Introduction

Following the publication of Harry Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital (Braverman, 1974), the labour process theory (LPT) has stood as an important Marxist approach to the study of work and employment. Concerned with restoring exploitation, class, and class conflict to their central place in the analysis of work under capitalism (Meiksins, 1994), LPT has been applied in various industrial and national contexts to study workplace conflict, social relations in production, work autonomy, control and consent at work, and the ‘degradation’ of skills under industrial capitalism (Knights and Willmott, 1990; Smith, 2006; 2015; Smith and Thompson, 1998; Thompson, 1989; 1990). In recent years, scholars have expanded LPT into understanding new forms of work, such as digital platform work in the ‘gig economy’ (Gandini, 2019) and creative industries (Siciliano, 2021; McKinlay and Smith, 2009). There has also been a renewed interest in LPT among scholars in China, India, Latin America, and other areas, where rapid industrialisation and social change are reshaping work and employment (Liu and Smith, 2016).

The main focus of this article is to examine how LPT has been engaged and utilised in research on the changing nature of work and employment in China in the reform era. Over the last four decades, China has undergone profound social and economic transformations. Deeply influenced by globalisation and capital-oriented marketisation, China has transitioned from a planned economy under state socialism to a market economy integrated into the global economy. As China became the ‘world’s workshop’, it also experienced rapid industrialisation, the transformation of work and employment, and the reformation of the Chinese working class (Shen, 2006). Against this backdrop, there has been a burgeoning literature on the changing work and labour relations in China, including a growing number of empirical studies directly engaged with LPT.

Based on a careful review of the engagement of LPT in China labour studies, this article suggests that the LTP has provided important insights and a theoretical framework for scholars to understand the empirical reality of the changing nature of work and employment in China in transition. The LPT’s capacity to connect the workplace to a broader political economy (Thompson and Smith, 2009) has allowed it to continue to expand its scope of analysis and engage with new developments and emerging issues in the study of work and employment in China, such as the rise of digital platform labour, informal and precarious work, and workplace regimes in global value chains. At the same time, China labour scholars have made important contributions to the LPT by adapting it to the Chinese context and theorising the Chinese experience based on workplace ethnographies and workers’ lived experiences. This includes theorising the role of central and local states in shaping various ‘factory regimes’ (Burawoy, 1985), expanding on Chinese workers’ diverse subjectivities in research on the labour process, and developing new concepts such as the ‘dormitory labour regime’ (Smith, 2003; Smith and Pun, 2006; Pun and Smith, 2007) that connects productive and social reproductive spheres. This review also reveals that there is no single or dominant labour process in China, and understanding the diversity and complexity of the Chinese workplace in different industries, ownerships, and regions is essential to capturing the rapidly changing nature of work and employment in China today.

Given the limited space, it is impossible to cover all the existing studies that have utilised LPT in research on Chinese labour in this review essay. I have adopted the following criteria in my selection of studies. First, considering LPT’s distinctive empirical focus on workplace regimes, I have prioritised workplace-focused studies, especially those using an ethnographic approach. Second, while highlighting influential works, more attention has been given to studies that apply LPT to understand new developments and emerging trends in the Chinese workplace. Finally, I have examined both English and Chinese scholarly works, including those by Chinese scholars inside China who have engaged with LPT and published works in reputable Chinese academic journals and thus contributed to the constructive dialogue and debates on LPT in China.

The article is organised as follows. I first lay out the key concepts and analytical framework in LTP that have been widely utilised in China labour studies. I then examine six areas of China labour studies that have been in direct dialogue with and contributed to the LPT in the study of work and employment in China. I conclude by discussing the contributions of the Chinese experience to LPT and the possible directions for further engagement of LPT in labour research in China.

Key concepts in LPT: control, consent, and ‘factory regimes’

How management control labour and extract labour power more efficiently has been the central concern of labour process research. Braverman’s (1974) primary focus is the degradation of work in the twentieth century under monopoly capitalism, which he associates with the relentless tightening of management control by controlling workers’ skills while reducing their wages to those of unskilled workers and increasing the amount of exertion required from workers (Knights and Willmott, 1990: 7). In his critiques of scientific management, Braverman (1974) highlights the structural need for capitalism to control the labour process by separating the conception (management) from the execution (labour) of tasks. Following Braverman’s footsteps, scholars have come to understand that management labour control and workers’ resistance or consent constitute two inseparable dimensions of social reality in the labour process. On the one hand, the capitalist workplace is a ‘contested terrain’ where there is a persistence of labour-management conflicts and the coercive nature of management labour control (Edwards, 1979). On the other hand, management deliberately gives workers some sense of autonomy that can bring about workers’ consent and self-control in the interest of management (Burawoy, 1979). China labour scholars have paid great attention to management control strategies and workers’ consent and resistance in the labour process, as we will review in detail in subsequent sections.

