Labor Activists And The New Working Class In China

This project provides an in-depth study of the role of worker-activist leaders in industrial strikes in China, a country where labor rights face significant challenges from state and industry suppression and by current lack of formal organization.

This work is an important addition to the rather limited literature on the social history of China during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on abundant sources and studies which have appeared in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s and which have not been systematically used in Western historiography. China has undergone a series of fundamental political transformations: from the 1911 Revolution that toppled the imperial system to the victory of the communists, all of which were greatly affected by labor unrest. This work places the politics of Chinese workers in comparative perspective and a remarkably comprehensive and nuanced picture of Chinese labor emerges from it, based on a wealth of primary materials. It joins the concerns of 'new labor history' for workers' culture and shopfloor conditions with a more conventional focus on strikes, unions, and political parties. As a result, the author is able to explore the linkage between social protest and state formation.

This project provides an in-depth study of the role of worker-activist leaders in industrial strikes in China, a country where labor rights face significant challenges from state and industry suppression and by current lack of formal organization.

This book engages with Foucault’s theoretical works to understand the (re-) making of the working-class in China. In so doing, the author applies Foucault’s genealogical (historicalization) method to explore the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) develop Chinese governmentality (or government of mentalities) among everyday workers in its thought management system. Through the investigation of the key events in Chinese history, she presents how China’s stable political party is sustained through the CCP’s ability to retain, update and incorporate many Confucian discourses into its contemporary form of thought management system using social networks, such as families and schools, to continuously (re-) shape workers’ consciousness into one that maintains their docility. This book will bring a new voice to the debate of Chinese working-class politics and labour movements. It will serve as a gateway to comprehensive knowledge about China for students and academics with interests in Chinese employment relations, Chinese politics, labourist activist culture, and social movements.

This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. Arguing that labor was working at cross purposes, the authors explore three distinctive and different forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement, convincingly illustrating the complexity of working-class politics in contemporary China. }This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement. As they convincingly illustrate, the multiplicity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution cautions against a one-dimensional portrait of working-class politics in contemporary China. }

This book brings a radically new voice to the debate in the field of Chinese politics and labor movement. Using a psychological and cognitive approach, the author examines workers and activists’ everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, their prospect of labor movements, and their sense of solidarity. The project shows how workers themselves have become a part of the apparatus of state repression and argues that Chinese workers have not acquired sufficient cognitive strength to become the much hoped-for agent for political change, which hinders labor activism from developing into a sustainable social movement. Multidisciplinary in its approach, the monograph provides analysis of Chinese politics, labor studies, international political economy, social movements, and contentious politics.

China has been the fastest growing major economy in the world for three decades. It is also home to some of the largest, most incendiary, and most underreported labor struggles of our time. China on Strike, the first English-language book of its kind, provides an intimate and revealing window into the lives of workers organizing in some of China’s most profitable factories, which supply Apple, Nike, Hewlett Packard, and other multinational companies. Drawing on dozens of interviews with Chinese workers, this book documents the processes of migration, changing employment relations, worker culture, and other issues related to China’s explosive growth.

Applying an original theoretical framework, an international group of historians and social scientists here explores how class, rather than other social bonds, became central to the ideologies, dispositions, and actions of working people, and how this process was translated into diverse institutional legacies and political outcomes. Focusing principally on France. Germany, and the United States, the contributors examine the historically contingent connections between class, as objectively structured and experienced, and collective perceptions and responses as they develop in work, community, and politics. Following Ira Katznelson's introduction of the analytical concepts, William H. Sewell, Jr., Michelle Perrot, and Alain Cottereau discuss France; Amy Bridges and Martin Shefter, the United States; and Jargen Kocka and Mary Nolan, Germany. The conclusion by Aristide R. Zolberg comments on working-class formation up to World War I, including developments in Great Britain, and challenges conventional wisdom about class and politics in the industrializing West.