Jeffries Vincent (Editor). Handbook Of Public Sociology

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242 Chapter 13

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245

In his 2004 presidential address, Michael Burawoy proposed four types of

sociologies, namely professional sociology, policy sociology, critical sociol-

ogy, and public sociology. As elaborated by Burawoy,

Professional sociology supplies true and tested methods, accumulated bodies

of knowledge, orienting questions, and conceptual frameworks for sociology;

policy sociology is sociology in the service of a goal defined by a client that

provides solutions to problems that are presented to us, or to legitimate solu-

tions that have already been reached; critical sociology examines the founda-

tions of professional sociology and provides moral stances and critiques of

sociology as a whole while public sociology strikes up a dialogic relation

between sociologists and public in which the agenda of each is brought to the

table, in which each adjusts to the other. (Burawoy 2005a:9)

The “flourishing of each type of sociology is a condition for the flourishing

of all” (Burawoy 2005a:4), and in practice, “any given piece of sociology

can straddle these ideal types or move across them over time” (Burawoy

2005a:11).

This chapter embraces Burawoy’s typology of our discipline, and vali-

dates it with a research project that not only neatly fits in the four categories

of sociology, but also promotes the integration of the four sociologies. It is

a project emerging out of a series of research efforts in Baigou (let’s simply

call it the “Baigou Project”

). It has a life cycle from professional sociology

to policy sociology, reaching its culmination as public sociology, which was

also constantly inspired and modified along the lines of critical sociology.

245

Integrating the Four Sociologies:

The “Baigou Project” in China

Lina Hu

246 Chapter 14

RESEARCH ROOTS IN PROFESSIONAL SOCIOLOGY

Baigou is a township affiliated to Gaobeidian City, Hebei Province, China.

It is located at the triangle hinterland of Beijing, Tianjin, and Baoding cities.

It has 33 village streets, taking up an area of 54.5 square kilometers, with a

town district of 13 square kilometers. Baigou is famous for its bag industry

formed in the 1980s. After 30 years of growth, it has become the largest bag

production base in northern China. The center of the regional bag manu-

facturing industry is based in Baigou Township, but bag production extends

beyond Baigou Township to involve 4 adjacent counties, a total of 56 towns

and over 3,000 villages that absorbed over 100,000 people working in the

industry. In 2005, Baigou Township’s production value reached 2.2 billion

RMB (300 million dollars) and its bag products (including suitcases, school

bags, women’s bags, purses and wallets, etc.) sell not only to 13 provinces

in China, but also export to South Africa, Russia, and South America.

The earliest research interest in Baigou stems from the pure and classic

academic question: Where do markets come from (the same question as

proposed by Harrison White in 1981)? That is, how could such a huge bag

industry and market be created within a rural region like Baigou, a town-

ship that is far away from urban areas and possesses no advantages in popu-

lation, raw material, technology, industry, or transportation (Shen 2007)?

From the perspective of economic sociology, and through the combination

of historical document analysis and in-depth interviews, Shen’s analysis

concludes that the market in Baigou was developed as a “social structure”

that contains all non-economic elements including cultural tradition, social

forces, and the distribution of power. It was via the continuous and active

interaction between three groups of social actors, namely the traditional

merchants, collective peasants, and local cadres that the market was created

and in constant expansion (Shen 2007).

Another academic problem immediately follows: who produces for the

grand market and how? This leads to a careful examination of the produc-

tion system in Baigou. By analyzing official data and carrying out partici-

pant observation in real factories, we discovered that the factory regime and

the workers in Baigou are very special.

In Baigou Township alone, there are 2,250 factories with approximately

40,000 migrant workers from 11 provinces in China engaged in the bag

industry. These migrant workers constitute half of the whole population in

Baigou Township. There are two different types of bag factories in Baigou,

the family factory and the standard factory. Family factories are prevalent

and are of greater importance in Baigou Township. In Baigou and in the

larger Huabei region, industrial practices and networks of family factories

are rooted in traditional village-style social relationships that result in the

special factory regime that has the following five important features.

246 Chapter 14

Integrating the Four Sociologies 247

Personalized Labor Market

Baigou has never established any formal labor market. Instead, each

spring, the factory employer will ask his more senior employees to take him

to their hometown and employ new workers (mostly young woman and

sometimes children under 16 years old). Usually, there is a consensus be-

tween the factory employer and the parents of newly hired workers that the

factory employer should hold workers’ salary (the minimum wage or even

below) during the working year and send their children and a whole year’s

salary back together before the spring festival. This kind of interpersonal

employment circumvents the procedure of signing a contract, avoids paying

monthly salary, and sometimes intentionally hires child labor.

