Flow Of Social Order

The Yi people traditionally lived in the mountain area of Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou. Since the late1990s, especially after2002, they began to migrant into the Pearl River Delta region, and mainly engaged in some temporary work in the factories. The number of these people was over10million. Unlike many other groups of workers, the Yi workers show a strong collectiveness. They become organized based on the labor-boss system. Usually, dozens or hundreds of Yi workers enter a factory, and later resign together. They obey the management of their labor-boss in the factory, and live with the labor-boss outside the factory. They mostly speak Yi language and keep their traditional customs. As a result, they construct an "invisible community". For these reasons, when there is a dispute with the factory or with another of workers, it is easy for the Yi people to raise collective actions involving hundreds of people.The Yi people become a controversial group because they showed a strong collectiveness and bring a series of "problems". Employers in the Pearl River Delta tend to think Yi workers as the "life-saving straw" when they have an urgent need for a large number of temporary workers. But at the same time, they also worry that Yi workers could raise collective resistance. Therefore, most of the employers hold a "love-hate" attitude towards Yi workers. In the opinion of the basic-level government staff, the number of workers in the Pearl River Delta has become larger and larger because of Yi people’s coming. Even worse, crimes such as conflicts, extortion and kidnapping keep rising with their arrival. Due to language miscommunication and lack of understanding in Yi people’s culture and lifestyle, the local government usually finds the incidents involving the Yi people in a mess, even incomprehensible. In the media and public opinions, Yi workers are mostly described as of low quality, poor hygiene, confused male-female relationships, and the labor-bosses mostly as engaged in fraud, exploitation, kidnapping, just like the slave owners in the history of the Yi people.According to this study, the Yi group living in the PRD is not so chaotic as some outsiders observed, instead, the group has its own order and rules. The characteristics of the group’s behavior in terms of migration, work, life and social activities are not so unreasonable as some people believe, but closely related to the particularity of the environment of the PRD.Since the Chinese policies of reform and opening up were carried out, the labor market based on the local structure of the industrial production of the OEM (Original Design Manufacture) has gradually been divided into the market of regular employees and the market of temporary workers. Compared with the limited development of the market of regular employees, the market of temporary labor has always been dominant, and maintained a very large scale. Temporary labor market requires the workers to back up any time they are wanted, thus completely becoming the "reserve labor ". The "reserve labor" system mainly depends on the labor-bosses or the labor dispatch companies working between migrant workers and enterprises. The generation and development of the intermediate organizations promote the growth of the labor market and enhance the marketization of the labor force to a great extent.Most of the Yi people only can enter the low-end labor market open to temporary workers; because they are usually thought to be the low-quality workers who maintain their traditional customs and habits. Those large-scale but short-term employments usually accept Yi workers, because their wages are low and the needs are huge. It is easy to organize and transport the Yi people who keep strong relationships based on their blood, marriage, geographical and ethnic origins, etc. The Yi people’s labor-boss system was exactly created based on this particular structure of labor supply and demand. Then the first Yi people’s dispatch company appeared. Therefore, it was the labor-boss system that helped the Yi people go into the temporary labor market and adapt themselves to live in the highly market-oriented Pearl River Delta.In addition to adapting itself to the temporary labor market, the labor-boss system also importantly provides basic protections to the Yi people. The fact that the Yi people whose language and customs are completely different from those of the local people have been able to survive is mainly due to the variety of social services provided by these labor-bosses and their organizations. Although the Yi people live in a strange place, they create an "invisible community" based on their internal clans, relatives, geographical and ethnic origins, and etc. This "invisible community" helps them find a kind of tender feeling and makes them stay together.This shows that the labor market and the society are fitted to each other and their connections cannot be cut. Once the relation between the market and the society falls into a crisis, it will bring contradictions and conflicts. However, in the highly market-oriented Pearl River Delta, the market is always trying to disembed workers from their social relationships, which has resulted in a series of collective resistance.Because these crises could exist in any aspects of the life, resistances are diversified. The resistances seem in chaos, because, on different occasions, they direct at different people and organizations such as the manufacturers, the labor agencies, and the labor-bosses. Consequently, the image of the Yi people turns out very bad in the opinion of the manufacturers, the local government staff, and the media staff, and so on.Resistances to the factory owners launched by the Yi people are somewhat similar to the traditional labor movements. But the Yi worker’s resistances are cut off by the labor market, because they are mainly employed as temporary workers rather than regular workers. As it were, the deep dynamic of the Yi workers’ movement does not entirely stem from the class conflicts in the Marxist sense, but primarily from the "excessive marketization" of the labor force.That is why the Chinese proletarian are stagnant in an "immature" state for a long time, despite that the socialist China’s industrial development has generated a large scale of workers. However, an "immature" proletarian does not mean that there are no protests or struggles. As we have seen, the Yi people have initiated a protest movement and the same thing is happening in many other places. In my opinion, this is the key factor of understanding the Yi people’s behavior and their social order in the PRD.