Continuity, ruptures and new insights into labour regimes in China (1949-2024)

The People’s Republic is at a turning point in its history. Economic growth following the Covid-19 epidemic, was 5% in 2023 and seems to be settling permanently at levels well below the double-digit rates of the 1990s and 2000s. On the demographic front, in 2022, for the first time since 1961 and the Great Famine that followed the Great Leap Forward (1958-1960), the population declined; the birth rate is falling, the working population is shrinking and there are more and more elderly people, the result of a birth control policy that has, in fact, been too efficient. On the employment front, youth unemployment has never been so high. Those who have a job are also less committed, and some employees are critical of the authorities’ call to work hard to participate in the “rebirth of the Chinese nation”. In this context, it seemed timely to take a fresh look at labour issues in China. In the first part of this essay, we take a look back at China’s labour history since 1949, drawing attention to the succession – and also coexistence – of several labour regimes in different periods. The transformations in the political economy of labour, in workers’ statuses and modes of employment, all pertain to four major issues : the question of the appropriate categories for analysing China’s social history, worker’s identity politics, the manifold and highly resilient role of the state institutions, and the deployment of worker’s agency.