i’m curious to get some concrete data wrt to worker rights/labour legislation in prc: is it as bad as it’s often perceived in the west? has anything changed recently? there’s a weird duality to it in my perception, on one side it’s a relatively happy nation, but on the other side there is the crazy 996 work schedule, poor safety net that’s largely substituted by investment in housing etc 🤔
Worker rights? Not exist in China.
Sure! Workers right’s in the PRC are stronger than nearly anywhere else in the world. Wages are up 4x in the last 3 decades, homeownership is nearly universal, urban poverty is essentially eradicated, workers right and safety are enshrined in its constitutional documents, unions are strong and regularly get the backing of the government against employer abuses. Mandatory unions and CPC reps in every business above a certain employee number threshold.
The 996 work schedules prevalent in some industries like tech remain a problem to be tackled, but since work hours have been decreasing steadily over the last few years, I think we can be confident that this will be addressed at higher levels.
- The real wage (IE the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. This is staggering considering it’s the most populous country on the planet. The US real wage by comparison is lower in 2019 than it was in 1973.
- Workplace democracy in action in the CPC.
- US Life expectancy peaked in 2015, is on the decline, and is now lower than in China. 2
- Wages themselves are forced to rise in the private sector by the CPC (+16% every years, +400% since 1980) who force the capitalists to accept the presence of CPC chapters who represent the interest of the workers, increasing workers control even in the capitalist parts of the economy.
- Eliminated Urban Poverty. On track to eliminate all poverty within a decade.
- CGTN documentary - China’s war on poverty
- Trade union laws of the PRC.
- The west views China as one big sweatshop, but the actual working hours aren’t much more than anywhere else. The average for a migrant worker (most vulnerable to exploitation as they are traveling from the countryside) is 8.8 hours, little under an hour more than a typical working day. Labor strikes are rarely suppressed, and usually get the support of the PRC.
- The workplace safety standards of China are better than in the capitalist countries of the West like in Australia who have an higher rate of work related death despite having a GDP per capita 3-5 times higher.
- /u/cheezicle - My experience as a factory worker in a Chinese “sweatshop”
- 70% of Chinese millenials own their own home, and 91% as of 2021 plan to buy their own home within the next 5 years.
- In a typical example of proletarian police accountability, the CPC sentences a police officer to death for killing a pregnant woman in a restaurant in southern China.
- The US is losing to China: “Washington is actually far more corrupt than Beijing. If you want to get something done in Washington, you do what you do in Jakarta: just slip some money to the right people.”
- Hudson and Escobar - The consequences of moving from Industrial to Finance Capital in the US
- Hudson and Escobar - China, the US, Russia - Finance capitalism, Industrial capitalism, and rent seeking
This sounds extremely close to propaganda.
Please state some negatives about China, including discussing the controversial history?
Some of this is real. Some of this is aspirational. Some of this is straight-up propaganda (and not even very credible propaganda!).
Life in China is nowhere near as dire as most westerners feel seemingly compelled to insist it “really” is. Life in China is nowhere near as paradisiacal as its strongest proponents feel compelled to state it is. The truth, as is usual, lies somewhere between the extremes and, further, in a nation as large and ornate as China, varies strongly according to where you are.
Many (not all) of the horrific stories you hear (like the Foxconn thing: I work about a 25 minute walk from that campus) are true-ish but usually overstated and are not representative of most experienced life here. (One area, however, where China is very similar to the west is that tech companies are utter dumpster fires as employers.) Conversely many of the rosy pictures you find painted in the above links are also overstated, incompletely analyzed, and again not representative of the lived lives of most people here.
For an example of the latter, I’ll pick on the “own their own home” thing. Yes, it’s true, 70% of Chinese millennials own their own home. Because their parents (and sometimes their grandparents!) took massive hits to their lifestyles to scrape the money together … for a down payment. (A frequent pattern is Chinese seniors taking up a mortgage on a home they’ve owned for decades just so they can meet a down payment for their children or grandchildren.) In the bigger cities people refer to themselves as “house slaves” because the majority of their income goes to service their mortgages, community fees, and other expenses related solely to owning a home. They own their own home, but very little else as a result. What’s going on with housing here right now cannot continue for much longer before there’s a collapse, and there’s some signs of that collapse already beginning as young people put off getting married later and later and later in life (because it’s almost obligatory for the man to own a home before marriage). There will come a time where people will stop bothering to even get married, to have children, because of something as simple as “I can’t afford a house in my lifetime”. The older generations can only mortgage off so much before the well runs dry.
(Source for my opinions: 22 years and counting of living and working in China, observing both my own state and that of my extended family here.)
You’re getting a lot of downvotes, but nobody commenting with counter points. Everything you said sounds wrong to me, but I genuinely have no idea.
Look at my counterpoints above
