Labour Strikes in China

The China Labour Bulletin website provides maps displaying incidents of labour strikes that have occurred in recent years. While of course these should be viewed with a hefty grain of salt, they may be worth scrutinizing all the same.

This image below shows the number of strikes in general that have occurred since 2011: as you can see, they have been becoming a lot more common since the beginning of 2014.

Yet this may be somewhat misleading: nearly half of the strikes indicated in the map above are thought to have had fewer than 100 people participate in them. It may be better to look just at the number of larger strikes that have occured, as the following two maps do:

These maps above show that the larger strikes, with 1000-10,000 people and 10,000+ people, respectively, occured most often in 2014, unlike the smaller but more numerous strikes that occured most frequently in 2015 and so far in 2016. Since 2015 there have not been any strikes involving more than 10,000 people, according to the China Labour Bulletin.

Now let’s have a closer look at the differences between China’s many provinces. Below I have tried to graph the number of strikes that have occurred in each province, first since 2011 and then since 2015:

Guangdong, China’s most populous province, finished at the top of both graphs, while Tibet, Qinghai, Hainan, Tianjin, Ningxia, Gansu, and Xinjiang finished at the bottom of both graphs. All of the provinces of China are more or less in the same position in both graphs, in fact. And there are no major regional patterns that can be gleaned clearly from either list.

What if we adjust the figures to take into account the population size and GDP of each province?  Then we get the following graphs:

Here Guangdong and Tibet again finished at the top and bottom of both graphs, respectively. Ningxia, however, which had finished fifth from the bottom before adjusting for population and GDP, has now moved up to second from the top. Ningxia is China’s third least populous province (the two Tibetan provinces, Tibet and Qinghai, are the least populous), is one of China’s five “autonomous regions” (the others are Tibet, Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and Guangxi), and, along with Xinjiang, has by far the highest concentration of Muslim inhabitants of any province in the country.

In the adjusted-for-population graph, China’s relatively small and wealthy “direct-controlled municipalities”, namely Shanghai, Beijing, Tianjin, and Chongqing, were much higher up than they were on the adjusted-for-GDP graph, with the exception of  Chongqing. (Chongqing is quite a bit less urbanized than the three others are). Shanghai and Beijing were third and fifth, respectively, while Tianjin, which was the least strike-prone of any province when adjusted-for-GDP, was close to the middle of the pack when adjusted-for-population.

Another big change was Hainan, China’s southernmost province and only island province (not counting Hong Kong, Macau, or Taiwan), which was third from the bottom before adjusting for population size or GDP, but fourth from the top when adjusting for GDP and eighth when adjusting for population size. Shanxi and Shaanxi, meanwhile, two neighbouring provinces located in and around the mountains of north-central China, moved from around the middle of the pack to near the top once adjusted for GDP and population.

Shanxi in particular is China’s major coal producing region, and the coal industry has come under a lot of pressure in recent years, which may help explain Shanxi’s high position on both of these graphs. (Shaanxi too is a top coal producer. Inner Mongolia, though, China’s second biggest coal producer, is admittedly near the bottom of the GDP-adjusted labour strikes graph). Shanxi has also been arguably the main provincial target by far of Xi Jinping’s intense “anti-corruption” campaign.

Still, these graphs again do not prioritize large strikes over smaller ones. Below, then, are the strikes with between 1000 – 10,000 participants that have occured since 2011. Since there have been very few strikes with more than 10,000 participants, the 1000-10,000 category accounts for an overwhelming share of the large labour strikes that have taken place:

The graph showing labour strikes with more than 1000 people since 2011, adjusted for GDP size, is I suspect the most important one. The population-adjusted graphs tend to somewhat misleadingly overemphasize the wealthiest provinces, like Shanghai or Tianjin, since they have lots of per capita economic activity and therefore also lots of per capita labour strikes. The graphs that are not adjusted at all skew in favour of populous provinces, meanwhile. The GDP-adjusted graphs, though, are perhaps the most indicative of provinces in which there may be growing social challenges to China’s political or economic establishment.

Notably, this GDP-adjusted graph is also the only one in which clear regional divisions can be seen. Apart from Guizhou, nine of the ten westernmost provinces in China- Tibet, Qinghai, Xinjiang, Yunnan,  Ningxia, Inner Mongolia, Sichuan, Chongqing, and Gansu – are in the bottom thirteen provinces of the list, and six are also in the bottom seven of the list. Seven of the top nine provinces on the list, meanwhile, are seven of China’s eleven eastern coastal states. These also happen to be the seven most southern coastal states on the Chinese mainland.

Beijing and the provinces around Beijing, like Liaoning, Hebei, Henan, Tianjin, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Shandong, are near the bottom or the middle of the list. Shanghai on the other hand, as well as two of the three provinces that surround Shanghai, namely Jiangsu and Anhui, are quite close to the top of the list. Guangdong, which is the most populous province in China, remains far ahead at the top of the list. Three of Guangdong’s four neighbouring provinces, namely Jiangxi, Guangxi, and Fujian, are at the top of the list as well.

Remarkably, Guangdong’s GDP-adjusted figure for large labour strikes is roughly twice as high as any other province and five times the nationwide average. Guangdong has also been home to four of the seven labour strikes in China involving more than 10,000 people since 2011, according to the China Labour Bulletin. Given Guangdong’s enormous size and revolutionary history, this may be worth noting.

The other biggest outlier is the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, which apart from Guangdong had by far the most large strikes adjusted for GDP size. Heilongjiang has been a major oil and coal producing province, which may partially help to explain this. Strikes in the province have been putting its governor Lu Hao, the youngest provincial governor in the country, under a lot of political pressure of late.

Heilongjiang’s position also highlights an interesting trend: China’s most peripheral provinces, like Tibet, Guangdong, Heilongjiang, Xinjiang, Guangxi, Yunnan, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, Hainan, and Jiangxi, are either at the very top of the list or at the very bottom of the list. Heilongjiang itself has the longest international border in China outside of the three “autonomous regions” of Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia. (Heilongjiang’s border with Russia is only slightly shorter than the entire US-Mexican border).

The China Labour Bulletin maps also zoom in to show which cities the strikes occured in, and gives basic information about them. For example:

It also breaks down the strikes by the response they are thought to have received, in five categories: “police”, “arrest(s)”, “government mediation”, “negotiation”, or “other”. According to the site, “Guangdong also led the country in the number of police interventions in labour disputes, accounting for about 19 percent of the total 831 incidents in which police were deployed and 24 percent of the incidents in which arrests were made”.

“Worker protests accounted for 38 percent of all mass protests by Chinese citizens last year, according to statistics published on the well-respected Wickedonna blog.”

To close, here are the numbers of strikes of all sizes since the beginning of 2015, adjusted for provincial population size and provincial GDP size. Guangdong is finally not at the top of either:

But if you look only at large strikes since 2015, then Guangdong is back on top: