Photo credit: © Javier Quiroga/Unsplash. Busy street in Shanghai, April 2019. 

Over the last 30 years, China has undergone dramatic economic growth and social transformation, bringing enormous changes in the daily lives of ordinary people. Often overlooked in the Chinese government’s grand narrative and its large-scale social engineering projects, however, are the lives of women, workers, and ethnic minorities in the country’s changing political and economic structure. 

Women in China

After the Communist Party took power in 1949, the Chinese state introduced a series of laws to narrow gender gaps. In 1950, the first Marriage Law was passed to prohibit arranged marriage and child betrothal, which had existed since the imperial era. The new constitution stated that women enjoy equal rights with men in all aspects of political, economic, cultural, social, and family life. 

In the state socialist era (1949–1976), ‘women can hold up half the sky’ was a symbolic and widely used slogan. As the state pushed industrial accumulation and agricultural production, women were mobilised to work in factories or agriculture. To support women’s full employment, the government promised to socialise much of women’s domestic work. As a result, women’s labour participation rate reached nearly 90%, among the highest worldwide. Despite this, the gendered division of labour in the household and public sphere remained intact. Women still had to bear most of the burden for unwaged reproduction work. New gendered divisions also emerged in the productive sector. In most workplaces, male workers were concentrated in the skilled positions in heavy industries, whereas female workers were concentrated in low-end positions in service and light industries. 

In the wake of the economic reform, which began in 1978, women in China have faced widening gender gaps in both their participation in the labour force and in wages. By 2000, most government-run childcare facilities were privatised or shut down, which moved the parenting burden to working women and jeopardised their position in the labour market. In contrast to the mobilisation of women’s labour in the socialist era, from the 1980s some male intellectuals began calling for women to ‘go back home’ to fulfil their domestic duties. Women have also faced increasing pressure to enter into marriage. Between 1990 and 2018, the female labour participation rate dropped drastically from 90% to around 60%, and  women’s earnings declined from about 84% of men’s wages in 2000 to 65% in 2013.

Since the early 2010s, the crisis of social reproduction has intensified. With a rapidly growing urban population and inadequate public services, the cost of social reproduction has been driven up further, which has in turn contributed to declining fertility rates. Chinese women continue to face systemic exploitation and appropriation of their reproductive labour and discrimination in the job market, although of course their experiences vary according to their social position. Women who work in the formal economy not only experience sexual harassment and earn lower wages than men, but also disproportionally shoulder the burden of childcare in the deepening class gap in the cities. Meanwhile, poor rural women have been pushed to enter informal, precarious, and poorly paid job markets to provide essential urban services. Owing to the lack of access to social welfare in the cities where they work, they are often separated from their children. These female migrant workers in China make up the world’s largest domestic service market, made up of approximately 35 million people.

In the face of this discrimination and oppression, women have not stayed silent. Chinese feminism dates from the turn of the twentieth century, when revolutionaries advocated for women’s rights as a part of national modernising project. As stated above, after the Communist Party took power, the state played a key role in launching campaigns to promote women’s legal and economic rights. More recently, between the 1990s and the early 2010s, non-government organisations (NGOs) emerged, focused on combatting domestic violence and promoting reproductive health rights. This included the ‘Anti-Domestic Violence Network’, which was shut down right before the government passed the ‘Anti-Domestic Violence Law’, for which the network had long advocated.

Over the past decade, explosive online discussions have contributed to unprecedented debate on gender issues, with wide scope and high visibility. Scholars Wu and Dong identify two major styles of expression women used during this period in a ‘Made-in-China’ feminism. The first and most pronounced is the ‘entrepreneurial’ voice, which resonates with women’s anxiety about economic security and encourages women to abandon traditional wifely duties and exercise their autonomy in deciding on marriage to maximise their personal returns. They also identify a more radical style, most represented in the ‘Young Feminist Activism’ (YFA). Since the early 2010s, this network of young students and activists has organised street demonstrations and online campaigns to against discrimination and gender-based violence and advocate for women’s rights. After the crackdown on the YFA, the #MeToo Movement, which emerged at a larger scale in 2018, has become one of the most energetic forms of activism in China today and the most pronounced critiques of the status quo. The #MeToo movement is reviewed in more detail in the later section ‘Social Movements in China’.

Workers and migration in China 

At the turn of the millennium, the working class in China could be divided into two main groups: permanent workers in the old state-owned enterprise (SOE) sector and internal migrant workers originally from rural areas and working as contract workers in cities. 

In the state socialist era, SOE workers held permanent jobs in public employment, and enjoyed socialist benefits from cradle to grave, such as housing and childcare benefits – all of which were distributed through membership in a work unit. However, as China accelerated its integration into the global capitalist system in the late 1990s, around 30 million SOE workers were laid off during corporate restructuring. This marked the demise of the old SOE working class, as China’s SOEs were pushed to operate as profit-driven corporations. More detail about the development of China’s economic system is reviewed in the section ‘China’s Economic System’.

China’s economic transition also increased its reliance on internal migrant workers. In the late 1970s, special economic zones (SEZs) were set up to attract foreign capital for export processing. By the 1990s, as China further opened up and became the world’s factory, tens of millions of migrant workers moved from poor rural areas to coastal cities to make a living in the hyper-exploitative manufacturing sectors producing goods for markets overseas. Transnational capital boosted its profitability through the massive relocation of global supply chains to China, where the overall enforcement of labour law was poor and basic labour rights of migrant workers were systematically abused. Migrants often worked in on-site dormitories, subjected to extremely long working hours for a meagre salary, where they suffer frequent work injuries. Moreover, workers’ right to strike was removed from the constitution in 1982, and workers’ bottom-up struggles were often repressed. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the only legal trade union, is also controlled by the Party and, despite occasional bids for greater autonomy since the 1949 revolution, primarily ‘maintains stability’ and ensures that production continues, rather than representing workers’ interests. At the enterprise level, union officials are often part of the management.

The collaboration between the Chinese government and transnational capital was essential to China’s emergence as the ‘world factory’. The government identified the large rural surplus population as its ‘comparative advantage’ in the global supply chain and crafted political and social policies to facilitate massive economic growth. The hukou system, which links the provision of social services to household registration in a particular location, has served as an overall development strategy to enable cities to enjoy a cheap workforce without having to pay any of its reproduction costs. Under the hukou system, rural migrant workers are denied access to all kinds of state-subsidised social services in the cities, including health care and their children’s education. As a result, despite some variations between successive waves of migration since the late 1970s, the pattern for many migrant workers is that they work in the cities when they are young, briefly moving back to the countryside to get married and have children, and then leaving them to return to work in the cities. By 2013, 61 million children were separated from one or both of their parents. Some of these children have been subjected to sexual and physical abuse. 

By 2021, there were 292 million migrant workers in China, comprising more than a third of the entire working population. In 2018, for the first time, the number of migrant workers employed in the service sector exceeded those in the manufacturing and building sectors and this share has continued to grow. Migrant workers in the cleaning, hospitality, food and logistic sectors have been crucial to sustaining the lives of the modern urban population, yet their jobs are both precarious and exploitative. In recent years, the central government has begun to address the situation of migrant workers in its rhetoric, and enacted some reforms of the hukou system. However, since the central government leaves implementation to local governments, but without providing additional resources, the welfare system remains effectively unreformed. Although restrictions on securing residence in smaller cities have been loosened, social services are still typically available only to a small number of better-educated non-locals. Registration in bigger cities, where better job opportunities are concentrated, remains extremely difficult. 

In response to the exploitation and exclusion of migrant workers, there have been persistent protests and wildcat strikes. These have articulated a range of demands – from wage increases and pensions to compensation for factory relocation – and led to both repression and policy reforms. We review labour movement in China in the section ‘Social Movements in China’.

Ethnic Minorities

China’s official position is that it is a unitary multi-ethnic state comprising 56 different groups. The Han constitute a 91% absolute majority of the total population, and other ethnicities are often referred as ‘ethnic minorities’. In 1950s, the Communist Party started its ‘Ethnic Classification Project’ to call for applications from ethnic groups for official recognition. The government sent hundreds of researchers to investigate groups for classification and identification, and eventually over 400 self-reported groups were classified into 55 officially recognised minorities that could claim minority rights enshrined in the law. It is worth noting that, within the process, the government categorised the ethnic groups in a way that fit its political concerns of territorial integrity and stability. For example, the Baima Ersu people, who are classified as Tibetans, have petitioned to be recognised as separate ethnicities, which the authorities have rejected.

As China instituted its economic reforms, the government has presented itself as an inclusive and multicultural state and invested in infrastructure in order to promote tourism. This commodified and exoticised ethnic cultural representation for domestic and international tourist markets. For instance, the provincial governor of Yunnan initiated tourism projects in Lijiang and used The Old Town, which features the Dongba culture of Naxi, to apply for the UNESCO-monitored legacy project. Meanwhile, as the central government encourages further urbanisation, some ethnic minorities in the border regions have been dispossessed from their lands and become part of the urban workforce. In the film project ‘Caches From The Landscape’, the Nomadic Department of the Interior (NDOI) features villagers in the southwestern province of Guizhou who were being displaced by the world’s largest radio telescope. It captures changes in the landscape, peoples’ collective identity, and the constant migration experienced by many ethnic minorities in China. 

According to scholars Gerald Roche and James Leibold, a ‘second-generation’ of Ethnic Policies was first proposed in 2011, and has been implemented across the country since 2013. This new approach, with its more forthright embrace of cultural assimilation, marks a break from the somewhat Soviet-inspired approach adopted in earlier periods, which featured language protections and occasional rebukes of ‘great Han chauvinism’ at the same time as even while it also repressed ethnic groups, such as Tibetan and Uyghur movements. In recent years, the government has placed increasing emphasis on ‘inter-ethnic mingling’ and proactive forging of a common identity, while also promoting universalisation of Mandarin-medium education, and scaling back a range of preferential policies. The response to these policies builds on long-standing grievances and campaigns for national self-determination by groups on China’s periphery, resulting in intensified grievances and social unrest in Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia and other autonomous regions. In 2020, a newly implemented language policy sparked petitions, street demonstrations, and school boycotts in Inner Mongolia autonomous region. The Chinese government has constructed a digital enclosure mass internment system in the Uyghur autonomous region, which has detained at least one million ethnic Uighurs ( more context and details is reviewed in the later section ‘Political System’).

Webinar participants

Yige Dong, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the State University of New York, Buffalo and author of the forthcoming The Fabric of Care: Women’s Work and the Politics of Livelihood in A Chinese Mill Town. 

Eli Friedman, Associate Professor and Chair of International & Comparative Labor at Cornell University’s ILR School.

Yutong Lin, Nomadic Department of the Interior art research collective

Resources

• Byler, D. (2021) Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Chan, J. Selden, M. and Ngai, P. (2020) Dying for an iPhone. Chicago: Haymarket.
• Friedman, E. (2022) The Urbanization of People: The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Rozelle, S. and Hell, N. (2020) Invisible China. How the Urban-Rural Divide Threatens China’s Rise. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Wang, Z. (2017) Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949-1964. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Photo credit: © Yuri Kozyrev / NOOR. Gulzira Auelhan, an ethnic Kazakh, returning to Xinjiang in 2017 to visit her ailing father, was detained for 437 days in China’s sprawling new system of incarceration and indoctrination. 

China’s political system is often difficult for outsiders to understand. While it is often portrayed as a monolithic, top-down bureaucracy, the Chinese government claims to practise ‘whole-process people’s democracy’, a model of socialist democracy which it characterises as ‘true democracy that works’. To explore the complexity of China’s political system in its own context, it is useful to look at the dynamics from several angles, such as the class character of the Chinese state, the ways the system shapes daily life, as well as recent political events such as the government’s ‘People’s War on Terrorism’ in Xinjiang, the crackdown on Hong Kong and the response to the pandemic.

Class character of Chinese state

At the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949, Mao proclaimed that the new socialist state would constitute a people’s democratic dictatorship, serving the class interests of the revolutionary peasant–proletarian alliance which had ushered the new state into existence. Throughout the socialist era, the state insisted on making its class character apparent and ensured the supremacy of the peasant–proletariat alliance in state practice and ideology. In other words, the state made no pretence of class neutrality, announcing that the state served the peasant–proletarian alliance and acted on behalf of the revolutionary people of China. This provided the state with its ideological legitimacy. While the state was to be democratic for those people who supported the revolutionary party and its allies, it was to prove a dictatorship to those who were considered anti-revolutionary or whose class background was suspect.

By contrast, although the state still claims universal continuity between its interests and those of the supposedly classless nation, it usually serves the interests of the wealthy and subordinates the interests of workers and peasants. During and after China’s reform era, far from retreating from social life the state has embedded itself further, issuing policies that advance the commodification of land and labour. At the same time, capitalist activity is subject to state control and surveillance. Today, although China acts in the name of socialism, the state largely serves to safeguard the conditions for capitalist accumulation and its power lies in its demonstrated capacity to ensure economic growth and stability.

The structure of China’s political system

The territories of China, especially the peripheral regions where non-Han Chinese reside, are largely a legacy of the Qing empire’s military conquest, and were inherited by the Nationalist-led Republic of China and subsequently reshaped by the upheavals of the twentieth century. Since 1949, the entire territory has been ruled by the Communist Party, whose leadership is enshrined in China’s constitution. The party is structured as a pyramid. At the lowest level, there are around 92 million party members across the nation, and around 2,200 delegates are elected as representatives to the National Party Congress, convened once every five years. At the Congress, a Central Committee of about 380 members are elected and take up key roles in the central government. Finally, a new Politburo and its standing committee are elected from the Central Committee. These are the organs of government that hold real decision-making power. Currently, there are seven members in the Politburo Standing Committee, representing the apex of power in China. The committee makes decisions through a majority vote. It has been led by party chief Xi Jinping since 2012, who is also the chair of the central military commission. 

While on paper the Communist Party operates on the principles of ‘Democratic Centralism’, which allows the party to elect its leadership from the bottom up and discuss and vote on policies in a democratic way, in practice the composition of the Politburo and standing committee is determined through closed-door negotiations. It is unclear to what extent democratic internal debates take place or whether lower-level party members simply go along with top-down directives. 

Moreover, the Communist Party has control over all branches of government, including legislative and judiciary institutions. Though there are a number of other smaller political parties present in the National People’s Congress (NPC), the existence of those smaller parties is based on the condition that they accept the Communist Party’s leadership. In effect, they serve as a rubber stamp, offering a nominal diversity of opinions, rather than a real supervisory power or a political opposition. The state council, tasked with enacting national policy and supervising all government departments, is also led by the Chinese premier who is himself a member of the standing committee of the Politburo. Meanwhile, the judiciary is supervised by the party’s central political and legal affairs commission, chaired by a member of the Politburo. However, it is worth noting that although the Chinese state generally works in a way where the power is concentrated at the top, it also consists of many departments and actors with conflicting or competing interests. In addition, lower level bureaucracies are not always in line with the central government, which often creates imbalance and tension in the system.

Pandemic as a case study

The Chinese government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic illuminates the structure of the state in motion and shows how the population interacts with the government. At the start of the pandemic, when its severity was still unknown, local governments’ interests in economic performance and social stability trumped public health concerns, resulting in an extended period of cover-up. The doctors who first detected the virus and alerted others on social media were reprimanded by local police and hospital administrators for sharing false information. Dr. Wen-liang, Li was one of the whistle-blowers who later died from the virus in February 2020, prompting a national outpouring of grief and anger at the government’s handling of the pandemic crisis. 

