Editorial Essay
The Myth of the Passive Worker
- Published
- September 27, 2024
- Read Time
- 1 min read
Deconstructing the media narrative that Chinese workers are docile — and looking at the evidence of grassroots organizing.
The image of the Chinese worker as passive, atomized, or purely instrumentalized by the party-state is one of the most durable clichés in Western labor writing. It is also empirically wrong.
China Labour Bulletin's strike map records thousands of collective actions per year — from short walkouts over unpaid wages to sustained campaigns in logistics, construction, and platform work. These are not the acts of a docile workforce. They are the ordinary background noise of a large industrial economy in which workers understand their bargaining position better than their critics abroad do.
What makes the Chinese case distinctive is not the absence of struggle but the specific institutional terrain on which struggle unfolds: an official union apparatus, a legal regime that formally privileges labor, and a party that treats worker unrest as politically consequential. The myth of the passive worker survives because it flatters a comparative story about liberal democracy. The evidence does not.
About the Author
Immanuel Ness is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg and author of Dialectics of Chinese Labor.