Among the pioneering LPT theorists, Michael Burawoy has significantly impacted labour process research in China. In his seminal work, Manufacturing Consent (Burawoy, 1979), he demonstrates the importance of worker subjectivity for understanding the dynamics of capitalist work organisation and labour control strategies in a large unionised corporation with internal labour markets. He shows how conflict and consent are organised on the shop floor – a labour process where winning workers’ consent, not managing through coercion, was required. Specifically, consent is achieved through the concrete coordination of capital and labour and the obscuring of exploitation through the work game of ‘making out’. Later, in The Politics of Production (Burawoy, 1985), he develops the notion of the ‘factory regime’, which refers to the overall political form of production, including the political effects of the labour process and the political apparatuses of production (Burawoy, 1985: 87). Through the framework of factory regimes, Burawoy argues that the labour process needs to be understood as part of a larger whole, which includes market competition among firms, the reproduction of labour power, and state intervention in the economy. This larger whole, not work relations within the factory alone, shapes patterns of conflict and working-class resistance (Meiksins, 1994).

Burawoy proposes two basic types of factory regime under capitalism: the despotic, under which work is organised around shop floor coercion; and the hegemonic, under which workers consent to their exploitation (Burawoy, 1985: 126). He identifies four factors to explain factory regime differences: labour process, competition among firms, reproduction of labour power, and state intervention (Burawoy, 1985: 90). The key factor that distinguishes despotic (coercion) from hegemonic (consent) regimes is state intervention. Under a despotic factory regime, workers are completely reliant on wage labour as their means of livelihood (free to work or free to starve); they lack state protection in the form of a social safety net; they, thus, have little ability to resist management coercion. Under a hegemonic factory regime, workers’ dependence on capital is reduced by state welfare provisions and pro-labour legislation; these state policies facilitate workers’ resistance to management coercion. Burawoy later argues that the crisis of relative profitability in advanced capitalist countries led to the displacement of hegemonic regimes by hegemonic despotism, under which workers were forced into concession bargaining faced with the threat of capital mobility in competitive global markets (Burawoy, 1985: 150–52). While Burawoy’s approach has been criticised for ‘over-ambitious attempts to create overarching models’ (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999: 23) that often miss the empirical complexity of workplace regimes (Elger and Smith, 2005),¹ the appeal of the factory regime framework to labour scholars lies in its ability to link diverse forms of workplace and labour process at the micro level with various institutional arrangements created by the state and market at the macro level. This analytical framework has proved useful for studying economies in transition, and its attention to the state is particularly relevant in the case of China, given the state’s central role in the Chinese economy and society.

Factory regimes in the Chinese context: theorising the role of the state

A number of researchers have adopted Burawoy’s framework of factory regimes to study the transformation of work and labour politics in post-socialist China. Given that China has a mixed economy consisting of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), private companies, and mixed-ownership enterprises, it is no surprise that researchers have found the coexistence of despotic, hegemonic, and hybrid factory regimes. In particular, scholars have highlighted the role of the Chinese state in shaping factory regimes, due to the predominant role the state has played under China’s transition from state socialism to a market economy. One argument states that economic reform without political change only creates conditions for a despotic factory regime. It is the Chinese state’s pro-capital policy and its failure to protect the vulnerable in the marketplace that subjects Chinese workers to the despotic factory regime (O’Leary, 1998; Lee, 1999; Chan, 2001; Chan and Zhu, 2003). These studies were based mainly on field research in private firms in labour-intensive, low-tech, and export-oriented foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and joint ventures (JVs), or in declining or privatising SOEs.

Meanwhile, studies of labour relations at large, profitable SOEs and JVs show that the factory regimes of those enterprises tend to be hegemonic in nature. For instance, Gregory Chin (2010) found that a hegemonic factory regime existed at large automobile JVs in Northern China, built on the material benefits and privileges autoworkers enjoyed as primary sector workers, such as higher wages, generous benefits, a more regularised system of hiring, firing and promotions, and better working conditions. Chin argues that the reasons for management to use hegemonic labour control are, first, that the Chinese state has been much more interventionist in monitoring industrial relations in enterprises of large size and strategic importance; second, those enterprises need a highly skilled and stable workforce, which requires a more sophisticated regime of labour control in getting workers to consent to their own subordination. Therefore, to Chin, the lack of labour militancy among Chinese autoworkers can be attributed to a more hegemonic regime of labour control entitled to a small segment of the primary sector labour force. However, relying solely on interviews with managers and party and union officials, Chin told a one-sided story without giving voice to workers. He found the use of temporary workers on assembly lines, but did not pay much attention to this employment practice and its impacts on labour relations in China’s SOEs and JVs.

