Labor Day and the Face of Chinese Modernization

By: Nicholas Clark

May 13, 2014

The Chinese Labor Day holiday falls on May 1, and the whole country takes a vacation for a few days. This year over Labor Day weekend, I went with my study abroad program to Dalian, a port city on the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula in northeastern Liaoning province. Dalian was one of the first cities in China to industrialize under Russian occupation in the late nineteenth century and later as part of Manchukuo under Japanese occupation in the early twentieth century. In recent history, Dalian flourished and advanced rapidly under Bo Xilai’s system of Chinese state-led capitalism, and today it is a symbol of modern development for China.

China’s rapid development and economic success has been built through hard labor, and propaganda about the value of labor can be seen throughout Beijing and Dalian celebrating Labor Day. For example, I saw an advertisement in the Beijing metro system espousing the value of labor, and I saw a billboard at a busy intersection with the text “Labor makes life wonderful, labor makes living beautiful.” The value of labor is built into Chinese culture with idioms like “Endure hardships and bear hard work,” said of someone who lives a life of labor. It’s no wonder that the Chinese Communist Party has focused propaganda on this aspect of Chinese culture: the Communist Party led a peasant revolution and built a nation on the backs of laborers.

Dalian has always been at the forefront of development in China. The first modern railroad was built by the Russians to connect Dalian with Lushun, another port city southwest of Dalian. The city also housed industrial factories used to power the Japanese colonial machine from 1905 until the end of World War II with the defeat of the Japanese. Called the “gate to Beijing” because of its location at the intersection of the Yellow Sea and Bohai Sea, Dalian is also home to China’s first aircraft carrier, berthed in a brand new harbor ten times larger than the one it replaced. Under Bo Xilai’s leadership in the 1990s, Dalian attracted large amounts of foreign direct investment and living standards rose dramatically, and even as Dalian initiated massive industrialization projects, the government also initiated policies to encourage domestic consumption. Dalian’s industrialization, public works, and urbanization projects relied heavily on labor. When I was in Dalian, I saw continued massive construction projects, and driving along the streets I saw various laborers on the sidewalk with tools and signs looking for work for the day.

China is such a fascinating place. On one hand, the Communist Party espouses labor through propaganda, and indeed the country has benefited enormously from labor not only in the construction of modern cities like Dalian, but also to staff the industrial factories inside those cities. But on the other hand, leading economists agree that China increasingly needs to shift its economic focus to domestic consumption in order to maintain economic growth and stability, and consumption is largely driven by the middle and upper classes, rather than low-wage laborers. So while the party and government emphasize the value of labor from an ideological and historical perspective, the economic realities and cultural environment of modern China do not seem to idealize labor in the same way. Dalian recognizes this contradiction, and that is perhaps why one nightclub in the city (read: a place for consumers to gather) poked fun at the holiday by hanging old propaganda-style posters as decoration and playing games where people sang “Revolutionary Songs” and proved their ability to “labor” by doing pushups on the stage.

It will be interesting to see how China continues to modernize as it makes the transition from labor-based development to consumer driven growth, both in terms of real economics and standard of living, and in ideological and cultural terms. Perhaps in a few years, the propaganda poster in Beijing will read, “'Consumption’ makes life wonderful, ‘consumption’ makes living beautiful.”

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