Doing Public Sociology in the Field—A Strong Sociological Intervention Project in China

Lina Hu

Published online: 27 October 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrial- ization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become either industrial working class or citizens. Facing this special group of workers, we still believe in their power of self-liberation. Drawing on Touraine’s action sociology and sociological intervention, and Burawoy’s public sociology and praxis-oriented research, we modify “sociological intervention” according to the reality of Chinese society and propose the methodology of “strong sociological intervention” whose vehicle is “Baigou Migrant Worker Night School.” The night school provided workers with courses of labor law, English, and computer based on their actual needs. Labor law is the core to evoke the self-consciousness of the workers. Through communications in the night school and workers’ real living circumstances, we collected their true information and treated it as the source of sociological knowledge. After three sessions of night school training, workers showed changes in skills, social, and psychological aspects, laying a foundation for the growth of self-consciousness.

Keywords Factory regime . Publics . Social action . Sociological intervention

It was the night of October 15th, 2005 when I entered my classroom and saw all my students already there waiting for me. They were gossiping with each other and laughing excitedly. “ Hello everyone, ” I said, “ so nice to see you again in English class of our night school. Last week we have learned how to make friends with strangers. Now I’d like two students to perform the situation to help us review unit 2. Those who raise their hands first get to choose their own partner.” A moment of silence occurred, and students began to look around the

Am Soc (2007) 38:262–287 DOI 10.1007/s12108-007-9014-x

L. Hu (*) University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

class. Several seconds later, a boy shyly saised his hand and walked toward a beautiful girl at the front seat, “Hello, my name is Li Jun. I am a worker from Liangdian factory. Nice to meet you!” The girl blushed and stood up slowly, “I am Chen Hong from Starlink factory. Nice to meet you too!” Suddenly the boy added something to everyone’s surprise, “Shall we go to a movie together sometime?” All at once a blast of laugh broke out among the students… This is typically how our English lessons begin. All of these students are migrant workers from factories in Baigou. There are over 40,000 migrant labors working as bag makers in this small but famous township in north China, and our night school, an experimental public sociology project, provides them with basic training in English, computer and labor law. However, the night school project is not a charitable project but a project with multiple academic and practical considerations. Through the analysis of Chinese society and reflection of relevant theories, we1 proposed the method of “strong sociological intervention” to engage our target publics. By empowering and striking a conversation with the publics, we try to discuss the possibility of the growth of civil society in China, reconstruct sociological knowledge and society in the field, and enrich the theoretical and practical scope of a civil society.

Baigou is a township affiliated to Gaobeidian City, Hebei Province, China. It is located at the triangle hinterland of Beijing, Tianjin and Baoding city and it also intersects with Xiong County, Rongchen County and Dingxing County. It has 33 village streets, taking up an area of 54.5 km2, with a town district of 13 km2. Baigou is famous for its bag industry formed in the 1980s. After 30 years of growth, it has become the largest bag production base in northern China. The center of the regional bag manufacturing industry is based in Baigou Township, but bag production extends beyond Baigou Township to involve 4 adjacent counties, a total of 56 towns and over 3,000 villages that absorbed over 100,000 people working in the industry. In Baigou Township alone, there are 2,250 factories with approximately 40,000 migrant workers from 11 provinces in China engaged in the bag industry which constitute half of the whole population in Baigou Township. In 2005, Baigou Township’s production value reached 2.2 billion RMB and its bag products sell not only to the 13 provinces in China, but also export to South Africa, Russia and South America.2

There are two different types of bag factories Baigou. One is family factory and the other is standard factory. Family factories are prevalent and are of greater importance in Baigou Township. In Baigou and in the larger Huabei region, industrial practices and networks of family factories are rooted in traditional village- style social relationships. This overlap of industrial processes, traditional personal

1 “We” refers to the research team of public sociology project consisted of teachers and students from department of sociology, law school and micro-electronic institute in Tsinghua University, China. Professor Shen Yuan from sociology department is the leader of the team, and he is a devoted public sociologist specialized in labor and social movement study. This project is a team effort. The author was a student of Prof. Shen, and is now studying at University of California, Berkeley. 2 Source of information: http://www.bdlyj.gov.cn/gaikuang/gaobeidian/g1.asp

