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Introduction: Labor in a Changing China

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2008

Renqiu Yu
Renqiu Yu
Affiliation:
Purchase College, State University of New York
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Extract

The experiences of the Chinese workers illustrate most dramatically the profound changes taking place in contemporary China. No longer the “leading class” in a socialist country, as proclaimed in the Constitution, many of them, especially the migrant workers from rural areas and the retired, the laid-off, the new urban poor, and farmers, are now reduced to being “the weak groups.” They are voiceless and defenseless, the most vulnerable and desperate people in a society that is rapidly transforming itself through marketization and globalization.

Type
Labor in a Changing China
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 1 - 6
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working Class History, Inc 2008

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References

NOTES

1. Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers' Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart,” ILWCH 70 (Fall 2006): 106–25.

2. Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London, 1985); Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle (Berkeley, 1998) and Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley, 2007); Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Hong Kong, 2005); Anita Chan, China's Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (New York, 2001).

3. Kenneth Lieberthal, Governing China: From Revolution to Reform (New York, 2004), 204.

4. Huang Ping, Yao Yang, and Han Yuhai, Women de Shidai (Our Times) (Beijing, 2006), 317.

5. For example, see Li Qiang, Nongmingong yu Zhongguo Shehui Fenceng (Urban Migrant Workers and Social Stratification in China) (Beijing, 2004); Lu Xueyi, Sannong xinlun (On Farmers, Agriculture, and Countryside, II) (Beijing, 2005); Zou Xinshu, Zhongguo Chengshi Nongmingong wenti (Issues Concerning Chinese Urban Migrant Workers) (Beijing, 2007). The Chinese farmers own the land use right in their villages even when they migrate to work as workers in the cities. When the migrant workers become sick or unemployed, they return to their villages and their land provides them the ultimate security. See, Li Qiang, Nongmingong yu Zhongguo Shehui Fenceng, 278. For a brief discussion of the recent developments in the rural land markets, see Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Boston, 2007), 246–48.

6. For example, see Richard Belsky, Localities at the Center: Native Place, Space, and Power in Late Imperial Beijing (Boston, 2006).