Lutte pour les espaces publics et échelles de visibilité : les organisations de travailleurs locales dans la Chine du XXIe siècle

In this paper we explore the issue of how a Beijing-based labour grassroots organisation has
managed to develop and subsist for almost twenty years in a political environment characterised
by uncertainty. How did this organisation adapt to the transformations of the political environment
and how did these changes impact the scales and visibility of the actions led and claims
made by the organisation? On the one hand, we document how the grassroots organisation’s
varying scales of action are informed by a dialectic of making visible the materiality of the experience
of indignity embodied in the workers’ condition and its consequent quest for recognition
and social justice. On the other hand, we show that the organisation has also displayed explicit
signs that the various projects it has engineered and its meaning-making practices remained
within the party-state’s authorised sphere, and that the party’s main ideological claims and
policies were also thereby recognised by the organisation.