The Chinese government took some measures to enable a certain level of sharing information from the public to improve governance. One example is the health emergency system restructured by the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) after the SARS pandemic in 2003. The system enables individuals to report health incidents to local commissions, but only the national commission and its designated provincial agencies are allowed to make public announcements. As a result, information could flow from the bottom up within the government bureaucracy while still being kept from the public. During the lockdown, there was also a brief period where the government loosened some controls on the media and public expression, which served as a way to collect information and respond to public resentment. However, after the brief loosening of public expression, there followed immersive social media censorship and arrests of ordinary people and citizen journalists. At least 897 people were penalized for online speech about COVID-19, and citizen journalist Zhang Zhan was handed down a four-year prison sentence for her reporting on the pandemic.

China’s security state and people’s daily life

The governance of the state is expressed through the intertwined relational networks that operate at the most molecular level of everyday life. For instance, schools, neighbourhoods, as well as private and public companies, are all required to set up a party branch, which ultimately links back to the formal bureaucracy and is responsible for overseeing and reporting to the upper-level party. In addition, a ‘patriotic education system’ is another important rhetorical device to buttress the ideological legitimacy of the state in people’s daily life.

In the past decade, rapid digitalisation has enabled the government to build security infrastructure to regulate the public sphere and increase surveillance. In the 2000s, the newly available internet enabled people to enjoy a certain level of freedom and autonomy by self-publishing on social media. This led the state to shift from attempting to direct the whole public sphere to managing and controlling discourse. Around 2010, the Chinese government initiated the all-round development of China’s security state; for the first time its domestic security budget surpassed military spending. Over subsequent years, the government implemented a real-name registration system for all mobile phone users and social media accounts, introduced an ID-based ticket booking system for public transport, and constructed an extensive network of CCTV cameras, which was soon connected to facial recognition technology. 

In 2013, an internal document entitled ‘Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere’ was circulated by the state leadership. The document identified universal values, freedom of the press on the internet, and civil society as major political ‘perils’ that the Party should be on guard against. A year later, the government formed the ‘Central National Security Commission (CNSC)’ in response to the internal and external ‘double pressures’ identified in its documents alongside other factors as a threat to political stability. The CNSC was directly chaired by Xi and developed an ‘overall national security outlook’, which covers politics, territory, military, economy, culture, society, science and technology, information, ecology, nuclear and natural resources.

Around the same time, the crackdown on media and civil society began to intensify. Since 2013, the government has tightened its censorship of mainstream media, arrested investigative reporters and constrained public discussion. In early 2015, a group of five Chinese feminists were detained in Beijing for planning a protest against sexual harassment. In July 2015, the Chinese government launched a nationwide campaign in which it jailed over 100 human rights lawyers and activists and in December, five labour activists were arrested for allegedly ‘disturbing public order’. There have since been numerous waves of repression against every part of civil society. In 2019, when the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in Hong Kong began, the government conducted a particularly harsh crackdown, arresting more than 10,000 people, and implementing the National Security Law to further break up the movement. For more detail about movements in Hong Kong, see the section ‘Social movements in China’.

Terror capitalism and dispossession of Uyghurs

The Chinese government has constructed a digital enclosure mass internment system in Xinjiang, the Uyghur autonomous region in northwest China, to control the dissent that has resulted in large part from expanding the capitalist frontier and land dispossession. The technology-enabled entrapment of at least one million ethnic Uighurs illustrates how China’s security state and mass surveillance systems operate.

In the 1990s, the Chinese government expanded its capitalist frontier by encouraging companies and migrants to move to Xinjiang to extract natural resources and extend infrastructure. This led to land dispossession and antagonism between the local population and the new settlers. In the 2010s, with the arrival of 3G networks and digital media, migrant workers in the city used smartphones to find jobs and discuss topics including religion. This not only enabled a revival of Islamic piety and but also allowed for increased connection with the larger Muslim world. Due to the lack of language-recognition technology, voice memos sent in Uygur through social media apps were outside the state-managed public sphere. The combination of these trends made the Chinese state nervous.

Chinese counterterrorism was also inspired by post-9/11 Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programmes in the United States and Europe and an emerging global discourse around Islamophobia and counter terrorism. As early as 2001 China had started to describe Uyghurs as a population prone to terrorism, but restrictions on the public sphere took off after 2010. In 2013, the Chinese media started to publish numerous stories about cases of terrorism involving Uyghurs attacking Han civilians in Beijing and Kunming, increasing public support for some kind of action to control the Uyghurs.

In 2014, the state declared the ‘Peoples War on Terror’, marking a shift towards preventative policing through surveillance and education systems. The government began to build a new security apparatus to enforce a new wave of racialisation and dispossession of Uyghurs. Apart from the massive deployment of police and lower-level police contractors, the government largely relied on a digital enclosure system to restrict privacy and assert state control of the internet and the Uyghur population. Up to 1,400 private technology firms worked with the Chinese government to develop tools to automate the transcription, translation and detection of Uyghur speech. A ‘counter-terrorism sword’ – software used by police to download all the contents of Xinjiang residents’ phones – was one of the tools the Chinese authorities used extensively  to scan people’s digital activities. Through these scans, at least 100,000 people were determined to have committed newly defined criminal activities, such as using a VPN or WhatsApp. Many of them ended up being locked up in internment camps and/or were forced to work in associated factories. In December 2019, the governor of the region announced that all ‘trainees’ had graduated. However, investigations revealed that the government continued to build new detention facilities or renamed ‘training centres’ as ‘detention facilities’, now intended to detain people prior to their trials. As mapped by the Xinjiang Data Project, there are currently around 380 suspected detention facilities in the region. Darren Byler described the process as a shift from mass internment to coerced labour and mass imprisonment. 

The mass internment in Xinjiang not only reveals the operation of a security state in China, but also illuminates how terror capitalism in the country is part of global surveillance capitalism. The security apparatus in China is interconnected with American institutions, military programs, and private companies. For example, the US Army has funded joint research with Chinese AI companies which are involved in building the security apparatus in Xinjiang. So, while the Chinese government outsources its policing duties to private and state-owned technology companies to enhance the state’s surveillance capacities, the ‘Public–Private Partnership’ (PPP) creates a space for private industries to expand their market share rapidly and improve their AI capacities through data harvesting and the construction of new analytic tools. Moreover, there is also a racialised component, where difference is accentuated in order to exploit people. In Xinjiang, ethnic Uyghurs have been labelled as terrorists and criminals based on their ethnic status, and their social existence has been systematically undermined through surveillance and indoctrination camps. A similar logic has worked in many places around the world, manipulating the abstract fears of the protected and creating entire groups of ‘suspect communities’ considered to pose a risk. 

Webinar participants

Rebecca Karl, Professor of History at New York University 

Darren Byler, Assistant Professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University

Yangyang Cheng, Research Scholar in Law and Fellow at Yale Law School’s Paul Tsai China Center, where her research focuses on the ethics and governance of science and US–China relations.

Au Loong-Yu, labour activist 

Resources

• Byler, D. (2022) Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• China Media Project: chinamediaproject.org
• Chun, L. (2021) Revolution and Counterrevolution in China: The Paradoxes of Chinese Struggle. London: Verso.
• Gallagher, M.E. (2017) Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Karl, R.E. (2020) China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History. New York: Verso.
• Karl, R. (2010) Mao Zedong and China in the 20th-century World: A Concise History Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
• Loong-Yu, A. (2020) China’s rise: strength and fragility Hong Kong in revolt: the protest movement and the future of China. London: Pluto Press.
• Manfred E. (2021) Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• McGregor, R. (2012) The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers. New York: HarperCollins.
• Pan, J. (2020) Welfare for Autocrats: How social assistance cares for its rulers. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Saich, T. (2010) Governance and Politics of China (3rd edn). Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan.

Photo credit: © Joshua Fernandez/Unsplash. Scene inside a Sam’s club during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic in Shenzhen, China. 

There has been heated debate over the nature of China’s economic system – specifically whether it is capitalist or socialist. This section summarises different views on the development of China’s economic system over three periods of recent history: the socialist period between the 1950s and 1970s, the transition period between the late 1970s and 1990s, and the capitalist period as from the 1990s. This is followed by a summary of several characteristics and trends in China’s current economic system, the crisis it has been facing and its responses.

Socialist period (1950s–mid-1970s) 

After the Chinese Communist Party gained power in 1949, it first eliminated private property from the means of production to establish new socialist economic structures. In urban areas, the party nationalised and collectivised industries and established work units based on public ownership. In rural areas, land was redistributed and placed in the hands of villagers’ collectives. But there are diverging views on the character of society in this period and the trends it manifested. 

Joel Andreas argues in ‘Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China’ that, during this period, Chinese workers gained ‘industrial citizenship’, which secured their recognition as legitimate stakeholders in factories through job tenure and extensive membership rights. Although the constraints on autonomous collective action severely limited the potential for workplace democracy, the work structure at the factories was designed to learn from workers’ grievances and the social hierarchy was compressed. 

In ‘The Communist Road to Capitalism’, however, Ralf Ruckus contends that, after the abolition of the old class divisions, new ones soon arose between peasants and workers and between different strata of workers. He argues that many overviews of the period are too optimistic and simplistic, and that it is important to examine some of its contradictions. In the 1950s, the system of taxation and unified purchase used to generate resources for the socialist industrialisation programme came at the cost of squeezing peasants’ livelihoods. The workforce was divided into permanent and temporary workers, who were accorded substantially different rights under the hierarchical dual labour system. Moreover, women faced a sexist division of labour as they occupied less skilled positions with lower pay. 

Transition to Capitalism (late 1970s–1990)

In ‘Rise of the Red Engineers’, Joel Andreas argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s class-levelling project ended in the late 1970s, after which the party started to restore the cultural and political class hierarchies that had been condemned during the Maoist era. This was done by establishing a more hierarchical education system, as well as through elitist academic and party systems that rewarded cultural and political credentials. In this period, the party retained the socialist economic infrastructure, but merged the cultural and political elites into a new class of ‘technocratic bureaucrats’. These bureaucrats would eventually become the new capitalist class, stimulating the transition to capitalism from the late 1970s.

Others contend that the economic basis for capitalism had already been established in the socialist period. Ralf Ruckus sees the socialist industrial infrastructure, including a disciplined industrial workforce and the patriarchal family structure, as laying important foundations for the new capitalist social relations. In this regard, the market reforms in the late 1970s facilitated the transition to capitalism in the 1990s. For instance, soon after the party officially announced the Economic Reform and Opening policies in 1978, it set up Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to facilitate foreign investment, and restructured the hukou system to enable rural populations to migrate as a cheap labour force in the SEZs. This then triggered new kinds of social struggles arising from rapid urbanisation and proletarianisation. 

Capitalist Era (1990s to the present)

From the 1990s, however, commentators and analysts tend to converge. Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 ‘Southern Tour’ marked a clear declaration by the party’s leadership to further transform China’s economy and integrate it into the global capitalist system. 

From the mid-1990s, the party accelerated the elimination of full employment and membership rights in the old socialist welfare system, which in cities had been based on the work unit structure. Between 1998 and 2003, around 16 million workers, or 40% of the state sector workforce, were laid off when most of the country’s SOEs were privatised or closed down. The remaining SOEs were amalgamated into modern, profit-driven conglomerates, making the workforce vulnerable to being hired and fired at will to minimise labour costs. In the rural areas, local governments dispossessed many villagers of their land, to be used to develop  infrastructure or industrial and commercial projects, totalling over one million illegal land grabs between 1998 and 2005.

After China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, more transnational corporations (TNCs) relocated their global supply chains to the country in pursuit of cheap labour and profits. In 2008, there were 225 million internal migrant workers, most of whom worked in coastal cities in export production. Built on the exploitation of migrant workers, China became the ‘engine of global capitalism’ and the largest destination for FDI. Throughout the 2000s, China enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom with an average of more than 10% annual GDP growth. Production for global markets was central to this boom, with the country becoming the world’s biggest exporter in 2009. 

After 2010, however, China’s economic growth has slowed. Although China was able to avoid the worst impact of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis due to its insulation from the global financial system, its export sectors were seriously affected. Throughout 2009 and 2010, the Chinese government introduced massive stimulus programmes, which totalled 4 trillion RMB (USD 586.68 billion), amounting to 12.5% of the country’s 2008 gross domestic product (GDP). Immersive infrastructure projects, such as high-speed railways, roads, and airports, were built with government funding and bank credit. Ho-fung Hung argues that China became burdened with diminishing returns from its continuous credit-funded stimulus projects, as it began to suffer a crisis of over-accumulation and over-leveraging, which worsened throughout the decade. Despite the government’s rhetoric about boosting domestic consumption to respond to over-production, the reality of growing inequality has made this less feasible. In the last 30 years, the growth rate of China’s per capita household consumption expenditure and disposable income has lagged behind its GDP per capita, leading to an increasing gap.

Characteristics of China’s economic system today

China’s current economy is fundamentally capitalist, in the sense that all businesses have to be oriented towards maximising profit. These enterprises co-exist with a strong state that regulates the economy to serve its national goals and ensure social stability. 

Yet, while capitalist, China’s economy is also distinct from many others. As Ho-Fung Hung points out, the domination of state enterprises is one distinctive characteristic. The Chinese constitution guarantees the state sector a dominant position in the economy and the party has used SOEs as important levers to direct the economy, playing a major role in domestic and global markets. In the 2021 Global Fortune 500 List, 124 out of 500 are corporations from China and 82 of these 143 are state-owned. The proportion of SOEs’ total revenue compared to private enterprises varies between sectors. In 2018, in strategic industries such as armaments, electricity, and minerals, SOEs compose 85% of all enterprises; in pillar industries, such as construction and electronics, they make up 45%, while in other industries they represent only 15%. Telecommunications and finance are exclusively state-owned, giving the state a continued monopoly of big data and finance. 

Ho-Fung Hung also argues that China’s economic slowdown, related to the debt and over-production crisis that has worsened since 2010, has created the context in which the state has launched regulatory crackdowns and is seeking to export capital overseas. Domestically, the government has pushed ahead with the expansion of state sectors at the expense of the private sectors in a situation of ‘economic cannibalism’ that has depressed the overall growth rate. For instance, while the state retains its monopoly in many sectors, its anti-monopoly laws have been disproportionately used against private and foreign enterprises. Internationally, Xi Jinping launched the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) in 2013 to provide credit to 70 low- and middle-income countries for infrastructure projects to absorb China’s over-accumulation. By 2015, the supply of local currency and loans was still growing while China’s foreign-exchange reserves were stagnant, which led to capital flight, a meltdown of the stock market, and devaluation pressure on the RMB. The state then introduced heavy-handed regulations on the financial market to tighten capital controls. More detail about China’s BRI project is provided in the section ‘China and the World’.

In all of this, it’s important to emphasise the enormous class polarisation and the struggles of ordinary people lying behind economic growth. In the past three decades, China’s explosive capitalist development has largely been built on the massive surplus rural population that supplies cheap labour to the export-oriented economy. In order to keep down the cost of labour, the state has facilitated the exploitation of its workers through overall development strategies in favour of capital. As a result, workers’ basic labour rights are often systematically abused, and their access to social welfare is also structurally limited. More detail about workers’ lives and their struggles is reviewed in other sections, ‘Life in China’ and ‘Social Movement in China’. 

Webinar participants

Ralf Ruckus, editor of gongchao.org 

Joel Andreas, Johns Hopkins University 

Ho-Fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University 

Resources

• Andreas, J. (2019) Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Chuang, J. (2020) Beneath the China Boom: Labor, Citizenship, and the Making of a Rural Land Market. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.~
• Chuang collective (2021) Social Contagion. Chicago: Charles H. Kerr.
• Hung, Ho-fung (2015) The China Boom: Why China will not rule the world. New York: Columbia University Press.
• Naughton, B. (2018) The Chinese Economy. Adaptation and Growth. (Second Edn). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Roberts, D. (2020) The myth of Chinese Capitalism. London: St. Martin’s Press.
• Ruckus, R. (2021) The Communist Road to Capitalism. How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)evolution since 1949. Oakland, CA: PM Press.
• Shih, V.C. (2007) Factions and Finance in China: Elite Conflict and Inflation Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Weber, I. (2021) How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate. Abingdon: Routledge.

