Download or read book The Chinese Worker After Socialism written by William Hurst and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-05 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This fascinating study considers the fate of 35 million workers laid off from the state-owned sector in China.
Download or read book Socialism Is Great written by Lijia Zhang and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2011-04-27 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Workers Democracy in China s Transition from State Socialism written by Stephen E. Philion and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-01-13 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Chinese Worker in the Nighties written by Sheila Oakley and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 146 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chinese Workers in Comparative Perspective written by Anita Chan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Chinese Workers written by Jackie Sheehan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Made in China written by Pun Ngai and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.
Download or read book Workers and Workplaces in Revolutionary China written by Stephen Andors and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-12-14 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Livelihood Struggles and Market Reform written by Ching Kwan Lee and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The surge of China as the workshop of the world has been founded on, among other things, a fundamental restructuring of the labour force. Massive unemployment in the state industrial sector is taking place simultaneously with momentous migration of peasants into global factories. Both the unmaking and the making of the Chinese working class are heavily shaped by the state. This paper traces the historical evolution of core changes in Chinese labour reform and worker entitlements: from the introduction of labour contracts to the promulgation of a national labour law, the demolition of work-unit socialism and its replacement with a national social security system. I also examine workers' livelihood struggles in response to this epochal transformation. The central problem for Chinese workers is not the new labour and welfare systems, but the wide discrepancies between the stipulation and the implementation of these new policies. The institutional source of these gaps, this paper argues, lies in two contradictions inherent in the strategy of Chinese reform. Firstly, the imperative to rely on local accumulation to fuel marketization clashes with the imperative to maintain legitimacy by providing a basic level of justice and welfare for the most disadvantaged. Local state agents are more interested in the former than the latter, especially when they can count on central government financial intervention to maintain social stability. The second contradiction in Chinese reform that is conducive to uneven protection of labour rights has to do with the illiberal nature of the Chinese legal system. The state uses the law as a means of controlling society, while allowing itself to remain mostly unrestrained by the law. When it is not in the interest of the local officials to enforce labour regulations, there is hardly enough countervailing authority-from the judiciary, for instance-to preserve the sanctity of the law. The result is that many workers, on seeing their legal rights and entitlements unjustly denied, and pressured by livelihood needs, become politically restive. Sharp increases of labour conflicts are accompanied by proliferation of labour activism, taking both conventional (that is, petition, labour arbitration and litigation) and unconventional (that is, protests, marches and road blockage) forms. The state has responded with measured mixes of concessions and repression. Economic and livelihood demands are recognized and, in many cases, at least partially answered by swift financial compensation doled out by the central or provincial governments. On the other hand, political demands such as those relating to the removal of officials and cross-factory actions are relentlessly suppressed and harshly punished. Protests notwithstanding, the Chinese Government has ardently pressed ahead with social security reform, targeting problem areas such as pension arrears, unpaid wages, unemployment benefits and medical insurance. Additional, earmarked funds are funneled from Beijing to provincial coffers to deal with social grievances that may erupt into social instability. There are also plans to systematically institutionalize the provision of legal aid to people who fall below a particular income level. Therefore, the Chinese state has responded to popular demands, if only slowly and selectively. Finally, both migrant workers and state workers are not totally dispossessed or proletarianized. Rural land rights for peasant migrants and private home ownership for state sector workers have functioned as safety valves to sooth the effects of massive unemployment and diabolical exploitation. Women in the two segments of the working-class examined here do face gender-specific difficulties. The disappearance of enterprise-based welfare means more demands put on the family unit to provide service and financial support. These domestic burdens are still borne predominantly by women. Also, women are among the first to be let go when enterprises restructure by down-sizing the workforce. Facing gendered disadvantages in the labour market, and under a welfare-entitlement regime based on employment rather than universal citizenship, female workers are likely to fall through the cracks of the new social safety net. The male bias in socialist allocation of housing in the past has inadvertently undermined women's opportunities to become homeowners when work units began privatizing welfare housing in the reform period. For young female migrants toiling in global factories, the lack of maternity benefits forces them to truncate their factory careers to give birth and take care of children and elderly kin. Recent legal changes in land use rights have the potential to encroach on women's equal access to land use, with grave long-term implications for female migrant workers' livelihood security. However, gender bias does not begin to capture the plight of millions of Chinese workers during the reform period. Middle-aged workers in the state sector, whether male or female, confront age discrimination, and migrant workers of both genders suffer from their caste-like status of being a rural resident. Unpaid wages and pensions will continue to plague the lives of both men and women in the working class, for as long as the legal system and the government fail to enforce the Labour Law.
Download or read book Adjusting to Capitalism written by Greg O'Leary and published by M.E. Sharpe. This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comprises a collection of papers which originated at a conference in Southern China at Shanton University, Guandong Province, in December 1995. Addresses issues including labour relations and, industrial and labour reforms in China.
