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Speaker 2: As we come margin Martin and the Beauty of the Day,
Speaker 2: A million dark in kegeens one thousand mil last grade
Speaker 2: are branden by the beauty. His Sun Sun discloses the
Speaker 2: papal hereusden Roses Roses.
Speaker 3: In two thousand and six, there was a big campaign
Speaker 3: that got a lot of international attention because the ACF two,
Speaker 3: in a very short period of time, set up union
Speaker 3: branches in every Walmart store in China. And this is
Speaker 3: something American unions had been trying to do for a
Speaker 3: while and had failed. So people are very excited about this,
Speaker 3: and I actually did some research into one of the
Speaker 3: consequences of this, and just one example in a store
Speaker 3: in nan Chung, which is the capital of Chiongxi Province,
Speaker 3: they had these elections, they set up a union, and
Speaker 3: they actually had a reasonably democratic election. They elected a
Speaker 3: guy who was very interesting and who really wanted to
Speaker 3: push management on just some basic workplace stuff. He wasn't
Speaker 3: organizing to overthrow the Communist Party or anything. He had
Speaker 3: a few successes, and then very quickly the higher levels
Speaker 3: of the union got anxious because they saw that he
Speaker 3: was kind of stirring up trouble and was making them
Speaker 3: a little bit nervous. He got fired and pushed out
Speaker 3: with the consent of the higher levels of the union.
Speaker 3: So I think that that's just one example that demonstrates
Speaker 3: some of the limitations. Even in those cases where you
Speaker 3: can have some sort of an election and someone who's
Speaker 3: going to fight a little bit, there's real institutional.
Speaker 4: Constraints given that the ACF T you on the whole,
Speaker 4: isn't organizing struggle. What forms do work as struggles in
Speaker 4: China usually take then, and kind of how does the
Speaker 4: state relate to those struggles.
Speaker 5: I think there is we're often a tendency to think
Speaker 5: China is exceptional. It's political institutions, it's political culture, et cetera,
Speaker 5: et cetera, and we're often you know, what's happening in
Speaker 5: China is counterposed to sort of idealized version of the West,
Speaker 5: if you will. So there's an idealized version of what
Speaker 5: a union should be doing to fighting union very cross
Speaker 5: so it's very radical, non bureaucratic. But actually that's now
Speaker 5: the the reality of most larger unions in Asia, in Europe,
Speaker 5: in North America, rights mostly bureaucratic, very top down. Union
Speaker 5: organizers are overworks, not given much resources, They are highly
Speaker 5: repressed or highly retarded against in workplace organizing. So I
Speaker 5: think this is actually very important point that we should
Speaker 5: be aware of in terms of not making that look
Speaker 5: like that's the exception to some kind of idealized image
Speaker 5: of whatever democracy. So society, unions, workers, etc. To your question, So,
Speaker 5: for most of the last thirty years, striking China have
Speaker 5: been almost entirely organized by workers themselves or by workers
Speaker 5: working in those workplaces. Of course, independent unions are not
Speaker 5: allowed or criminalized. So if you'll try to organize an
Speaker 5: independent union, the chances are you'll be arrested. I think
Speaker 5: maybe waitin a few days. There are small labor and
Speaker 5: jills you can think of themselves, worker centers of a
Speaker 5: few staff, interesting in labor rights, skilled trainings, auvacracy. I
Speaker 5: think a small number of them do try to assist
Speaker 5: workers in organizing, but they are you know, very small
Speaker 5: and very fragmented, and I don't think they are you know,
Speaker 5: for most of the workers they're organizing, their strikes are
Speaker 5: organized entirely by themselves. And this is you know, what
Speaker 5: we normally call wildcat strikes, that these strikes are that
Speaker 5: are not organized by officially by tue unions. But again
Speaker 5: here I think I want to make this point that
Speaker 5: we talk about wildcat strike as the exception to the
Speaker 5: more conventional sort of union organized strike. But I think
Speaker 5: if you look globally, WorldCat strikes may be the norm
Speaker 5: rather than the exception, because they're very actually very few
Speaker 5: union organized strikes almost anywhere, and I think in China
Speaker 5: in many other places in Asia, so called wildcare strikes
Speaker 5: actually are the normal kind of strikes where workers entirely
Speaker 5: organize their own own actions. And as cause this for
