Occupational health and social estrangement in China

229 Pages·2017·9.184 MB·English

by  Wing-Chung Ho

New New
Ethnographies Ethnographies
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This book examines the experiences of individuals suffering
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from occupational diseases in contemporary China. It
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illustrates how the experience of most Chinese sick workers
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can be understood as examples of Agamben’s notion of
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homo sacer – the ultimate biopolitical subject whose life
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is located at the domain of “double ambivalence” in which
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they are constantly and disturbingly caught in between the e
i
public and private, the productive and unproductive, and so
the culturally normative and the culturally deviant. tn
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a
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The study regards two of the most common occupational l
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diseases in China – pneumoconiosis and heavy metal h
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poisoning. Through a corpus of qualitative, ethnographic data e
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solicited from one hundred individuals, the book details the a
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experiences of four different groups of employees – battery l
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workers, gemstone and jewellery workers, Japanese mat eh
workers, and coalminers – as well as their family members, n

non-governmental organization workers, and healthcare ta
and legal professionals in Guangdong, Sichuan, Chongqing, in
Hunan, Beijing, and Hong Kong. nd

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Covering a wide range of issues related to occupational
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disease in China, this book possesses a gaze which focuses
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on the lived experiences of occupationally sick workers at ni
the actor-power interface. Through their stories as well as aa
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the descriptions of their life-worlds and power relations
they are living with, this book aims to shed light on how the
socially marginalized encounter and understand domination H
in their everyday life in China, now and in the foreseeable O
future.
Wing-Chung Ho is Associate Professor at Department of Applied
Occupational
Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong
health and social
Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk estrangement
ISBN 978-1-5261-1361-0
in China
9 781526 113610 WING-CHUNG HO
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
Occupational health and social
estrangement in China
New
Ethnographies
Series editor
Alexander Thomas T. Smith
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Occupational health and social
estrangement in China
Wing-Chung Ho
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Wing-Chung Ho 2017
The right of Wing-Chung Ho to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 1361 0 hardback
First published 2017
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external
or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any
content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Typeset by
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Contents
List of figures vi
List of tables viii
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xxviii
List of abbreviations xxx
Series editor’s foreword xxxi
Maps xxxii
Part I Life in perspective 1
1 Facts, theoretical gaze, and journeys 3
2 Sick workers as homines sacri 43
Part II Responses to marginality 57
3 Cadmium-poisoned women: contesting for sick role status 59
4 Pneumoconiosis-afflicted workers: toward rightful resistance 87
5 Sick coal miners: the compromising citizenry 112
Part III Sick life governed 131
6 Law as a technique of Chinese governmentality 133
7 Conclusion: the future of Chinese marginality 153
Appendix 165
References 169
Index 189
Figures
1.1 Occupational disease trends in China, 1993–2014. 9
1.2 Accumulative cases of occupational diseases. 9
1.3 The proportion of CWP in pneumoconiosis, 1949–2013 (incomplete). 14
3.1 Shiwai’s paper strip, indicating name and the level of blood cadmium.
(Source: author) 63
3.2 Results of Shiwai’s blood cadmium test without an official chop.
(Source: author) 64
3.3 Shiwai’s blood cadmium test result with an official chop.
