3:00
November 11 2008
PSC Reading Room, Room 4.27, Level 4, Hedley Bull Centre, ANUSaving the Working Class: Work and Life of Community Cadres in China’s Rustbelt
Dr Luigi Tomba Fellow, Department of Political and Social Change, Australian National University
The district of Tiexi in the Chinese rustbelt city of Shenyang was famous for its massive industrial base and as a cradle for the once privileged, state-sponsored working class. The restructuring of China’s industrial system has produced unemployment, underemployment, informalisation and rampant social conflicts, that accompanied a substantial overhaul of the city’s economic base and its unlikely re-branding as a post-industrial city.
It also stimulated a new governance strategy, as territorial units of administration (in Shenyang known simply as shequ – communities) have replaced the traditional governance structure provided for over three decades by socialist work-units.
One of the by-products of the devolution of social functions to the shequs
If the collapse of entitlements has produced disenchantment in one “lost” generation of former workers, how is the Party redefining its role and its language? How are such traditional (as much as socialist) values as “responsibility”, “quality”, “harmony” and “participation” – recently redeployed as pillars of the CCP political culture – being rewritten and concretised in what is, arguably, a hostile environment?
Dr Luigi Tomba is a Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, ANU. He worked on China’s labour reform (marketization, ideology, mobility and policy) and more recently on urban governance, residential segregation, urban citizenship and the political discourses of stratification, “quality” and the middle class. He lived and worked in Beijing for many years, and his recent research field has been the Northeastern city of Shenyang where he worked on a project titled "Community and New forms of social stratification” funded by an ARC Discovery Grant. Between 2009 and 2011 he will be working on two new comparative projects on China’s urbanization one funded by the ARC and one by the German Research Foundation. Since 2005 he is the co-editor, with Andrew Kipnis, of The China Journal.
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