Speaker 5: simple reasons that either the unions are stay controlled in
Speaker 5: the case of China or Vietnam, so they do not
Speaker 5: organize workers, they do not support workers strikes, or because
Speaker 5: the union are very pro management, or they are in
Speaker 5: this kind of union management cooperation framework, or just there's
Speaker 5: no union. Again, it's the case for I think, for
Speaker 5: the majority of the workforce globally, where they never see
Speaker 5: any union in their workplace. So it's interesting to see
Speaker 5: this kind of very direct formal confrontation between labor and
Speaker 5: capital without the mediating role of the union. And I
Speaker 5: think if we again thinking critically about the role of
Speaker 5: the union in capitalists libert democracies, often their role is
Speaker 5: not to push the struggle forward structurally or institutionally. Their
Speaker 5: goal is now to transcend or go beyond capitalism. Their
Speaker 5: the roal is to mediate the interests of labor and
Speaker 5: capital in some way. They of course they would push
Speaker 5: for the interest workers, but they will necessarily have to
Speaker 5: make compromises, Whereas when workers and capital are in this
Speaker 5: direct confrontation, there's no mediation, and this kind of confrontation
Speaker 5: actually see in law cases in China over the last
Speaker 5: twenty thirty years, workers end up winning their demands. There
Speaker 5: also some problem with it in terms of the after
Speaker 5: twenty thirty years, you don't you still don't see you
Speaker 5: mass tree union, movement of mass workers organizations. So that's
Speaker 5: another aspect of this. But in terms of winning actually
Speaker 5: this kind of direct form of worker theybor capital confrontation,
Speaker 5: actually end up being favorite workers in a lot of cases.
Speaker 5: And two questions about the state approach to labor and
Speaker 5: workers struggle, and I think again here is sort of
Speaker 5: undergone several phases, if well, since the nineteen nineties. I
Speaker 5: think for most of the nineteen nineties, the trans state
Speaker 5: didn't really treat these megro workers very seriously because you know,
Speaker 5: for the first ten years or so, ten to fifteen
Speaker 5: years or so of this rural migration to the cities,
Speaker 5: I think the trans government and I think a lot
Speaker 5: of people in public think they are just transient, right,
Speaker 5: So that's why they're called rural mecro workers. They will
Speaker 5: come to the state for work for maybe ten months,
Speaker 5: nine months, and ten months, they go back for a
Speaker 5: chance in a year for a couple of months, and
Speaker 5: maybe after several years they are enough money in the
Speaker 5: city and they will just go back to the countryside
Speaker 5: and settle so the traditional image of workers is that
Speaker 5: of stay owned state sector industrial workers, and those so
Speaker 5: called pithon workers, that's kind of their names in Chinese
Speaker 5: are just hybrid pithon workers. But maybe the pison part
Speaker 5: was even more important than the worker part. So they
Speaker 5: really just tries. They didn't take workers right very seriously
Speaker 5: until workers start to protest more and more and you
Speaker 5: start to see the rise of workers protests and strikes
Speaker 5: late two thousands and early tens, where again, as I mentioned,
Speaker 5: there are thousands and probably tens of thousands strikes a year,
Speaker 5: and that's when the trans governments start to realize they
Speaker 5: have to find some way to deal with class conflict.
Speaker 5: And there are of course two sides to it. One
Speaker 5: is depression. If you are a very high profile worker leader,
Speaker 5: you may be highrassed, you may be attacked, assaulted, or
Speaker 5: you may be jailed. But there is also other part
Speaker 5: of that which is more consolidatory, and there's parts to that,
Speaker 5: minds legislation. So trying to in the eight to the
Speaker 5: nine start to implement pro labor legislations, labor contract laws,
Speaker 5: laws on mediation and arbitration, and actually those are if
Speaker 5: they are implemented, are actually quite in favor workers. And
Speaker 5: then there's other part, which is the XFT you and
Speaker 5: state state institution that actually start to play a mediating
Speaker 5: growth because they see labor and capital confy had to
Speaker 5: mediate in some way, so they start to implement with
Speaker 5: institution reform in order to mediate. And then the final
Speaker 5: part of this is it changed again in the second
Speaker 5: half of the twenty tents, where I think the trands
Speaker 5: state revert back to a more repressive kind of approach.
Speaker 5: So they start to shut down labor and jails their
Speaker 5: rights and put very harsh surveillance on worker organizers and
Speaker 5: regularly harass, you know, anyone would try to do anything
Speaker 5: to do its labor, and so you began to see
Speaker 5: kind of much more exclusionary of the world and much
Speaker 5: more repressive approach by the state to the working class.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you've both actually kind of touched already onto the
Speaker 4: next section that I wanted to talk about, But I
Speaker 4: wonder if you might particularly of this sort of two
Speaker 4: thousand twenty tens periods, could you maybe talk about any
Speaker 4: particular struggles which seem kind of emblematic of that period.
Speaker 3: I think the most famous strike from this period is
Speaker 3: the twenty ten Honda strike. And this took place after
Speaker 3: the economic crisis two thousand and eight, which had a
Speaker 3: big impact in China, and you had about twenty million
Speaker 3: migrant workers that lost their job. But in contrast to
Speaker 3: what was happening in western countries, China really resumed growth
Speaker 3: quite quickly, and so you see a period of high
Speaker 3: speed growth, but also growth in wages and a really
Speaker 3: severe tightening of the labor market that's happening in this
Speaker 3: period of time, which gives workers some kind of structural
Speaker 3: advantages that they may might have been enjoying quite as
Speaker 3: much before. So in twenty ten, you have this factory.
Speaker 3: It's in a city close to Guangzhou in southern China,
Speaker 3: wholly owned by Honda, just producing transmissions, and it's in
Speaker 3: the city of nan High and a strike happened. It
Speaker 3: was just organized a small group of workers from Hunan
Speaker 3: Province who had trust with each other, and they stopped
Speaker 3: working in the transmission assembly workshop of the transmission plant,
Speaker 3: and very quickly thereafter the other workshops had to stop
Speaker 3: because of this kind of just in time production, and
Speaker 3: so they couldn't proceed, and within a matter of days,
Speaker 3: Honda's entire supply chain within China was shut down and
Speaker 3: the company was losing I think tens of millions of
Speaker 3: dollars every day, So it had a huge national and
Speaker 3: international impact. And the thing that was really interesting, there's
Speaker 3: a number of things that were really interesting about this.
Speaker 3: The first was that workers were very militant and they
Speaker 3: were very insistent, not just on having the laws implemented,
Speaker 3: but they were demanding to have a wage increase above
Speaker 3: and beyond what they were legally entitled to, which was
Speaker 3: something of a departure from the dynamics of labor unrest
Speaker 3: that we had seen previously. Right, workers are on the offensive,
Speaker 3: but they weren't just demanding economic gains. They were also
Speaker 3: demanding unionization. They didn't like the union officers that existed there,
Speaker 3: and they wanted to be able to directly elect their
Speaker 3: own union representatives. That showed a kind of higher level
Speaker 3: of political consciousness that was beginning to develop at the time.
Speaker 3: They also had At this point, it was kind of
Speaker 3: the most developed that Chinese civil society was, and so
Speaker 3: there was support from NGOs in the area as well
Speaker 3: as kind of pro labor a student and academics who
Speaker 3: were in the area. And it's worth noting that at
Speaker 3: following previous patterns, the union organized directly against them, and
Speaker 3: in fact, the union organized a bunch of thugs to
Speaker 3: go and try and break the strike. So it was
Speaker 3: a very, very kind of nasty, but the workers want
Speaker 3: They got a huge wage increase, they were promised that
Speaker 3: they'd be able to elect their own union representatives. Ultimately
Speaker 3: that that ended with a lot of frustration, but a
Speaker 3: process was initiated, and they did so with support from
Speaker 3: the much from the provincial level of the union federation,
Speaker 3: who saw this as maybe an example that they could
Speaker 3: use to begin to develop some sort of system of
Speaker 3: more regularized labor relations. The other thing that happened is
Speaker 3: it got a lot of coverage. Chinese media was also
Speaker 3: more open at the time, and there was a strike
Speaker 3: wave in the auto industry, and you had many other
Speaker 3: plants in the region and around the country that were
Speaker 3: going on strike at that period of time, and all
Speaker 3: of them basically were winning big wage increases. That was
Speaker 3: the moment that Kevin and I were very involved in
Speaker 3: a lot of the activism that was happening there, and
Speaker 3: I think was the most optimistic period. Very shortly thereafter,
Speaker 3: you begin to see growing repression and less willingness to compromise,
Speaker 3: both on the part of state and capital.