Photo credit: © 8268513/Pixabay. Hong Kong Pride Parade. 

While the Chinese state’s political and economic structural power is characterised by capitalist relations and repressive authoritarianism, the country is still shaped in different ways by power from below. Despite the government’s increasing investment in new forms of technological surveillance and intensifying political arrests, people in China persistently struggle against exploitation, discrimination, and political repression and to secure their rights to a healthy and dignified life. The section explores workers’ struggles and feminist movements in mainland China, as well as the Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Bill movement in 2019.

Labour movement in China 

China has a long tradition of labour militancy, stretching back to mobilisation in foreign-controlled ‘treaty ports’ like Shanghai and Guangzhou in the early twentieth century and, from there, to waves of workers’ protests during the Hundred Flowers Movement, as a part of the Cultural Revolution, and during the Tiananmen Square Movement of 1989. Since the beginning of China’s Economic Reform Era, and especially in the early 2000s, there have been numerous strikes and workers have staged protests, petitioned, and rioted in order to push for their demands. Chinese workers have been extraordinarily active. There was a dramatic rise in labour actions during the Hu-Wen administration (2003–2012). There have been fewer since then, which could be interpreted either as a fall in the number of strikes or on reporting on them.

As noted earlier, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, the working class in China was still divided into two main groups: permanent workers in the old SOE sector and internal rural migrant workers with temporary urban employment. Their  different experiences have led to articulating distinct claims. SOE workers experienced privatisation and corporate restructuring, which led to many job losses during China’s Market Reform in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As we have already seen, migrant workers never enjoyed socialist benefits, such as membership rights of their work units, and housing and childcare benefits. On the contrary, they experienced a discriminatory system in the cities, where they were hyper-exploited by factories operated entirely according to a capitalist logic.

C.K. Lee argued in ‘Against the Law: Labour Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt’ that the claims of the SOE workers in the 1990s and early 2000s were rooted in their tattered socialist social contract, whereas the migrant workers focused on narrower legal rights. Conversely, Manfred Elfstrom points out that an increasing number of workers also made more assertive demands for higher wages and better social benefits in the later 2000s. For instance, in 2010, thousands of workers stopped Honda automobile plants in Guangzhou which led to the shutdown of the entire supply chain in demand of better wages. 

Various actors have given support to these struggles. Workers gain support from social media, from the loose networks of workers from the same home town, and, more recently, from Marxist students. Several years ago, grassroots non-governmental organisations were notable supporters. These were usually based in the industrial zones, where they opened community centres. They later became the target of government crackdowns. Elfstrom argues that NGOs played a complicated role in workers’ struggles. Certainly, some of the criticisms that they focused too much on advocacy and individual legal work as opposed to organising collective actions may be justified, but NGOs also had a more militant side, for instance when they provided advice in strike-making and facilitated informal collective bargaining in the aftermath of work stoppages. 

We have noted that China has a single, party-controlled union, ACFTU. Despite its revolutionary history, the union’s main goals today are to maintain peaceful industrial relations and restore normal production if it is disrupted. These goals are inscribed in the country’s Trade Union Law. Very occasionally, the union serves as a fairly neutral mediator between workers and capital, and is a mild internal advocate for new labour legislation on behalf of workers. In most cases, however, the union is merely an arm of management and the local government. 

Elfstrom argues that the results of workers’ activism in China have been double-edged: increased responsiveness and increased repression. The struggles of SOE workers have spurred the state to expand the social safety net, and workers’ protests have been credited with encouraging the enactment of a new Labour Contract Law in 2008 and a Social Insurance Law in 2011, providing a more comprehensive legal framework for labour protection. There have also been sporadic pilot experiments to allow elections in enterprise-level unions, and/or sectoral bargaining. It is important to note that these reforms took place in specific localities where independent collective actions were already more frequent. As the union reformers themselves have acknowledged, it was the workers pushing the unions to act, not the other way around. Elfstrom points out that although the repression has been more pronounced under Xi’s administration, with a crackdown on NGO leaders and Marxist students, strikes nevertheless continue and have even expanded to more sectors, like service industries, and the platform economy.

#MeToo Movement in China

China’s feminist movement has a long history (see section ‘Life in China’) but in 2018 it connected with the global #MeToo movement, when Xi-xi, Luo shared her allegations of sexual harassment against her former university professors on her social media platform. Her story went viral and encouraged a wave of women to publish their accounts of sexual harassment. To counter the censorship, netizens also invented the hashtag ‘Rice Bunny’ (the Mandarin pronunciation sounds like ‘Me Too’) and used it widely in the online discussion. The #MeToo movement has since expanded to universities, cultural, business and non-profit sectors in China.

The #MeToo Movement responds to the context of the long-term structural suppression of Chinese women and their grievances – as well as a history of women’s mobilisation against this. Women in China continue to face a discriminatory labour market and a society which urges them to have children but fails to provide public childcare support. 

In 2011, members of ‘Young Feminist Activism’ started to campaign against discrimination and sexual violence. They organised the ‘Occupy the Men’s Toilets’ campaign to protest over unequal provision of public toilets. They wore wedding dresses covered in red to draw people’s attention to domestic violence. They shaved their hair to address the unequal requirements women face to enrol in university. These eye-catching campaigns caught the attention of Chinese mainstream media, and provoked heated discussions on social media. A few policy changes were also made, including China’s first Anti-domestic Violence Law in 2015. However, in the same year, repression of civil society also intensified: five feminist activists were detained after planning a multi-city protest against sexual harassment on public transport.

In 2018, despite the political climate, the #MeToo Movement expanded and became more decentralised. Countless women continued to post their accounts of sexual harassment online and a handful brought their cases to the courts. In 2018, Zhou Xiaoxuan accused Zhu Jun, a prominent host on state broadcasting, of sexual harassment and drew enormous public attention. After being sued by Zhu for defamation, Zhou counter-sued him for ‘violation of personality rights’, as sexual harassment is not clearly defined in the civil code. In 2020 and 2021, when Zhou’s trials were held, crowds gathered outside the court to show support for her despite police harassment. Although the court eventually ruled that Zhou had tendered insufficient evidence in her sexual harassment case, her action was empowering to many participants in the #MeToo movement. Besides the lawsuit, there have also been various efforts to document and discuss the #MeToo movement in China despite government’s attempt to silence it, including a 2600-page ‘#MeToo in China Archive’ compiled by volunteers, and exhibitions in Guangzhou and Beijing. 

Since the #MeToo movement in 2018, a couple of policy initiatives have been introduced. For instance, in 2018, The People’s Procuratorate and the Education Bureau of Hangzhou Xihu District jointly announced the first guidelines to handle sexual harassment cases in schools. In 2021, nine Shenzhen government departments co-published a guidebook to provide a unified standard for sexual harassment policies at schools and workplaces to prevent and punish sexual harassment. In the same year, China’s first-ever Civil Code obliges companies to adopt measures to prevent and respond to sexual harassment in the workplace. However, while the state introduced the new policy initiative, it has also censored the online discussion, arresting and harassing the activists who were part of the grassroots movement that pushed for the changes. A prominent feminist activist, Huang Xueqin, who supported women to come forward with stories of sexual harassment, has been detained since 2021 on the charge of ‘inciting subversion of state power’, and her lawyer’s request to meet with her has been denied. 

Hong Kong Movement in 2019

In the summer of 2019, a million people marched in the streets to protest against the Extradition Bill, introduced by the Hong Kong government to enable the extradition of suspects from Hong Kong to mainland China. In so doing, they kicked off the biggest mass movement in Hong Kong’s history.

The government’s refusal to withdraw the bill and increasing police suppression led to a shift in the protesters’ focus, coalescing into Five Demands: complete withdrawal of the Extradition Bill, police accountability, retracting classification of the protests as riots, amnesty for arrested protesters, and universal suffrage for the legislative and chief executive bodies. The protests also expanded to various locations throughout Hong Kong, moving from the financial and political centres to outlying communities. Moreover, due to the intense police crackdown and the government’s refusal to make concessions, protesters began to complement mass demonstrations with more radical tactics, including road blocks, raids of government buildings, and petrol bombs. 

The street clashes escalated and reached their peak in mid-November 2019, with street actions taking place every couple of days. In response, the police crackdown and mass arrests also escalated: over a thousand people arrested in a single day as battles took place in two universities. The repression caused immense, social and psychological trauma and led to a decline in this radical street action as protestors perceived little possibility that it could achieve a change.

At the same time, there was a growth on other fronts in the movement, such as unionisation drives, ‘Yellow Economic Circles’ (a network of businesses which openly supported the protests), elections, and community-based organising. These fronts were explored through trial and error. When the pandemic struck at the start of 2020 the networks and solidarity formed by the movement enabled a prompt civil society response. For instance, the network of cross-sector unions became important for workers to express a joint and critical voice to the government’s pandemic policies and facilitated an unprecedent industrial action launched by health workers.

From the start of the Anti-Extradition Movement to early 2021, the Hong Kong police made over 10,200 arrests linked to the movement. In June 2020, the Chinese government escalated the crackdown by bypassing the local legislature to impose a National Security Law (NSL) on Hong Kong. The new law vaguely defined and criminalized activities related to ‘Subversion’, ‘Secession’, ‘Terrorist’ and ‘Collusion with a Foreign Country,’ which could potentially lead to a life sentence. Since the enactment of the law, the National Security Department (NSD) carried out a widespread crackdown on various parts of civil society, including universities, the media, and trade unions, arresting a total of 183 people. In early 2021, 53 activists and legislators were arrested on the grounds of ‘conspiracy to commit subversion’ for taking part in an opposition-organised primary election – speech crimes constitute nearly a third of arrests carried out by the NSD. The same year, dozens of activists from a speech therapists’ trade union former news outlets were arrested for publishing books and articles under the charges of ‘conspiring to publish seditious publications’, a notorious offence introduced during the colonial period. The arbitrary arrests functioned as an intimidation campaign and led to the mass disbanding of civil society organisations (CSOs) and self-censorship in public discussion. 

The crackdown on Hong Kong’s civil society has also had deep repercussions on mainland China. Au Loong-Yu pointed out that Hong Kong’s organisations have a long history of supporting social movements and grassroots initiatives in mainland China, covering a wide spectrum including environmental, labour, and human rights issues. For instance, in the last 30 years, the ‘Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China’ has continuously organized mass vigils to remember the June 4^th Tiananmen Square massacre, until it was banned in 2020, with several activists jailed for participating in the illegal gathering. A handful of labour organisations based in Hong Kong have also played a crucial role in supporting groups in mainland China in awareness raising and empowerment of migrant workers. Au Loong-Yu thinks that if the cross-border solidarity and support had continued, we could see a different China, but the government has turned the clock back and cracked down on civil society in Hong Kong and mainland China.

Webinar participants

Au (a pseudonym), an activist from Hong Kong 

Manfred Elfstrom, University of British Columbia

Crystal L. (a pseudonym), a Chinese feminist activist  

Au Loong Yu, a labour activist

Resources

• China Labour Bulletin. https://clb.org.hk/
• Elfstrom, M. (2021) Workers and Change in China; Resistance, Repression and Responsiveness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Lee, C.K. (2007). Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Franceschini, I. and Sorace, C. (eds.) (2022) Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour. London: Verso Books.
• Loong-Yu, A. (2020) Hong Kong in Revolt: The Protest Movement and the Future of China. London: Pluto Press. 
• Lu, Z. (2015) Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance. New York: Cambridge University Press. 
• Lee, C.K. (2022) Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Wu, G. Feng, Y. and Lansdowne, H. (2019) Gender Dynamics, Feminist Activism and Social Transformation in China. Abingdon: Routledge.

Photo credit: © European Council President/Flickr. President of the EU Commission Jean-Claude Juncker,  Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, and European Council President Donald Tusk at the EU-China Summit 2017. 

This section provides a contextualised overview of China’s economic and military rise, including the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s overall military capacity, and cross-strait and South China Sea tensions. It also explores reflections from an activist in the Chinese diaspora participating in a transnational social justice movement in a period of heightened US–China geopolitical tensions. 

China’s Economic Rise – Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)

China’s contemporary economy has been largely integrated with the global economy, but one project above all is seen as representative of China’s global aspirations. Since Xi Jinping unveiled the ‘One Belt One Road Initiative’ in 2013 – later renamed ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) – to connect the economies of Asia, Europe and Africa with transport and energy infrastructure projects, it has been depicted as a coherent and geopolitical-driven ‘grand strategy’ orchestrated by top Chinese political leaders to dominate the world. Research by Lee Jones and Hong Zhang suggests, however, that BRI was largely determined by ‘multilevel, multi-actor struggles for power and resources’. 

Lee Jones argues that profit-seeking SOEs and banks are the dominant actors driving the further internationalisation of the Chinese state. Because SOEs have been facing massive over-capacity, saturated markets, and declining domestic profits, their motives to seek overseas markets became the most significant drive behind the BRI. Political leaders then overlaid diplomatic language on this overseas economic expansion and framed it as a diplomatic ‘win-win’: recipient countries receive investment in projects that other risk-averse competitors are hesitant to back, while China expands its economic globalisation and boosts its international legitimacy. Moreover, the BRI is not an entirely new initiative, but an aggregation and scaling-up of China’s existing overseas economic activities, consolidated to allow foreign governments and consumers to soak up SOEs’ excess capacity and banks’ surplus capital. More discussion about China’s crisis of over-accumulation and overleveraging is reviewed in the section ‘China’s Economic System’. 

Hong Zhang categorises five major BRI actors: the central political leadership, government ministries, sub-national governments, enterprises, and social organisations. While the BRI actively mobilises agents across all levels, the central government’s ability to coordinate and oversee these has been weak and ineffectual. Characterised by Jones as a ‘Chinese style regulatory state’, the Chinese government often fails to devise detailed strategies and micro-manage outcomes; conversely, diverse actors may influence, interpret or ignore the broad policy guidelines formulated by the upper echelons. Usually, enterprises are the primary actors, scouting for overseas business opportunities then retrofitting their projects into the country’s overall development strategy and competing for the government’s diplomatic and financial support. This means that ‘the tail wags the dog’, with many uncoordinated and poorly thought-through projects being approved. Moreover, as Hong Zhang’s research shows, SOEs are often powerful economic actors in their own right, and are to some extent independent of the government’s ‘financial power’.

China is now a major international investor and creditor, and its involvement in development financing is also noteworthy. Over the 2000–2014 period, China’s overall provision of development finance totalled US $354 billion, only US $40 billion behind the US. However, while China’s share of foreign governments’ debt has risen substantially, its debt ownership is still relatively small compared to private lenders overall and lags well behind the established multilateral lenders. As of 2022, China is the dominant lender in only 17 debt-distressed states worldwide.

Chinese market dominance in overseas infrastructure projects, particularly in Africa and Asia, is unassailable, with nearly 1,000 projects totalling $170 billion dollars over the 2013–2021 period. Further information on some of these projects can be found on ‘The People’s Map of Global China’, a bottom-up, collaborative initiative documenting infrastructure and other projects financed and/or built by Chinese entities worldwide. Some of these projects are facing great challenges or already failing, which Jones interpreted as a reflection of the shortcomings of Chinese-style regulatory governance and recipient states’ economic unsustainability, rather than the success of Beijing’s ‘debt trap diplomacy’. 

Low transparency in governance and in engagements with the local community are common problems, which have led to significant ‘blowback’ for China from recipient countries. For instance, the land-grabs and displacements associated with several BRI projects in Cambodia Sri Lanka have caused serious local unrest. In recent years, due to rising concern about the potential risks and backlash, an increasing number of recipient countries are suspending (Sierra Leone) or scaling back (Myanmar, Malaysia) major planned BRI projects. The BRI therefore does not only strengthen China’s ties with recipients, but may also generate local and inter-state discord, undermining Beijing’s broader foreign policy goals.

