This fascinating study considers the fate of 35 million workers laid off from the state-owned sector in China.

With a great charm and spirit, "Socialism Is Great!" recounts Lijia Zhang's rebellious journey from disillusioned factory worker to organizer in support of the Tiananmen Square demonstrators, to eventually become the writer and journalist she was always determined to be. Her memoir is like a brilliant minature illuminating the sweeping historical forces at work in China after the Cultural Revolution as the country moved from one of stark repression to a vibrant capitalist economy.

This fascinating book is among the first to examine state workers’ protests against privatization in China. Philion discusses how Chinese state enterprise workers have engaged a discourse of ‘workers democracy’ in the process of struggle with the new social relations of work that are engendered by privatization oriented policies in China today. By the 1990s, this discourse was being deployed by the state in an effort to minimize the social obligations of the Party and enterprise to state workers and to win the latter over to faith in markets. Philion reveals that Chinese workers have recently engaged this discourse in order to do something they never envisioned having to do: fight for what Chinese state socialism had always promised them as the ‘masters of the factory’, namely the right to a job and basic social security.

"Cogent, evocative, and theoretically rigorous. I know of no one else who has so artfully delineated the complex, heterogeneous effects of political mobilization on the formation of collective and individual subjectivities."—Dorinne Kondo, author of Crafting Selves

As the "world’s factory" China exerts an enormous pressure on workers around the world. Many nations have had to adjust to a new global political and economic reality, and so has China. Its workers and its official trade union federation have had to contend with rapid changes in industrial relations. Anita Chan argues that Chinese labor is too often viewed from a prism of exceptionalism and too rarely examined comparatively, even though valuable insights can be derived by analyzing China’s workforce and labor relations side by side with the systems of other nations. The contributors to Chinese Workers in Comparative Perspective compare labor issues in China with those in the United States, Australia, Japan, India, Pakistan, Germany, Russia, Vietnam, and Taiwan. They also draw contrasts among different types of workplaces within China. The chapters address labor regimes and standards, describe efforts to reshape industrial relations to improve the circumstances of workers, and compare historical and structural developments in China and other industrial relations systems.

Jackie Sheehan traces the background and development of workers clashes with the Chinese Communist Party through mass campaigns such as the 1956-7 Hundred Flowers movement, the Cultural Revolution, the April Fifth Movement of 1976, Democracy Wall and the 1989 Democracy Movement. The author provides the most detailed and complete picture of workers protest in China to date and locates their position within the context of Chinese political history. Chinese Workers demonstrates that the image of Chinese workers as politically conformist and reliable supporters of the Communist Party does not match the realities of industrial life in China. Recent outbreaks of protest by workers are less of a departure from the past than is generally realized.

This powerful 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 dissects the world of Chinese workers today and finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Intense working-class agitation is being spurred by massive unemployment of Mao's socialist proletariat in the northern rustbelt and by the exploitation of millions of young workers in the southern sunbelt. Providing a broad comparative political and economic analysis of the vast mosaic of this labor struggle together with unprecedented fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the multi-faceted humanity of the Chinese working class as their stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at heroic moments of street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.

Workers and Workplaces in Revolutionary China collates documents detailing the conflict and politics of Chinese industrial development in the 1970s. Originally published in 1974, issues discussed in this volume include socialism, the harbour docks in china and tobacco factory workers. This title will be of interest to students of Asian studies, anthropology and politics.