 Between the mid-2000s and 2010s, we actually see 10 years of what we would call a golden age for labor activism in China. So that was the 10 years where we actually see fast economic growth, we see a lot of labor struggles, we see rising real wages actually, and we see also fast capital accumulation. So this actually shows that that 10 years was really marked a period with very successful labor activism. So the labor activism actually has some very positive impact on the real wage growth. But then all of a sudden it changed. In 2016 we see the labor repression and all that. So I was trying to explore why. Why is this inconsistent? So my name is Ying Chen and I'm an assistant professor of economics at the New School. I am a political economist. My work mainly explores the contradictions of capitalism and how it manifests itself in the form of different kind of crisis and in various crisis in various areas actually, but including and probably primarily now on the ecological crisis. I also study development and I see this unequal development process between the global north and global south as an innate feature of the overall capitalist development process in the world. Most recently I've been working on intervening the debate of global climate change from the global south's perspective. Most studies on climate change and particularly China's role in it usually starts with a positivist description like what China has done and has not done yet and what China is doing and is not doing. And then ends with a normative prescription like you know what China is supposed to do. So for me this kind of analysis lacks some understanding, some historical, political and social understanding of how China make the choice, why China makes some of the choice that it is making today. What has driven China into the position today that in a way shapes its decision making process. So my intervention was really to use an historical and a political analytical perspective to see what has happened before historically and what is China's current economic system and therefore what are some of the constraints that China has at this moment to pursue more progressive policies for the climate change crisis and therefore also at the same time I try to look at how can some of the limits that China experiencing right now can really be lifted given its internal economic condition as well as its external positions in the world. There is one study that I recently worked on that shows for example that although China we can find that when it invests in renewable energy sectors it can actually generate twice as many jobs as the same level of spending if it were invested in the fossil fuel sector. So that's actually very good news right for people who are serious about green economy transitions. The thing is that if you look closely at the data you actually find that more than half of these jobs particularly in the solar and wind energy sectors are actually in the informal sector which means those jobs are going to be low-wage and with little social welfare protection so that's actually not good news for the labor. So that is actually a very important thing to look at that I feel is currently missing from the mainstream debate on say Green New Deal or even the global Green New Deal which usually would see the global south country as passive recipients. So the focus the priority is always on the global north countries about what should be done there and then talk about okay we can facilitate some kind of technological or financial transfer to the global south country which is already a very progressive proposal if you think about it right it's much better than the proposal that completely ignore the global south countries but if you think about it the global south country are still treated as passive recipients so whatever is going on within the block within the global south block was not really carefully studied. Problem that I just mentioned about say informality in China right is actually a very common problem for a lot of the global south countries as well so this problem if it's not addressed then even with a lot of the technological or financial transfer to those countries we will still see informality right we will still see labor exploitation we will still see job precariousness right so all these problems should also be at the center of the debate I would say rather than just as an outcome of whatever is initiated in the global south. I think this part that the global south perspective was really a key thing in my work and it has also informed some of my other discussions things like the concept some of the concept that we often use in the climate change debate such as climate finance climate debt for example I in the recent paper Michael Arthur and I were arguing that you know concepts like climate finance is very ahistorical and apolitical and it focused really just on the technical part of it while climate debt is a much progressive much more progressive concept because it actually integrates historical dimension of the story but then it also has its own limits because you know how can you really calculate how can you really quantify the debt right how can you calculate human lives so it's it can get really tricky in the process so what we would propose is that if we really want to start with a global south perspective then we need to actually be very serious about the concept of global carbon budget there are a lot of discussion actually a lot of scientists were able to make a very good estimation on the global carbon budget how much we basically how much carbon that we still have left to consume if we want to maintain in a you know a 1.5 Celsius degree scenario right so it's actually a very straightforward concept I mean if we think about it I mean we have right right now mostly commonly measured as 400 like gigatones of CO2 right so we have also a projection of the human population so just very straightforwardly we can divide it and calculate how much is left for each each person to consume my approach to development again I would say focus is a lot on the economic history of China as well as the economic system it is operating under so for example there are a lot of people who would say okay China has had economic miracle right it has had some economic success and but at the same time you know people would also say well there are a lot of inequality issues there are ecological destruction there are labor exploitation so how can we avoid those problems while having all these economic success right so my approach to that was actually I see China first of all as especially its market reform I see the market reform period as really the start of its capitalist development process so in that sense all the problems and the success should be expected from this whole process starting from the 80s was the beginning of the market reform and into the 1990s would be where the privatization has really peaked so that was the full-fledged kind of market reform a capitalist development process starting from the 90s