China’s Military Rise – Cross-strait and South China Sea Tensions

There is no doubt that China is modernising and expanding its military capacities, although Walden Bello argues that this is largely limited to its own region rather than being a global phenomenon. Key indicators show that China’s military capacity remains largely inferior to other global powers, specifically the US. In terms of nuclear weapons, it is estimated that China has 350 nuclear warheads while the US has 5,600; the US has 800 military bases in 177 countries (out of a total of 195) while China only has one military base in Africa, and an overseas military presence in a few sites in Tajikistan and artificial islands in Asia. China only has two aircraft carriers based on an antiquated design while the U.S. has 11 of the total 43 that exist in the world today. 

However, the South China Sea (SCS) dispute and cross-strait tension with Taiwan are two major flash points for intensifying geopolitical tensions. The South China Sea (SCS) is a strategic link between the Pacific and Indian Ocean, which is not only an important trade route but also rich in oil, natural gas, and fish. It has been a point of contention in the disputed territorial claims among Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. In the past decade, China has carried out increasingly aggressive military activities in the region by building artificial islands for military bases, exploring for natural resources, and violating the rights of neighbouring countries. Walden Bello points out that an important factor in the SCS is US forward-deployed military presence in the region. Furthermore, China is surrounded by around 50 US military bases from Northern Japan to the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea has also been controlled by the US 7th Fleet with its carrier taskforces, surface ships, nuclear-armed attack capacity, strategic submarines, and provocative air reconnaissance. Bello argues that, while the US and China are jostling for power in the region, this has created an explosive situation for the entire region, and although China’s moves might be understandable in its geopolitical tension with the US, this is no justification for them. 

Taiwan is only 160 km off China’s coast, and its political status has been contested. While Beijing claims Taiwan is part of China, Taiwan enjoys de facto autonomy with its own elected president and independent political system. Although China’s military aggression is not new to Taiwan, in the past few years, Chinese warplanes have crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait at a historically high level. However, although the western media plays up the military threats, survey results show that the Taiwanese are aware of these but are not necessarily worried about the prospects of an immediate military conflict. 

Brian Hioe lays out some political and economic context to take into account when assessing the possibility of a cross-strait conflict. Despite the significant difference in military capacity between China and Taiwan, occupation of Taiwan would not be as easy as some observers might assume. Militarily, Hioe argues that China would face a severe death toll from a beachhead invasion, and currently China still lacks the ‘lift capacity’ to send troops for a long-term occupation of Taiwan. Economically, the world’s dependence on China and significantly on Taiwan would also be a decisive factor. As Taiwan produces more than half of the world’s semiconductors, used in all kinds of electronic devices from missiles to mobile phones, China would want to ensure minimal disruption and preserve know-how and infrastructure in Taiwan. This has led China to follow a multi-pronged strategy: not just intimidation campaigns and psychological warfare, but also economic and political co-optation as a strategy towards unification. So, China facilitates a class of cross-strait elites to encourage economic integration and supports KMT, the Chinese National Party, as its domestic proxy to attempt to take over Taiwan through electoral means. Similar to the regional tension in the South China Sea, Hioe points out that Taiwan is caught between the US and China. US diplomatic visits and gestures regarding Taiwan often lead to a response of China’s military aggression in a tit-for-tat escalation. 

Diaspora activists’ experiences in the heightened US–China tension

May Wu is a social justice organiser who works with Chinese students and activists in the US and internationally. She shared her personal experiences of participating in transnational social justice movement in the US, which also sheds light on the struggles of the Chinese diaspora in the heightened US–China tension and her insights on reimagining international solidarity. 

With the population of Chinese students in the US totalling more than 300,000, May underlines the importance of mobilising them while the liberal environment gives them opportunities to engage in social movements. However, as Mengyang Zhao argues in his article ‘Chinese Diaspora Activism and the Future of International Solidarity’, diaspora activists often suffer the ‘triple penalty’ of simultaneously being activists, immigrants in their countries of residence, and activists in their home countries. In the context in the US, the Chinese state is aggressively tightening its grip on diaspora activists, and puts them under extensive surveillance and scrutiny. At the same time, the worsening US–China relationship, Trump’s rise, and anti-Asian hate crimes following the pandemic outbreak has caught diaspora activists between two state actors and growing hostility in the US. For instance, May noted that when Chinese students and activists participated in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in the US, their actions were viewed as evidence of having been brainwashed by ‘western liberal values’ among the mainstream Chinese public, and perceived by some US audiences as an intervention by Chinese communist spies sent to sabotage US domestic politics. 

It is important to move beyond the common stereotype that Chinese diaspora activists are only ‘dissidents against Chinese government in liberal democratic countries’. Diaspora activists  have huge amounts to contribute to social movement in their countries of residence practically and intellectually. During the BLM movement, in solidarity, some Chinese students joined rallies, created content and workshops about the topics, and participated in initiatives led by people of colour. Some also organised fellow students to contact Chinatown vendors to explain the cause of the movement. May argues that overseas Chinese students have a long history of transnational social movement organising in the US, and their participation in activism today is a living example of this transnational identity, building bridges between Chinese students, resident and home communities, and with other diaspora activists and local movements. 

Webinar participants

Brian Hioe, activist in Taiwan, editor of New Bloom Magazine 

Lee Jones, Queen Mary University London

Hong Zhang, John Hopkins University and co-editor of the People’s Map of Global China (https://thepeoplesmap.net)

Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South 

Resources

• Bello, W. (2019) China: An Imperial Power in the Image of the West? Bangkok: Focus on the Global South.
• Dreher, A., Fuchs, A., Parks, B., Strange, A. and Tierney, M.J. (2022) Banking on Beijing: The Aims and Impacts of China’s Overseas Development Program. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Global China Pulse: https://thepeoplesmap.net/globalchinapulse/global-china-pulse-1-2022/
• Jones, L. and Hameiri, S. (2021) Fractured China: How State Transformation is Shaping China’s Rise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Jones, L. and Hameiri, S. (2020) Debunking the Myth of ‘Debt Trap Diplomacy’: How Recipient Countries Shape China’s Belt and Road Initiative. London: Chatham House. https://www.chathamhouse.org/2020/08/debunking-myth-debt-trap-diplomacy
• Lee, C.K. (2017) The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, And Foreign Investment in Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• New Bloom: https://newbloommag.net/
• Pettis, M.K. (2020) Trade Wars are Class Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
• Reilly, J. (2021) Orchestration: China’s Economic Statecraft Across Asia and Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Ye, M. (2020) The Belt Road and Beyond: State-Mobilized Globalization in China: 1998–2018. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Photo credit: © Photoholgic/Unsplash. Shanghai’s high rise buildings covered in smoke.  

The climate crisis affects the entire globe. Addressing it depends on international collaboration and collective action coordinated across the planet. This section examines China’s contribution to the global climate crisis, and the progress and shortcomings of its current policies. China has long been at the centre of the debate over this crisis, but much analysis often fails to understand its position in the global economy, the role of social movements in the country, and the possibilities for international climate cooperation.

Economic development and the energy model

China’s economic model and its position in global supply chains have significant implications for its energy model. China’s contribution to global emissions is a relatively recent phenomenon, coinciding with its spectacular economic growth and its emergence as ‘the factory of the world’. China’s export-led and infrastructure-building economic model, as well as its coal-rich energy resources, established an energy system that is highly dependent on coal, which has led to high carbon intensity given its economic outputs and also created enormous greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. China’s carbon emissions started to take off in the early 2000s and escalated until 2012. In 2006, China overtook the US as the largest annual contributor to global carbon emissions in absolute terms, although US remains responsible for the largest share of historical emissions, with some 20% of the global total as of 2021.

As Ying Chen points out, however, different data sets can affect how people understand the climate crisis, influencing the questions to be posed and the possible solutions. While the mainstream media highlights aggregate data showing that China is responsible for 27% of global carbon emissions and more than 50% of the world’s total coal consumption, in per capita terms, China’s emissions are 10.1 tons per person, compared to 17 tons in the US. In addition, most emissions data is based on the production that occurs within a given territory. It does not reflect externalities, such as the fact that much of this production represents carbon-intensive activities that have been outsourced from the former industrialised countries to poorer ones. Per capita consumption-based data is a more accurate indicator, since it shows how those who are on the end of the consumption chain bear responsibility for the emissions. Using these measures, the G7 group of high-income countries have a much higher level of per capita emissions than lower-income countries, including China, which is the highest among emitter among the non-G7 economies. 

Environmental consequences and environmental movements 

By the early 2000s, China’s massive coal consumption had led to severe smog and poor air quality across the country. An internal government from 2003 estimated that 300,000 people died each year from air pollution, mostly due to related heart disease and lung cancer. The contamination of water and soil with chemical waste and heavy metals are also huge concerns. A nationwide soil survey conducted by land officials from 2005 to 2013 revealed that about 16% of China’s soil and about 19% of agricultural land were contaminated. Recent estimates suggest that water pollution in China causes more than 100,000 deaths each year. 

Environmental public health issues have become a major concern and generated domestic discontent. This pressure from society and emerging environmental movements became one of the most important forces that eventually propelled China’s environmental policies. In the 2000s, an emerging middle class with a growing environmental awareness – including journalists, NGOs and self-organised groups – formed an nascent environmental movement advocating for cleaner air and clean water. In the mid-2000s, around 80,000 mass protests were taking place every year, many concerned with the environment. Some officials working in environmental protection agencies made alliances across society and attempted to regulate the polluting industrial sectors. However, as economic growth remained the state’s top priority and local governments were dependent on industrial revenues to meet economic targets, environmental protection agencies often lacked real power to take action. 

From the 2010s, demands from Chinese civil society to control air pollution made some progress. The government increased transparency in environmental data and accountability in the governance of public health, and has gradually embedded some of the calls for environmental changes into its own policies and launched ‘Ecological civilisation’ as a major campaign. In 2018, the Chinese government set up the Ministry of Ecology and Environment to coordinate, supervise, and regulate the country’s environment and formulate a new industrial strategy. However, as Hongqiao Liu and Isabel Hilton observed, unlike the vibrant social movements and self-organised groups of the 2000s, today’s civil society is compelled to address environmental issues through official channels, as popular movements face political repression and increased regulation. 

China’s environmental policies

After becoming the largest global emitter by volume in the mid 2000s, the Chinese government not only faced domestic discontent but also increasing international pressure. In addition, it began to be accepted that the country’s future prosperity could also be negatively affected by the climate crisis. For instance, much of the country’s urban infrastructure is located in the coastal regions, which are vulnerable to sea-level rise. 

In 2010 – and coinciding with the Chinese government’s attempt to encourage industrial restructuring in response to the economic downturn – the central state orchestrated a strategic shift in energy and climate policies that, it argues, will lay the groundwork to build a carbon-constrained world. China’s energy structure has been extremely dependent on hydrocarbons. In 2020, 84% of its primary energy consumption came from fossil fuels, of which about 57% is derived from coal. At a 2020 United Nations meeting, Xi Jinping pledged to peak C0₂ emissions before 2030, a promise first made at COP 21 in Paris in 2015, and to reach a target of carbon neutrality by 2060 – the first time China had put a carbon neutrality deadline on the table. Prior to COP26 in late 2021, China officially submitted its carbon neutrality ‘before 2060’ target, which could significantly prevent an extra 0.2–0.3ºC of global warming. The strategic vision to achieve carbon neutrality also specifies that China will increase the share of non-fossil fuels in the energy mix to 25% by 2030 and to 80% by 2060.

To build a carbon-constrained world, the Chinese government has launched national policies and devoted enormous resources to renewable energies, including wind, solar, nuclear, and hydropower. Starting in 2010, China began building the supply chain of the green economy, spanning from mineral inputs to manufacturing, as well as developing new technologies. Today, China is a significant player in the global green economy, and accounts for 75% of world’s supply chains for solar power, while its refineries supply an estimated 85% of the world’s battery-ready cobalt for lithium-ion batteries. China’s technologies and ability to manufacture renewable alternatives cost-effectively have also brought down the cost of solar and other renewables for the rest of the world, making it more possible for Low and Middle-Income Countries (L&MICs) to bypass a high-carbon emitting route to fuel their development. At the same time China’s GDP is also growing from being a major manufacturer and exporter of renewable energies. There are, however, various injustices within the green supply chain. One investigation reported by the New York Times found that the growing solar industry in Xinjiang is based on forced labour of the Uyghur minority, and that workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo are exposed to severe exploitation when working in the cobalt supply chain to fuel the switch to electric vehicles. 

It will be a major challenge for China to meet its environmental targets. It is that, to achieve the target of carbon neutrality, China will have to cut the same level of CO₂ emissions between 2020 and 2060 as it produced over the last 50 years. China will need to implement huge structural transformation of its economy. Although it appears to be on target to meet the peak C0₂ emissions by 2030, it remains unclear if it can meet its 2060 goals. Regardless, the priorities of the Chinese government have clearly undergone a significant shift away from a sole focus on economic growth towards a different development path that emphasises environmental sustainability. 

International Climate Collaboration 

The climate crisis requires global collaboration, argues Tobita Chow, the director of the Justice Is Global project, and the co-author of an outline on US–China cooperation. As Jonas Nahm has argued in ‘Collaborative Advantage: Forging Green Industries in the New Global Economy’, collaborative approaches between China, Germany and the US have historically brought positive outcomes and helped develop the wind and solar industries. 

Chow points out that the US and China are currently stuck in a nationalist competition over the dominance of cutting-edge clean energy technologies, which encourages both countries to hoard these technologies. However, since China has the largest industrial capacity in renewable energies, and the US is leading in the development and financing of green technologies, their collaboration on tech sharing, financing, and debt relief could potentially accelerate climate action in other countries. 

In addition, Chow argues for the importance of weakening the global intellectual property rights (IPR) regime for clean technologies. Currently, poorer countries struggle to build their own clean energy industries due to the monopolies granted by the IPR regime, which mainly benefits capitalists in industrialised countries, including China. Although cooperation on carbon pricing and carbon tariffs has been at the centre of the debate in industrialised countries, Chow argues that any such mechanisms need to be paired with other measures that support climate-friendly economic development in L&MICs. Otherwise, these could end up as punitive measures that further alienate and undermine poorer countries and would not help achieve a just climate transition. Last but not least, Chow advocates that people around the world should build political power not only to push for better policies domestically, but also to promote cooperation at the sub-national level. 

Webinar participants

Tobita Chow, activist and founder of Justice is Global 

Isabel Hilton, founder and senior advisor of China Dialogue

Ying Chen, Assistant Professor of Economics at The New School

Hongqiao Liu, independent journalist covering climate change and China

Resources

• Chen, Y. and Li, A. (2021) ‘Global green new deal: a global South perspective’. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 32(2): 170-189. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F10353046211015765
• China Dialogue: www.chinadialogue.net

AUTHOR: Sophie Chen

EDITORS: Nick Buxton, Deborah Eade

DESIGN: Evan Clayburg, Jess Graham

Acknowledgements

Warm thanks to Stephanie Olinga Shannon, Pietje Vervest, Fiona Dove, Ralf Ruckus, Kevin Lin, Darren Byler, Yangyang Cheng, Rebecca Karl, Yige Dong, Tobita Chow and Sandy Shan for advice, guidance and support for the webinar series and this booklet.