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relations and social arrangements distorts our basic concepts of industrial production. Typical examples include:

Overlapping work and living spaces: factories are embedded in the family life and their layout follows that of the typical, northern Chinese style rural home. Typically, these compounds include a main entry gate on the southern side of the compound, a central courtyard, and a “U” shaped building arrangement lining the north, east and west walls of the compound. To meet the needs of the family factory, the row of rooms facing north are used as the living quarters for both employers and employees. The rooms facing west are the factory workshops, usually divided into a clipping workshop and sewing workshop, each with the necessary tools for production, such as sewing machines. The rooms facing east are the kitchen and storeroom. The gate into the compound is on the south wall. In this way, the layout blurs production space and living space, public space and private space.

Overlapping personal and labor relations: day-to-day labor relations are difficult to distinguish between interpersonal, even familial, social relationships. First, factory employers are often directly involved in day-to-day production. Second, factory employers eat, drink and live with their employees. In addition, in the past 20 years, many of these employers were farmers themselves (like their employees) and still choose to engage in the work of the day. As a result, the structural differences between employer and employee blur in day-to-day factory production. Add to this that few factory owners are educated in the basics of factory management, aboveboard market practices and relevant labor rights, it is an easy next step to make factory management decisions that work against the interests of their employees (such as regarding contracts, work hours, salary distribution, time-off, etc.). In addition, because employees feel close personal ties to their employers, they hesitate to raise issue with their working condition, rights as workers, etc.

Personalized market relations: although Baigou region has created a large-scale professional bag market, the trade in goods and labor is highly personalized. This is comprised of two aspects:

One is that the trade relations are personalized: factory stalls located in the central Baigou wholesale market are only used to exhibit bag samples, rather than instigate sales. Instead, the real trade is conducted between the factory operators and the middlemen “patrons” they have cultivated over the years. Because these relation- ships are highly personalized, factory owners often know little about the larger marketplace. The other is that the labor market relations are personalized: there is no formal labor market in the Baigou area. Instead, each spring festival, the employer asks the more senior employees to hire new workers on behalf of the employer and bring them from their hometowns back to the factory. This kind of “one consigns another” way of employing new workers has highly personalized the labor market. It also exacerbates the existing social inhibitions against workers speaking up for their rights.

Furthermore, the workers are separated apart according to their ethnicity and locality so that the bosses can rule them better (Tong 2005). As Dipesh Chakrabarty skillfully unravels, the resilience of prebourgeois consciousness explains the fragility of class identity and the salience of identities along lines of religion, language, race, or place of birth even at dramatic moments of conflicts between labor and capital (Chakrabarty 1989).

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Besides these family factories, there has been built a lot of standard bag factories with pipelining in recent years. Some of the standard bag factories are owned by foreign bosses from Korea, Russia and other areas. Standard factories usually possess commodious workshops, a large number of professional machines, brighter lights, and of course, hundreds of workers. There is always music on in the workshop, helping to cover the loud noises of the machines and release the tense atmosphere caused by fast production pace. Also we see monitors in the boss’s office, supervising the work of the workers.

Therefore, due to the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become either industrial working class or citizens.

Baigou Township is the field in which we chose to practice public sociology, and its family and standard factory migrant workers constitute our target publics. Two questions emerge here immediately. The first one is: why do we choose Baigou Township as the field? The second is: how to engage this particular public? To seek the answers, we must above all place the field and the public in a boarder theoretical framework and in a larger picture of China and the world.

Theoretical and Practical Inspirations

In 2004, the theme of American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was “Public Sociology”. In 2005, the centennial, the meeting was centered on “Comparative Perspectives, Competing Explanations: Accounting for the Rising and Declining Significance of Sociology”. This year, the major topic of the meeting was “Great Divides: Transgressing Boundaries” while in 2007, people will be discussing “Is another World Possible? Sociological Perspectives on Contemporary Politics”. From this trajectory, there is a clear tendency that sociologists worldwide have began to focus their attention on the fate of society and sociology in an era of fast transforming world. Tons of works has been written to address the urgent call for a civil society, and some have proposed very insightful ideas and methods of realizing it, including several interesting experiments.