Overlapping Work and Living Spaces

Factories are embedded in the family life and their layout follows that of

the typical, northern Chinese style rural home. Typically, these compounds

include a main entry gate on the southern side of the compound, a central

courtyard, and a “U”-shaped building arrangement lining the north, east,

and west walls of the compound. To meet the needs of the family factory,

the row of rooms facing north are used as the living quarters for both em-

ployers and employees. The rooms facing west are the factory workshops,

usually divided into a clipping workshop and sewing workshop, with nec-

essary tools (e.g., sewing machines) for production. The rooms facing east

are the kitchen and storeroom. The gate into the compound is on the south

wall. In this way, the layout blurs production space and living space, public

space and private space. Most of the time, workers work about 13 hours a

day, enjoying no weekends or holidays at all except the spring festival that

lasts 15 days.

Labor Process under the Guise of Extended Familial Relations

Day-to-day labor relations are difficult to distinguish between inter-

personal, even familial, social relationships. First, factory employers are

often directly involved in production (in the past 20 years, many of these

employers were farmers themselves who still choose to engage in the work

of the home). Second, factory employers eat, drink, and live with their

employees. So the workers never call their factory employers “factory em-

ployer,” instead, they call them “uncle” or “aunt.” These extended family

relations conceal the essence of a labor process which is also the process of

exploitation, obscuring the structural differences between the employer and

employee as opposed classes, and depriving the workers of their rights to

raise issues about their working condition and rights as workers (according

248 Chapter 14

to national labor law of China, workers should enjoy rights of signing con-

tracts, getting monthly wages, working under safe conditions, and rights to

rest, etc.)in a patriarchical tradition (these are most important for migrant

workers).

Separation of Workers Based on Ethnicity

The workers are separated according to their ethnicity so that in the labor

process, one group of workers who come from the same place are often

in competition with other groups of workers who come from different re-

gions. It greatly inhibits the chance for workers to develop a unified class

consciousness which enables factory employers to rule them better (Tong

2005). As Dipesh Chakrabarty (1989) skillfully unravels, the resilience of

traditional social features explain the fragility of class identity and the sa-

lience of identities along lines of religion, language, race, or place of birth,

even at dramatic moments of conflicts between labor and capital.

Repeated Laborious Work and Dangerous Working Conditions

Bag production is organized on an assembly line, including such opera-

tions as clipping, sewing, pasting, and so forth, that every worker has to

repeat over and over through the long working hours, leading to a lot of

occupational diseases. Moreover, many of the machines are dangerous to

operate, especially as most of the factories lack appropriate safety precau-

tions, so industrial injuries are common in the labor process. What is worse

is that some production materials (for example, the glue) contain poison-

ous elements in them so that workers’ lives are endangered by just being

exposed in the workshop.

The special factory regime forges special workers. On the one hand, be-

cause the labor process is covered by interpersonal relations, workers are

unable to recognize the exploitation relations between the factory employ-

ers and themselves. On the other hand, because the interpersonal network

of the labor market has evaded important procedures like signing a labor

contract, it cuts off the workers from the protection of labor law

(labor law

here refers to the national labor law of China) from the beginning. This

consequently cuts off the connection between workers and the state. These

workers are shielded by the traditions of household and village, unable to

rely on law and the social arrangements of the state to protect their legal

rights. In this sense, they are not “citizens” at all. They are, actually, the

most oppressed group in China today—weaker even than the migrant la-

borers in the city—because employment relations are veiled by traditional

village and family arrangements which deprive the workers of their rights

to protest (Shen 2006).

Integrating the Four Sociologies 249

What’s even worse is that they are exposed to dangerous production ma-

terials, working for 13 hours a day under substandard working conditions

and without necessary safety precautions. Their lives are at risk every single

day. In fact, in winter 2002, six female migrant workers died of poisonous

benzene contained in tinpot glue water in Baigou. The disastrous situation

of the workers called for serious policy intervention.

EXTENDING TO POLICY SOCIOLOGY

This tragic death of six female migrant workers aroused a great deal of re-

porting by media and attention of publics and government officers. The re-

sponsible government officers were dismissed, and the working conditions

of family factories were scrutinized. All these events provided an opportu-

nity to break the bulwark of the village and enter into the family factories.

We were funded by the Dutch Embassy to initiate the “China-Nether-

lands Law Support Project” in cooperation with the “Chinese Law Develop-

ment Support Corporation” to design and carry out a “Sending Medical and

Legal Services to the Village and Family” project in Baigou.

