Economic Integration Through De-Democratizing Work (CJTL)

Abstract: The concept of “decoupling” has quickly taken center stage in American and Chinese politics. Far beyond issues of international trade, the term has become a mutual domestic focal point for legitimizing new industrial and technology policy regimes. This rapid change has reversed the basic terms of the post-1978 U.S.-China relationship—turning each nation away from an aggressive embrace of economic globalization and towards an equally aggressive embrace of economic nationalism. Leaders in both countries now highlight the other as possessing polar opposite values, framing regulatory reform as demanded by these divergent values and as part of an existential international struggle.

Yet little attention has been given to how countries, now cast as antagonists with divergent values, came to have the most deeply intertwined major economies on the planet. While the sources of modern Sino-American economic intimacy are diverse, this Article focuses on how a convergence in assumptions regarding the ademocratic nature of the workplace powerfully facilitated this engagement. In tandem, isomorphic changes in U.S. and Chinese workplace regulation placed increasing emphasis on regulating employment contracts while minimizing any form of collective bargaining in favor of authoritarian notions of corporate governance. These distinct but parallel trajectories of workplace de- democratization manifested in another telling, if surprising, modern convergence: the promotion of employee ownership. On both sides of the Pacific, the ideal of employee ownership was advanced as a means of soothing the displacement of each country’s tradition of economic citizenship. Employee participation through share ownership never materialized as a significant aspect of either economy during this time, though it repeatedly found, and still finds, great rhetorical resonance in otherwise opposed political systems. Tellingly, the employee-ownership instruments that did develop were undermined by a strikingly similar set of legal techniques preventing employee-owners from contributing to more democratic workplaces.

Ultimately, this mutual process of de-democratization points to an implication current decoupling rhetoric actively avoids: that fundamental differences in formal political organization appear to have strikingly minimal impact on their citizens’ lived experiences of work and economic citizenship. This politically inconvenient commonality is critical for both necessary for understanding how this historical process of economic integration occurred and why coercive state power drives decoupling—rather than emerging as a private product of divergent values. Thus, while the future of U.S.-China relations is both consequential and uncertain, the rush to reframe the relationship must address unsettling questions underlying the two countries’ modern history of economic integration.