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Labor and the Contradictions of Law in China

In the late 2000s and early aughts, China enacted a series of important national labor laws. Among other things, these abolished fees for arbitration, outlawed certain forms of discrimination, and raised penalties for employers not signing contracts. The changes sparked a level of debate in the country that would be surprising in North America or Europe, where industrial relations have slipped from popular attention (and where breakthroughs in workplace regulation have become quite rare). For example, a draft of the most important new piece of legislation, China’s 2008 Labor Contract Law (LCL), received 191,000 comments during a thirty-day public comment period. Prominent professors debated the law on Chinese television. And foreign groups were drawn into the discussion too: the American and European Union Chambers of Commerce expressed concerns about the LCL, while the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations and Change to Win decried this corporate lobbying and invited a pro-LCL Chinese academic to tour the United States. When the then-less-well-known technology firm Huawei fired and rehired employees to get around the law’s provisions mandating non-fixed-term contracts for some workers, condemnation rained down on the company from outraged citizens online. Following the LCL’s enactment and other policy changes, according to state statistics, Chinese workers doubled the number of employment cases they brought to mediation, arbitration, and court and, according to unofficial sources, took to the streets to protest in increasing numbers. At the same time, investment moved both further inland and abroad, while authorities cracked down harshly on labor advocates. A decade later, the reasons why the government pushed through the precise kinds of reforms it did, as well as the long-term consequences of those reforms, are still subject to different interpretations. In Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State, Mary E. Gallagher (2017), one of the world’s leading scholars on Chinese labor relations and labor law, makes a compelling contribution to research on the topic. She posits that Beijing decided to shake things up for structural reasons, including a deepening labor shortage on the coast and a perceived need for a higher-skilled, more stable urban workforce. However, if China’s motivations for acting made sense, it adopted a puzzling approach