In fact, Smith and Pun (2018) suggest that all segments of the workforce can experience the same levels of insecurity, and the idea of a dualist divide between two worker segments is too simplistic. It is important to locate dualism within the historical, national, and societal context. Zhang’s detailed study of the Chinese automobile industry (Zhang, 2015) shows that the contradictory pressures of pursuing profitability and maintaining legitimacy have driven large SOEs and JVs to follow a policy of labour force dualism, producing a hybrid factory regime that combines both hegemonic and despotic elements within one single enterprise. Hegemonic practices characterise relations with the core segment of formal/regular workers, and despotic practices characterise relations with the periphery segment of temporary workers. While regular workers enjoy higher wages, more generous benefits, and relatively secure employment, as part of management efforts to gain cooperation from a core segment of workers, temporary workers have lower wages, fewer benefits, and little job security, as management attempts to lower costs and increase profitability. The rural-urban divide continues to perpetuate labour force dualism, as rural migrant workers are disproportionately concentrated in non-regular/temporary work. Zhang argues that this dualism or hybrid factory regime reflects a dynamic boundary-drawing strategy pursued by the state and employers to strike a balance between increasing labour flexibility and profitability, and maintaining certain stability and legitimacy with a core workforce. However, the boundary-drawing strategy has also generated new terrains of contradiction and resistance by temporary workers. The central state re-regulation to limit temporary agency work in the face of rising labour disputes and temporary workers’ discontents, channelled by the official trade union, suggests that labour politics in post-socialist China is a contested process. Furthermore, by tracing the rise of temporary agency work and its regulation politics, Zhang (2021) shows the persistent, albeit evolving, dualist employment structure with explicit state policy support. By providing some (urban) workers with more protection to shore up its legitimacy, while excluding others to promote flexibility and profitability, the Chinese state has played a central role in defining and maintaining the boundaries among its workforce. Instead of just looking at whether or not the state intervenes, scholars must examine how the state intervenes and at what levels, how capitalists/management, workers, and unions respond to the state intervention, and how key actors and forces in global production interact to produce the specific factory/workplace regimes.

This point is further illustrated in the study of workplace regimes in global value chains. Boy Lüthje and his coauthors (Lüthje et al, 2013) traced the development of globalised ‘network-based mass production’ in the IT industry from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen and the reorganisation of work since the 1990s. Aiming to ‘bring the labour process back in’ the analysis of changing work and production systems in the global IT industry, the authors detailed the rise of ‘neo-Taylorism’ in electronics contract manufacturing in developing countries, particularly China, in the context of global production networks (GPNs). In line with this research, Zhang (2023) explores how capital relocation interacts with workplace regime dynamics in global electronics value chains, based on a comparative study of the relocation of four electronics multinationals from China’s coastal regions to its interior. Zhang found that a migrant labour regime in coastal regions has shifted to a local-labour-based strategy in western regions when capital moves inland. This shift has increased labour agency and given rise to capital’s labour control problems and workplace regime dynamics unique to the relocation process and Western China. Specifically, rather than a race to the bottom in labour conditions, three distinct workplace regimes have emerged in the new production sites, depending on firms’ positions in the GPNs and workers’ responses and agency embedded in the GPNs and local labour institutions. The evidence highlights the important role of the local state in building local labour institutions and workers’ constrained, varied agency in influencing workplace regime dynamics.

LPT in the study of diverse worker subjectivities in China

Burawoy (1985) made important contributions to the LPT by emphasising workers’ subjectivity and the political-economic conditions of workers’ dependence in his analysis of factory regimes. However, he was criticised for not paying enough attention to the role workers’ non-class subjectivities such as gender, race, ethnicity, and citizenship play in the labour process. His followers have taken up this task to study diverse worker subjectivities in the labour process in China. Ching Kwan Lee has been influential in introducing Burawoy’s work to Chinese labour studies. Lee (1995) argues that gender is a dimension of managerial control, and factory regimes should be seen as ‘gendered orders’ rather than gender-neutral products. Based on a comparative ethnographic study of two factories in South China, Lee (1995; 1998) finds that, despite having the same ownership, products, and technologies, the two factories developed distinctive factory regimes, which she termed ‘localistic despotism’ and ‘familial hegemony’. The key to explaining this difference lies in the social organisation of local labour markets, which produces diverse conditions of workers’ dependence. Rather than depend on the state or the enterprise for the reproduction of labour power, women workers in Shenzhen rely on their localistic networks while those in Hong Kong depend on their families and kin. These networks are organised along gender lines and embedded in the local labour markets (Lee, 1998: 21). As Lee shows, both management and labour appeal to women’s gender to devise and legitimise control and resistance on the shop floor. Gender leads to different incomes and produces different workplace experiences (Lee, 1995: 394).

Otis (2008) extends this line of research into the service sector. By comparing ethnographic cases of labour in two global luxury hotels in China, Otis (2008: 15–16) observed two distinctly gendered labour regimes at the two hotels, which are linked to the same US-based global corporation, employ the same organisational template, and recruit same-aged female workers. At the first hotel, the labour regime can be characterised as ‘virtual personalism’, as workers cater to customer preferences using recorded customer preference data and enacting imported feminised practices. At the second hotel, by contrast, workers perform ‘virtuous professionalism’, displaying service expertise to establish control over customers who might otherwise mistake them for sex workers. Otis convincingly shows that the answer to explaining these gendered differences lies in the labour process in service firms that is ‘embedded in the local consumer market’. This embeddedness in local consumer markets leads to the influence of region-specific work legacies and cultural practices on the labour process of service work.