We will certainly all remember 2020 for the way it turned our lives upside down, but what will its long-term repercussions be on our political, economic and social systems? The virus may have been invisible to the human eye, but this spiky protein particle exposed like never before the fractures and flaws of our manmade systems, accelerating certain trends, and demonstrating the need for transformative change to protect our health and the health of this planet. Between April and July 2020, Transnational Institute hosted a unique set of 12 global conversations to analyse the fallout from COVID-19 and to articulate the changes we need for a better world. The webinars took place in collaboration with allied organisations and partners around the globe, including AIDC and Focus on the Global South. This critical report pulls out the main analysis from those conversations, with a focus on the proposals and solutions put forward by activists and experts worldwide. We hope this report helps citizens and social movements analyse the crisis, inspires transnational solidarity and works towards the emergence of a more just world.

1. Internationalism – Social movements limit themselves by working within national boundaries.

For too long, activists have operated in silos – failing to provide platforms for each other’s struggles, build cross-national infrastructure and reallocate resources towards those most in need. The global nature of the crisis presents an opportunity to unite and fight – we must better understand the transformative power of solidarity, reach over divides, and reduce the disparities between richer and poorer nations.

2. Healthcare – Privatised healthcare systems cannot cope with pandemics like COVID-19.

Creeping privatisation of public health infrastructure and big pharma withholding access to medicines have impacted upon those most in need of life-saving healthcare. We must prioritise resourcing universal public health services across the globe that will best serve both patients and frontline health workers.

3. Neoliberalism – States have not learned lessons from the last great financial crash in 2008.

Government proposals to stimulate the economy after a global shutdown fail to consider existing social inequalities, which are likely to exacerbate in the aftermath of the pandemic. Rather than bail out CEOs and speculators, we should strongly invest in communities and workplaces, while addressing underlying structures of injustice.

4. Migration – The ‘border-security complex’ is expanding and normalising massive breaches of human rights.

The crisis has seen the increased demonisation and harassment of migrants, with access to asylum closing, displaced people being detained, and borders extending further. Civil society can help dismantle barriers and better champion migrant rights and the freedom to move by placing those with experience of migration at the forefront of campaigns.

5. Authoritarianism – Emergency powers handed to state authorities tend to stick.

New measures have given police and security forces unprecedented capabilities under the guise of public safety, yet these often curtail fundamental civil liberties – particularly of those already marginalised – and embolden authoritarian groups. The public should push for emergency laws to be transparent and temporary and seek to defend spaces of resistance when governments and vigilantes overstep the mark.

6. Ecology – The likelihood of future pandemics and climate chaos is rising.

Extractive industries and human expansion into wildlife habitats play a critical role in spreading disease and speeding up climate change. An immediate transition from fossil fuel reliance to localised renewable energy production, and moving away from commercial agribusiness towards more agroecological farming methods will help avert large-scale food, water and electricity shortages, create jobs, and allow humanity a chance to live a sustainable future.

7. Feminism – The women’s movement offers a transformative politics to address contemporary crises.

Industries with predominantly female workforces like nursing, cleaning and food production are underpaid and at risk, domestic labour is devalued, and under lockdown restrictions women have been targeted by state authorities and abusive partners. The women’s movement is advancing feminist democratic ideas worldwide through building new inclusive structures of power, and centring care and participation as the basis of social organisation.

8. Incarceration – Unsafe, overcrowded prisons unveil a crisis in the worldwide criminal justice system.

Across the globe, prisons lack basic provisions and support for those incarcerated – many of whom have committed minor, non-violent offences and predominantly come from poorer backgrounds. Society should make urgent moves towards decarceration – looking at community–based alternatives to detention, championing rehabilitation over punishment, defunding prisons and supporting those with experience of the criminal justice system to have a say over its future.

9. Technology – Big tech’s growing power poses an unprecedented threat to democracy and privacy.

As more of our work and social life moves online, states are paying technology companies vast sums for public surveillance, digital businesses are booming and storing unprecedented amounts of our personal data, while developing countries are being over–run or excluded from participating in the modern economy. Citizens should work towards helping to close the digital divide between poorer nations and major economies, bring tech titans under democratic control, and protect our privacy by reclaiming our data.

10. Universalism – Our human rights are being further eroded.

Across the globe, access to even the most minimal services – from social security and healthcare, to food, water, electricity and shelter – is denied to many, and in each continent there are states which seek to persecute marginalised communities. Activists will need to ensure that during an emergency the fundamental rights of all citizens are not just protected but advanced, forming the basis of the society which emerges from this crisis.

‘Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.’ Arundhati Roy

Unleashing fear and confusion among citizens and states across the world, COVID-19 demanded an internationalist response as it exposed social inequalities and the inadequacies of public health systems in developing and industrialised economies. The panel explored the global dimensions of the pandemic, discussed what resistance and solidarity can look like and the ways social movements may organise an internationalist response.

Analysis

According to Sonia Shah, author of Pandemic: Tracking contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, the pandemic was a ‘ticking time bomb’ which experts knew was coming. Humans have taken over half the surface of the planet and non-human species crowd the ever decreasing habitats left behind – frequently next to where we live and work in homes, towns, and farms. Industrial expansion at the expense of wildlife habitat is at the root of COVID-19’s spread, amplified in our cities and travelling throughout a global network created to rapidly trade commodities. Ebola originated in West Africa from a single event where a two year old child was playing near a tree in which bats were roosting – the child fell ill, infected family members, their healthcare workers and their family members and so on. This massive outbreak killed over ten thousand people.

There is a dynamic between disease and poverty that mirrors existing inequalities. Cures for malaria – ‘a disease of the poor’ – have been available for over a hundred years, yet hundreds of thousands of people every year still get sick and die from it. Shah understands that there is not ‘a lot of drug development for diseases that affect the poor’ – the best remedy for malaria is based on a 3000 year old Chinese medicine. Illness remains unaddressed even though there may be easy solutions – it is down to lack of political will.

Public health professor Dr Luis Ortiz Hernandez draws parallels between the United States and Cuba in their responses to the pandemic. The US health system based around private insurance is disorganised, struggles to contain the infection, and sees hospitals compete for ventilators. Meanwhile Cuba’s less resourced but universal health system organised around family physicians sees community workers identifying people with infections then isolating them, going as far as to send medical missions around the world because the country has internally controlled the epidemic.

Focus on the Global South’s Benny Kuruvilla describes the dual necessities of containing COVID-19’s spread while minimising the social and economic consequences on the vulnerable and marginalised. Before the crisis, India’s huge informal workforce had already experienced a precarious job market, cramped rental accommodation and no social security, following a long-standing agrarian crisis where tens of millions left rural areas to seek work in the cities. The economic fallout of Coronavirus saw migratory workers undertake a mass exodus from large business centres back to rural villages where jobs are scarce.

Mazibuko Jara of the South African Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education says that the crisis has shown his country’s elites to be ‘out of their depth’. South Africa is the most industrialised nation in African continent, yet millions of poor and working people are left with no food, water, or adequate medical facilities. Resources to fight the pandemic are out of the public’s hands, with the government introducing inadequate social and economic measures, leaving the private sector to dominate the emergency health response.

Umyra Ahmad of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) in Malaysia states that the pandemic cannot be isolated from systemic faultlines – authoritarianism, fundamentalism, and neoliberalism are all entrenching themselves during this period of flux. Xenophobia is heightened as specific communities – Muslim and Chinese especially – are seen to be culpable for spreading the virus. Racial profiling has led to closing off borders, while mass surveillance and the misuse of personal data are being justified as the unfortunate by-products of ensuring public safety. The push for exceptional laws impacts most upon already vulnerable communities – law enforcement agencies are gifted executive powers, while misinformation and propaganda may be deployed as a tactic of social control. Global governance is not able to react to a situation like this, with bodies like the International Monetary Fund responding to the economic fallout with a ‘neoliberal’ approach, doing little for the most marginalised.

Solutions

Despite the devastation the virus has wrought across the globe, the panel believes that these politically uncertain times provide opportunities at an international level.

Sonia Shah discussed the unique way that everybody is focused on a single pathogen – even the world’s wealthy elites are getting sick, losing money and work. Telling a compelling story of the virus to the widest possible audience may offer the chance to address the root causes of its spread, insisting that all interventions consider the fundamental rights of humankind. At a time when people are ‘getting a crash course in epidemiology and public health’, science should be brought into the political sphere, and civil society can look to empower the public with scientific literacy.

Dr Luis Ortiz Hernandez feels this novel situation gives people time to consider not only what is best for their immediate families but also how society as a whole can take care of every citizen. Rather than simply disseminating data and guidelines around the virus and its spread, the World Health Organisation should spearhead a more active and coordinated response.

Benny Kuruvilla believes it is time for free trade treaties to be altered, and countries to instigate a more ‘activist industrial policy’. Medicines can be better developed domestically or at regional levels rather than extending a dependence on foreign imports – India, the second largest nation on earth relies on China, the biggest, for 70 per cent of its drugs. States should further be able to requisition private hospitals for public health reasons without the threat of litigation from lawyers acting on behalf of multinational healthcare conglomerates.

Mazibuko Jara thinks we can embed the notion of healthcare as a right and as a public good. There is hope in the practices of community-based health groups who provide ways of ‘socialising’ healthcare beyond existing public health systems. Alternative systems of public financing can be explored outside the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, while mutual aid networks and peasant mobilisations across the world can offer support to citizens if states fail in their duty of care.

Umyra Ahmad sees a heightened awareness in recent times of the international arena, giving social movements the space to break out from their silos and connect their struggles. In framing their demands, an alternative and transformative system can be imagined which, in the spirit of co-creation, highlights, amplifies and spreads new narratives from communities working on the ground.

Further resources: ‘Coronavirus: the need for a progressive internationalist response’, Transnational Institute

‘To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships’. W.E.B. Du Bois

The worldwide economic fallout from COVID-19 looks set to have greater impact than the virus itself, especially in the Global South. The panel discussed how social movements can advance cogent economic responses where they failed following the 2008 crash, and address the underlying structures of injustice.

Analysis

According to Economics Professor Jayati Ghosh we have reached an unprecedented moment. The economic impact of the pandemic will be devastating – worse than the 20th century’s two World Wars and the great crashes of 1929 and 2008. Simultaneously shutting down large parts of the global economy has significantly reduced incomes and supply, leading to a shortage of services and necessities, and exports collapsing in the travel, transport, and tourism industries. A cessation of economic activity has seen bond markets collapse in many emerging countries, currency depreciation, volatile borrowing, and capital flight. Inequalities have increased – both between and within countries – and developing countries are the worst hit.

The structures of power may not be ‘dramatically affected’, but as with all capitalist crises, it will impact upon workers and women the most. The outcomes of this crisis cannot be anticipated, though war is a possibility. Global institutions show little vision in bringing the international community together and the chances of cooperation are often undermined by ‘horrible’ leaderships in many countries, which fail to listen to or negotiate with civil society.

Walden Bello, TNI Associate and author of Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash, believes we have entered the second big crisis in globalisation in just over a decade – many countries barely emerged out of the 2008 crash, and do not seem to have learnt its lessons. During the last downturn, governments of major economies focused their resources on protecting big financial oligopolies rather than saving jobs and homeowners – this time around, the most severe crisis in the capitalist system’s history, their focus could go the same way. States are usually ‘instruments of the elite, the ruling class’ and we have seen authoritarian measures deployed from India to the Philippines designed not only to deal with the public emergency, but also to strengthen executive control.

Quinn Slobodian, Author of Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, thinks that the virus can be viewed in three distinct ways: as an X-ray, exposing the existing structures of our societies and economies; as a dress rehearsal, for when we will have to respond to upcoming collective recessions; and as a dynamo, exacerbating and exaggerating existing political tendencies. The authoritarian right is finally ‘learning about money’, with both the League in Italy and National Front in France favouring anti-austerity measures to deal with the crisis. In an ‘era of fantasy and fabulism’, progressives will find themselves needing to argue with the far right not only in economic terms, but also debunking their conspiracies, such as ideas that coronavirus was created in a Chinese laboratory or caused by 5G technology.

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko of the South African thinktank Trade Collective understands that neoliberalism’s fixation on ‘competitiveness’ has led to the ‘unnecessary’ catastrophe we find ourselves in. We are ‘not here by chance’ – instead the current crisis is part of an epochal moment dating back to the 1970s which launched an era of financialisation. The virus will be no great equaliser: across Africa currencies have been overvalued – from the South African rand to the Kenyan shilling – and are now depreciating compared to the US dollar.

Solutions

Though state authorities and large companies would like to see a rapid return to ‘business as usual’, the panel believes that social movements have the ability to change the narrative, putting forward progressive solutions to the current crisis.

Jayati Ghosh notes the need to make immediate demands that are ‘socialist, feminist and ecologically conscious’. These include pressuring the IMF to create global liquidity and a debt moratorium, encouraging developing countries to instigate capital controls and better localise employment, production and consumption, and ensure that public goods like health and care work are recognised and protected. Progressive forces are weak, but may be able to revive by ‘capturing people’s imagination’ and creating enough public support that governments might cede to their demands.

Walden Bello believes that crisis and conflict on the streets – with several groups defying lockdowns ‘imposed from above’ – present both problems and opportunities. Responses need to be progressive, not authoritarian, and our economic life must be radically reorganised to offer a different kind of politics and create a truly popular democracy.

Quinn Slobodian outlines ways to ensure that public responses to financial instability are better than those proposed after 2008. When people come back to work, ‘green infrastructure’ should be in place, with workplaces pushing a zero carbon model. Worker representation on boards can form part of any bailout, in addition to an immediate debt moratorium as Argentina has argued for, and a prohibition on bonuses. Similarly, at national level, economic recovery plans must be strictly tied to socially-just ecological transition. It is possible to ‘retool’ international institutions like the IMF and WHO given the vacuum of US involvement, as their mandates change over time. A return to localism can be promoted not only around issues of food security but also pandemic preparedness.. These initiatives have the benefit of encouraging solidarity, with people checking in on each other as part of wider local care networks. There is ‘inventiveness in resilience’, which can spark new forms of political action.

Lebohang Liepollo Pheko sights an opportunity to move away from neoliberalism, with countries in the Global South having witnessed that sovereign wealth funds ‘don’t solve everything’ and debt is bad (‘bad bad bad – morning. noon and night’). Developing countries are used to suffering, and the global nature of the pandemic may aid them when reframing their demands from larger economies. The role that state banks may play in a future economy should be considered, alongside the potential for wealth taxes and the introduction of a basic income. Gross Domestic Product as a measure of achievement is ‘bunk’, of little use, and could be replaced with the quality and comprehensiveness of a nation’s healthcare services to define its success.

Further resources: The Economic Impact of COVID-19 on Developing Countries, Inter Press Service

‘The world we want is a world in which many worlds fit.’ Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional

Global food systems and industrialised agriculture have been put in the spotlight due to their critical role in the spread of the pandemic. The panel discussed working towards minimising the power of international agribusiness, fighting for food sovereignty, securing better rights for small farmers, and making sure fewer people go hungry.

Analysis

‘Agriculture had a role to play in this crisis’, according to Rob Wallace, the author of Big Farms Make Big Flu. The transmission of COVID-19 follows the pattern of deadly viruses such as SARS, Ebola and Zika moving from non-human species into human populations, as shifts in land use, migration into recently urbanised areas, and the expansion of factory farms make new influenzas more likely.

Disease and deficits are interacting – for many impoverished people access to food is a more pressing concern than the virus itself, while in countries like Brazil and the US, migrant farm workers’ wages are lowered as ‘pandemic relief for agricultural companies’.

Moayyad Bsharat of the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) argues that policies around privatisation have made healthcare unaffordable for many, meaning that small scale farmers and their families often lack the financial capacity to access healthcare. There is an urgent need for food producers to get back to their land and cultivate gardens to harvest healthy produce rather than rely on state handouts or the commercial and chemical processes of agribusiness.

