UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xviii, 252 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures.) US$33.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-107-11118-5.
Can a single-party authoritarian regime promulgate the notion of “rule of law” and implement high labour standards for its workers and marginalized citizens? Can a rapidly urbanizing country overcome the gap between urban and rural citizens? Can a country that for a long time encountered a large gap between “law in books” and “law in action” fix the problems of workplace disputes through legal institutions? Addressing all these questions, Mary E. Gallagher’s Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State explores China’s intriguing reform of workplace rights and its extraordinary plans for urbanization.
Primarily since the 1990s, China has legislated some of the most protective workplace laws in the world. Gallagher argues that this reform is closely related to China’s distinctive division between rural and urban citizens, the frequent conflicts over local governments’ land taking, and the sharply increased migration of rural workers to urban areas (5–6). The increased population of migrant workers has led to dramatic changes to the long-existing hukou system. More importantly, while the new class of “landless peasants” has become an inevitable product of the centralization of land tax revenue and the competition over rural land ownership, the Chinese state has been keen to offer social welfare to the starving rural citizens who have gradually lost land security and hence have sought urban employment. As a result, as Gallagher persuasively argues, the new “rule of law” attempts at workplace rights protection, together with the gradual dissolution of the household registration system, have become a crucial part of China’s policies towards labour disputes and rural land conflicts (9–14).
Chapter 2 situates China’s instrumental use of “rule of law” within a broader debate on autocratic institutions. Contrary to the perception that China’s authoritarian legality is merely limited and bounded, Gallagher argues that it has a functional logic relevant to the current challenges within the system. The adoption of rule of law not only assisted the ruling party in making bargains for elite support, but also helped the state to “manage principal-agent problems between levels of government, to cultivate mass support, and to exploit and reshape social cleavages” (31). This strategic use of rights-giving legislation has allowed the central government to build “hierarchical trust,” generating competition between regions and local actors and creating space for bottom-up mobilization to foster compliance of local governments and firms with the central policies (36–50).
Chapter 3 examines the institutional trajectory of China’s workers’ rights mobilization. Focusing on the legislative development mainly from 1995 to 2008, Gallagher analyzes how legal reform shifted the previous socialist employment model to an inclusive, protective, and individualized system (63–77). While the state’s law serves as a constitutive element of social and political transformation, it was deemed incomplete without government-sponsored legal dissemination (78–85). Consecutive campaigns not only raised legal awareness, but also constructed a new labour dispute resolution system, through which the state detected disputes from below to assure law enforcement and compliance within the system (85–108). However, such heavy reliance on bottom-up mobilization has also compelled the central government to set up resolutions for the grieved labourers. Moreover, the new protective institution reinforced the existing inequalities between advantaged and disadvantaged groups and intensified tensions between frustrated workers and their employers and local governments (108–111).
Chapter 4 analyzes the importance of education and access to various aids and resources in the process of mobilization. Workers with a higher level of education tend to claim their rights through legal channels, while those with less education usually resort to media and other resources (141–146). The spread of legal knowledge has empowered workers to claim their rights, but it has also exposed the flaws of these institutions and the ambivalent attitudes of local governments towards worker’s rights (113–114). Chapter 5 examines various types of workplace problems and diverse channels for dispute resolution. Workers with negative experiences with the judicial process or limited access to legal representation are usually reluctant to use these institutions again (152–175). Generation-wise, younger workers are relatively positive and confident in their abilities to deal with workplace disputes (175–189). As chapter 6 reveals, the state-led campaigns have put pressure on local officials and employers and have increased the number of lawsuits and demonstrations as many workers are dissatisfied with the gap between the promised rights and the actual law enforcement. This has compelled the state to shift from promoting “legal weapons” to disseminating propaganda on no-litigation and a “harmonious society.” In the end, the state has yet to find any efficient approach to reducing conflicts, and the increasing disputes regarding workplace rights have undermined the stability of authoritarian rule (208–215).
Drawing upon abundant narratives and surveys, Gallagher offers a groundbreaking take on the complex dynamics between the Chinese state and workers. Her vivid account forcefully challenges the conventional theories about authoritarian legality and discloses the intertwined relationship between workers’ rights mobilization, economic development, local governance, and the changing demographic structure in rural and urban areas. However, while Gallagher convincingly demonstrates how China’s authoritarianism “worked” with its quasi-democratic reforms under specific circumstances, some points raised by her analysis deserve further exploration. First, Gallagher vigorously engages in debates on authoritarianism by demonstrating the Chinese state’s extraordinary ability to exploit social and legal cleavages in order to bolster its own rule, but she does not provide sufficient discussion on an equally important topic that appears throughout the book: the concept of legality. If legality is an essential part of both state-led campaigns and bottom-up mobilization, how are these legalities constructed and how do they correlate to one another? Did the enthusiastic campaign of Chinese workplace rights reform fundamentally alter the construction of legality at the grassroots level? If so, how did the bottom-up legality play off the policies from different levels of bureaucracy, and how did these interactions reshape the complex process of China’s legality construction?
Second, if the Chinese state actively reconstructed urban-rural dynamics with its highly selective reform of workplace rights and migrant workers’ welfare, how did it approach other civil law issues? Did the state also employ quasi-democratic approaches in its management of various issues regarding laws? Did the CCP similarly harness other institutions to build connections with “the masses”? Moreover, did the acknowledgment of law shape the ways legality was constructed in various realms of law?
The third point has to do with the broader comparison of law in different societies. As Gallagher vividly demonstrates, the ways Chinese “authoritarianism” has dealt with laws and democratic institutions has greatly differed from other types of authoritarianism. Given that, if we intend to build an analytical model to compare laws in different political systems and historical periods, what kind of law-and-society model does China adopt compared to the diverse experiences of other societies? What’s the nature of China’s judicial process if we take into account both “authoritarianism” and other significant factors, such as the co-existence of multiple legal resources that have jointly shaped the operation of the legal system?
Weiting Guo
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada