Dual Circulation Human Rights and the Challenge of Myanmar for Socialist and Liberal Democratic Orders

 

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Since the idea of a dual circulation economy became a prominent part of the official discourse of globalization within Chinese New Era theory, both the idea and its manifestations have had a broadening role to play in the ordering and assessment of human rights compliance within global production chains. "According to the dual circulation model, China plans to emphasize both growing exports (international circulation) and expanded domestic demand, powered mainly by rising consumption (internal circulation), with the two reinforcing each other. " (here). 

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Chinese policymakers, who are more often engineers than lawyers or economists, think about development in terms of an open giant complex system. The dual circulation framework is dialectic, being a strategic balance between internal loops and external loops, depending on overall threats and opportunities. Dialectically, if the outside world does not want to engage with China, it will focus internally. (here)

Whatever the assessment of the value or effectiveness of the strategy as a macro-economic policy objective (eg here), the normative and discursive power of the "dual circulation" model cannot be underestimated.  

1. The idea of dual suggests not just operational separation but conceptual borders.  That is, under traditional theories of internationalist convergence the operative premise was that all stakeholders would, through a process of active engagement nudge themselves and be nudged into roughly common approaches based on similar  shared ideas core operating premises. Conceptually dual circulation necessarily posits that there need not be an identity between core operational concepts that drive the optimization of an internal system and operational concepts that drive the most profitable engagement between systems.  They might align, but they do not require an identity of core premises, objectives, working styles, conduct valuation, normative principles, interpretation, and governance. 

2. Those conceptual borders leak into the field of human rights in economic activity. And indeed, in the context of human rights, there has already been a substantial push to express the emerging differences between human rights first principles that are sourced in liberal democratic imaginaries and those sourced in New Era Chinese Marxist-Leninist theory (eg, The Rise of Socialist Human Rights). While the systems may share the same language, they do not necessarily share the same values. Even when values are aligned, they may be interpreted in significantly different ways. The differences in the "language of human rights requires, in turn, a new vocabulary.  It requires a vocabulary that shifts the emphasis of discourse (and thus the way that terms are understood and applied as policy and rules and norms) from the language and vocabularies of human rights (of the individual) to that of  development (of society and collective institutions)." (Ibid.).  From this starting point, divergence is likely, as the interior dialectic of "domestic" circulation and that of "international" circulation produce their own interpretive trajectories. That requires, in turn, a third language--the language with which it is possible to align (or differentiate) the imaginaries of the domestic and the international. All three share a common language, bt beneath the sound ad signs, meaning, perspective, valuation, purpose, can differ.   

3. Dual circulation in a globalized world creates both challenges and opportunities. For economic actors (including state controlled or owned entities managing production chains), the challenges are clear enough.  Principal among them is the problem of operating among systems whose expectations may be incompatible.  Inconsistent but compatible systems merely cause compliance costs; they do not necessary affect access to markets or productive forces. Incompatible systems or requirements produce substantial issues of access to productive resources and markets. Nonetheless the compatibility also produces opportunity; that opportunity is itself a function of the border that divides conceptual territories and the necessity for developing spaces for operating between and within them. In this case the operative opportunity is contextualized mimesis--the opportunity to develop mirroring parallel systems, one focused on domestic circulation and the other on foreign.

All of this came to mind when reading through  Myanmar Garment Worker Allegations Tracker: Three years of military rule distributed by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre.

The 1 February 2024 marks three years since the military takeover of Myanmar. The Resource Centre has been tracking labour rights abuse in Myanmar’s garment factories during this period, recording hundreds of attacks on garment workers’ human rights both in their workplaces and on the streets. In this latest update we examine allegations of abuse tracked over the past year and responses from international buyers – many familiar big brand names. Alongside, we have conducted anonymous. . . worker interviews with the aim of centring the everyday experience of this predominantly female and increasingly precarious workforce. . . The actions taken by the military regime since February 2021 have resulted in far-reaching restrictions on basic civil liberties and trade union rights, as recently confirmed by the ILO Commission of Enquiry. For garment workers, this means tolerating worsening conditions in factories while at the same time highlighting both the disintegration of their rights at work and their ability to raise concerns with trade unions no longer able to operate at factory level.(here)

 Such violations require action grounded in the imaginaries of the human rights priorities of business in global production. 

As our data shows, allegations of labour rights abuse in the country's garment sector continue to increase, not just in frequency but also in severity. And while some brands have taken the decision to divest from Myanmar- including a new wave of companies during 2023, from Inditex to H&M and Lidl- many international fashion brands continue to profit from the political and economic status quo in the country. Three years after the coup and amid overwhelming evidence of attacks on worker rights and freedom of association and assembly, brands sourcing from Myanmar have an unequivocal obligation to conduct heightened human rights due diligence on their supply chains. (here).

Nonetheless it also suggests something else: dual circulation strategies for human rights in business. In this case brands might eventually be nudged into separating their operations.  For those brands subject to regimes of human rights that do not circulate directly within liberal democratic consumption chains one regime.  For them, both the domestic markets and the transnational regimes, the imaginaries of Socialist human rights apply--and with them the choices and values built into that system. These will sometimes align with other systems but sometimes not.  For domestic and transnational regimes within the the orbit of liberal democratic systems the contemporary imaginaries of internationalist human rights applies within the legalities of applicable context.  These are the regimes aligned with the human rights sensibilities that might (in one reading) be expressed as the BHRRC suggests (though there are other readings of the application of both the UNGP and national supply chain due diligence regimes). 

The application of regulatory regimes centered on human rights, then, may not be drawn as a function of physical territory, but rather as a function of production chains (discussed here: Are Supply Chains Transnational Legal Orders? What We Can Learn from the Rana Plaza Factory Building Collapse). In the context of Myanmar, that suggests that the application of legal or normative regimes within the territory of Myanmar will be a function of the production chain to which it will be applied. Those facing toward Socialist markets may be suggest to expectations quite different than those facing toward liberal democratic markets.  What follows for business is then fairly straightforward: brands might be faced with the reality of developing two production streams with two institutional structures nationalized within two distinct territoriality managed units. The result, of course, is then that the unitary analytics of reports such as those in Myanmar Garment Worker Allegations Tracker may be severely impacted, along with the ability of states and other actors to project their preferences beyond the production chains they control and the actors within them subject to the authority of their law. 

These are the questions and strategies that tend to be avoided by those whose preference is to push toward a unitary imaginary of incorporating human rights sensibilities into the compliance regimes of enterprises. They appear nowhere in either national legalization of international normative standards, nor are they anywhere near the construction of that project of international treaty making around human rights (though in fairness that effort might be written broadly enough to make it impossible to apply it within a single normative structure). Also avoided are the questions about the practical consequences of human rights compliance fracture for economic enterprises seeking to operate within production and consumption markets subject to sometimes incompatible systems. From the perspective of pragmatics, especially by those charged with developing and using productive forces, the consequences are easiy visible. The challenge for developing mimetic production chains operating independently then becomes the critical issue, rather than any challenge with respect to compliance within systems. States will seek to project their (unifying) authority to their broadest extent. Other states act to protect the integrity of their systems from inward projection from competitor systems.  Dividing business into context compatible operating systems within each offers the greatest opportunity for productive forces; and the greatest challenge for public authority.