He (2009) highlights ‘gendered age’– the gender construction of age and its consequences on women’s family roles and social responsibilities – in the labour process of female migrants in the service industry. Through a case study of a Chinese chain restaurant in Chengdu, He shows that restaurant management actively constructed and utilised gendered age to differentiate female migrants as the ‘older sisters’ and the ‘younger sisters’ in terms of competition in labour market, labour reproduction and dependence, and the distribution of work. On the one hand, the perceived difference in gendered age leads to workers’ different responses to the management, the clients, and their families. On the other hand, management capitalises on these differences to exert despotic control over the older sisters and hegemonic domination over the younger sisters.

Focusing on ethnicity and gender, Mao’s ethnographic study of ethnic performers in Southwest China shows ‘how performers are expected to do ethnicity at work and work on their ethnic self, as well as how women performers are drawing a distinct boundary between stigmatised sexualised labour by referring to the state’s rhetoric of ethnicity’ (Mao, 2021: 10). The performers actively mobilise the party-state’s discourse about ethnicity – such as promoting ethnic culture and relating ethnic tourism with poverty alleviation – to reaffirm the value of their labour. The author proposed to use ‘the multiplication of labour’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013) as a framework to understand the work-life intersection in ethnic performers’ labour process.

Scholars have also emphasised the role of guanxi (social connections) such as kinships, clans, and hometown networks in shaping Chinese workers’ subjectivities and enabling neo-paternalistic control strategies (Lee, 1998; Pun and Smith, 2007; Swider, 2015). Guanxi has been emphasized as a unique characteristic of the Chinese economy and society, which can directly influence workers’ experiences in the Chinese labour market, workplace, and labour process. For example, migrant workers often rely on guanxi to find jobs. But guanxi does not end with getting a job. Migrant workers enter the workplace with existing guanxi and the associated values and culture, which shape mechanisms and strategies of labour control and resistance (Wen and Zhou, 2007). In their study of the labour process in the construction sector, Shen and Zhou (2007) develop the notion of ‘guanxi hegemony’. Unlike Burawoy’s concept of a hegemonic factory regime based on institutional arrangements in the workplace, the authors argue that in China’s construction sector, workers, subcontractors, and team leaders have brought guanxi into the labour process to manufacture loyalty, restrain workers’ discontent, and maintain order at construction sites – that is, the guanxi hegemony. On the other hand, for workers, guanxi can also serve as a weapon of resistance and limit the power of management (Wen and Zhou, 2007). Shuai (2021) further explores the role and impact of ascribed guanxi, such as kinships and hometown relations, and achieved guanxi in the workplace in couriers’ labour process in the delivery industry. He found that, on the one hand, management uses guanxi to control couriers, including the use of existing guanxi of kinships and hometown relations, as well as building new guanxi at work. On the other hand, the couriers utilise multiple strategies based on guanxi to resolve tensions and conflict in their everyday work and counteract management control.

What should be noted is that, while attentive to workers’ diverse subjectivities in non-class categories, these studies do not ignore or downplay class relations. The central concern of labour process theory – the class nature of production and the exploitative relationship in the labour process – has remained at the centre of attention in the aforementioned studies that engage LPT to study workers’ diverse subjectivities in China.

Developing new concepts in the study of migrant workers’ labour process in China

China’s massive waves of internal migration have had profound impacts on the Chinese economy and society. There were an estimated 297.5 million rural migrant workers in China in 2023, accounting for more than one-third of the entire working population (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2024). In China, rural migrant workers are workers with a rural household registration (hukou) employed in an urban workplace and living in an urban area. The hukou system has divided Chinese citizens into urban and rural residents and relegated rural residents to second-class citizens since the 1950s (Solinger, 1999). With the loosening of the hukou system in the reform era, the regional and rural-urban disparities have driven millions of rural migrant workers to cities for factory jobs, particularly in the booming coastal provinces where export-led growth requires large numbers of low-cost labourers. Most migrant workers enter labour-intensive industries characterised by mass assembly line production, low technology content, and tight control and discipline. Here, Braverman’s thesis concerning the separation of conception from execution of tasks in the capitalist labour process becomes particularly relevant in examining the labour process and labour control of migrant workers. Ethnographic studies of Chinese migrant workers’ factory life in the world’s workshop consist of an essential part of labour process research in China (see, among others, Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005; Chan, C, 2010; Chan, J et al, 2020).

Chris Smith and Ngai Pun have made an important contribution to the study of migrant workers’ labour process in China by developing the concept of ‘dormitory labour regime’ based on evidence from China’s export-oriented factories (Smith, 2003; Smith and Pun, 2006; Pun and Smith, 2007). This concept builds upon Burawoy’s work and explores the interaction between the reproduction of labour power and the production process. The dormitory labour regime was present in different forms in Japan and the US in early phases of industrialisation and has been applied to other emerging economies (Goodburn and Mishra, 2024; Jones et al, 2024; Kaushal and Nair, 2024). The rise of the dormitory labour regime in export factories in China and other developing countries has expanded the ability of employers to control labour well beyond the point of production. It has inspired a new wave of labour process research that aims to connect productive and social reproductive spheres.