We are now in consensus that creating a civil society is our ultimate goal and that our discipline needs to transcend itself beyond its academic boundary to be a public knowledge. However, the question is: how to create a true civil society? There is no way for us to recreate a world or produce a population coming out of nowhere to constitute this ideal society. Hence our hope is on the current world and people rooted in a continuous history of human society.

By developing the historical analysis of marketization process discussed by Polanyi (1944) in his famous “The Great Transformation”, Burawoy has weaved a new picture of capitalist trace in terms of marketization period, fictitious commodity, object against, right invoked, corresponding property of sociology and concept of science illustrated in Table 1.

This table beautifully highlights the evolvement of capitalist history as well as sociology, providing us a penetrating theoretical lens for understanding the world behind us and the future awaiting. In the first wave the destructive power of markets was countered by local communities that hung onto labor rights enshrined in custom

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and practice rather than a system of law. As the second wave of marketization eroded labor rights, it generated a countermovement. This time it was states that would regulate commodification, restoring labor rights but also promoting welfare or social rights. And today, nation states no longer contain markets; instead they unleash them through deregulation of industry, privatization of public services, and the reversal of both labor rights and social rights. Once again society has to spring to its own defense, drawing on its own resources. This time the scope of societal self-protection is not confined to the local or national but extends to the global. Accordingly, the language of its defense has to be universal—the language of human rights, of self- determination that includes both labor and social rights (Burawoy 2005a).

Here we are standing at the front edge of the third wave of marketization. Given the gap between the sociological ethos and the world we study, sociology is propelled into the public arena where public sociology becomes an inevitable pressing cause. Through the fine analysis of the four different but intertwined types of sociology—professional sociology, policy sociology, critical sociology and public sociology, as well as their configuration variation from country to country, Michael Burawoy has reminded us to take a close look at the national contexts before we apply public sociology to any specific society.

Locating China

After 30 years of reform and opening to the outside world, China has achieved spectacular economic development that amazed the globe. However, in sharp contrast, its political system has remained almost the same. People’s living standard is enhancing, but they choke in a tight political atmosphere where there is no equality, democracy, freedom and civil right which are generally considered concomitants of market economy. What underlies the combination of “economic miracle” and “institutional miracle” is a marriage between the highly centralized state and the fast developing market (Shen 2006a). Though all too often, market and state have collaborated against humanity in what has commonly come to be known as neoliberalism, it is a post-communism we face in China which exhibits many idiographic characteristics. This has posed tremendous challenges for the theoretical logic of our discipline and for the people living in it trying to make political changes.

Before we make any move, we need to rightly locate china in a map of human history and theoretical framework. There is one word that can best characterize china today—“transformational”. However, the transformation of china is a very complex

Table 1 Three waves of marketization and sociology

First wave of marketization (1850–1920)

Second wave of marketization (1920–1970)

Third wave of marketization (1970 onwards)

Rights against the market Labor rights Social rights Human rights Social defense against the market Local community State regulation Global civil society Contribution to society Utopian sociology Policy sociology Public sociology Unifying principle Vision Object of knowledge Standpoint Science Speculative science Pure science Value science

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and amorphous one, and it is quite different from any other countries. The transformation of China at least contains the following distinctive aspects:

As regards historical period, China is now at the intersection of three waves of marketization. Its labor, money, land and environment are being comodified all together in such a fast pace that we departed from a “shortage economy” termed by J. Kornai to a market economy oriented “wealthy society” in only 30 years, accomplishing what took other countries hundreds of years to fulfill (Shen 2006b). The mixed marketization is definitely a crucial important reason why China has achieved so rapid economic growth, but it’s also the reason why people’s labor rights, social rights and human rights are being intruded entirely as we will see in the following section. Where we are heading for still hangs in doubt.

As regards the production way, China is at the convergence of two great transformations… Polanyi used the term “The Great Transformation” to refer to the transformation from feudalism to market economy. His extraordinary theoretical contribution also lies in what he called “double movements”—the coexistence and contradiction of self-regulated market expansion and self-protection of society. Writing The Great Transformation in 1944 he imagined a socialist world in which market and state would be subordinated to the self-organization of society. He was overly optimistic (Burawoy 2006). Based on Polanyi’s viewpoint, Burawoy brought forward the concept of “the second great transformation” to refer to the transformation from socialism to capitalism, drawing on the evidence that former socialist countries began to embrace capitalism. Hence for China, as debris of feudalism still remains while socialism is still ruling the country at large, its way to capitalism is destined to be a double challenge.

