ILPC 2026

Over the last decade, China’s evolving migrant labour regime has been distinguished by an increasing number of strikes and workers’ protests. Research on the patterns of migrant labour resistance has so far, however, largely been confined to the developed coastal regions. Literature on the recent phenomenon of manufacturing capital relocation from coastal to inland areas and the concomitant geographical diversification of the Chinese migrant labour regime is only beginning to emerge. Against this background, the paper provides an in-depth case study analysis of the collective strike action by approximately 2000 workers from more than ten different factories in the footwear industry cluster of Chengdu in December 2015. It draws on 50 semi-structured interviews with workers, factory management staff, state officials, lawyers and academics conducted between 2016 and 2017. The paper increases our understanding of China’s migrant labour regime beyond the traditional core regions of China’s export-oriented industries in two ways.  First, it demonstrates that the strike action reflects an ongoing crisis in the local footwear industry arising from a stalled process of industrial relocation and its declining competitiveness. This stands in contrast to the continued self-branding of “China’s Capital of Women’s Shoes” in Chengdu as the country’s fourth most important footwear cluster. Second, it explains how new reproductive arrangements of migrant workers employed in physical proximity to their rural hometowns are shaping their class subjectivities and collective agency in face of this crisis.