The Habitus and "Logic of Practice" of China's Trade Unionists

Accelerated state-induced market-oriented reforms in China threaten to catalyze labor explosion. How would the official trade union act in this situation? Focusing on a previously unexplored issue of the question-namely, that of China's unionists as social agents, this paper analyzes the "logic of practice" of China's unionists by means of Pierre Bourdieu's social agency concept of habitus. This paper finds that the unionists' habitus generates practices that reproduce their spontaneous and unforced subordination - as part and parcel of the state - to the Party in managing labor on behalf of the state so as to facilitate the implementation of market-oriented reforms. The implications of the analysis for the paradigmatic "dualist" and its derivative "corporatist" models of China's union are drawn out.