In this project, we established a team consisting of teachers and students

from the sociology department and law school in Tsinghua University, as

well as doctors from Beijing Armed Police Unit No. 2 Hospital. We orga-

nized manpower and material resources to offer free physical examinations

for migrant workers in family factories. When the migrant workers were

waiting in queue for their physical examinations, we dispensed leaflets and

a brochure with labor law information to the workers in the hope that they

would use the “labor law” to protect themselves. We also set up a medical

file to record their detailed information including their age, hometown,

gender, years of work in Baigou, type of work, and their health status. Tak-

ing advantage of the direct contact with these migrant workers, we instructed

them in four fundamental categories of labor law, namely contract, wage,

working hours, and rights of rest. For a whole year from March 2002 to

March 2003, we entered 26 village streets of the 33 village streets affiliated to

Baigou Township, providing 1783 migrant workers with medical, law, and

social services. With the “Sending Medical and Legal Services to Village and

Family” project in Baigou, we entered many family factories and got to know

more about the migrant workers’ daily life; through the dissemination of

“labor law,” we helped the migrant workers begin to be aware of their rights;

and moreover, we created a chance for the segregated workers from differ-

ent factories to communicate with each other (Shen 2006). Later, the local

government also showed great appreciation of our work, and we shared with

them the records and files of the migrant workers, in hope that it might help

the local government make better policy arrangements in the future.

250 Chapter 14

However, the achievement of policy sociology was encouraging but not

sustaining. For one thing, the local government’s finance depends mainly

on the revenues generated by the family factories. As a result after the public

attention on the tragic incident faded away, they loosened the scrutiny pro-

cess and turned a blind eye on many factories’ violations against standards

of working conditions and provisions of the labor law. For another, because

of the unbalanced power relations between the researchers or doctors and

migrant workers, to a great extent this project was more a material rather

than mental contact with the workers. Instead of getting true knowledge

about their work and life, we only set up a database for their personal traits.

Furthermore, the sporadic information about labor law the workers received

during the physical examination process was definitely not enough to help

them develop the concept and consciousness of “rights.” Most importantly,

under the collusion of market tyranny and state despotism, the workers can

only rely on themselves (not the NGOs, not the foundations, not the local

government, and not the researchers) as a unified class to fight for their

rights. All these factors called for a more systematic project which could offer

the workers a long-term education in labor law, a critical way to understand

themselves, and a channel to build solidarity. That is, a project to empower

the workers, which, in its nature, is an organic public sociology project.

EVOLVING INTO PUBLIC SOCIOLOGY

With the research problems and background knowledge provided by

professional sociology, along with the fruitful but limited outcome from

policy sociology, the “Baigou Project” eventually evolved into an organic

public sociology project whose vehicle is the “Baigou Migrant Worker Night

School.”

Breaking Two Myths, Establishing Citizen and Class Consciousness

Today, the fast developing world along with the ideology of the highly

centralized Chinese government has created two myths for all the people,

especially the underclass. In an era of high-technology, if one doesn’t know

how to use the computer and in an era of globalization, if one doesn’t

speak English, then this person is deemed to be illiterate and useless. This is

exactly how a great many people feel about themselves—an anachronism,

far behind the world, the epoch, and other people, so that they are doomed

to be ostracized and silenced. To raise the consciousness of the oppressed

and build their self-confidence, we need to break these myths.

To help the migrant workers establish citizen and class consciousness,

the foremost task would be to penetrate the seemingly harmonious social

Integrating the Four Sociologies 251

relations which veiled the actual exploitation and class situation through

the special factory regime in Baigou. The weapon to fulfill the mission is,

of course, the labor law.

Systematic Planning

Course Design

In the night school, we offered three courses: labor law, English, and com-

puter literacy. Labor law was the core course. On the one hand, it was aimed

at penetrating the double bulwarks of village and families, thereby helping

the migrant workers establish their citizen consciousness. On the other hand,

it was aimed at exposing the cultural assumptions regarding the interpersonal

relations between employers and workers so as to help workers establish their

class consciousness. English and computer courses were offered to break the

two myths, but also they served another important function too. They were

the icing of the core course. According to our experiences, in a local society

like Baigou, only giving labor law lessons would incur the hostility of family

factory employers, and the workers themselves often wouldn’t understand.

Workers typically view labor law as something related to the “formal work-

ers” in cities, which had nothing to do with the “informal factory workers”

in a rural area like themselves. So we came up with the idea of a “sandwich

class” that arranged the labor law class between the English class and the

computer class. On the one hand, it would reduce the radicalism from the

perspective of the factory employers; on the other hand, it could add to the

interest of workers to come and study. All the classes were held every week

on Friday and Saturday nights from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Site Selection

The place of our night school was at the center of Baigou Township be-

cause many family factories were located there, and it was easy to engage

the migrant workers from neighboring villages. There were two classrooms

and one teachers’ office in the night school. One of the classrooms was

turned into a computer room, equipped with one server and 20 computers.

The other one was a regular classroom. The two classrooms could hold 50

workers for lessons at the same time.

Teachers and Teaching Materials

All the teachers were professors and students from the sociology depart-

ment, law school, or micro-electronics institute in Tsinghua University. The

teaching materials for all the courses were written and edited by students