How China Works

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.

Jacob Eyferth is assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He is the co-editor of Rural Development in Transitional China: The New Agriculture (London: Frank Cass 2003) and author of articles in The China Quarterly and the Journal of Peasant Studies.

1. How China Works: Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Workplace 2. Village Industries and the Making of Rural-Urban Difference in Early Twentieth-Century Shanxi 3. Socialist Deskilling: The Struggle over Skills in a Rural Craft Industry, 1949-1965 4. Commanding Heights Industrialization and Wage Determination in the Chinese Factory, 1950-1957 5. Industrial Involution: Recruitment and Development within the Railway System 6. Serving the State, Serving the People: Work in a Post-Socialist Department Store 7. Capital's Incorporation of Labor Rights and Corporate Codes of Conduct in a Chinese Dormitory Labor Regime 8. Work, Conformity, and Defiance: Strategies of Resistance and Control in China's Township and Village Enterprises 9. Labor on the "Floating Native Land": A Case Study of Seafarers on PRC Ocean-Going Ships