cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/46377338
Opinion piece by Li Qiang, founder and executive director of China Labor Watch, and a human rights advocate with over 30 years of experience investigating global supply chains.
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China’s low rights model is no longer a domestic labor issue but a systemic challenge to global labor standards, supply chain governance, and fair market competition. Without a coordinated civil society response, the global baseline for worker rights will continue to fall.
I call China’s economic model a “low rights” one because it has long relied on suppressing labor costs to maintain industrial competitiveness. As a result, trade imbalances between China, the United States, and Europe are strategically linked to China’s ability to attract multinational companies through low-cost labor and policy incentives. At the same time, Chinese companies internalized the technology and management know-how of these foreign companies into their domestic systems, gradually transforming what were originally Western competitive advantages into China’s own strengths.
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In recent years, China’s “low-standard, low-cost” development model has expanded beyond its borders. Through the Belt and Road Initiative, it has spread globally, exporting labor, environmental, and governance risks to host countries. Nowhere is this more evident than in Indonesia’s nickel sector, where mining and smelting contracts are so short that they function like countdown clocks, pressuring companies to recoup capital as fast as possible.
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This “low-cost” model has been permitted to exist due to an increasingly shrinking civic space. Independent labor monitoring inside China has become dramatically harder in the past decade. Today, only a few independent organizations remain capable of conducting investigations, such as China Labor Watch. Yet, political risks deter most international funders from supporting work inside China, leaving independent oversight critically under-resourced in an area where it is needed most.
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To counter this dynamic, civil society organizations must be central to any strategy for raising global labor standards. We can advance change in three key ways.
First, increase public awareness. We can collectively highlight that consumers must recognize the real costs behind low-priced products: long working hours, low pay, job displacement, low labor standards. The public must understand that declining labor standards ultimately harm every society. In reality, with wages stagnating in many Western countries, more consumers rely on cheaper products that are produced by workers who are, in fact, competing with them for similar types of jobs in the global labor market.
Second, advocate and partner with authorities for the rigorous enforcement of forced-labor laws. Import bans, labor regulations, and due diligence laws already exist. But enforcement depends on independent organizations holding authorities accountable, and providing evidence if there are enforcement gaps. It also requires sufficient and sustained funding to ensure that these laws can be implemented in practice, rather than remaining symbolic commitments.
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The EU Forced Labor Regulation and the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD) had their scope narrowed during the legislative process, while U.S. forced labor import enforcement remains inconsistent and lacks clear direction, making the global regulatory landscape by significant uncertainty. If global civil society does not intervene now, global labor standards will not simply stagnate; they will be redefined downward by a model built on speed, opacity, and the suppression of rights.
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I think the argument is rather that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the proletariat taking political control over capital. The tankies, so to speak, recognize that this does not resolve all internal contradictions of society nor instantly improve the material conditions of said society.
What you might agree on is that:
Does this mean that worker’s rights are unimportant? No. However, I believe the political leadership prioritizes the development of productive forces over worker’s rights at this stage of development.
I also want to highlight the question of who benefits from this labour. If the proletariat is the class that benefits from their own work and the government has their popular support, is this really the red fash, authoritarian exploitation that the other comments and western media assume it to be?
This is just my flawed understanding, of course. There are probably many who can give better answers. Looking at the comment section at time of writing, I am not sure such an effort is deserved.
Yes, because without basic political rights which do not exist in China, Chinese workers have no political agency by which they can express a political preference. It is entirely possible that given such freedoms, the Chinese people would implement the exact same system of government they have now, but there is no way to know that since the functional basis for political self determination does not exist.
I am not quite sure I agree that proclaiming a resolution to class struggle by taking political control over the means of production is sufficient to resolve internal contradictions. The statement regarding “basic political rights” however seem to imply that this in particular is ensured in liberal democracies, on which I definitely categorically disagree.
I spend one third of my life at work, one third sleeping and one third making myself ready for either. At work I have no “basic political rights”, not because I live in China, but because there is no democratic control over the mode of production in my liberal democracy.
I think that freedom ultimately necessitates equity, at the very least with regards to opportunities in life. In western countries, you pretty much only have the option to live subservient to the capitalist class. The political freedoms are hollow as long as political power is controlled by capital.
