Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation

Most people know little about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling for very low wages in terrible sweatshop conditions. This book is one of ongoing attempts to reverse the simplified view of Chinese labour. Recently, studies have broadened from an earlier focus on workplace relations in the industrial workplaces and factory workers, to include migrant workers in non-state industries, and take on added perspectives of gender, rural-urban hierarchy, etc. This book continues that trend, to better reflect the diversity and heterogeneity of the Chinese workforce and the Chinese workplace. 12 ethnographies of Chinese labour and workplace relations are collected here, including professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, and insurance agents. Ching Kwan Lee’s chapter, for example, uses examples from worker protests in Liaoyang to highlight the logic, limits and potential of ‘cellular’ activism—the prevailing mode of worker mobilization in China. Overall the book gives a rich and informative picture of how workers deal with socioeconomic change and new fields of work in current-day China.