(Source: author) 64
3.4 Sick workers reminiscing about the past over a lunch in rural Luzhou.
(Source: author) 65
3.5 Shiwai’s urine cadmium test result, indicating a level of 47.2 µmol/L.
(Source: author) 67
3.6 Shiwai’s urine cadmium test result, indicating 28.0 µmol/L. (Source:
author) 67
3.7 Shiwai’s urine cadmium test result, indicating a level of 17.3 µmol/L.
(Source: author) 68
3.8 Workers rally outside the court building in Huizhou. (Source: GM) 73
3.9 Protesting outside Gold Peak Battery International Ltd, Hong Kong
after its violent suppression. (Source: GM) 74
3.10 an d 3.11 S ick workers’ living arrangements in the hospital.
(Source: informants) 78
3.12 an d 3.13 Th e residence rented by hospitalized sick workers.
(Source: author) 79
3.14 Cooking together at Shiwai’s home in rural Luzhou. (Source: author) 81
4.1 Juhong in his home in rural Lianyuan. (Source: author) 91
4.2 Qinsheng in his home in rural Lianyuan. A plastic container
containing his phlegm is on the table. (Source: author) 93
4.3 The store where Wenwai and his wife did business and lived.
(Source: author) 95
4.4 The grocery store owned by Qifa. The LED torches shown were the
bestselling items at the time of the fieldwork. (Source: author) 96
List of figures vii
4.5 Yaoyuan’s backyard business producing noodles in rural Liangping.
(Source: author) 99
4.6 The dilapidated house of Yaoyuan’s younger brother in rural
Luangping. (Source: author) 99
4.7 Two workers protesting in front of the company in Hong Kong. The
employer, however, kept the door shut and refused to meet the
protestors. Police were monitoring the action. (Source: author) 103
4.8 Pingkwan (fourth from left) holding a work meeting with
pneumoconiosis-afflicted workers at LAC’s office in Shenzhen.
(Source: author) 109
4.9 LAC’s sick workers’ self-help center in Liangping. (Source: author) 110
5.1 Used clothes given away to CWP sufferers and their families at the
self-help center at Liangping. (Source: author) 117
5.2 an d 5.3 Loudi Municipal Coal and Charcoal Hospital specializes in
the prevention and treatment of CWP. (Source: author) 121
7.1 Guoshou’s wife holding the photo of her dead son. (Source: author) 160
Tables
1a–1d Official statistics of occupational diseases (MoH) 1993–2014 8
Preface
Preface
Knowing the problem from afar
This book is about the lived experience of occupationally sick workers in China,
but has its origins in Hong Kong. Located in southeastern China, Hong Kong is
a city of 1,104 square kilometers, 8,941 times smaller than China proper, 8,712
times smaller than the United States, and 230 times smaller than the United
Kingdom in terms of land area (Map 1). The city had been under British colonial
rule since 1842, was handed over to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, and
then became its Special Administrative Region (SAR).1
I was first introduced to the problem of occupational disease in 2004 in
Hong Kong by a personal acquaintance, Shek Pingkwan (“Pingkwan” hereafter).
A child of 1970s’ colonial Hong Kong, I had never heard of any sizable local
occupational disease outbreaks. It was Pingkwan who alerted me to the plight
of pneumoconiosis-stricken workers in the lapidary factories of the Pearl River
Delta (PRD) region of Guangdong province (Map 2). I came to realize the numer-
ous predicaments that Chinese sick workers face in their process of gaining diag-
nosis, undergoing treatment, and pursuing compensation. Thus, it is Hong Kong,
Pingkwan, and the year 2004 that constitute the context of this book.
These factors – Hong Kong, Pingkwan, and the year 2004 – deserve further
attention as a reflexive approach to anthropology upholds that how the researcher
is positioned in relation to his/her informants, and how the two parties perceive
each other are determinants to the way the resulting ethnography is represented
(Robertson 2002). In my case, it is essential to let readers, as suggested by King
and King (2011), glimpse how the personal interactions to be presented in subse-
quent chapters may be culturally choreographed by me, the author, as someone
who was born in colonial Hong Kong, and like the majority of post-handover
Hongkongers, has come to self-identify as both Hongkonger and Chinese.2 The
contextualization of the vantage point of this book is thus a prerequisite for
readers to question “the relative status of interviewer and participant, and social
norms about what is appropriate or inappropriate” in various ethnographic situa-
tions which involved a Hong Kong male researcher probing into the subjectivities
of peasant workers in China, and how these factors may have interacted and influ-
enced the empirical data collected (King and King 2011: 1478).