Description

Domestic private enterprises (DPEs) are continuously booming as a result of the development of market economy especially in the first decade of twenty-first century in China. This talk however is not about the causes of the DPEs’ emergence or prediction of their future development. It is about the following observation from my field research on DPEs in 2008: privately owned enterprises, particularly regarding labor control, adopt many managerial strategies and methods that were popular in state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under the socialist system. What is more intriguing is that DPEs share with SOEs the similar managerial rhetoric about relations between owners/managers and workers. This observation challenges the “sweatshop” image associated DPEs. It also raises questions about our understanding of the power relations formed in DPEs. I argue that those managerial strategies, methods and rhetoric, along with newly implemented so called “modern management”, have inevitably constructed a similar paternalistic type of power relations in DPEs as it is often observed in SOEs.

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Xiaodan Zhang is an Assistant Professor at the The City University of New York, where she teaches sociology. Her research focuses on changing labor relations under economic reforms in China. She is also interested in women’s social movements in China and how they adopt, apply and redefine feminist theories from the West. Recent publications include:”Trade Unions under the Modernization of Paternalist Rule in China” in Working USA: the Journal of Labor and Society and “Hidden Forms of Bargaining on China’s Shopfloor” in International Labor and Working Class History. Zhang has also written on the representation of migrancy and China’s modernization in documentary films.