As China consolidates its position as the world's premier industrial workshop, scholars have debated the impact of this transformation on the global economy and, just as importantly, on China's workers. How have they fared in the often gut-wrenching transition from socialism to capitalism? Why have their protests against oppressive, even inhumane, working conditions and treatment not precipitated enduring change? Ching Kwan Lee answers these questions through a remarkably comprehensive and trenchant analysis of the challenges that Chinese workers face and their strategies for survival. Combining an unsurpassed eye for fine-grained ethnographic detail with a theoretically sophisticated macro-level analysis, this study is an example of scholarship at its best: passionate, thoughtful, and critical.
Although this book builds on Lee's earlier study, Gender and the South China Miracle (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), it goes well beyond it by persuasively arguing that the differing modes of worker protest...
