[en] Post-Mao Chinese State capitalism, through its complex politico-institutional configurations, has produced extraordinarily efficient processes of extraction of rural migrant workers’ labor value. Starting with the 1993 Zhili factory blaze in South China in which 84 female migrant workers, locked in their workshop, were burnt alive to then focus on the 2010-2011 waves of suicide in Foxconn factories, the following question will be asked in this paper: how have claims to justice and accountability been framed and made visible by migrant workers in a context in which the accountability of capital and the State cannot be framed straightforwardly because of the CCP’s foundational commitment to represent the working class along with other social categories? This will be pursued at two levels: how have grassroots associations, through the formation of alliances between workers, social organizers, students and scholars endeavored to strike (unstable) balances of recognition and visibility of their actions and claims for dignity and accountability; secondly, I will document the nature of various forms of cultural mediation (literary and visual) of workers’ experiences of their bodies being exhausted, injured or made dead (Tyner, 2019). At the theoretical level, drawing on Tyner (2019) and Mitchell (2012; 2020), I will engage with the idea of the centrality of death in the resilience of global capitalism. Sources for this paper are a combination of ethnographic observations carried out in China (mainly Beijing and the Pearl River Delta) between 1999 and 2019, of online exchanges and observation, of popular cultural products and archives (songs, poems, popular literature, exhibitions, etc.) gathered over the years.
Disciplines :
Sociology & social sciences
Author, co-author :
Florence, Eric ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département des sciences de l'antiquité
Language :
English
Title :
Making Death, injuries and exhaustion visible: rural migrant workers’s struggles for dignity and quest for accountability in South China
Publication date :
05 October 2023
Event name :
Thanatic Ethics, Workshop 4: In search of accountability
Event organizer :
Université de Montpellier
Event place :
Montpellier, France
Event date :
5-6 octobre 2023
Audience :
International
Peer reviewed :
Editorial reviewed
References of the abstract :
Post-Mao Chinese State capitalism, through its complex politico-institutional configurations, has produced extraordinarily efficient processes of extraction of rural migrant workers’ labor value. Starting with the 1993 Zhili factory blaze in South China in which 84 female migrant workers, locked in their workshop, were burnt alive to then focus on the 2010-2011 waves of suicide in Foxconn factories, the following question will be asked in this paper: how have claims to justice and accountability been framed and made visible by migrant workers in a context in which the accountability of capital and the State cannot be framed straightforwardly because of the CCP’s foundational commitment to represent the working class along with other social categories? This will be pursued at two levels: how have grassroots associations, through the formation of alliances between workers, social organizers, students and scholars endeavored to strike (unstable) balances of recognition and visibility of their actions and claims for dignity and accountability; secondly, I will document the nature of various forms of cultural mediation (literary and visual) of workers’ experiences of their bodies being exhausted, injured or made dead (Tyner, 2019). At the theoretical level, drawing on Tyner (2019) and Mitchell (2012; 2020), I will engage with the idea of the centrality of death in the resilience of global capitalism. Sources for this paper are a combination of ethnographic observations carried out in China (mainly Beijing and the Pearl River Delta) between 1999 and 2019, of online exchanges and observation, of popular cultural products and archives (songs, poems, popular literature, exhibitions, etc.) gathered over the years.