For example, in her ethnographic study of labour politics at the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou in inland China, Yige Dong (2023) incorporated social reproduction theory into the factory regime analysis to demonstrate how dynamics at both the point of production and social reproduction co-produce the conditions that give rise to ‘hegemonic precarity’ – that is, inland Foxconn workers voluntarily choose a more precarious employment status despite being offered formal contracts with long-term benefits. Specifically, Dong found that Foxconn’s management was purposely ‘hoarding of time’ in production, so that it pays relatively high wages to a minority of workers while keeping the majority’s wages minimal. Meanwhile, changing dynamics in social reproduction make Foxconn workers, especially women with children, constantly struggle between work and the family. These factors have led to ‘extremely high turnover rates, bleak prospects for labour solidarity, and the rise of ‘gig manufacturing’ in China (Dong, 2023: 1231). On the other hand, empirical evidence also shows that changing dynamics in workers’ reproduction when capital moves to inland China (Zhang, 2023), and shifts in workers’ lifestyles and family life (Siu, 2015), have increased worker agency and caused new labour control problems for employers.

The rise of digital technology further complicates the intersections between productive and social reproductive dynamics. Capital continuously adjusts the production-reproduction arrangement through digital technology to accumulate more profits, as reflected in the blurring of boundaries between work and home spaces. For example, remote-working technologies have continuously blurred the time and space boundaries between work (production) and home (reproduction) spheres. Many Chinese tech companies have extended working hours with the help of various technologies and project-based arrangements. As a result, many tech employees in China have to constantly work overtime, which seriously squeezes their reproductive time (Liang, 2019). Digital technology has also become an important tool for capital to control workers in the platform economy.

LPT in the study of digital platform work in China

Digital labour platforms have become pervasive in today’s society and economy. Given the increasing reliance of businesses on digital labour platforms and the fact that these platforms are significantly transforming the world of work, it becomes all the more relevant and urgent to understand the implications of these developments for work, employment, organisations, and workers in the platform economy. Nowhere is this transformation more apparent than in China, the country with the largest platform economy and the largest number of platform workers in the world (Rothschild, 2018; Zhou, 2020). The scale of China’s digital economy reached 39.2 trillion yuan (about 6.1 trillion US dollars) in 2020, accounting for 38.6 percent of the GDP (Xinhua, 2021). The COVID-19 epidemic has further contributed to the growth of new forms of employment that are based on the platform economy, commonly referred to as the ‘sharing economy’ in China. The rapid expansion of the platform economy has had profound ramifications on the country’s labour market and workers. According to the official Annual Report on the Development of China’s Sharing Economy (RCSE, 2021), the sharing economy has become a significant driver of job creation in China, drawing 830 million users in 2020, among which service providers stood at 84 million, and the number of employees directly hired by platforms reached 6.31 million (RCSE, 2021).

Academic research on digital platform work in China has been burgeoning, primarily focusing on food-delivery and ride-hailing platforms, the largest employers of labour platforms in China (Chen, 2018; Wu and Li, 2018; Chen et al, 2020; Lei, 2021; Sun et al, 2023; Zhao and Han, 2021). Of particular scholarly interest are the digital platforms’ modes of labour control and workers’ subjective experiences. Lei (2021), for example, develops the concept of ‘platform architecture’ to examine the multidimensional – technological, legal, and organisational – aspects of control and management in the labour process of two major types of food-delivery platforms in China: service (outsourcing) platforms and gig (crowdsourcing) platforms. Based on participant observation at an online ride-hailing platform, Zhao and Han (2021) show that the platform appears to be a ‘flat’ market organisation relying on digital technology, but in fact it is a hierarchical organisation that relies on corporate rules, digital technology, and third-party agencies. Sun and her colleagues find that food-delivery platform companies and third-party staffing agencies have jointly deployed algorithmic systems and communicative techniques to cultivate ‘sticky labour’ and control food-delivery workers (Sun et al, 2023). The result is the ‘de-flexibilisation’ for workers, which contradicts the purported flexibility of platform-mediated work. Focusing on platform workers’ subjective experiences, Chen (2020) argues that by using software and data – a form of digital control – food-delivery platforms weaken riders’ willingness to resist and reduce their autonomy, and induce them to participate in an incursive process of self-management. Data gathered from real-time locational tracking, riders’ working hours, and customer ratings are constantly fed into the platform’s algorithms. These data become the platform’s assets and the basis for continuously shortening the expected delivery time, ultimately enabling the platform to gain more profits. Similarly, Li and Jiang’s (2020) study on the labour process of food-delivery riders focuses on platforms’ algorithm-based work time control and workers’ ‘fake experience of freedom’. They highlight how the mechanism such as qiang dan (order grabbing), resembling ‘the game of making out’ that Burawoy (1979) describes in his ethnographic work at a Chicago machine shop, helps shape the riders’ experience and a sense of freedom to perform timely and efficient work, thereby inducing the riders to ‘voluntarily’ work around the clock. As a result, the riders cooperate with the platforms’ work-time control, while the platforms acquire and disguise the pursuit of more profits in the name of riders’ ‘freedom’ at work.

