China's growth was, until recently, considered unstoppable. The world's manufacturing hubs were increasingly clustered in southern China and the country's influence was building in Asia and Latin America. It was a matter of when, not if, the country would overtake the US as the world's largest national economy. Its astounding resilience during the protracted crisis of the global economy suggested as much.

In 2012, however, China's seeming insulation from global trends ended. Factory output contracted, and there was a deepening problem of "labour oversupply". So why is now the time for the government to think about more effective union representation for the country's workforce? When everywhere else the answer is to smash unions, the better to drive down wages, why is the Chinese answer seemingly different?

Part of the answer is the threat of constant labour unrest outside of an official union. Strikes broke out again in the notorious Foxconn factory again this January, over seasonal bonuses. During "off" seasons, workers receive only 1,100RMB, the equivalent of £112 a month, and less than half of what they receive during "peak" seasons. But recent strikes have also taken place over the ways in which management rule, and their attempts to dictate the work process itself. In the last few years, there have been convulsive rebellions. Riots by migrant workers in 2011 and 2012 seemed to threaten a wider, politicised reaction to the authoritarian regime and forms of exploitation it maintains.

Managing the country's vast labour migration system, one of the assets that has enabled its prolonged growth, is essential to China's current growth model. Migrant workers make up most of the workforce. Cities have swollen, sucking in a newly urbanised proletariat that can be forced to work seven-day weeks, and which needn't always be paid on time, or at all. Employers have the advantage of knowing that workers still get more from working in these factories than they could in the villages.

Within and around these cities, mini-metropolises masquerade as factories. Foxconn's facility near Shenzhen, where workers can eat and sleep on site, is a little city in itself, with its own security force independent of the police. They are redolent of textile towns in the southern US, except that the mill towns were built for permanent residence. The sprawling Foxconn industrial estate has no such purpose; it is built for neoliberalism, not paternalism. Nonetheless, these facilities depress the cost of labour, since the owners don't have to worry about supporting a permanent urban residential living standard for the workforce.

Yet 70% of strikes in the last decade have been in the manufacturing sector, and the leaders of the new militancy are generally young migrant workers. Sometimes, this "migrant" status is purely official, since many workers are now the children of migrant workers who have grown up in the city, with their expectations moulded accordingly. Moreover, this generation deploys a sophisticated strategy of using social media and instant messaging to co-ordinate strike actions and discuss affairs out of the hearing of management or the state. The current labour system is clearly endangered.

A key threat for the Chinese government is that since the existing unions are incapable of representing workers, they may begin to find their own representation. Thus far, workers have mainly struggled to make the official unions, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), more democratic rather than to replace it. But workers take action independently of the ACFTU, and it is increasingly common for them to elect their own representatives for the duration. This signals a degree of confidence that the employers should fear. Were Chinese workers to achieve a democratic union system on their own terms, their demands may become uncontrollable.

This is most likely why the government is increasingly anxious to institutionalise workers' resistance: to slow it down and manage it through a bargaining process rather than risk continual, sometimes violent conflict. As the historian Frances Fox Piven noted in her study of poor people's movements, workers have achieved most in phases of disruptive militancy. Their gains have been subsequently institutionalised, as targeted companies offered official, legalised channels of dialogue. This both recognised workers' claims and impeded their ability to make further gains. This is why, for example, Ford motors dropped its vicious, violent union-busting strategy after the radical 1930s, and instead opted for a corporatist system based on bargaining.

Foxconn pledges to hold union elections later this year, involving 1.2 million workers, perhaps a tentative first step toward institutionalising this conflict. And if China is to be subject to the same precarity that has afflicted the rest of the world, the regime will be grateful for any predictability this brings.