labor hours has been developing for some time. The 2017 China Time Use Survey published a follow-up report on the nation’s first ever time-use study, performed by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2008. These findings showed that the proportion of workers doing overtime increased from 12 percent of the working population to 42 percent. The survey also showed that China has longer working hours than any other country with comparable data, with the exception of Colombia, and longer working hours than any OECD country, with the exception of Turkey.
In sum, China is not defined by sweatshops, nor are its proletarian struggles – in fact, its class composition and struggles are increasingly similar to those in other “more developed” countries. To understand this, we have to overcome many of the tropes portraying China as being fundamentally different, so we can together realize our common fate and better support one another in our common struggle.
[1] There are no detailed official statistics on worker deaths in logistics, or manufacturing for that matter. However, Chinese news reports regularly cover work related accidents, horrific injuries, and deaths. Projects like China Labour Bulletin’s Workplace Accident Map has records hundreds of major workplace accidents per year, involving worker deaths or multiple workers injured. In 2019, before the pandemic and under more “normal” conditions for delivery drivers, CLB recorded 15 delivery driver deaths.