Arie Kurniawaty of feminist organisation Solidaritas Perempuan (SP) in Indonesia feels that though her country is rich in agriculture and fisheries, government policies are ‘biased towards the middle class’. Indonesian authorities are more concerned with the needs of the military than allocating resources towards the public good. The current crisis falls hardest on women, who make up most of those working in the country’s traditional food trades. Women are finding it difficult to buy and sell produce at markets, which lacking the state support to implement health and safety protocols, are labelled unhygienic and forced to close.

Sai Sam Kham of Myanmar’s Metta Foundation argues that conflict, land grabs, dispossession and migration are all interlinked, with the country’s rural population struggling as the government fails in its attempts to provide citizens food. A backdrop of xenophobia against migrant workers returning from neighbouring countries and state control of the Internet in conflict-ridden areas has jeopardised many people’s access to the essential information needed to survive the emergency.

Paula Gioia, who works as a peasant farmer in Germany, believes that industrialised agriculture in recent decades has strengthened corporations, labour exploitation, and disease. Across Europe, the income of small food producers is being threatened by the closure of public markets, canteens and restaurants, with production concentrated on supplying the larger supermarkets. In Spain, France and Italy, a fallow period for tourism has seen many local food producers lose their biggest source of annual income, while seasonal agricultural workers find themselves urged to accept dangerous working environments and longer working hours. European farmers, with an average age of 65, are more vulnerable to the virus than much of the continent’s workforce and due to restrictions on movement face extra difficulties accessing their fields and delivering produce.

Solutions

The panel discussed how the public can help avert a food crisis and prevent an already exploited agricultural workforce falling victim to both the disease and the state response to it.

Rob Wallace argues for a profound shift in our relationship with the planet. Learning from indigenous groups, people can fight to reclaim rural and forest landscapes and waters, restart natural processes, and reintroduce crop diversity. The ‘story of food’ should be re-established – for it not to be seen as dependent on an industrial economy but a natural economy, using sun, soil and the life cycles of animals to feed and nourish the population.

Moayyad Bsharat’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees is distributing hundreds of thousands of seedlings to assist Palestinian farmers returning to the land, in addition to providing hygiene kits to their families. He calls for those providing local support to globalise the struggle against capitalism.

Arie Kurniawaty sees an opportunity to show international solidarity and prove there is no need for people to rely on agribusiness for food and livelihoods. Since the crisis hit, there have been several local initiatives aimed at bringing together the needs of rural and urban people. Food barns have been built anticipating future scarcity while the distribution of government aid packages is monitored in a bid to root out corruption.

Sai Sam Kham says civil society and public opinion in Myanmar demands an immediate end to conflict. While welcoming China’s offer to provide medical support to the state, the superpower’s strategic economic and political interests in the region is cause for concern.

Paula Gioia sees hope in smaller European farms feeding their local populations with fresh, healthy food, often in open air peasants’ markets at a fair price, alongside the growth of consumer cooperatives and shopping groups. The right to food and nutrition is paramount, and people should fight to guarantee public access to fields and waters. Public policy should focus on providing Common Agricultural Policy payments to small-scale farmers, delivering a safe environment for land workers, supporting new entrants into agriculture, and ensuring generational renewal.

Further resources: Public policies for food sovereignty, Transnational Institute

“We know now that Government by organised money is just as dangerous as Government by organised mob.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

For decades, corporate power has entrenched itself in healthcare delivery – public health providers are increasingly privatised and big pharma has profited while withholding access to life-saving medicines for those who cannot afford them. The panel discussed what needs to change in the global governance of health.

Analysis

According to President of the Transnational Institute Susan George, the world is ‘not ready for this pandemic because we allowed our health systems to become neoliberalised’. Globally, an underpaid, underequipped public health workforce sits beside chains of profit-making hospitals and private clinics.

The pharmaceutical industry – whose ten biggest companies are worth $1.8 trillion – continually lobbies Washington and Brussels to further push a deregulatory agenda that seeks profit-making over saving people’s lives. That there are no reserves of supplies to tackle health epidemics is by design, not by accident.

Baba Aye, Health Officer at Public Services International, tells us that a 1978 international conference organised by the World Health Organisation and Unicef was a flashpoint in the struggle towards universal healthcare. The United Nations agencies proclaimed a wish that by the year 2000 there would be health provision for all – however, corporations were able to subsequently argue that they could play a leading role in addressing the lack of money invested in public healthcare systems. From private finance initiatives in Britain and across Africa to the introduction of user fees, public money has frequently been used to subsidise private interests rather than provide universal coverage.

South Africa’s Daily Maverick editor Mark Heywood looks to his country’s struggle with big pharma in getting access to HIV/Aids medicines. Pharmaceutical companies took the post-apartheid government to court in order to stifle its attempts to make medication more affordable, citing World Trade Organisation rules around intellectual property rights. Successful campaigning pressured the WTO to establish the Doha Declaration in 2001 which allowed states to circumvent patent rights for better access to essential medicines. While HIV/Aids medication has become more accessible for those in developing countries, pharmaceutical companies are still able to patent treatments for many preventable illnesses and thus restrict access for the poorest people. Considering the current crisis, Heywood believes the world ‘cannot afford to wait for a vaccine to be developed to start raising questions about access, affordability, patents’.

Lawyer Kajal Bhardwaj understands that intellectual property rights, enforced by international trade rules, are deeply entrenched in national and regional legal systems, making swift action against the pandemic difficult without first guaranteeing corporate compliance. Myriad private patents have been recorded in the treatment of COVID-19 – its diagnosis and prevention as well as medicines and vaccines. Big pharma can block the manufacturing of affordable treatments by withholding access to patented products that may be repurposed – during the peak of the outbreak in Italy, those producing parts for ventilators through 3D printing were threatened with legal action by companies that owned the patents.

David Legge of the People’s Health Movement argues that the failure of research following prior pandemics and the World Health Organisation’s lack of skepticism regarding transmissibility contributed to delays in travel restrictions resulting in the rapid spread of COVID-19. The WHO is dependent on funding from rich countries, the World Bank and big philanthropic donors.. The American government has pressured the secretariat over recent decades to advance the interests of large private companies, using the threat of defunding to assert its control and push trade liberalisation. Proposals for publicly funding the research and development of pharmaceuticals to allow lower costs are widely supported by the member-led World Health Assembly but have not been enacted by the WHO.

Solutions

The pandemic has shown the necessity of working towards universal public health systems and increasing access to medicines so that everyone in need can afford them.

Susan George believes that ‘it is possible to have everyone cared for’ – if corporations are taxed properly, our social security systems are improved and the health lobby’s attempts at influencing legislation are scrutinised and fought.

Baba Aye wants populations to loudly proclaim that ‘our health is not for sale’. A new global consensus has developed that healthcare is a right – an idea already present in most countries’ constitutions. Swift action by both governments and social movements has already led to a number of private hospitals requisitioned to deal with the pandemic, and factories converted to manufacture personal protective equipment and medical supplies to make up for a shortfall.

Mark Heywood understands that ‘sometimes it takes a crisis to make people work together’. It is through public investment in research that medical breakthroughs are achieved, and people should demand universal access not only to a coronavirus vaccine but to the knowledge and understanding behind it. Activists should remember that big pharma is not invincible – organised people are much more powerful. Movements in Africa and India in the past have forced down prices of medicines, saving millions of lives.

Kajal Bhardwaj thinks that the threat of government action encourages good behaviour from pharmaceutical companies. There have been positive developments in Germany, Canada, Chile, Colombia, and Ecuador where authorities have implemented measures to issue compulsory licenses. There is also capacity in many countries to ramp up production of generic medicine at extremely affordable prices.

David Legge hopes that with enough public pressure, it is possible to successfully campaign for intellectual property reforms. Efforts should be focused on lobbying authorities to ensure – in the face of hostility from big pharma – compulsory licensing and allow generic drugs to be produced without the consent of the patent owner.

Further resources: People’s Health Movement, Coronavirus – statements and responses

“We are connected to one another, in the deepest sense, through our common pain. When we lose that connection we lose our humanity.” A Sivanandan

During political crises, states push for emergency powers. Following the attacks on the World Trade Centre on September 11^th 2001, for example, a wave of immediate measures was introduced to counter a terrorist threat, yet much of this architecture remains in place to the present day. The panel reflected on a wide range of issues from authoritarianism and surveillance to the rise in anti-migrant sentiment and Islamophobia, and agreed that the rights of citizens are being curtailed across the globe and must be resisted.

Analysis

According to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights while Countering Terrorism Fionnuala Ni Aolain, parallel to the medical pandemic, ‘we are seeing an epidemic of emergencies’. Under international law, emergency measures can be introduced to protect public safety, health, and national security, yet there is a ‘pattern of non-notification’ where states choose to use these powers but fail to inform official bodies or their own citizens. During emergencies, the political culture of nations often changes – oversight mechanisms are removed in favour of increased powers for the executive, police and security forces.

Alongside parliamentary opposition, civil society can find it difficult to know what states are doing as emergency legislation refrains from naming itself, with measures often tucked into health and sanitation bills. Citizens in a state of fear may be willing to sacrifice their liberty, believing that during an emergency human rights are not a priority, yet temporary powers have the tendency to stick around.

Author of The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, extremism, and the domestic War on Terror Arun Kundnani points to 9/11 as a useful reference point for those monitoring authorities’ emergency measures. The attacks on the World Trade Centre saw a temporary emergency transform into a permanent state of affairs. Almost 20 years later, acts of terrorism still take place across the world, the detention camp at Guantanemo Bay remains open, and the wave of anti-Muslim racism enveloping Western nations has further ‘globalised’ into countries such as India, Sri Lanka, and Myanmar. Authorities now look to empty states of their unruly populations while the influence of big business sees our lives determined by market-based digital algorithms. New licenses given to police forces to implement quarantines and lockdowns has only intensified existing forms of violence. The COVID-19 crisis has given rise to a clampdown on migrants – already existing anti-migrant sentiment has intensified, while those in immigration detention centres experience high infection rates with little possibility of isolation. Various EU countries continue to turn away refugees in the Mediterranean, in Qatar migrant workers offered coronavirus testing were rounded up then deported, and from Hungary to the US, nativist leaders have weaponised the pandemic, unleashing new forms of racism.

Author of Militarisation and Women in South Asia, Anuradha Chenoy says that the current crisis ‘can be marked as an authoritarian moment in world history across countries’ where regimes look to expand control over citizens and centralise power even within democratic systems. When the virus began to spread, almost all states – unprepared and panicked – similarly reacted, taking emergency measures without declaring emergencies. The military were put on the streets in Israel, Philippines, Yemen, and Iraq, and self-appointed vigilantes linked to right wing populist governments took on the role of monitoring particular marginal communities. The stigmatisation of outsiders and dissenters has seen police use chemical disinfectant on migrant labourers and investigative journalists picked up and incarcerated. Global bodies such as the World Health Organisation are being undermined by the leadership of member states – the US has sought to remove itself fromWHO’s jurisdiction – while supranational organisations like the EU and ASEAN seem more concerned about closing borders than international solidarity.

María Paz Canales of the digital rights campaign Derechos Digitales believes there has been a ‘repurposing of many surveillance technologies in the context of the pandemic’. Private firms are offering their services to the state under the auspices of being helpful in a moment of crisis, yet are hoping to whitewash technologies through their new use. Many were ineffective when deployed for their original purposes and are inefficient in tackling the spread of the virus as the type of data recorded is not precise enough. Facial recognition technologies – used in the past in the name of public safety and national security – in particular have very limited use. The danger is that ‘we are not surveilling the virus, we are surveilling people’, impacting upon the rights of vulnerable groups and stigmatising the sick.

Solutions

The panel talked about how to protect fundamental rights in the shadow of creeping authoritarianism, outlining ways of mobilising ourselves during lockdown, and imagining lives less dependent on technologies.

Fionnuala Ni Aolain considers the global effect of the pandemic – every single person’s rights are being impinged upon in certain ways and some more than others. The language of rights for all can be reclaimed, and the idea of health as a basic human necessity entrenched – after all, governments ‘shut down the world’ on the basis of the protection of the right to health. Though the pandemic may have empowered authoritarians, weakened democracies and multilateral systems, producing a ‘narrower and tightly squeezed civil society space’, Ni Aolain argues that  ‘crisis is innovation’ providing an extraordinary opportunity to emerge with a healthier democracy.

Arun Kundnani warns people to be wary of corporations trying to exploit the current situation to create their own version of a new order. The increasing digitalisation of our social lives must be fought as the public becomes dependent on big tech to provide and mediate these relationships – over lockdown, the use of video chat has become the norm in accessing healthcare and higher education, and tech companies want to keep this in place as populations move out of an emergency situation. Activists ‘cannot give up the streets’, and should fight to reclaim public spaces and defend a ‘sense of human connection’. It may well be safer to attend protests than turn up to workplaces. Quoting journalist Susie Day, Kundnani predicts ‘The revolution will not be quarantined’.

Anuradha Chenoy notes that there has been no end to defence spending – citizens should be asking ‘where is the defence against this virus?’, and demand a transfer of military expenditure towards health expenditure. Though the compact between civil society and the state has been breaking down over recent years, the public has been able to show its strength during the crisis, delivering mutual aid and food parcels to communities in need. Instead of globalisation, Chenoy argues, there should be international solidarity – its symbols including alternative media outlets have been emerging in the face of a toxic press.

María Paz Canales says people would be wise to reject the ‘technosolutionism’ of not only authoritarian but, increasingly, democratic governments. Citizens need to be more critical about which type of data is useful for their purposes, and seek to develop alternative technology that opposes ‘capitalist-surveillance logic’. Some data can prove helpful in fighting the pandemic, related to a country’s testing capacity, resource allocation, and directing assistance to the most vulnerable, yet there is no need to capture the identity of individuals, putting certain people at risk of discrimination in terms of immigration and employment status.

Further resources: From Fanon to Ventilators; Fighting for our right to breathe, Arun Kundnani, ROAR

“We have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.” Bertrand Russell

A more serious emergency than COVID-19 is on the horizon – the climate emergency. Decisions  forced by the pandemic to shut down extractive global modes of production saw not only a reduction in carbon emissions and air pollution, but demonstrated states’ potential to take bold decisions to protect their citizens. The panel outlined the challenges and opportunities of working towards a just transition to a sustainable world.

Analysis

According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s Richard Kozul-Wright, comparisons can be drawn between the Green New Deal and the original New Deal. Both wish to contest economic power, regulate Wall Street, and invest in public services and infrastructure. Before Coronavirus hit, economic prospects globally were deteriorating following a period of hyperglobalisation, with Bretton Woods institutions serving as handmaidens of speculative, predatory forms of capital.

The response to the 2008 crash can be viewed as a ‘dry run’ for current and future crises  – instead of going back to business as usual, COVID-19 has forced governments to tear up the neoliberal rulebook. ‘Tory chancellors suddenly discover their inner Keynesian selves’, with emergent ‘magic money forests’ concocting trillions of dollars to deal with consequences of the pandemic.

Chair of Friends of the Earth International Karin Nansen believes that humanity is at an impasse – related to the imposition of neoliberal logic which fails to work for people and the environment, endangers lives, and threatens public wellbeing. Companies are gaining more and more power and there is a widespread expansion of extractive activities, especially in the energy sector. Capitalism provides false solutions – carbon offsetting, for example, that is not a ‘real’ solution to addressing climate change. Those who generated the environmental breakdown comprise a small portion of the population in a few countries – those who are most affected barely contributed to it.

Sandra van Niekerk of the One Million Climate Jobs campaign in South Africa feels that the term ‘Green New Deal’ is contested having been hijacked by big capital, offering the veneer of environmental friendliness. Instead of encouraging a ‘reformed, green capitalism’, there is an urgent need to deal with the dual crises of unemployment and climate change. In South Africa – ‘one of the most unequal countries in the world’ – it is difficult to tackle climate change when you have no house or electricity, while renewable energy initiatives are hampered by trade regulations, limiting their ability to grow.

