The Myth of the Passive Worker

The image of the Chinese worker as passive, atomized, or purely instrumentalized by the party-state is one of the most durable clichés in Western labor writing. It is also empirically wrong.

It is worth being honest about the weakest version of the counter-evidence first. China Labour Bulletin's strike map is often cited as proof that Chinese workers are anything but docile — but Dialectics of Chinese Labor is skeptical of that source, arguing CLB “thrived on distorting facts about the Chinese working class, inflating the number of strikes and job actions for the consumption of foreigners” (Ness, Dialectics of Chinese Labor, p. 193). If the myth of passivity is going to be refuted, it needs sturdier evidence than a contested strike count.

That sturdier evidence exists in the institutions themselves. By 2025, an estimated 300 million of China's 402 million workers — a union density of roughly 75 percent — were registered members of the ACFTU and its affiliate unions, and workers who brought disputes before China's labor courts won roughly 95 percent of those cases (Ness, Dialectics of Chinese Labor, p. 30). The pattern holds in more recent data too: in 2022, national arbitration bodies closed 96.9 percent of the 3,162,000 labor disputes filed, with 72.5 percent of arbitration cases resolved mostly in favor of workers (Ness, Dialectics of Chinese Labor, pp. 145–146). A workforce winning at that rate, that consistently, in its own labor courts is not passive; it is exercising real institutional leverage.

What makes the Chinese case distinctive is not the absence of struggle but the specific institutional terrain on which struggle unfolds: an official union apparatus, a legal regime that formally privileges labor, and a party that treats worker unrest as politically consequential. The myth of the passive worker survives because it flatters a comparative story about liberal democracy. The evidence does not.

For a concrete instance of that leverage in practice, see Shifts in Guangdong's Industrial Zones, and for how it plays out in the platform economy, see Organizing China's Delivery Workers.