Speaker 4: I also remember that periods as a real period of
Speaker 4: not even just in China really, but you know that
Speaker 4: kind of early twenty tens international an the austerity movements
Speaker 4: and things like that, and seeing workers in China go
Speaker 4: on huge strikes as they were at the time, it
Speaker 4: sort of felt like it was all part of a
Speaker 4: growing internationalism that was coming back around again. Your book
Speaker 4: actually also goes into a lot about the crisis in
Speaker 4: social reproduction and specifically you know how that crisis affects women.
Speaker 4: Could you maybe just give a brief explanation of what
Speaker 4: you mean by social reproduction and what its crisis in
Speaker 4: China actually looks like.
Speaker 3: Sure, So, social reproduction we think about as the maintenance
Speaker 3: and the regeneration of social life on both a daily
Speaker 3: and an intergenerational basis. Right, So, these are the provision
Speaker 3: of all the things that people need to survive biologically
Speaker 3: but also to survive socially. Right, So, you need house,
Speaker 3: you need clothing, you need food, you need healthcare, et cetera.
Speaker 3: But you also need some time work to be able
Speaker 3: to spend time with your family. Whoever you might care
Speaker 3: for and love and to be able to live a
Speaker 3: kind of a dignified and meaningful life. And again, this
Speaker 3: is a process that happens on kind of a daily basis,
Speaker 3: but also intergenerationally between parents and children. And China's experiencing
Speaker 3: a severe crisis of social reproduction. It's one again to
Speaker 3: come back to a theme that we've touched on several
Speaker 3: times already. It's one that very closely mirrors things that
Speaker 3: are happening in lots of other countries, and I think
Speaker 3: it's another opportunity to kind of de exceptionalize China. The
Speaker 3: headline number that you can use to kind of understand
Speaker 3: this crisis of social reproduction is the falling fertility rates.
Speaker 3: And if you look at fertility rates in China over
Speaker 3: the last forty years, they have dropped, and they've dropped
Speaker 3: really precipitously just in the last few years. Now. People
Speaker 3: might know about the so called one child policy that
Speaker 3: was enacted for the eighties nineties into the twenty tens,
Speaker 3: and of course that somewhat you know, artificially depressed the
Speaker 3: fertility rate, and there was a lot of human rights
Speaker 3: violations that came along with that, forced abortions for civilizations
Speaker 3: and things of that nature. But one of the things
Speaker 3: that I think is really surprised demographers but also really
Speaker 3: surprised the state, is that once they've lifted in essence,
Speaker 3: they've ended that there's now nominally a three child policy,
Speaker 3: but you can have as many kids as you want. Actually,
Speaker 3: the fertility rate has continued to crater right, and so
Speaker 3: now it's right around one, which means that it is
Speaker 3: lower than It's much lower than the United States. It's
Speaker 3: lower than most of Western Europe, although I believe Southern
Speaker 3: European countries Italy, Spain might be a little bit lower.
Speaker 3: And it's in league with the place that have the
Speaker 3: lowest fertility rates in the world, places like Taiwan, South Korea.
Speaker 3: It's lower than Japan now, I believe. And this is
Speaker 3: just kind of an indicator, right about how people are
Speaker 3: feeling about bringing children into the world. And there's a
Speaker 3: lot of reasons that people are anxious about it. And
Speaker 3: some of it may be the political instability, some of
Speaker 3: it may be climate change, but there's other explanations which
Speaker 3: are basically it is very hard to bring children into
Speaker 3: the world because all the things that you need to survive,
Speaker 3: including critically housing, education, health care. Those are the big ones,
Speaker 3: but also we should include elder care in there have
Speaker 3: become much much more difficult for Chinese people to organize
Speaker 3: as they have been marketized, as the cost has increased
Speaker 3: a really dramatically, and you know, with respect to the
Speaker 3: question of elder care, China is now a rapidly aging society.