As regards the relationship between state, market and society, we see a happy matrimony between state and market, but we can’t find a civil society growing within. By civil society, according to Sociological Marxism, we mean an active society which is against a self-regulated market in Karl Polanyi’s terms, and a civil society which is against state in Gramsci’s terms (Burawoy 2003).

As regards social structure, China is becoming a cleaved society (Sun 2003). It manifests in three aspects. First, on social hierarchy and stratification structure, the bi- polarization is becoming more and more severe but there lacks an effectual mechanism of integrating different classes and groups. Second, a cleavage occurred between city and the country. It embodies two facets. One is that rural residents and urban residents belong to two different social classes, and the other is that there is a great gulf fixed between rural regions and urban regions. Third, cleavages exist on many levels of cultural and social life. The essential of a cleaved society is that ingredients of different epochs coexist but there is no organic connection between them.

As regards class structure, globalization has produced the largest-scale of working class in China. After the reform and opening to the outside world, as Chinese economy integrates with global economy, China becomes an important part of the world-wide manufacturing industry, and the industrial worker troop of China also gets huge development. When international society is in consensus that China is becoming a “world factory”, its sociological implication is: China is forming the largest scale of industrial working class around the world. This burgeoning working class has two sources: Firstly, there are workers from former socialist state-owned enterprises, and secondly there are migrant workers. About their quantity, there is no

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accurate figure yet. According to official document, there are approximately 230 million industrial workers in contemporary China.

As a special group, migrant workers have contributed a lot to the city devel- opment. Nonetheless, for a long period of time, they are discriminated and disdained by urban residents. The word “migrant worker” is usually linked to mess, violence, instability, theft and robbery. These migrant workers leave their hometown to enter the secondary labor market in the city, doing things that urban residents are unwilling to do, working in the most dangerous environment overtime while getting the least payment. They live in tabernacles or cheaply rented houses, prohibited to use public infrastructure, and their children are repulsed from attending council school. Most of the migrant workers enjoy no insurance at all, and many of the factories they work in lack necessary labor protection equipment, causing numberless industrial injuries and occupational diseases. When accidents occur, they have no way of getting compensation without formal contract or insurance, and the families depending on them would collapse soon, facing extremity. Or in one word, their labor right, social right and human right are invaded completely.

As regards sociology, after the rebuilding of the discipline with the help of American sociology at the beginning of 1980s, the first generation of Chinese sociologists were able to carry out basic social investigation and research. However, it wasn’t before long that people found Chinese sociology in profound paradox. For one thing, on the production of “problematic consciousness”, when sociology was supposed to possess the macro vision of grasping social institution and class re- formation in face of the great social transformation, it encountered “post- modernism”, accepting sociological thinking fashion of “micro-practice” and “fractalization”; for another, in the respect of theory and technique, when sociology was supposed to develop theories and methodologies measuring the drastic social change, it embraced the theories and techniques of gauging stable society. Thereby the reality is: people are studying occupation stratification in the era of new class formation; people are studying stable structure in the era of intense social conflicts; people are studying labor outside the labor process framework while people are emphasizing the “value free” principle facing the suffering of the bottom society. In this way, it asphyxiates the imagination of Chinese sociology, rendering its “dislocation” (Shen 2006a). Or we may say that Chinese sociology has a short and weak triumph of professional and policy sociology, though critical and public sociology has been around at a fringe producing low but counter-voice.

Now envisaging the great transformation of Chinese society, it is time for us to bring sociology into a conversation with publics, understood as people who are themselves involved in conversation and therefore entail a double conversation; it is time for us to make visible the invisible, to make the private public, to validate these organic connections as part of our sociological life (Burawoy 2005c); it is time for us to work in close relationship with the publics to trigger internal interaction, to constitute movement or organization, and to change the current system. Public sociology has broken fresh ground on which sociologists can plough and sow, and we are in an advantaged position of reconstructing our society and our discipline.

