Mary Gallagher, the Marilyn Keough dean of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs, gave a keynote lecture Tuesday at the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies’ fifth annual Justice and Asia Distinguished Lecture.
The lecture, titled “Contagious Capitalism Revisited: Labor, Law, and Justice in China,” drew from Gallagher’s 2005 book, “Contagious Capitalism: Globalization and the Politics of Labor in China,” which focused on the intersection of labor, law and justice in China.
The annual Justice and Asia Distinguished Lecture Series invites scholars to explore the theme of justice in relation to Asia, part of the Liu Institute’s broader “Justice and Asia” research initiative.
Gallagher, a leading scholar of contemporary China with a focus on Chinese domestic politics, political economy and industrial relations, recently joined Notre Dame from the University of Michigan.
During her lecture, held in Jenkins-Nanovic Hall, Gallagher explained that China opened up to foreign direct investment in the 1980s and 90s and encouraged competition among local regions through a system of decentralized authoritarianism in order to drive economic growth.
She shared that China reframed economic reforms, such as privatization and mass layoffs, not as a shift to capitalism, but as necessary steps for China to remain globally competitive.
Gallagher went on to share that China has expanded labor rights but emphasized that there is a gap between laws on the books and laws on the ground.
Introducing the concept of "hierarchal trust," she explained, “in China, it is the reverse of the United States, people have very high levels of trust in the central government and very low levels of trust in the local government.”
Expanding on this, she noted that central law grants labor laws to the people, but local governments get blamed for the lack of enforcement of the laws.
She further explained that this causes the Chinese population to believe that “the central government … is doing these things in good faith, but it is the bad local governments that are corrupt.”
She asserted that China was “doing something called legal dissemination campaigns … to make sure people knew about the awareness of their rights” and shared that her book makes an argument as to “why China as an authoritarian regime would be empowering people.”
She noted, however, that legal dissemination campaigns were ineffective, as the migrant workers from rural areas most affected by labor violations were uneducated and less likely to benefit from the campaigns.
“I don’t see expansion of labor rights in China as something that the regime was doing out of altruism,” she said.
Rather, she has found that China was “doing it out of concern for its development model, that it something that it needed to do in order to address … a concern for its economic model.”
She argued there are a number of similarities between the policies of the United States and China.
“The Trump administration has talked about patriotic education that is directly taken from the communist party in China in the 1990s as a way to make students more appreciative of the party,” she said.
She added that “Biden’s administration doubled down on industrial policy and really looked at, ‘How did China build up those industries and become so successful?’”
Gallagher explained that Xi Jinping, the President of the People's Republic of China, has “reverted China’s development model away from consumption back to manufacturing.”
She added further that “part of the reason why you see a lot of trade friction between the United States and China is that China has become much less reliant on consumption, and domestic demand is way down.”