Speaker 3: So if you are a single person of childbearing Asian,
Speaker 3: your your twenties, thirties, whatever, and you're thinking about having
Speaker 3: a child, well, first of all, you have to think
Speaker 3: about taking care of your aging parents. And there is
Speaker 3: definitely not adequate facilities for elder care in China, which
Speaker 3: again doesn't make it at all exceptional in the world.
Speaker 3: And as the costs for all these other things have
Speaker 3: gone up, that's going to really give you pop. Now
Speaker 3: it's really important to note, of course, the gender dynamics
Speaker 3: of this, because the expectation in China, as an all
Speaker 3: patriarchal societies, is that women are going to take on
Speaker 3: all of the labor or almost all of the labor
Speaker 3: that's associated with social reproduction, with caring for children, with
Speaker 3: caring for older people, etc. And one of the things
Speaker 3: that that makes trein actually pretty exceptional is that, in
Speaker 3: contrast to global trends, the gender pay gap between men
Speaker 3: and women has actually been getting bigger in China over
Speaker 3: the last forty years.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 3: That's actually, I think more of a comment of the
Speaker 3: progress that was made in the male era, where the
Speaker 3: pay gap was very very small, almost non existent, not
Speaker 3: non existent, but very small, and it is wide and
Speaker 3: significantly and so now it's much more similar to other
Speaker 3: capitalist countries. One of the ways that they've tried to
Speaker 3: resolve this, and here you can see that it's not
Speaker 3: just a kind of a gender form of gender oppression,
Speaker 3: but there's other forms of social hierarchy involved, is by
Speaker 3: trying to push those costs of social reproduction specifically onto
Speaker 3: rural women. How does that work well, is you can
Speaker 3: see the fiscal reorganization of the state, which has really
Speaker 3: undermined the basis of social reproduction and rural areas and
Speaker 3: created this big urban bias, right so that people so
Speaker 3: that women in rural areas and especially grandparents in rural
Speaker 3: areas have to take on a disproportionate share of child
Speaker 3: rearing while the young, younger people are out working in
Speaker 3: the cities. And so you have a kind of reorganization
Speaker 3: of the family structure in rural areas where it's almost
Speaker 3: the norm in many places to have grandparents looking after
Speaker 3: children while the parents are way that's hard work, especially
Speaker 3: you're going to do your sixties, seventies and even eighties.
Speaker 3: It's hard work to look after children. And then the
Speaker 3: other way that it works is by bringing domestic workers
Speaker 3: into relatively well off urban households. And the domestic workers,
Speaker 3: in contrast to most places in the world, are not
Speaker 3: sourced from elsewhere in the Global South. Y're sourced from
Speaker 3: rural China, right, So almost all of the domestic workers nannies, etc.
Speaker 3: Come from rural China to urban China, and they are
Speaker 3: paid substandard wages to essentially make the lives of urban
Speaker 3: women somewhat easier. It's not to say that urban women
Speaker 3: themselves don't face all kinds of struggles, but that's the
Speaker 3: way they've tried to balance it, and it hasn't worked
Speaker 3: right because, you know, some people think about it as
Speaker 3: like a reproductive strike. Women are not willing to have children,
Speaker 3: and this has created great anxiety on the part of
Speaker 3: the country's patriarchs in the Communist Party this past year
Speaker 3: over the lunar New Year holiday, the government announced that
Speaker 3: they were putting a ban on sort of online discussion
Speaker 3: that was opposed to marriage or opposed to childbirth, basically
Speaker 3: telling people no, no, no, like it's you know, it's
Speaker 3: your patriotic duty to get married and to have children,
Speaker 3: but it is not working so far. Yeah.
Speaker 4: I think there's a part of your book where you've
Speaker 4: got this really interesting quote from Hijin where he talks about,
Speaker 4: you know, it is the women's task to strike a
Speaker 4: balance between family and work and to take up social
Speaker 4: responsibilities while contributing to their families. It's so in keeping
Speaker 4: with actually quite a lot of the the sort of
Speaker 4: patriarchal discourse that we're getting from, you know, the resurgent
Speaker 4: kind of right across the West. It's quite striking, and
Speaker 4: I wonder if as part of that de exceptionalizing China
Speaker 4: that we've talked about, maybe there are other kind of parallels,
Speaker 4: things like I think you talk about restrictions on abortion,
Speaker 4: restrictions on LGBTQ rights, and actually this experience of migrant
Speaker 4: women workers as kind of domestic help, you know, which
Speaker 4: is kind of famous in you know, the sort of
Speaker 4: the big wealthy cities London or New York, Paris and
Speaker 4: things like that, where often it would be women from
Speaker 4: like you said, from the global South who come to
Speaker 4: do this work. In China, it's women from rural China. Again,
Speaker 4: it really feels like there are these really strong parallels
Speaker 4: of the gender regime of China with a lot of
Speaker 4: Western countries. Does that feel fair or is that like
Speaker 4: a fair comparison?
