Speaking Bitterness in Post-socialist China: The Gendered Strategy in Elderly State Workers’ Ten-Year-Long Protest

• In Event: Salvaging Socialist Gender Project in Today’s China

Abstract

This paper examines a ten-year-long protest conducted by a group of retired state forestry workers in southern China. The paper reveals a gendered division of labor in state forestry enterprises in socialist China, that the wives of male workers were recruited as “dependent laborers” in the 1950s and assigned temporary labor duties. Because the state enterprise had not paid social security for dependent workers, none of these retired women workers received pensions after privatization in 1998. In response, over 1,000 elderly women workers, joined by some of their husbands, began petitioning the government over their lack of pensions. The author theorized their gendered strategy in their ten-year-long fight: the male workers utilized a legal narrative to sue and negotiate with government officials, while the female dependent workers resuscitated the Maoist mass-mobilization technique of “speaking bitterness” to talk about their previous sufferings in their jobs to arouse sympathy from within the government system. In 2008, the local government finally conceded and compensated the dependents with monthly allowances. These workers had succeeded in pressuring a now neoliberal government to respond by recalling and reiteratively speaking of their labor experience during the socialist period. I argued that the workers took up state techniques originally used to mobilize a state-defined proletarian subaltern, and turned them around in a different historical time to mobilize subaltern subjectivities, valorize women’s labor, and resist oppression and exploitation that had gone unrecognized by both state and society.

Author

• Shuxuan Zhou, University of Washington