Although sanguine about a bright “public” future, and indeed Burawoy has offered us a key to the door of civil society, we still have to grope for the right door as there are so many doors with different paths leading to different ends of civil

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society. Just as Burawoy noted, public sociology has no intrinsic normative valence, other than the commitment to dialogue around issues raised in and by sociology. What we are fully aware of at present is that our theoretical and practical ambition is to create and foster a civil society in China and we need to realize our goal in the guidance of public sociology, especially the organic kind. But who constitute our publics? Which method is more feasible and effective in fostering publics? And what concrete means shall we adopt to build a civil society under the collusion of market tyranny and state despotism? The answer to the first question is relatively clear. In the United States, public sociologist are in the business of fostering such publics as the poor, AIDS, single women, gays and so on not to control them but to expand their powers of self-determination. Analogously, we choose the most marginalized and oppressed groups as our immediate publics to foster not only because they are large in quantity, but also because they are the most potential actors desperate to change their life circumstances. Among these publics, migrant workers form a very important part. As Anthony Orum and Arlette Grabczynska described, migrant workers are subject to arbitrary abrogation of their rights, no wonder that they are often the first to form unions—whatever their legal status. On the other hand, we insist that the industrial working class has made significant and self- conscious interventions in history (Burawoy 1985). So as migrant workers become a new member of industrial working class, we believe in their power to reshape the world. However, the answers to the latter questions still lie in the distinctive features of China itself.

Strong Sociological Intervention

The penetration of the state into all realms of life did not extend a public sphere so much as negate it, for without attachment to the party or one of its subsidiary organizations no particular individual could make claims with any general validity. For the everyday citizen there was little space for politics because everything could be politicized and affairs of heart and hearth be treated as affairs of state. (Nee and Stark 1989) All the relations concerning power, domination and oppression are obscured by the state, imposing an invincible structure upon atomized individuals. To create a civil society, the foremost issue is to unearth the real relations of the present society and convert the atomized individuals into dynamic actors to transform the structure.

Here enters Touraine (1965) who contends that sociology studies social relations. He assumes sociology’s main method to make possible the direct observation and analysis of the relations masked by order and domination, so as no longer to be the dupe of categories of social practice. This then presupposes the active intervention of the sociologist whose task is to bring out these social relations concealed behind a mesh of approved and organized practices. He makes social movement the central problem of sociology because social movements are at the heart of an analysis of how a society makes itself. He contrived sociological intervention method to conduct research on five different movements: the trade union movement, the student movement, the women’s movement, the Occitanist movement, and the antinuclear movement. The intervention is carried out on a group of rank and file militants involved with the self-analysis of their movement based on their confrontation

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with opponents or partners. These groups spend many hours reflecting and examining the nature of the struggle they engaged in and, under the probing questions of the research team, raise their consciousnesses. Sociological intervention is actually an analysis of the self-analysis of a group of social movement participants.

Touraine (1987) proposed four principles for sociological intervention. First, we must enter into a relationship with the social movement itself; second, we need to go beyond ideological language and to apprehend the group in its militant role; third, we should set the social movement in its context, and cause the societal and cultural stakes of a conflict to emerge by speaking to both sides; and last, the researcher performs two functions, one as agitator, and the other as secretary. The researcher will transform his observation of the actors into social action theory to enhance the ability of the actors. The objective is to create a research situation that would be able to represent the nature of the struggles. Intervention helps the actor to shake free of the constraints by which he is surrounded, to extend his field of analysis and become more capable of action. The function of intervention is to establish as prolonged as possible an exchange between action and analysis—thereby stimulate a permanent sociology. Touraine (1981) is at his best elaborating the self-analysis part which include four crucial flexions that transform witness or confrontation group to image group and then to analyst group, turning actors to analysts who would finally become a better actor.

Touraine has offered us some useful methods analyzing social movement. However, his action sociology and sociological intervention is against the programmed western society that is quite different from China. For example, there are few militants in China, not to mention social movements. Even if we are able to conduct research on some of the movements, we find out that the militants are willing to be a part of it while the interlocutors or the opponents show indifference or even contempt to be involved. This is so because the two sides are at such an imbalance of power field. The militants treat researchers as their listeners rather than researchers to share their pain, frustration and desperation caused by struggle with the powerful opponents. And even if we do manage to invite the two conflicting groups to be at the same room to carry out sociological intervention, we discover that the m

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