Issue #4 of the web-journal China Left Review is now online. The latest issue is tightly focused on the issue of workers, including general overviews and in-depth original pieces on recent large-scale labor struggles involving SOE workers and migrant workers. This marks the second fully bilingual edition of CLR. Producing an issue in two languages takes a great deal of effort, and if you’d like to help out with translating, revising or writing for future issues, please contact [email protected].

In this issue we document how through the effort of one individual worker in Beijing, Liu Rongli, a small workplace union branch was set up successfully against all odds.

This case demonstrates that there is some support within the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) for workers to take the initiative to set up their own union branches, within the parameters of China’s Trade Union Law. Five years have passed since the ACFTU’s highly publicized campaign to set up union branches in Wal-Mart stores and to hold collective “consultation” with management. But the Wal-Mart unions in the end have not actively represented workers after all. By contrast, in this case Liu Rongli set up a union on his own initiative, and the message from the authorities was that his efforts were indeed legitimate.

Joel Andreas reviews Huang Yasheng’s Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics in the latest New Left Review, which also contains a response from Huang.

Andreas: “Huang’s diagnosis of the maladies afflicting rural China is clearly informed by one of the foundational myths of neo-classical economics—the ideal of competitive capitalism. Free competition, it is assumed, creates a level playing field on which small entrepreneurs naturally flourish. If small entrepreneurs are squeezed out, it must be the fault of the state, which tips the playing field to the advantage of favoured players. The reality is quite different. Market competition intrinsically centralizes property without the need for state intervention. Winners squeeze out losers, amass capital, capture market share and block new entrants. The state often facilitates this process by favouring the winners, but it can also inhibit it by protecting the weaker players. Over the last two centuries, peasants and small rural entrepreneurs have been the main losers as capitalism has swept across the globe.”

Translation of Li Changping’s “中国农村将彻底走上菲律宾道路” by Joel Andreas & Li Yuyu, first published on Chinastudygroup.net

A Report on an Investigation into the Tongyu Textile Group of Jiangsu
by Wang Hui
with introductions by Rebecca Karl and Cui Zhiyuan and a 2007 postscript by Wang Hui
translated by the China Study Group
Journal Critical Asian Studies, Volume 40, Issue 2 June 2008 , pages 163 - 209

From the postscript:
Although workers’ struggles to improve their fate will continue, the series of investigations, news reports, legal proceedings, spontaneous strikes, and government intervention surrounding Tongyu’s restructuring seem to have ended for now. The weakness of supervision by the news media, the legal …