The Role of Labor Regimes in Reconfiguring Global Production Networks in China and Vietnam

Since 2013, China has embarked on a set of infrastructure projects and free trade deals throughout Asia, Europe and Africa that are collectively referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative. Energy, transport and industrial infrastructure is organized into multi-national corridors that promise to bring

together laboring populations from different countries into streamlined transnational networks, allowing firms from China and elsewhere to tailor the production process according to where unit labor costs are cheapest. While investors, business strategists and economists tend to consider labor inputs as a given, labor supply and the

conditions of work are developed and reproduced through concrete formations called 'labor regimes.' Workers are socially differentiated by race, gender and migration status; relations between labor and management determine the production process; the available means of attaining housing, food and education constrain the value of wages;

and, political struggles for democratic rights impact the possibility of economic gains. These factors, among others, constitute a given labor regime and dictate the patterns of uneven development. This research project will examine two connected labor regimes in flux: in the Pearl River Delta, where garment and electronics factories are being

reorganized and relocated abroad, and in Vietnam, along the China-Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, a planned belt of infrastructure and special trade zones in the BRI. In 2013, the Chinese Communist Party announced a project that would eventually be called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Consisting of a cluster of six overland logistical

corridors through Central Asia to Europe and a series of seaports in the Indian Ocean, the BRI promises to economically integrate more than 60 countries via direct 3 / 11 free trade agreements across Asia, Europe and Africa (Olinga-Shannon 2019). The most striking feature of the BRI is the massive scale of the plans, suggesting a process of

cohering a distinct pan-Afro-Eurasian region, composed simultaneously of traditional inter-state agreements and subnational-supranational conglomerations of investment organized primarily into interlocking corridors. In my research, I will explore two interrelated problems- spatial scale and labor regimes-as they pertain to the BRI.

The question of scale and its ambiguity haunts much of the literature about the BRI, encompassing work on both the project's causes and putative consequences. Though some scholars (cf. Ye 2020) primarily apprehend the drivers of the BRI on the level of state agency, as a strategic geopolitical project, others, such as Professor Akhter, give

priority to secular economic processes compelling the actions of states, that is, at a supranational scale of capital accumulation. Akhter (2018), following Harvey (1982), frames this relocation of surpluses as a 'spatial fix,' in which locally over-accumulated capital is redeployed to new areas, creating new spaces of production and

circulation, often at new scales. Akhter applies this lens to the BRI, relating it to problems of surplus capital and industrial overcapacity (cf. Hung 2008; Li 2016), and situating it within a longer process in which labor-intensive industry in the east coastal regions has been relocated in the underdeveloped western provinces, in the Western

Development Project, and abroad, in the 'Go Out' campaign (cf. Zhu and Lan 2016; Zhang 2014).