In addition to technology control, scholars have paid close attention to the emotional and normative dimensions of control in the platform labour process. For instance, the use of customer feedback, ranking, and rating systems on digital labour platforms serves as the baseline for the enactment of ‘techno-normative’ forms of control and monitoring of one’s work (Gandini, 2019: 1048; Cameron, 2020; Ravenelle, 2019). Sun’s (2019) ethnographic study of food-delivery workers in China reveals how emotional labour and gamification have become critical manifestations of algorithmic management. Zheng and his colleagues (Zheng et al, 2020) examine the role of ‘emotional intelligence’ as a form of normative control in the labour process of online live-streamers in China. They show that by promoting vaguely defined ‘emotional intelligence’, streaming platforms can set norms in the industry and exert effective control over the uncertain labour of online streamers to generate profitable returns for platforms. Behind the soft measures of emotional intelligence lies the hard reality of disposable labour: by lowering entry barriers and encouraging fierce competition, the live-streaming industry keeps a high-level labour turnover, as streamers who are unable to generate sufficient profits in a certain period will be considered as lacking emotional intelligence and unsuitable for live streaming, thus quickly being removed from the platforms (voluntarily or involuntarily). This way, the streamers who can stay on the platforms generally maintain a good status and generate a stable income, which guarantees the platforms’ profitable returns. On the other hand, empirical evidence also suggests that algorithm-based control and the emotional labour required in the platform service industry provide spaces and specific paths for workers to exercise agency and strive for autonomy in the labour process, to a certain extent (Sun, 2019; Cameron, 2020; Anwar and Graham, 2020).

In sum, scholars have documented multidimensional aspects of managerial control, with an emphasis on technology-based surveillance and algorithm-based control as some of the core features of the platform labour process in China. This tends to align with findings on the platform labour process in industrialised countries in the Global North (Kenney and Zysman, 2016; Rosenblat, 2018; Veen et al, 2019; Wood et al, 2019; Kellogg et al, 2020; Vallas and Schor, 2020).

Another research stream on China’s digital platform work focuses on workers’ collective resistance. Lei (2021: 282–3) argues that specific differences in platform architecture diffuse or heighten workers’ collective contention. More specifically, within the service (outsourcing) platform, technological control generates work dissatisfaction, but the legal and organisational dimensions of the platform architecture contain grievances and reduce the appeal of, and spaces for, collective contention. Conversely, within the gig (crowdsourcing) platform, all three dimensions of platform architecture reinforce one another, escalating grievances, enhancing the appeal of collective contention, and providing spaces for mobilising solidarity and collective action. As a result, gig platform couriers are more likely to consider their work relations exploitative and to mobilise contention, despite facing higher barriers to collective action due to the atomisation of their work.

By contrast, Liu and Friedman’s (2021) study found that outsourced riders tend to engage more easily in strikes. Their evidence showed how outsourced couriers frequently engaged in quiet, small-scale strikes that targeted the platforms’ subcontractors. Similarly, Zhao and Luo (2023) found that the outsourcing platforms in China frequently trigger but largely conceal riders’ strikes. They argue that platform firms have dominant power. However, the inherent tensions between outsourcing platform firms, outsourced agencies, human supervisors, and workers have led to a ‘contentious despotism’ that is frequently resisted by outsourced riders who possess workplace bargaining power. Given the lack of reliable statistics on strikes in China, it is difficult to quantify which types of food-delivery platforms are more likely to incite workers’ collective action. Nevertheless, using qualitative methods and engaging with labour process analysis, these studies help us to better understand the structure and mechanisms of food-delivery workers’ collective resistance amid the rapid expansion of platform work in China.

LTP in the study of knowledge work in China

A distinctive feature of the digital platform business model is the creation of a highly segmented dual labour market, which consists of two categories: a small core knowledge workforce directly employed by the platforms (for example, managers and engineers) and a large outsourced workforce whose work is mediated through the platforms (for example, service workers) (Rahman and Thelen, 2019; ILO, 2021: 73). There is a notable distinction between knowledge workers, who are claimed to have considerable autonomy and control over their work, and service workers, who are under strict technological control and have little say in the algorithmically-controlled labour process.

Among the limited number of studies on the labour process of knowledge workers in China, Liang’s (2021) case study of internet engineers at a large elite tech company shows how the integrated internet technology and tech culture shape their labour process. In Engineering Culture, Kunda (2006) demonstrates how capital controls knowledge workers from cultural and emotional perspectives. He shows that by promoting an engineer culture with concepts such as open-mindedness and flexibility, management has been able to exert ‘normative control’, which ‘attempt[s] to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experiences, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions’ (Kunda, 2006: 11). Adopting Kunda’s notion of engineer culture, Liang argues that the labour process of internet engineers is characterised by the contradiction between engineer culture and bureaucracy, and the contradiction between virtual teams and real teams, in the organisational structure of tech companies. This is because internet technology contains cultural elements such as engineer culture, which is considered essential for continuous innovation – an important ideological basis of the tech industry. For tech companies to continue to develop and gain profits, they need to provide their knowledge workers with a working environment based on an autonomous engineer culture while also converting workers’ potential into actual labour power to accrue surplus value. These contradictions provide workers at elite tech companies with a certain degree of autonomy to exhibit more agency in the labour process. However, most IT programmers in China work at small software companies. Sun and Magasic (2016) found that small tech companies used the more traditional strategy of ‘despotic’ control over their workforce, such as long working hours, high-pressure key performance indicators (KPIs), and ‘panoptic control’ beyond the workplace. As a result, workers at small tech companies used the term ma’nong (coding peasant) to identify themselves – a term describing their repetitive and laborious coding tasks and poor work conditions. This essentially confirms Braverman’s insight, as emphasised by Paul Thompson (1989: 118), that ‘deskilling remains the major tendential presence, within the development of the capitalist labour process’.

