Prof. Rho’s book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China’s Rise?’ (Cambridge University Press, 2023), asks whether the Chinese regime’s selective toleration of workers’ protests has appeased factory workers’ discontent. With export-led growth no longer sustainable, the regime faces new challenges in state-labour relations. Rural-born migrant workers, who make up the bulk of low-skilled factory workers, have engaged in protests to demand better wages and working conditions. The central and local governments take a relatively tolerant approach to these protests, but ensure that workers’ demands remain job-specific. This approach, which Prof. Rho calls atomized incorporation, is assumed to ensure the long-term resilience of the authoritarian regime.
The book explores theoretically and empirically the inevitable dilemma of atomized incorporation, which allows some collective claim-making without workers’ organizing. Prof. Rho theorizes the potential benefits and limitation of atomized incorporation from a comparative perspective. If small protests are successful in ensuring regime resilience, what might explain why other authoritarian countries choose different strategies? Conversely, what might be the reasons the Chinese regime does not pursue other avenues, such as institutional co-optation or corporatism, that are considered effective in stabilizing state-labour relations? This book empirically examines these questions from the workers’ perspective. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative data collected over two years of intensive field research, Prof. Rho argues that atomized incorporation has successfully demobilized the labour movement because it encourages workers with resources for collective action to reap the rewards. However, this also means that many aggrieved workers are left out because they do not have access to such resources. The regime’s toleration of workers’ demands as atomized economic agents, but not as social and political beings, makes it difficult to depoliticize workers’ discontent.
Sungmin Rho is Associate Professor of Political Science and International Relations at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Her research bridges international and comparative political economy with a focus on labour. Sungmin Rho is broadly interested in interactions between structural economic changes and political and social conflict. Prof. Rho’s book, Atomized Incorporation: Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China’s Rise (Cambridge University Press, 2023), examines political implications of labour unrest by investigating marginalized workers’ perceptions, beliefs and behaviour within factories. Other research interests include domestic determinants of trade policy, labour politics and gender studies.
