Workers And Workplaces In Revolutionary China

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.

State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

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.

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.

A century of complex relations between Communists and workers in China In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party’s humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China’s leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China’s global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This will be achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century. Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, J onathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O’Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chloé Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.

Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, How China Works examines the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China in both the Republican and People's Republic epochs. The international team of contributors treat China's twentieth-century revolution as an industrial revolution, stressing that China's recent emergence as the new workshop of the world was a gradual change, and not a recent phenomena led by external forces. Providing the reader with extensive ethnographic research on topics such as culture and community in the workplace, the rural-urban divide, industrialization, subcontracting and employment practices, How China Works really does ground the study of Chinese work in the daily interactions in the workplace, the labour process and the micropolitics of work.

“Great themes run through this book: local differentiation and societal integration, reform and revolution, innovation and renewal, conservatism and radicalism, tradition and modernity. All relate to the fascinating dialectic of Chinese history.” This comment by G. William Skinner aptly describes this pioneering volume in which twelve specialists in Chinese history discuss the great questions of history in the dramatic context of the “New China” of the early twentieth century. The work of young scholars from seven countries who have had access to Chinese, British, and French archives opened only in recent years, the book provides new findings that presage not only a reinterpretation of the Revolution of 1911 itself but also of the dynamic links between Imperial China and both the communist revolution of 1927-49 and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of today. "An outstanding example of historians’ inquiries is this collection of essays by 12 authorities, brilliantly edited by Mary Wright of Yale. Brilliant because unlike most such cooperative endeavors, the studies in this volume focus on a single major topic, China in the years around the revolution of 1911. The papers vary in scope, from a general interpretation of the origins of the warlord armies, which were to dominate Chinese political life until the mid-twenties, to a fascinating reconstruction of events hour-by-hour during the first week of the revolution in the city where it began, Wuchang. . . . This important work is bound to have a great impact on our understanding of modern China, and will surely stimulate further research in the period."—New York Times Book Review "Will set a style for ten to twenty years hence by all scholars of the subject."—John K. Fairbank.