Struggling over public spaces and scales of visibility: workers’ grassroots organisations in twenty-first century China

In this paper we explore the issue of how a Beijing-based labour grassroots organisation has managed to develop and subsist for almost twenty years in a political environment characterised by uncertainty. How did this organisation adapt to the transformations of the political environment and how did these changes impact the scales and visibility of the actions led and claims made by the organisation? On the one hand, we document how the grassroots organisation’s varying scales of action are informed by a dialectic of making visible the materiality of the experience of indignity embodied in the workers’ condition and its consequent quest for recognition and social justice. On the other hand, we show that the organisation has also displayed explicit signs that the various projects it has engineered and its meaning-making practices remained within the party-state’s authorised sphere, and that the party’s main ideological claims and policies were also thereby recognised by the organisation.