Solutions

The panel put forward a programme of action to encourage the just transition towards a green future that centres environmental justice and the needs of the most vulnerable people on the planet.

Richard Kozul-Wright believes the Green New Deal provides a ‘unifying narrative’ and calls for any new proposals, like the first New Deal, to be based around ‘an avowedly political project’ and embrace popular voices. Rejecting the concept of ‘degrowth’ as unhelpful framing particularly for the Global South, he advocates reforming the international financial systems in order to ‘reconnect a healthy people and planet with a healthy economy’. Bailout packages should reject austerity, introducing measures that are wage-led and job rich. This involves a massive investment push into climate mitigation and adaptation, reliant on progressive taxation, financial regulation, and strategic planning in industrial policy, with a far greater role considered for public banking. Though many reforms are rooted within nation states, work can be undertaken internationally with major economies helping to pull up the Global South.

Karin Nansen argues that the radical transformation of society demands public participation and democracy. Organising around a ‘common agenda’, the world may be able to transition away from fuel dependent economies, change energy systems and ownership, and move towards community-controlled energy production. In addition, there needs to be a huge transfer of resources from North to South to pay for climate debt and historic economic crises generated by former colonial powers. Nansen considers the example of Latin America, where peasant and indigenous movements have often taken a stand alongside women’s groups and trade unions as a critical model for the movements that need to be built to deliver this systemic change..

Sandra van Niekerk understands the need for a ‘radical restructuring of the economy’ and the redistribution of resources in a ‘hugely unequal world’. The public sector can employ people in new climate jobs; transport, local government, schools, hospitals, and housing could be made more energy efficient; and workers could be supported to transition away from the fossil fuel industry. Considering South Africa, where many people lack electricity, van Niekerk suggests not talking in terms of cutting back on the amount of energy generated – if there is a shortfall, many people may never have access to electricity, and continue to live in poverty-riven environments.

Further resources: Just Transition: How environmental justice organisations and trade unions are coming together for social and environmental transformation (TNI, 2020)

“The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue.” Tony Judt

There has been a groundswell of vocal support for public services during the current health emergency. The panel discussed the broad impacts of privatisation on countries’ wellbeing and people’s dependence on poorly paid frontline workers delivering essential services.

Analysis

According to former UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip Alston, the steady privatisation of essential public services demonstrates that governments have been ‘washing their hands of human rights obligations’ by passing over relevant sectors to private interests. Across the world, access to even minimum services – from water, electricity, and transport to education, criminal justice, and welfare – is denied to many. If a country is unable to provide public services like a nationwide health system to its citizens, it is unable to deal with the pandemic, effectively throwing the bottom half of the population ‘under the bus’. The dramatic ideological shift from public to private can be traced back to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and subsequent Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan’s administrations.

Despite very little supportive evidence, the assumption that private is always best– cheaper, more efficient, less corrupt, and ultimately better for societies – has subsequently become the dominant mentality of most governments and international organisations. In the push towards digitisation of the public sector, further steps may be taken in the privatisation of essential services – in recent years tech companies have been offering to assist the UK’s National Health Service deliver its commitments.

General Secretary of the global union federation Public Services International (PSI) Rosa Pavanelli believes that the pandemic highlights the failure of the neoliberal system, unearthing a deeply unequal global division of labour. National health services which have been the most privatised, such as the US, also have the most unequal societies, while many major economies outsource to developing countries because it is cheaper to employ their workers. Multinational corporations are able to avoid tax contributions, while countries in the Global South struggle to pay their debts to former colonisers.

Sulakshana Nandi of the People’s Health Movement Global in India believes that we have witnessed decades of privatisation under the guise of improving efficiency. The Indian government actively promotes vested interests, handing over district hospitals to the private sector, while reducing the national health budget, and rolling out a costly insurance scheme. Vulnerable groups entitled to coverage under the scheme are often not able to utilise it and rural areas remain under-resourced as the private sector routinely refuses to operate in remote regions, meaning they are ‘completely missing in action’ in the testing, surveillance, and treatment of COVID-19.

Aderonke Ige of the Our Water, Our Rights Campaign in Lagos, Nigeria, states that ‘you cannot leave the public good in private hands’, arguing that the ‘problem isn’t lack of resources, it is lack of political will’. The pandemic exposes the gap in the system, where governance is accompanied by the capitalist philosophy of commodifying every public good, including water. Nigeria has significant economic income, but still cannot prioritise universal access to water – women and young girls carry the greatest burdens, but are rarely consulted in public decision-making.

Solutions

The panel outlined ways to make the public sector more democratic and participatory, and how citizens can move away from subsidising large corporations in the delivery of essential services.

Philip Alston declares there are very few examples of private companies acting in the broader public interest, so ‘we shouldn’t expect it and it’s not going to happen’. Corporate actors will see no opportunity to profit from helping poor people, and services will always be priced above their capacity to pay and directed to those better off. Civil society can look at a different set of principles and institutions for delivering services. On an international level, people should reevaluate whether the sustainable development goals can be achieved, and more broadly determine what the United Nations stands for.

Rosa Pavanelli suggests the World Health Organisation’s commitment to researching and producing a COVID-19 vaccine which will be free to all is ‘invaluable’ for the ‘common good of humanity’. However, governments must be pressured to transform the direction of their economies. They must introduce an immediate wealth tax on digital corporations like Amazon and Google, that are profiting during this crisis. People can better interrogate how the closure of borders will affect food distribution and work towards more sustainable farming and energy production.

Sulakshana Nandi notes that in India areas with good food security programmes have often effectively dealt with the crisis, and more progressives states such as Kerala in the south have better health outcomes. The most vulnerable should be offered opportunities to have a say in decision-making and public sector workers need to be adequately resourced.

Aderonke Ige says that improved investment in the public sector amounts to ‘collective development’. The Our Water, Our Rights Campaign is a ‘child of necessity’, prioritising the rights and welfare of everyday users of water. The coalition, born in 2014, brings together civil society, the labour movement, youth and grassroots organisations. Women play an active role and have achieved a number of victories protecting Lagos’s water – authorities have tried to privatise access but are yet to succeed.

Further resources: The Future is Public, Transnational Institute (2020)

‘The function of freedom is to free somebody else.’ Toni Morrison

Patriarchal states have shown themselves incapable of facing global problems. The panel reflected on the condition of women across the globe, how to dismantle gendered labour hierarchies, and how to construct stronger, feminist participatory democracies.

Analysis

According to Tithi Bhattacharya, co-author of the manifesto Feminism for the 99%, the ‘work of women and gender non-conformist people makes all other work possible’. Though capitalism prioritises profit-making over life, it also depends on the processes and institutions of life-making, yet is reluctant to spend any money on this. Thus care work is devalued, underpaid or unpaid and there is a continual push to underfund or privatise schools, hospitals and public transport.

Professions that embody the spirit of care work – teaching, cleaning, nursing, homecare, food production – are undertaken in the most part by women, and it is they who are hardest hit by the current crisis: from those forced to work in unsafe conditions and risk being laid off, to others compelled to remain indoors with abusive partners as rates of domestic violence rise.

Awino Okech at the Centre for Gender Studies of the UK’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) believes that with governments failing to respond to public needs, democracy no longer works for the vast majority and our agency as citizens has been taken away. Renegotiating the social contract through electoral means has never looked less appealing to the public: authoritarian leaders and parties in the US, Europe and Latin America find themselves represented in national parliaments, while in Africa – from Sudan and Burkina Faso to Tunisia and Egypt – citizens may have ousted their leaders but have yet to secure the change they fought for. Ultra-nationalists, informed by their conservative and binary ideas around gender and sexuality, are targeting and disciplining female human rights defenders and the LGBT community, while feminist and queer politics is narrowly and opportunistically co-opted by certain governments in order to prevent wider, more important discussions about women’s and gay liberation.

Khara Jabola-Carolus, author of Hawaii’s Feminist Economic Recovery Plan for COVID-19, outlines some ways in which women can work positively within official structures. Most US states have a commission on the status of women – a tool left by 1960s feminists to help advance the movement – and Hawaii has one of the longest standing ones. This has the potential to provide a link between feminist activists and government, facilitating community-based participation by diverse women spanning race, class, age and life experience. Having an understanding of the shared trauma of colonialism and land loss in Hawaii, the commission seeks to reorientate the economy away from destructive industries – for example tourism and militarism – and to scale up the social safety net.

Laura Roth, co-author of the report Feminise Politics Now!, argues that pandemic responses show a trend towards top-down centralisation. In times of crisis, fear can make people worry less about who is making decisions, but Roth believes that feminism and municipalism, with their focus on building power from the bottom up, may offer an alternative. They are ‘great allies’: both change the way ‘politics is done’ and can link up social movements with local government, a lifeline for many people in sustaining relationships, taking care of the vulnerable, and looking after the invisible. Politics is something that ‘everyone should be able to do’ and citizens platforms have shown they can win elections at a local level – in Spain, these took power across some of its largest cities in 2015 on the back of a nationwide anti-austerity movement.

Solutions

The panel discussed ways of creating transformative feminist realities, revaluing women’s role in public life, and alternative non-patriarchal modes of power.

Tithi Bhattacharya believes that humanity should work towards a world where ‘life and life-making’ become the basis of social organisation – states must now be pressured to prioritise life over profit. The pandemic has normalised the view that nurses and farmworkers, not stockbrokers and CEOs, are ‘essential workers’. Women’s unpaid labour in the home amounts to ten trillion dollars globally – capitalism for hundreds of years has undervalued the lives of women, migrants and other marginalised people, yet networks of support, solidarity and survival have survived..

Awino Okech understands that ‘we are not all in this together’. It is therefore imperative that effective allyship is sought across borders, moving resources from the Global North to the South. The autonomous organising of marginalised groups should be respected, and transnational solidarity can occur without sharing the same physical spaces – though civil society should refrain from relying on those with access to funds from determining the success of initiatives in poorer parts of the world.

Khara Jabola-Carolus understands the need to move from the language of inclusion and equality to liberation. Her group uses shareable documents to co-create agendas and provide training to hundreds of government workers – telling stories that instil empathy and helping people better understand the lives of women and non-binary people.

Laura Roth hopes feminists will look towards municipalism to find ways of building new forms of power. Little will be achieved simply by bringing more women into politics or focusing solely on local issues – there is a need to innovate around new forms of leadership, share responsibilities and ultimately treat people as ‘subjects’ not ‘objects’ of politics. Participatory democracy can shoulder a collective spirit – women have the ability to break historic privileges, move away from confrontational discourse and bring care into the political arena.

Further resources: Feminists, it’s time to decide where public resources go (May 2020), AWID

“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” Nelson Mandela

COVID-19 has exposed a crisis in penal systems across the globe – prisoners live in unsafe conditions, lack legal support, and punitive drug policies drive up the numbers. With unprecedented numbers of inmates released to prevent deadly outbreaks in jails and detention centres, the panel discussed the societal costs of mass incarceration, the potential for criminal justice reform across the globe, and alternatives to imprisonment.

Analysis

According to Olivia Rope of Penal Reform International, prison systems were at breaking point before the pandemic, with 11 million people incarcerated globally – the highest figure yet, with numbers still on the rise. People are in no way becoming ‘more criminal’ – crime rates across the world are either stable or going down. Yet over 100 countries still operate above their maximum occupancy rate as imprisonment is increasingly used for those committing non-violent offences.

Within a system where mortality levels are 50 per cent higher than in wider society, there is an overwhelming lack of healthcare provision – the prison population is virtually unable to follow World Health Organisation guidance around Coronavirus and tens of thousands of people have contracted the disease inside.

Isabel Pereira of Dejusticia states that in Latin America prison overcrowding is rife and there is an excessive use of pre-trial detention. Societal discrimination leads police authorities to target women and the LGBT community. There has been an increase in the use of incarceration as a deterrent for minor drugs offenses, overwhelmingly affecting people from low socio-economic backgrounds – in some cases drug possession is placed on a par with the length of sentencing for rape and genocide convictions.

Andrea James Justine ‘Taz’ Moore of the National Council For Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls in the USA argue ‘prisons are not financially equipped to take care of us’, and during a health crisis become a ‘death-trap’. Incarcerated people live in cramped sleeping conditions, and lack toilet paper, hand sanitiser, soap, masks and adequate food supplies, often reliant on those outside to provide these essentials. Disproportionate levels of criminal justice funding are put towards building new jails and providing police equipment rather than rehabilitating people in their communities on release. Women are often threatened with eviction by taking in people with convictions, and former inmates find it difficult to get work, making recidivism more likely because there are no resources to support them.

Advocaid’s Sabrina Mahtani believes that African states have reacted to the COVID-19 crisis by taking a law enforcement rather than public health approach. Prisons in Africa are old and overcrowded, lacking running water and soap which makes it difficult to maintain good hygiene. Women’s needs are often ignored by the authorities and if outside after curfew they risk being detained. The prison system lacks facilities for women, some of whom are imprisoned with their young children – access to basic supplies is problematic and there is one doctor for every 2000 detainees.

Maidina Rahmawati of the Indonesian Institute of Criminal Justice Reform (ICJR) believes that state authorities were not prepared for this outbreak. Prison overcrowding has become ‘undeniable’ during COVID-19 in a country which sees few alternatives to detention. Indonesia has an ineffective bail system that lacks transparency and under-resourced parole, probation and integration programmes.

Solutions

The panel discussed the urgent necessity for civil society to make the case for decarceration and effective strategies towards long-term structural reform of the criminal justice system.

Olivia Rope understands the pressing need to reduce numbers in prison and explore non-custodial alternatives to imprisonment, especially for women. Swift coordinated action by the Irish government, for example, saw the female prison population reduced by over one third at the start of the pandemic. Civil society needs to gather evidence to urgently highlight the plight of incarcerated women, while arguing for prisons, as part of society, to be better integrated into public health systems where inmates can access medicines, care and support.

Isabel Pereira sees networks of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people and their families active in protesting poor conditions in prison. Budgets should be reallocated away from building new prisons and minor drug offences must not lead to incarceration.

Andrea James Justine ‘Taz’ Moore urge people to ‘stay in touch with those inside’ and support the growing demands not just for reforms but rather abolition of prisons – an end to incarceration. Those who have experienced incarceration may be able to provide solutions – not just around reimagining the prison system, but reimagining whole communities. In recent years, a clemency project to commute the sentences of women who are elderly, pregnant, survivors of domestic violence, or terminally ill, has achieved success, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, campaigns to defund police departments are gaining traction. Women of colour are the fastest growing demographic in American prisons, and ‘defunding racism involves ending the incarceration of women and girls.’ In addition to being ‘vigilant on the fiscal side’ – monitoring the levels of investment set aside for new jails and police equipment – James and Moore advocate for more ‘transformative’ forms of justice, where neighbourhoods can come together to deescalate a situation without resorting to police involvement.

Sabrina Mahtani has witnessed civil society groups across Africa push for decarceration and provide urgent supplies for those incarcerated during the current crisis – adapting their capabilities to offer legal advice and monitor police activity. In Ethiopia, Senegal, and Kenya, thousands of detainees have been released in a bid to reduce overcrowding. Exploring alternatives to prison for drug possession, there is a push towards decriminalisation of petty offences which affect the poorest in society – ‘poverty should not be a crime’, Mahtani proclaims.

Maidina Rahmawati believes that the Indonesian government is aware of the ‘undeniable’ problems with its penal system, and has taken steps to release vulnerable inmates. The promotion of ‘restorative justice’ can help further reduce prison overcrowding across the country.

