The Role of Labor Regimes in Reconfiguring Global Production Networks in China and Vietnam

Since 2013, China has embarked on a set of infrastructure
projects and free trade deals throughout Asia, Europe and
Africa that are collectively referred to as the Belt and Road
Initiative. Energy, transport and industrial infrastructure is
organized into multi-national corridors that promise to bring
together laboring populations from different countries into
streamlined transnational networks, allowing firms from
China and elsewhere to tailor the production process
according to where unit labor costs are cheapest. While
investors, business strategists and economists tend to
consider labor inputs as a given, labor supply and the
conditions of work are developed and reproduced through
concrete formations called 'labor regimes.' Workers are
socially differentiated by race, gender and migration status;
relations between labor and management determine the
production process; the available means of attaining
housing, food and education constrain the value of wages;
and, political struggles for democratic rights impact the
possibility of economic gains. These factors, among others,
constitute a given labor regime and dictate the patterns of
uneven development. This research project will examine
two connected labor regimes in flux: in the Pearl River
Delta, where garment and electronics factories are being
reorganized and relocated abroad, and in Vietnam, along
the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, a
planned belt of infrastructure and special trade zones in the
BRI.
In 2013, the Chinese Communist Party announced a project
that would eventually be called the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI). Consisting of a cluster of six overland logistical
corridors through Central Asia to Europe and a series of
seaports in the Indian Ocean, the BRI promises to
economically integrate more than 60 countries via direct
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free trade agreements across Asia, Europe and Africa
(Olinga-Shannon 2019). The most striking feature of the BRI
is the massive scale of the plans, suggesting a process of
cohering a distinct pan-Afro-Eurasian region, composed
simultaneously of traditional inter-state agreements and
subnational-supranational conglomerations of investment
organized primarily into interlocking corridors.
In my research, I will explore two interrelated problems-
spatial scale and labor regimes-as they pertain to the BRI.
The question of scale and its ambiguity haunts much of the
literature about the BRI, encompassing work on both the
project's causes and putative consequences. Though some
scholars (cf. Ye 2020) primarily apprehend the drivers of
the BRI on the level of state agency, as a strategic
geopolitical project, others, such as Professor Akhter, give
priority to secular economic processes compelling the
actions of states, that is, at a supranational scale of capital
accumulation. Akhter (2018), following Harvey (1982),
frames this relocation of surpluses as a 'spatial fix,' in
which locally over-accumulated capital is redeployed to
new areas, creating new spaces of production and
circulation, often at new scales. Akhter applies this lens to
the BRI, relating it to problems of surplus capital and
industrial overcapacity (cf. Hung 2008; Li 2016), and
situating it within a longer process in which labor-intensive
industry in the east coastal regions has been relocated in
the underdeveloped western provinces, in the Western
Development Project, and abroad, in the 'Go Out' campaign
(cf. Zhu and Lan 2016; Zhang 2014).