Prolétarisation incomplète et miracle économique chinois : entre héritage collectiviste et capitalisme transnational

Abstract

The contemporary Chinese regime of accumulation draws its main specificities from the intersection between China’s involutive long-term developmental trajectory and the accumulation process characteristic of transnational capitalism’s of the last 30 years. This involutive historical development process had produced a large pool of workers, but the reforms from 1978 onward unlocked this surplus labour built in collectivists institutions to enlist it to work in the export-oriented special economic zones, thus creating the migrant workers phenomenon. Social-property relations in industrialised urban areas are thus capitalist-like, yet in the countryside they are still shaped by institutional collectivist heritage. The interactions between those two social-property relations regimes have been at the foundation of China’s growth since 1978 by supplying to transnational capital an abundant workforce below its reproduction cost, but the ongoing peasant expropriation wave now threatens the stability of the Chinese growth regime.

Keywords

• capitalism
• China
• migrants
• involution
• hukou