Further resources: The law of the land: decolonising criminal justice (March 2020) Oliver Durose at Verso blog

“We must not fixate on what this new arsenal of digital technologies allows us to do without first inquiring what is worth doing.” Evgeny Morozov

The pandemic has accelerated the use and profits of large online platforms, giving them unprecedented power over how we conduct our everyday lives. The panel discussed who owns our data, how we can protect our right to privacy in the face of big tech, and the best ways to build a fair and equitable digital economy.

Analysis

According to founding editor of technology magazine Logic Ben Tarnoff, digitisation now is as important to capitalism as financialisation was in the 1970s. It is the new engine of capital accumulation and offers states innovative tools of social control to help manage and order rebellious populations, with the COVID-19 crisis only intensifying developments. Globally, unprecedented numbers of people are staying at home and there has been a sharp increase in internet usage, with traffic 25–30 per cent higher than before. Big data is driving the digitisation of everything as corporations make it easier for us to do more online, yet ‘everything we do online leaves a trace’.

‘As long as capitalism has existed’, Tarnoff argues, ‘data has helped it grow’ – from bosses watching employees work then rearranging them to be more efficient, surveillance generated information has been used to increase productivity. Digitisation makes data more abundant – it has become easier to create, store, transmit – and a small device can be attached to anything to stream real-time information: shipping containers, assembly lines, gas turbines, and the wrist of a worker in a factory or office.

Vahini Naidu of the South African Department of Trade, Industry and Competition has witnessed advanced economies pushing their own agendas within the World Trade Organisation, pursuing a deregulatory approach to digital trade. Big Tech companies believe there should not be any customs, duties, or fees on digital products transmitted electronically, and argue that consumers will decide how secure their electronic transactions should be. These proposals reinforce existing global imbalances, constraining the ability of developing countries to build their own digital capacities – the ‘digital divide will reinforce the social divides in the world’. Digital capacity is essential to build productive capacity, especially for countries in the Global South in pursuit of sustainable growth.

Anita Gurumurthy, Director of IT for Change in India, sees all global production and market exchange managed through insights from data. ‘Platforms’ dominate the business landscape today and their power is growing at breathtaking speed. Large companies work out which other companies to acquire and how to expand their dominions based on ‘data marriages’ – no different from how royal families once decided to fix the marriages of sons and daughters based on political and economic considerations. Thus, a company like Whole Foods can be acquired by Amazon to ‘marry’ its online commerce with a new and booming offline market for organic foods.

Chief Science Officer of the City of Amsterdam Caroline Nevejan argues that because of data we have moved from measuring individual human beings to measuring humankind – we now know ‘what many people can feel, think, and see’. Big Tech is invading our private lives, financialising aspects which were never previously concerned with money. As we lose our personal privacy, we are given little information about how our data is used by large corporations to extract profit.

Kenyan technology writer Nanjira Sambuli feels we need a greater degree of ‘contextualisation and humility’ when dealing with issues of data and privacy, especially in the Global South – ‘the diverse and marginalised majority of the globe’. These markets are ‘prized possessions’ in the data economy. While activists should continue to advocate for laws and regulations protecting data and privacy, they must also understand that this is not necessarily reflective of what much of society wants. Deleting Facebook or WhatsApp, for example – ‘the internet for so many people’ – may be a growing political demand in the North, but at present is impractical for substantial numbers of citizens in developing countries without alternatives in place.

Solutions

The panel explored pressuring governments to constrain the excesses of big tech, ways of reclaiming our personal data, and how countries – especially in the Global South – can achieve ‘digital sovereignty’.

Ben Tarnoff warns civil society that it cannot simply call for data to be ‘socialised’ as currently ‘capitalism doesn’t just own the data – it owns the infrastructure’. The increasing demand for invasive state and corporate surveillance should be confronted – during the pandemic, personal data has been gathered through contact tracing, monitoring location and body temperature, facial recognition, and wearable technology in the workplace.

Vahini Naidu believes in the need to develop policies that recognise the ‘sovereignty of national data’. The ‘localisation’ of data provides an opportunity for the Global South to tie up its domestic industries with the digital economy. While the European Union is ‘taking the lead’ in confronting
Big Tech companies, only 50 per cent of African countries have introduced legislation regarding privacy and data protection.

Anita Gurumurthy calls on people to interrogate who controls new supply chains and how to reclaim data for ‘the commons’. To build an equitable and fair digital economy, the huge discrepancy between the economic superpowers and the rest of the world must be addressed – 75 per cent of the cloud computing market is controlled by the US and China. Campaigners should find ways of freeing the personal information Big Tech companies hold hostage – which amounts to ‘the raw material’ that allows an invasion into private lives and ultimately leads to exploitation.

Caroline Nevejan asserts that it is ‘not normal to be filmed’ throughout daily life. Citizens need to learn and practice cryptography in order to protect their personal details. This should happen in conjunction with helping to bring the tech titans under democratic law – data about their operations is important for transparency and exposing any corruption that may be taking place, so civil society must demand that this information be put into the public domain.

Nanjira Sambuli suggests that because many people ‘can’t take to the streets during COVID-19’, activism is increasingly undertaken online – using the same large global platforms, like Facebook, that many activists wish to see deleted. International civil society must consider a ‘diversity of perspectives’ on digital rights and ensure to ‘give a spotlight to those working on the ground’.

Further resources: Evgeny Morozov: The tech ‘solutions’ for coronavirus take the surveillance state to the next level (April 2020)  The Guardian

‘Governments are responding to this pandemic with nationalist gestures – with images of the border, of the wall.’ Achille Mbembe

The pandemic has seen the closure of borders in many countries and displaced people detained at alarming rates. The panel looked at how the ‘border-industrial complex’ impacts upon the most marginalised communities, and the ways populist politicians seek to blame the spread of the disease on migrants and those deemed outsiders.

Analysis

According to author of Undoing Border Imperialism Harsha Walia, walls are not to be seen as ‘static structures’ – borders are ‘elastic’, their existence less about demarcating territory and more linked to controlling labour flows. European border policies have considerable influence over regions in North Africa; Australia extends its reach to the Pacific islands. In exchange for trade and aid agreements, poorer nations are compelled to impose increased border controls, off-shore detention facilities, migration prevention campaigns as well as admitting expelled deportees.

The ‘free flow of capital requires precarious labour’ underpinning contemporary policies of ‘managed migration’. An asymmetry sees tourists and expats given different legal rights to refugees and asylum seekers, ‘bargaining chips’ in immigration diplomacy. The language used to describe the ‘migrant crisis’ has Western nations presented as its victims – their past colonialism ‘conveniently erased’ – while the migrant is depicted as its cause, not an outcome of the actual crises of capitalism, conquest and climate change.

Todd Miller, author of Empire of Borders and Transnational Institute’s More Than A Wall report, interrogates the United States’ ‘border-industrial complex’, believing that public focus on the Trump administration’s infamous pledge to ‘build a wall’ along US-Mexico lines erases the nation’s long trajectory of border militarisation. There has been an ‘astronomic’ increase in funding the expansion of immigration enforcement apparatus over a number of presidencies – both Republican and Democratic. In 1994 the annual budget was $1.5 billion; by 2019 it was $24 billion. Public bodies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) spend billions of dollars on private contracts, creating ‘borderscapes’ to deploy drones, robots, biometrics, and hi-tech cameras to monitor the movement of people. Beyond national boundaries, the US government pressures neighbouring states in the Caribbean and Central America to build up their border security, while American companies such as Raytheon operate facilities further abroad in the Philippines and Jordan.

Jille Belisario of Transnational Migrant Platform-Europe understands that migration has always played a role in human development, and always will. In Europe, several countries have used the COVID-19 spread as an excuse to suspend access to asylum, with populist politicians painting migration as a threat to containing the virus. There have been reports of violent pushbacks on the Croatia-Bosnia border, while Maltese and Greek authorities have deported incomers to areas outside their jurisdiction. The externalisation of Europe’s borders to Turkey, North Africa and beyond has become ‘the new normal’.

Kavita Krishnan of the All India Progressive Women’s Association (AIPWA) believes that daily life is extremely precarious for ordinary citizens in border regions and for the many migrant workers being forced out of India’s cities during COVID-19. This is part of a historical pattern in which migrants and refugees have experienced waves of conflict and repression. Under Modi, existing tensions between a nationalist state and those it considers outsiders have been exacerbated. Aggressive contact tracing is used to surveille potential infiltrators, rather than focus on helping those most in need, while the criminalisation of ‘illegal migrants’ and marginalisation of the country’s Muslim population frequently lead to inhumane treatment and violence against those opposing reactionary citizenship laws.

Solutions

The panel outlined ways to resist growing anti-migrant sentiment, secure rights for the undocumented, and encourage solidarity across borders.

Harsha Walia feels that to secure people’s ‘freedom to move, stay, return’, campaigners will have to make connections between differing experiences of oppression. Artificial divisions between activist movements must be broken down – in the north American context, black liberation, indigenous and migrant struggles are often seen as separate, and yet the same ‘white vigilantes’ will cause concern for each group.

Todd Miller finds the sheer scale of the global border system ‘astonishing’, and its continuing growth ‘unsustainable’. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 there were 15 fortified border walls – now there are more than 70, two-thirds of which were built after 9/11. Civil society must keep track of the ‘pushing out’ of US borders and the European Union’s extension of its boundaries, which see armed guards and billions of dollars of technology deployed to Western allies across the world.

Jille Belisario says the biggest challenge for civil society is to find ‘strategies of convergence’ between border politics and other social issues. People who have experienced migration should be considered key parts of other progressive struggles – from trade union and peasant rights to improved conditions for domestic and care workers. There is ‘a lot of positive activism and resistance’ around borders taking place including the Permanent People’s Tribunal which has held hearings in five European cities, supported by 500 organisations.

Kavita Krishnan has witnessed the Indian government criminalising people who protest in favour of the rights of Muslims, against militarised borders, and around disputes over Kashmir – in the state’s eyes, ‘to protest is proof of criminality’. Those routinely termed ‘anti-national’ should be supported as many are being profiled and threatened with arrest under draconian laws allowing imprisonment without trial.

Further resources:
COVID-19 and Border Politics https://www.tni.org/en/publication/covid-19-and-border-politics

‘Each generation must discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it.’ Frantz Fanon

At a time of unprecedented anxiety and insecurity, building truly global movements may well prove arduous. The panel discussed how authoritarian power can be challenged and the pandemic could become a turning point in the struggle to defend humanity’s very survival.

Analysis

According to Thenjiwe McHarris of the Movement for Black Lives in the USA, discussions around challenging the patriarchy often get lost within social movements – ‘men with guns’ serve hierarchies of power. The ‘NGO-isation’ of movements leads to an emphasis on individual campaigns, losing sight of the bigger strategy of social transformation.

In a country where a disproportionate number of black and indigenous people lose their lives to state violence, the recent ‘black-led multiracial uprising’ across the US confronts a system which treats blackness as ‘criminal’ and ‘deviant’, and seeks to control it.

Indian human rights lawyer Vrinda Grover understands that ‘working from home is not an option when you don’t have a home or don’t have a job’. As the pandemic deepens inequalities in the Global South, it is possible to see ‘schisms further aggravated’. In India, care, compassion, and public consultation have been conspicuously absent as its government favours a punitive approach, further extending its authoritarian power. With Parliament prorogued, decisions are made through executive decree and courts are hesitant to intervene. Following reelection in May 2019, Modi’s government has stepped up stifling freedoms of speech, expression, assembly, and association, while arresting and incarcerating prominent human rights activists. Press and broadcast are increasingly used as propaganda, while those protesting the government invite ‘the wrath of social media’.

Secretary General of the SENTRO trade union in the Philippines Josua Mata sees the rich live through lockdown in comfort, while the poor are imprisoned in their shanties. President Duterte has mishandled COVID-19 but remains popular following years of neglect. The Marcos dictatorship, followed by periods of kleptocracy and neoliberalism, and now state terror and creeping authoritarianism, have severely eroded people’s confidence in themselves and their collective capacities. In a period of mass unemployment, it becomes clear that the system has ‘never been working for the working class’.

Hakima Abbas of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development feels that 2020 has proven to be a long year in which the ‘economy has gone from the alienation of labour to the coercion of labour’. It began in ‘rebellion’ within countries as diverse as Haiti, Lebanon, Chile, Guinea, West Papua, France, and Palestine, where people made demands for an absolute transformation of the economy. The COVID-19 crisis then kick-started the ‘deepest economic recession in history’, with stay-at-home orders and other restrictions negatively affecting four in five of the world’s workers, while wealth at the top has increased. Women in work continue to be at the bottom of the global supply chain – they undertake the most precarious jobs, yet are paid less than men and experience violence.

Palestinian performance poet and lecturer at SOAS Rafeef Ziadah states that when COVID-19 hit, the economy was already in a dire condition with Palestine’s manufacturing base destroyed. Subsequently, the Netanyahu government has positioned itself as a leading global exporter of surveillance equipment that has proved successful in monitoring and dictating every aspect of Palestinian life.

Solutions

The panel outlined an internationalist agenda for social movements – how to mobilise and emerge from the crisis with a confidence in people power to fundamentally transform the global system.

Thenjiwe McHarris hopes people develop a ‘multi-decade strategy’, as social movements ‘can’t do everything at once’. Difficult conversations need to take place about how to envisage global movement infrastructure, governance and resources. In this particular moment, the traditions of black resistance and black liberation can be learnt from, while rejecting notions of incremental reform, and the differentiation between ‘bad’ and ‘good’ protestors. Furthermore, people should be unapologetic about naming their opposition: ‘the billionaire class’. Power is not some ‘weird mythical creature’, and though it may be difficult to imagine a radical realignment, there is a ‘real possibility of victory’.

Vrinda Grover compels activists not to indulge in ‘the politics of distraction’. This may be a ‘moment of anxiety’ but ideas and imagination can flourish from it. Society is involved in an ‘intergenerational struggle’ – many existing structures like the nation state must be interrogated with ‘compassion and dignity’. Where political leadership is lacking, activist citizens should fill the gap – the feminist movement in India showing solidarity with Black Lives Matter in the US points the way forward in a spirit of internationalism, friendship and solidarity.

Josua Mata thinks that ‘things will get tougher before they get better’, but there are signs of hope. In Manila, many workers – street cleaners, garbage collectors, domestic workers, food vendors – used to be invisible; now they are ‘essential’ to people’s survival. Community kitchens are establishing themselves, while social media sheds light on state corruption and Filipino youth rises up against a government ‘creeping towards fascism’. The country can be rebuilt through educating, organising and building unions, reaching across organisational as well as ideological lines.

Hakima Abbas believes that, at a time when mutual aid and collective care is providing disaster relief, now is the moment to ‘capture the imagination’ and ‘squash myths’ around the ‘inevitability and pervasiveness of neoliberal capitalism’. A ‘feminist bailout’ is needed – only the ‘first step towards a feminist economy’. The concept of ‘growth’ should be rejected, economies recentred towards health and wellbeing. There may even be opportunities to build a ‘communal tapestry across the world’, linking previously disparate struggles. If factories are taken over or popular communes created outside the state, real tangible experiments can blossom. Social movements should bring humour and irreverence to the situation, though ultimately people need to believe they can win and ‘transform society’.

Rafeef Ziadah understands that as ‘austerity is back on the table’, movements must build their own ‘infrastructure of dissent’. They can take as an inspiration the struggle of the Palestinians, who continue to ‘resist’ – ‘we have survived and in our survival is strength’. The planet is no longer sustainable so citizens across the world have no choice but to confront power.

Further resources: ‘Social movements in and beyond the COVID-19 crisis: sharing stories of struggles’, Interface Journal

Acknowledgements

Authors: K. Biswas, Nick Buxton

Credits to: Kirstie Crail (text), Orijit Sen (header illustration), Elizabeth Niarhos (webinar illustrations), and Jess Graham (images)