In fact, popular press and social media have exposed the intensification and degradation of work in China’s tech industry, as reflected in the infamous ‘996’ work culture: a work schedule spanning from 9am to 9pm, six days per week. The GitHub repository, ‘996. ICU’, became a popular online forum for tech workers frustrated with their companies’ brutal workplace practices to vent and bring attention to the worst-behaving companies. This raised the question about the limited autonomy of knowledge workers in the context of normalised overtime and the normative control of capital that shapes knowledge workers’ ‘voluntary’ participation in the ‘996’ work culture at internet companies. For burnt-out young workers across China, the trend of tang ping (lying flat), which rejects the pressure and ambition that so defined earlier generations of tech work culture, has become a popular form of resistance (Zaagman, 2021). Notably, the Chinese state continues to play a significant role in shaping industrial relations in the tech industry by manipulating the business environment. Based on interviews and observations at a large Chinese internet company, Liu (2023: 3) argues that the state’s quest for technology supremacy has resulted in internet companies that compete ferociously, which in turn causes extreme working hours and burnout. The censorship of online labour activism, and the ambiguity in court decisions, also lower the interest of tech workers in organizing and defending their labour rights.

LPT in the study of informal and precarious work in China

Informal and precarious work has grown significantly over the past several decades throughout the world, driven by globalisation, rapid technological change, the decline of the power of workers and their unions, and the spread of neoliberalism (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018). Scholars have defined precarious work as work that is uncertain, unstable, and insecure, and falls short of social benefits and statutory protections (Vosko, 2010: 2; Kalleberg and Hewison, 2013: 271). China has witnessed a similar trend in the expansion of informal and precarious work since the mid-1990s. As China’s marketisation deepened, urban labour reform accelerated to prioritize efficiency and flexibility in conjunction with large-scale SOE restructuring and downsizing. One of the major institutional changes was the replacement of permanent employment in state-owned and collective enterprises with a labour contract system, under which employers can hire and fire workers based on fixed-term contracts (Lee, 2007). The resulting growth in informal and precarious work since the mid-1990s is well documented (Gallagher et al, 2011; Park et al, 2012). Over 30 million SOE workers and almost 50 million urban workers were laid off between 1994 and 2004. Many ended up with informal or non-regular employment (Naughton, 2007: 184–191). Meanwhile, over 200 million rural migrant workers left the countryside for jobs in cities, most working in private or informal sectors without written labour contracts (Friedman and Lee, 2010). To date, there are no official statistics on informal workers in China. According to an estimation based on multi-source data, the number of informal workers ranged between 138 million and 155 million as of 2016, accounting for 33.2 to 44.7 percent of total urban employment in China (Chen et al, 2021).

The construction industry is an important sector representing informal precarious work in urban China, and it employs one-third to one-half of all rural migrant workers (Swider, 2015: 5). In her ethnographic study, Building China, Swider (2015) documented the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers, who represent a large segment of the informal precarious workforce and are central to China’s economic success. The author develops the ‘employment configuration’ concept to identify three different pathways – mediated, embedded, and individual – that construction workers pursue to acquire their positions, and the mechanisms employed to regulate and discipline their activities in the labour process. Swider shows how each employment configuration embodies a different combination of production and social reproduction, leading to distinct precarity forms. This ‘diversity’ in employment configuration, as Swider argues, has important implications for informal construction workers under varying conditions of precarity to protest against exploitation and organise for concessions from the state.

Domestic workers comprise another large group of informal workers in China. According to an estimate by the Ministry of Commerce, the number of domestic service workers in China reached 37.6 million in 2021, accounting for approximately eight percent of the country’s total employment, and 90 percent of domestic workers were from rural areas (Yang et al, 2023). Su’s (2011) case study examines the labour process of domestic work in China. Engaging with Braverman’s central thesis on the structural need for capitalism to control labour by separating conception from execution, Su found that, on the one hand, employers tried to make their domestic workers’ conception detached from execution by using strategies such as ‘routinising scheduling’, ‘panopticon surveillance’, and emotional management. On the other hand, domestic workers, primarily female migrant workers from China’s countryside, attempted to keep conception and execution unified by deploying strategies of job-hopping, emotional bargaining, and ‘front stage vs backstage building’ to gain more control and autonomy in their labour process. Meanwhile, ideological mechanisms were operating to elicit domestic workers’ consent to employers’ control, and the separation of conception from execution in their labour process. For example, through training, domestic-service companies promoted values of ‘quality’ and ‘professional ethics’, along with the official discourse on ‘self-development’ under China’s economic reform, to encourage domestic workers to transform themselves to adapt to the market and the logic of ‘developmentalism’.