Speaker 3: I think it's extremely fair. So, just to pick up
Speaker 3: on a couple of points that you made, if you
Speaker 3: think about how I'll just talk about the United States,
Speaker 3: the country that I know best. If you look at
Speaker 3: how our country has tried to solve the crisis of
Speaker 3: social reproduction. For let's say, middle class and elite urban people,
Speaker 3: what is the hinterland that they can draw on. Well,
Speaker 3: if you're in Los Angeles, your hinterland is Mexico or
Speaker 3: the Philippines, right, And you bring in domestic workers, you
Speaker 3: bring in nannies, you bring in elder care workers, you
Speaker 3: bring in nurses from those places at depressed wages. Sociologists
Speaker 3: talk about these care chains, right, which is to try
Speaker 3: to understand that the global dynamics of this, if those
Speaker 3: people are coming from the Philippines or from Mexico or
Speaker 3: from elsewhere in Latin America to Los Angeles. That means
Speaker 3: that they're leaving behind their own care responsibilities in their
Speaker 3: own country, right, which means it's similar to chrya. Oftentimes
Speaker 3: you know elder people, you know grandparents that have to
Speaker 3: look after kids, and of course there's the emotional cost
Speaker 3: of being away from your children for you know, key
Speaker 3: years of their development which cannot be quantified. So in
Speaker 3: that sense, I think we just have to think about
Speaker 3: these these kind of global cities and what their hinter
Speaker 3: lends are, and in China, I think for people outside
Speaker 3: of the country can sometimes be hard to understand the
Speaker 3: way that the Chinese countryside functions as that hinterland, and
Speaker 3: that there are similar kinds of restrictions even in terms
Speaker 3: of citizenship as institutionalized through the household registration system that
Speaker 3: they call Huko. It's very similar to the way that
Speaker 3: I think global cities in western countries will draw on
Speaker 3: different kinds of hinterlands in the global South. With respect
Speaker 3: to the question of LGBTQ and kind of queer rights
Speaker 3: within China today, you know, to me, there's just so
Speaker 3: much overlap with what the right wing extremists in Western
Speaker 3: countries are trying to accomplish and what China already has
Speaker 3: accomplished in a sense, right like Donald Trump just wants
Speaker 3: to get up to the speed that China's already at. Right,
Speaker 3: And I think that there's a way in which the
Speaker 3: right feels like in Western countries feels like they've missed
Speaker 3: the boat. You know, we already have gay marriage, and
Speaker 3: now they have to attack trans people to make sure
Speaker 3: that they don't kind of lose out on that and
Speaker 3: that they don't lose the next generation. I think, you know,
Speaker 3: in China, there's no gay marriage. There's not going to
Speaker 3: be gay marriage anytime soon. I can guarantee you that
Speaker 3: there's been a concerted attack on queer groups, even very
Speaker 3: mild ones, you know, these kind of like student groups
Speaker 3: that are there to provide emotional support for people. You know,
Speaker 3: coming out is very difficult in China, as in all contacts,
Speaker 3: those kinds of groups have been under attack. And you know,
Speaker 3: to say nothing of trans rights, like that's not even
Speaker 3: remotely part of a discussion in China, because I think
Speaker 3: people understand that it's not possible, and with this increased hysteria,
Speaker 3: really about the following following fertility rate. Of course, it
Speaker 3: is disproportionately following falling on women and CIS women, because
Speaker 3: that's just numerically a larger people. But there's no question
Speaker 3: that it is also enhancing discrimination against queer people, against
Speaker 3: trans people, because they're not going to be reproducing in
Speaker 3: the way that the state demands of them. And if
Speaker 3: that is your kind of overriding political aim, then it's
Speaker 3: going to have those very clear and kind of heteronormative consequences.
