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

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Since 2013, China has embarked on a set of infrastructureprojects and free trade deals throughout Asia, Europe andAfrica that are collectively referred to as the Belt and RoadInitiative. Energy, transport and industrial infrastructure isorganized into multi-national corridors that promise to bringtogether laboring populations from different countries intostreamlined transnational networks, allowing firms fromChina and elsewhere to tailor the production processaccording to where unit labor costs are cheapest. Whileinvestors, business strategists and economists tend toconsider labor inputs as a given, labor supply and theconditions of work are developed and reproduced throughconcrete formations called 'labor regimes.' Workers aresocially differentiated by race, gender and migration status;relations between labor and management determine theproduction process; the available means of attaininghousing, food and education constrain the value of wages;and, political struggles for democratic rights impact thepossibility of economic gains. These factors, among others,constitute a given labor regime and dictate the patterns ofuneven development. This research project will examinetwo connected labor regimes in flux: in the Pearl RiverDelta, where garment and electronics factories are beingreorganized and relocated abroad, and in Vietnam, alongthe China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, aplanned belt of infrastructure and special trade zones in theBRI.In 2013, the Chinese Communist Party announced a projectthat would eventually be called the Belt and Road Initiative(BRI). Consisting of a cluster of six overland logisticalcorridors through Central Asia to Europe and a series ofseaports in the Indian Ocean, the BRI promises toeconomically integrate more than 60 countries via direct3 / 11free trade agreements across Asia, Europe and Africa(Olinga-Shannon 2019). The most striking feature of the BRIis the massive scale of the plans, suggesting a process ofcohering a distinct pan-Afro-Eurasian region, composedsimultaneously of traditional inter-state agreements andsubnational-supranational conglomerations of investmentorganized 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 theliterature about the BRI, encompassing work on both theproject's causes and putative consequences. Though somescholars (cf. Ye 2020) primarily apprehend the drivers ofthe BRI on the level of state agency, as a strategicgeopolitical project, others, such as Professor Akhter, givepriority to secular economic processes compelling theactions of states, that is, at a supranational scale of capitalaccumulation. Akhter (2018), following Harvey (1982),frames this relocation of surpluses as a 'spatial fix,' inwhich locally over-accumulated capital is redeployed tonew areas, creating new spaces of production andcirculation, often at new scales. Akhter applies this lens tothe BRI, relating it to problems of surplus capital andindustrial overcapacity (cf. Hung 2008; Li 2016), andsituating it within a longer process in which labor-intensiveindustry in the east coastal regions has been relocated inthe underdeveloped western provinces, in the WesternDevelopment Project, and abroad, in the 'Go Out' campaign(cf. Zhu and Lan 2016; Zhang 2014).