Zheng et al (2015) explored the labour-control mechanism in the informal employment of small garment factories in Zhongda Textile and Garments District in Guangzhou. Building on Burawoy’s concept of the game of ‘making out’, the authors observed a different game beyond the workplace: the game of becoming boss. They argue that this game explains why informal garment workers work hard willingly despite their harsh working conditions, unpredictable and exhausting work, and lack of workplace protection. On the one hand, the practice and idea of ‘everyone can become a boss’ blurred the boundaries between workers and bosses, so hard work was considered a necessary step toward the ‘primitive accumulation of capital’ for workers to set up their own garment workshops in the future. On the other hand, since small garment factories used a piece-rate pay system and master-disciple relationships in labour control, the autonomy workers enjoyed at work gave them a sense that ‘everyone can become a master/manager’ – the step that was necessary for workers to gain knowledge about the market situation and prepare for the transition from a worker to a boss. Thus, whereas there is no internal labour market in small garment factories, there is a broader ‘occupational labour market’ (Althauser, 1989) for upward mobility in the garment industry or the informal sector. The game of becoming boss brings factors (such as sector characteristics) outside the workplace back into the labour process analysis, pointing to the ambiguity between workers and managers/bosses in informal employment.

Conclusion

This review suggests that the LTP has provided important insights and a theoretical framework for scholars to understand the empirical reality of the changing nature of work and employment in China in the reform era. While industrialised countries in the West have experienced deindustrialisation and the decline of industrial sociology, China – the world’s largest manufacturing country today – has witnessed rapid industrialisation and the formation of the world’s largest working class over the last four decades. In this historical context, empirical research and theory development in China labour studies are in urgent need. The LPT has provided a useful theoretical lens for scholars to study the transformation of work and employment as well as working-class reformation in contemporary China. In this regard, Burawoy’s notion of factory regimes is particularly useful in linking complex and diverse forms of workplace and labour processes at the micro level with various institutional arrangements created by the state and market at the macro level. Furthermore, the LPT’s capacity to connect the workplace to a broader political economy has allowed it to continue to expand its scope of analysis and engage with new developments and the emergence of new types of work and employment in China.

Meanwhile, as this review shows, China labour scholars have made important contributions to the LPT by adapting it to the Chinese context and theorising the Chinese experience based on workplace ethnographies and workers’ lived experiences. Through a workplace-based approach, China labour scholars have theorised the role of the Chinese central and local states in shaping various factory regimes, expanded on Chinese workers’ diverse subjectivities in research on labour process, and developed new concepts such as the dormitory labour regime that connects productive and social reproductive spheres. This review also reveals that there is no single or dominant labour process in China, and understanding the diversity and complexity of the Chinese workplace in different industries, ownerships, and regions is crucial to capturing the rapidly changing nature of work and employment in China today. Importantly, when applying LPT to studying the Chinese workplace, we should be aware of the limitations of its explanatory power. Rather than simply borrowing some theoretical concepts to tailor the reality of Chinese society, scholars should pay close attention to what challenges the Chinese experience has posed to LPT, and which of these challenges have theoretical potential and are likely to contribute to the development or revision of LPT.²

In fact, the importance of labour mobility – what Smith (2006) calls workers’ ‘mobility power’ – has been emphasised in more recent work that has used China as a key empirical testing ground (Alberti and Sacchetto, 2024). Thus, we should continue to pay close attention to the new trends in labour mobility and internal migration, especially in the context of China’s industrial restructuring and capital relocation, to understand changing work and employment in China.

Second, the relationship between technology and work continues to evolve, with continuous technological advancements such as automation, artificial intelligence, and digital platforms. For labour-process theorists, understanding how technological change restructures work tasks, skills requirements, control and consent in the labour process, and its effects on job security and worker autonomy, requires innovative empirical research and theory building. In addition, with the rise of new work arrangements such as home/remote working, research exploring issues and dynamics at the intersection of productive and social reproductive spheres is much needed.

Third, further research on precarious work and informal labour, and their impact on workers’ experiences and well-being, requires greater attention to workers’ subjectivities and agency. As existing studies have shown, the way one experiences informal and precarious work is not the same and should not be generalised. Also, our analysis should not be limited to the point of production, as workers’ subjectivities are influenced by other factors beyond the workplace, such as workers’ social demographics, expectations, guanxi networks, and industrial and labour market conditions (Zhang, 2021). Moreover, precarious and informal workers have agency and the potential to fight back collectively, despite their limited access to workplace organising and workplace power (Agarwala, 2013; Atzeni, 2016; Paret, 2020). By conducting empirical research in these and other related areas, LPT can help further our understanding of the current and future trends of work, employment, and the broader social economy in China.

Funding

The research was funded by Summer Research Award and Sabbatical Award, Temple University.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.