29/09/2021
Author: Lao Tian
At the moment, a significant proportion of the Chinese
population at the bottom still has positive experiences and feelings about the
expansion of industrialisation. It is important to see that the pink attitudes
that are produced on the basis of an elevated living situation are not acquired
on the basis of ideological persuasion, and certainly cannot be refuted or
dissipated through logic.
The situation is probably the opposite of that in the U.S.
After the 1970s, whites in the U.S. who did not go to college took a pay cut
every time they changed jobs, and de-industrialisation essentially wiped out
the working aristocracy in the U.S. To this day, the life expectancy of the
white population in the US without a college degree has declined significantly,
and this group is buying into the fantasy that Trump is spreading, which is what
makes it an "anomaly" that Trump was elected despite his media
support being significantly behind his opponents.
In fact, many leftists are obsessed with talking about
class, but are not sensitive to, or even slow to understand, the concrete
changes in the class situation. They lack a minimum understanding of the
connotations of "pinkness" among workers (especially migrant
workers), and are even unwilling to understand it, simply denouncing it as a
characteristic propaganda effect.
For pinkos like my rural classmates, talking about class and
exploitation was not necessarily the right thing to do; the main issues or
problems that interested them were:
1. The problem of getting a wife: due to extreme family
planning policies and the existence of de facto gender selection, the sex ratio
in rural areas is often as high as about 130, this group of people entered the
marriage age at the beginning of the century, a significant proportion of rural
young men cannot find a wife, the proportion of "male bachelors" in
rural areas of my hometown is not less than 20%. There are more than ten or
twenty bachelors in every natural village. At the same time, the uncontrolled
rise in bride price in rural areas, from a base of 100,000 to 200,000 yuan or
more, has exacerbated the problem. At the same time, due to the imbalance in
the sex ratio and the fact that most young men in rural areas are at the bottom
of the social ladder, those who do have a family are often unstable, and the
proportion of wives who "follow someone else" is not low. In recent
years, many of the main protagonists in some of the most popular incidents have
been families without mothers, such as the suicide of four siblings in Bijie[1]
and the frosty boy in Yunnan[2],
all of whom were single-parent families who had lost their mothers.
2. Loss of support for the elderly rural population: as
young adults have to go to work in the cities or abroad to support their
families, two generations no longer live in the middle of a village, and the
elderly and sick rural population are left without support, many of them
choosing to commit suicide. This is the evil consequence of low-cost
industrialisation and low-level urbanisation, which has to be borne and
embodied by the generations of migrant workers who have "lost their
livelihood in old age".
3. The large number of abandoned fields and the failure of
farming to feed people: this is a knot in the minds of the older generation of
farmers, many of whom came from the Mao era and worked hard to build terraced
fields in order to produce more food. This is also a great disappointment.
4. When it comes to class and exploitation, of course this
will be felt, for after all, many people have come from the Maoist era and have
had a basic education, and memories of the land reform are still being passed
on. But this is really not a major problem for the migrant workers such as my
primary school classmate, who had concrete experience of industrial expansion
to enhance his living conditions. Although he did not necessarily believe in the
"freedom of movement" and "the hard truth of productivity
development" of the Right and the mainstream, he had a closely related
experience of the huge amount of income from part-time jobs that went into the
countryside to build small buildings, and of the expansion of consumption as a
result of the increase in income, all of which were tangible.
5. The generalisation of the employment conditions of
migrant workers is the real feature of the reform. Among blue-collar workers,
the main achievement of the Reformation has been the replacement of formal
workers by informal ones, and even among state-owned enterprises formal workers
have tended to disappear. China's manual workers today, whether born in urban
or rural areas, are collectively caught up in the mire of "job
insecurity" and "family instability", resulting in a vast amount
of trauma and experience.
The reason why Lao Tian is so disgusted with some people who
keep playing the dock[3]
and pretending to be pure within the left is not entirely because of their
tactical misconduct or whatever, but because they also have a rather shallow
understanding of the new generation of workers and don't even bother to find
out what some of the specific social issues that migrant workers may be
concerned about, and then make a rousing speech about who he represents and
then use this self-appointed representation as a stick to beat people with.
This poor style of learning and sectarian approach is terrible.
Although the pure
leftists like to talk about class analysis, they are quite detached from the
suffering of the working class at the bottom, and the most painful part of it
is certainly not the purely economic feelings associated with the deprivation
of surplus value. The government is obsessed with the idea that after the
suicide of the four siblings in Bijie, the local government came out and said
that the family was not considered poor, but this kind of thinking sees people
as machines - isn't it time to run out of oil? How come it's down? Unless we
see the increase in individual incomes and their rise to the status of rulers
as the way forward for the emancipation of workers, it is not very effective to
talk to workers by insisting on economic analysis of the rate of exploitation,
by looking at things in the same way as the "purely economic mind" of
the government, and by abandoning the specific problems experienced by workers.
Therefore, the emancipation of the workers will certainly not be achieved by
reducing the rate of exploitation to zero or by doubling wages.
Therefore,
it is necessary to look at issues from the perspective of the effects of
dialogue with workers. Even if it is
based on class analysis, you need to start with specific and palpable key
issues before finally being able to progressively touch on the issue of class
and exploitation, in such an order that would be convincing. The choice of some
leftists, on the other hand, is to use their narrow theoretical vision to
overwhelm and replace (if not cover up) the specific painful experiences and the
perceptual materials themselves. Not
paying attention to the perceptual material can save the effort of
"investigation and research"; but to try to get rid of the concrete
perceptual understanding and to use the old rational knowledge to quickly grasp
the masses, at least for the moment, does not seem to be very effective.
[1] On
9 June, 2021, four siblings died at home in Guizhou Province by drinking
pesticides. Local authorities ruled out a possible criminal case, and said the
reasons for taking the poison are still being investigated. They rejected a
statement by some that "poverty caused the suicide of the children"
and had sent someone to find the father.
[2] On
January 9, 2021, a photo of a child at school with frost on his head in
Zhaotong, Yunnan Province, attracted widespread attention online. The child in
the photo stands in the classroom, his hair and eyebrows covered in frost, his
face red, his clothes not thick, and his classmates behind him laughing at his
"ice flower" look. The temperature that morning was nine degrees
below zero. The boy's home is 4.5
kilometers from the school, and he usually walks more than an hour to school.
His parents were usually working in the fields when he left for school, and he
did not eat breakfast other than a piece of bread or cookies supplied by the
school. The principal told reporters that the school has been fighting for
heating equipment.
[3] This
refers to a strategy from the feudal classic, The Romance of the Three
Kingdoms. The dock, or wharf, was considered a very important strategic
resource point, but it is also very difficult to attack and control, and led to
many casualties. In contemporary China, it often refers to patriarchy within
marriages, with men trying to outdo each other in “playing the dock” or
establishing their authority over their wives. It can also be extended to other
fields where people try to establish their authority.