Speaker 3: You know. The last point on abortion, because this in
Speaker 3: China is a huge, huge issue. Of course, I already
Speaker 3: mentioned the one child policy and the forced abortions and
Speaker 3: things like that. There was I think some fear for
Speaker 3: a while that they were going to flip in the
Speaker 3: other direction because there is this kind of like extreme
Speaker 3: polarization and how the Chinese state has approached a childbirth.
Speaker 3: You know, from the late nineteen seventies on, they're basically saying,
Speaker 3: we have you know, we have too many people. We
Speaker 3: really really have to restrain it. And they're saying that
Speaker 3: up until whatever it was in the mid twenty tens,
Speaker 3: and then they're saying, wow, we don't have enough people.
Speaker 3: We got to force everyone to have more children, and
Speaker 3: so people thinking that rather than making abortion widely available
Speaker 3: and sometimes coercive, that they were going to go in
Speaker 3: the other direction and say, no, you're not going to
Speaker 3: be allowed to have an abortion. And you know, there
Speaker 3: were some statements from the state based saying well, you know,
Speaker 3: we shouldn't be doing abortion if it's not medically necessary,
Speaker 3: and you know, doctors maybe trying to kind of counsel
Speaker 3: women out of having abortions if they don't deem it
Speaker 3: to be medically necessary. So far, we haven't seen evidence
Speaker 3: that there are intensive restrictions on abortions, and that's a
Speaker 3: good thing, but I do think that it's something to
Speaker 3: watch out for for sure.
Speaker 4: So given all of that, could you speak a little
Speaker 4: bit about how feminist organizing in China who has developed,
Speaker 4: and maybe its responses to these kinds of pressures of
Speaker 4: this gender regime.
Speaker 3: You know, there's been a lot of really impressive and
Speaker 3: inspiring organizing done by feminists. Most people mark the beginning
Speaker 3: of the modern phase of feminist organizing, distinguishing it from
Speaker 3: some of the important advances but also some of the
Speaker 3: problems that existed in the MA era. Most people mark
Speaker 3: the beginning of the kind of modern contemporary phase to
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety five when the UN held their Women's Conference
Speaker 3: in Beijing. This was a big event. Famously, Clinton went there,
Speaker 3: and you know, there's things to be I think dismissive of,
Speaker 3: certainly with Hillary Clinton and with the UN. But one
Speaker 3: of the things that a lot of feminists say in
Speaker 3: China is that this really brought attention and gave legitimacy
Speaker 3: to women's rights as a kind of a distinct issue
Speaker 3: and an issue that couldn't just be left alone to
Speaker 3: the al China Women's Federation, which is the kind of
Speaker 3: the official body for representing women's interests, and its problematic
Speaker 3: in all sorts of ways. So after nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 3: you actually do see the growth of a kind of
Speaker 3: civil society organizations working on different kinds of women's rights issues,
Speaker 3: and that is a really important foundation for the things
Speaker 3: that came afterwards. We begin to see some more to
Speaker 3: me and to many of my comrades, more interesting organizing
Speaker 3: that happened in the twenty tens at the same time
Speaker 3: that this kind of more interesting labor organizing was happening
Speaker 3: in In fact, a lot of times there's a lot
Speaker 3: of overlap between the people and the labor and the
Speaker 3: feminist world, not coincidentally, and there was a famous event
Speaker 3: in twenty fifteen where you had a bunch of feminists
Speaker 3: who were organizing against domestic abuse, and they were doing
Speaker 3: some campaigning that I think is liberal democracy would seem
Speaker 3: pretty tame. They were going out into public and distributing
Speaker 3: information about domestic violence, really doing the important cultural work
Speaker 3: to let people know, here's what domestic violence is and
Speaker 3: here's why it's a problem. Right, And the state decided
Speaker 3: to crack down on that very hardly. And I think
Speaker 3: that the reason that they did that was not even
Speaker 3: so much that they couldn't bear to have any kind
Speaker 3: of discussion about domestic violence, but because it demonstrated that
Speaker 3: they had organized kind of at the national level, because
Speaker 3: there was women in multiple places around the country who
Speaker 3: were taking similar kinds of action at precisely at the
Speaker 3: same time. So it was the kind of the existence
Speaker 3: of an organizing network that the state could not tolerate.
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