So what am I saying? That I believe a socialist society is the only one that can give any basic rights, and that in turn one must rephrase the question whether China has attained socialism to whether they are working to attain it. Then the situation of current worker’s rights become a question of whom their work serves.
To the victor goes the spoils, after all. Bear this in mind when you relativize the material conditions of Chinese workers to that of western ones, who historically directly benefitted on the exploitation of the former.
You are doing the age old ML trick of attaching the rights which convey political agency to a specific historical epoch of economic liberalism. If we are to understand that the Chinese socialism is a process which inherently must navigate through flaws and imperfections of the material conditions it is dealt, then surely we much acknowledge the same of the western struggle. And yes, it is a struggle all the same, albeit from a position of historical privilege.
In reality there is nothing about the enshrinement of individual rights which requires or implies capitalism or imperialism, other than historical snapshot these things have been attached to. It is no more correct than saying all socialism requires autocracy. In fact, we have an entire century of revisionist thinking which modifies Marx with this specific goal in mind. So just as China approaches this struggle from a more Orthodox perspective inspired by Lenin and molded by a period of historical oppression (itself a bit or a contradiction given China’s broader history), the west’s struggle is throwing off the shackles of its comparative success and influence which binds it to so much old world influence. Both molded by imperialism in different ways. Both currently stuck in a vicious cycle of capitalism, thrust on them by material reality.
We are, and we are analyzing the situation materially and historically in hope to arrive at a real understanding of the internal contradictions of either system. Historically, as you say, the capitalists use their privilege to exploit the rest of the world. When the crisis revolving around the internal contradictions become to great, they decay into fascism.
📍This is where we currently are with respect to the stages of the western capitalist cycle.
Well no. Conversely the enshrinement of individual rights requires the absence of capitalism and imperialism, in favour of socialism. I am not saying that communism with Chinese characteristics is the only way to attain this, that would be stupid and contrasting our understanding of material reality.
I agree that the West is not only as much, but even more powerless to change its own capitalist mode of production due to the material reality. This is even more favouring the line of China in paving a new path for the betterment of all. Give the west a bit deepening of state of crisis, and it will be sure for all we are going to need it.
We are in agreement on many topics. Where we diverge is in the mythologizing of deterministic western fascism without making the same potential attribution to failures at implementing socialism. This is, simply put, a failure at critical analysis. History has seen both cases. The idea that the Chinese system is the answer to, or even a protective force relative to western imperialism, simply because it exists as an alternative, is flawed reasoning. I would even say dangerous reasoning. The path forward is understanding and learning from the failure and success in all systems through history. In China’s case, a big part of that is literally the inability to discuss its failures. And I’m not just talking about the legal state of China itself, but also the broad hesitancy to acknowledge this as a failure within leftist circles.
These acknowledgements do not collapse any house of cards unless it has been built on fragile ground in the first place.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was a philosophical construct. Not a literalism. Industrialization has improved the material condition of every society that has been through it. It has nothing to do with left or right etc.
And capitalists like China aren’t going to change that.
Again that’s a factor of industrialization. Not economic model. The problem they’re just starting to face that countries like the United States and others have been struggling with for some time now. Is that the petite bourgeoisie has always benefited more. And expansion or growth can never be infinite. Once that slows the proletariat is always the first victim of the bourgeoisie.
First of all, the advance of the bourgeois class cannot be separated from the industrial technological revolution in a historical materialist context.
With regards to
Note that (quoting Wikipedia)
The dictatorship of the proletariat is not ideal, it is material and can be analyzed as such, whether or not you agree on its ideal form.
The crux of your argument is that the industrial revolution and the bourgeois revolution has developed the productive forces, i.e. capital, and thus improved the material conditions of many people as a result. Even Marx agreed on this issue in the 1800s, remarking the absence of novelty of this idea. What you conveniently ignore is the exploitation that this development has inflicted upon every citizen outside the imperial core.
The nonsensical wording of
than the proper bourgeoisie, is self explanatory for anyone understanding what the word “petite” means.
That
is also not novel to any socialist worth their salt. However, this is more of a nod in the opposite direction of what you think, towards western countries currently undergoing a state of crisis.