Download or read book Against the Law written by Ching Kwan Lee and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2007-06-07 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Chinese Workers are Marching Forward to the Socialist Future written by and published by . This book was released on 1955 with total page 59 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Communist Road to Capitalism written by Ralf Ruckus and published by PM Press. This book was released on 2021-07-27 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Communist Road to Capitalism explores how a dynamic of social struggles from below followed by countermeasures of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regime has pushed the historical evolution of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since 1949. Under socialism until the mid-1970s, during the ensuing transition until the mid-1990s, and in the capitalist period since, the CCP regime responded to the struggles of workers, peasants, migrants, and women* with a mix of repression, concession, cooptation, and reform. Ralf Ruckus shows that this dynamic took the country into a new phase each time—and eventually all the way from socialism to capitalism: in the 1950s, labor struggles and the Hundred Flowers Movement were followed by the regime’s Great Leap Forward; in the 1960s, the Cultural Revolution led to the CCP’s failed attempt to revitalize socialism; in the 1970s, social unrest and movements for a democratic socialism made room for the regime’s Reform and Opening policies; in the late 1980s, the Tian’anmen Square uprising triggered more radical reforms; in the 1990s, peasant and state worker unrest could not stop the capitalist restructuring; and in the 2000s, migrant worker struggles led to concessions, tightened repression, and the regime’s global capitalist expansion strategy in the 2010s. The Communist Road to Capitalism breaks with established orthodoxies about the PRC’s socialist “successes” and myths on its later rise as an economic power. It combines a historiography of workers’, peasants’, migrants’, and women*’s struggles with a searing critique of exploitation, authoritarian state power and gender discrimination under socialism and capitalism. Drawing lessons from PRC history, Ralf Ruckus finally outlines political aims and methods for the left that avoid past mistakes and allow to fight on for a society free of all forms of exploitation and oppression.
Download or read book Other Modernities written by Lisa Rofel and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book Migrant Labor in China written by Pun Ngai and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long known as the world's factory, China is the largest manufacturing economy ever seen, accounting for more than 10% of global exports. China is also, of course, home to the largest workforce on the planet, the crucial element behind its staggering economic success. But who are China's workers who keep the machine running, and how is the labor process changing under economic reform? Pun Ngai, a leading expert in factory labor in China, charts the rise of China as a world workshop and the emergence of a new labor force in the context of the post-socialist transformations of the last three decades. The book analyzes the role of the state and transnational interests in creating a new migrant workforce deprived of many rights and social protection. As China increases its output of high-value, high-tech products, particularly for its own growing domestic market of middle-class consumers, workers are increasingly voicing their discontent through strikes and protest, creating new challenges for the Party-State and the global division of labor. Blending theory, politics, and real-world examples, this book will be an invaluable guide for upper-level students and non-specialists interested in China's economy and Chinese politics and society.
Download or read book Chinese Workers and Their State written by Greg O'Leary and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text examines the most economically critical and politically sensitive issues of China's reform process - labour market development, changing industrial relations, and labour-state and labour-capital conflict. It suggests that a system is emerging in China which is a form of capitalism.
Download or read book The Myth of Chinese Capitalism written by Dexter Roberts and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2020-03-10 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how restrictive policies are preventing China from becoming the world’s largest economy Dexter Roberts lived in Beijing for two decades working as a reporter on economics, business and politics for Bloomberg Businessweek. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Roberts explores the reality behind today’s financially-ascendant China and pulls the curtain back on how the Chinese manufacturing machine is actually powered. He focuses on two places: the village of Binghuacun in the province of Guizhou, one of China’s poorest regions that sends the highest proportion of its youth away to become migrants; and Dongguan, China’s most infamous factory town located in Guangdong, home to both the largest number of migrant workers and the country’s biggest manufacturing base. Within these two towns and the people that move between them, Roberts focuses on the story of the Mo family, former farmers-turned-migrant-workers who are struggling to make a living in a fast-changing country that relegates one-half of its people to second-class status via household registration, land tenure policies and inequality in education and health care systems. In The Myth of Chinese Capitalism, Dexter Roberts brings to life the problems that China and its people face today as they attempt to overcome a divisive system that poses a serious challenge to the country’s future development. In so doing, Roberts paints a boot-on-the-ground cautionary picture of China for a world now held in its financial thrall. Dexter Roberts is an award-winning journalist and a regular commentator on the U.S.-China trade and political relationship. His prior speaking engagements include traditional news media outlets (NPR, Fox News, CNN International) as well as universities and institutes (George Washington University, Council on Foreign Relations, and the Overseas Press Club). He is available for virtual classroom visits to courses that adopt The Myth of Chinese Capitalism. Please contact [email protected] for more information.
