When Old Meets New: Some Perspectives on Recent Chinese Legal Developments and Their Relevance to the United States (The Importance of Labor Law)(Excerpts)

• Author: Louise Willans Floyd

One aspect of China's emergent power is labor law. With its rock-bottom wages, China "has become 'the factory of the world'" as companies from all over the globe clamor to make use of low production costs to increase corporate profits. But those low production costs come hand-in-glove with myriad problems for workers.

It is against this background that the newly developing labor laws of China and the new international law measures aimed at Chinese labor standards (such as the attempts by assorted U.S. administrations to link labor conditions to trade agreements) have been put in to place.

The argument of this Article is that the raising of Chinese labor standards is a matter of acute significance to the United States, her allies, and her trading partners such as Japan and Australia. In the first place, there is a human rights imperative in seeing vast swathes of the Chinese working population progress from the conditions they have traditionally suffered, which in some instances amount to basic exploitation. Secondly, and of more direct concern, it is in the interests of America and American workers that the world avoids a "race to the bottom" in which companies only operate using the world's cheapest labor along with the worst pay and conditions.

The Article advances that argument in three parts. Part II briefly recounts the appalling conditions of Chinese workers and then sets out the newly developing Chinese labor laws aimed to improve the working lives of Chinese laborers. In this context, the Article makes the crucial point that today's newly developing law can only be understood through an understanding of Chinese tradition, culture, and legal history. That tradition, culture, and legal history includes periods of strong centralized government, an actual basic conception of law that is different from a Westerner's conception of law, and an emphasis on custom, which is unusual to a Western lawyer.

While there may be some strengths to Chinese legal traditions and developments, these traditions can also form part of the problems experienced when enforcing the new laws.

In Part III, whilst acknowledging that inroads have been made on the enforcement of fair labor standards by the Chinese government, this Article discusses and analyzes very real enforcement problems. In the first place, the strong position of the central government means that criticism of the state regarding the treatment of workers can be muffled or even eliminated. The...