but definitely before 80s we could we can categorize it as a planned economy period two things that are really important for my development work one is the economic history and the other is the economic system so the economic history part for me is important because I see China's success the economic miracle not just starting from the market reform period it actually is built upon what was achieved in the planned economy as well there are a lot of economic historians these days starting to talk about this economic historians such as Robert Allen who talked about how the planned period was able to leave China a very healthy educated labor force which later was very helpful in terms of China's integration into the global division of labor and because that disciplined healthy and educated labor force appear to the global capital foreign capital as really cost-effective right so without that you can't really have a very kind of comprehensive integration into the global division of labor later facilitating the economic success in China so I think that part of the history is actually very important so we should really be very aware of what happened before the market period so my research in that sense often actively engage with what happened before the market period and the economic system part I would just say that instead of seeing China's success as you know as just a result of the market reform and all these problems just as side effect I actually see them as inseparable so along with the capitalist development the success and the problems actually go hand in hand so it's it's it's impossible for me to to think of a possible solution a possible development path in that sense that only has the economic miracle right but does not but without all these problems of environmental destruction because that's really the logic of capitalism itself so in in that sense if we really want to confront all of those social issues it is very much important to acknowledge the overall logic of the economic system and to try to confront it and then go beyond it so for example I have a work that talks about why did the Chinese government exercise this really brutal repression of labor activists in 2016 so this is actually a big event it happened in Guangdong province right a lot of the activists especially the student activists was violently repressed by the government put into jail and all that so a lot of the experts analyzed this as just a consistent and expected behavior from authoritarian government but by looking close into the data I actually find that between the mid 2000s and 2010s we actually see 10 years of what we would call a golden age for labor activism in China so that was the 10 years where we actually see fast economic growth we see a lot of labor struggles we see rising real wages actually and we see also fast capital accumulation so this actually shows that that 10 years was really marked a period was very successful labor activism so the labor activism actually has some very positive impact on the real wage growth but then all of a sudden it changed in 2016 right we see the the labor repression and all that so I was trying to explore why why is this an inconsistent right so a lot of people would say okay it's just because the government changed their minds so to me that's a very superficial analysis what really happened was that the golden age really comes with rapid capital accumulation and that was the period when both the local government and the capitalist class really needed the capital accumulation and so there was a lot of demand for labor the real wage was also growing but of course with the capitalist development you started to see slow capital accumulation right once those happened the overall conditions changed and so the capitalist class cannot afford this kind of compromise that they made before and therefore they don't want to abide by it anymore right so what happened was that either they relocate to the inner region from the coast region to the inner region because the labor is much cheaper there or they just rely on the local government to brutally repress labor there so I think this kind of analysis of the economic reality is really important for us to understand some of the policy choices so if we understand that we probably would think it's quite naive to say that okay we need to advise the government to regulate the capital and to treat labor more fairly because it's not that they don't know they can do that right but the logic that they're in that they have such a high stake in maintaining this kind of economic environment that is good that is friendly for capitalists so they are always ready basically the government the local government is always ready to repress labor whenever they see needed so when the capital accumulation slows down right and and the profit margin was really really thin because of China's position of global economy they think that's the time to really intervene so I think in that sense we can really see the logic of this kind of inconsistent behaviors the socialist project has worked for some of the poor countries in the 20th centuries to address this question of economic development really just in the sense of economic development in terms of you know producing essential goods and services for the people providing this kind of basic public services to the people so this is why when a lot of people are saying you know at the beginning of the market reform China was still very poor by GDP measure but actually lots of people when they say that they didn't realize that a lot of the public services in the plant economy or we can say socialist that's a big debate a lot of people don't really think that ever existed in any part of the world but I would say I actually belong to the school that think there was a socialist attempt there but the thing is that a lot of the public services at the time were affordable and free and was not marketized therefore their value was not even counted into the GDP so if you really look at the social indicators during the socialist period in China you would see that life expectancy wise and literacy rate wise China was able to achieve the level that already exceeds many of the middle income countries by before 80s I mean before 80s so that's also something that I mentioned before you know how the the the Chinese labor force was so prepared after the economic reform to join the global division of labor right so I think that really worked for some of the poor country agrarian economy in the 20th century it also has posed some threatening factor threatening effect on the capitalist economy as well so we see the a lot of struggles labor struggles in europe in europe we also see you know the new deal in in the united states which people are still talking about right going back to the golden age and all that but we should realize it's all under this global kind of political struggle that in a way threatens the kind of more probably more radical version of capitalism so I think it's all intertwined in that sense