ORGANIZERS:

French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC)

LANGUAGE:

English

ARGUMENT:

The year 2010 has been marked by an unprecedented wave of labour-related collective actions in South China. Media and scholarly accounts of these events stressed the fact that the workers involved belonged chiefly to the second generation of migrant workers. They also highlighted the greater scale and radicalisation of these social movements, as well as the fact that the protesters had a greater capacity to use communication technologies and were increasingly able to mobilize across class-lines.

Five years later, the participants to this round-table will engage a number of pending questions such as: how have patterns of labour-related conflicts and mobilizations changed over the last two decades and how have local governments and companies adapted their strategies to cope with changes in the legislation and a more « protective » labour regime? What about the role of branches of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) in emerging trends of collective bargaining? To which extent has there been an institutionalization of workers’ representation or on the contrary have the deeply entrenched interests and coalitions between local governments and economic forces neutralized such institutionalization? Moreover, what about the possible elements of specificity and commonality between labour-related grassroots organizations and other types of organisations such as environment-related NGOs? Eventually, how to reflect on how workers’ use of digital medias relate to the politics of class and identity formation and to collective mobilization?

SPEAKERS:

Chan King Chi Chris, (Department of Applied Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong)

Eli Friedman (Department of International and Comparative Labor, Cornell University)

Chloé Froissart (CFC, Tsinghua University Sino-French Centre in social sciences, Beijing)

Jack Linchuan Qiu (School of Journalism and Communication, the Chinese University of Hong Kong)

Anthony J. Spires (Department of Sociology, Centre for Social Innovation Studies the Chinese University of Hong Kong)

The session will be chaired by Eric Florence (Director of the CEFC)

ALL INTERESTED ARE WELCOME!

Free admission