Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour
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, Proletarian China 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.
The book, co-edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, is forthcoming with Verso Books in June 2022 but will also be available open access on our website.
Table of Contents
The Proletariat Is Dead, Long Live the Proletariat! – Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace
- 1898: ‘A Cheaper Machine for the Work’ – Corey Byrnes
- 1902: Techno-Utopias and Robots in China’s Past Futures – Craig A. Smith
- 1915: An Extraordinary Journey: Chinese Labourers on the Western Front during the Great War – Xu Guoqi
- 1920: A Day Trip to Changxindian – Deng Zhongxia (translated by Zhou Ruixue)
- 1921: Setting Sail: The Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party – Lin Chun
- 1922: The Anyuan Strike of 1922: Lessons in Leadership – Elizabeth J. Perry
- 1923: The 7 February Massacre – Luo Zhanglong (translated by Tony Saich)
- 1925: From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton–Hong Kong Strike (Apo Leong)
- 1925: Everyday Politics in Tianjin Factories – Gail Hershatter
- 1925: The Founding of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions – Wang Kan
- 1927: The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre – S.A. Smith
- 1927: Organising Rural Society: Disintegrating Rural Governance, Peasant Associations, and the Hailufeng Soviet – Alexander F. Day
- 1928: Feminist Agitation inside Chinese Factories – Yige Dong
- 1929: Striking for Rice: The Struggle for the ‘Rice Allowance’ in Republican China – Seung-Joon Lee
- 1938: Resurgence of Labour Activism in Prewar Hong Kong – Lu Yan
- 1941: The New China Daily and the Moral Language of Class in Wartime Chongqing – Joshua H. Howard
- 1942: The Rise and Fall of Wu Manyou, China’s First Labour Hero – Bo Ærenlund Sørensen
- 1946: Production in Revolution: Agricultural and Political Labour during Land Reform – Brian DeMare
- 1948: Women Workers and the Shanghai Cotton Mill Strike of 1948 – Emily Honig
- 1949: On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship (Excerpt) – Mao Zedong
- 1949: Continuity and Change: Women Workers in the Early People’s Republic of China – Robert Cliver
- 1949: A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II (1945–1950) – Po-chien Chen and Yi-hung Liu
- 1951: Li Lisan on the Relationship between Management and Unions – Li Lisan (translated by Malcolm Thompson)
- 1951: Revolutionising the Factory through the Mass Political Campaign – Jake Werner
- 1952: Housing the New Socialist Worker: The ‘Workers’ New Village’ in Shanghai – Mark W. Frazier
- 1952: The First Patriotic Locust Extermination Campaign: Rural Labour Mobilisation and Pest Control in the Early People’s Republic of China – John Williams
- 1955: The Short-Lived Eternity of Friendship: Chinese Workers in Socialist Mongolia (1955–1964) – Christian Sorace and Ruiyi Zhu
- 1957: How Do Unions Handle Contradictions among the People? – Lai Ruoyu (translated by Malcolm Thompson)
- 1957: Confronting the State: The Strike Wave of 1957 – Chen Feng
- 1958: Beyond the Wage: Zhang Chunqiao, Bourgeois Right, and Maoism as Theory – Benjamin Kindler
- 1958: Reorganising Chinese Labour: The Establishment of the Household Registration System – Jane Hayward
- 1960: Workers’ Peril in the Workers’ State: The Laobaidong Colliery Disaster – Tim Wright
- 1960: The Angang Constitution: Labour, Industry and Bureaucracy during the Great Leap Forward – Koji Hirata
- 1960: Production First, Life Second: The 1960 Ban on Hand Spinning and Hand Weaving – Jacob Eyferth
- 1961: Anatomy of a Woman Worker: Collectivisation and Labour during the Great Leap Forward – Aminda Smith and Fabio Lanza
- 1962: Working Together in Agricultural Production Teams: The Work Lives of the Majority of Chinese Under Mao – Jonathan Unger
- 1963: Gods, Ghosts, and Workers: ‘Feudal Superstition’ and the Socialist Education Movement, 1963–1966 – S.A. Smith
- 1964: Learning from the Daqing Oilfields – Maggie Clinton
- 1964: The Third Front Campaign – Covell F. Meyskens
- 1967: The January Storm of 1967: From Representation to Action and Back Again – Patricia M. Thornton
- 1967: The Hong Kong Riots of 1967 – Ray Yep
- 1968: The Establishment of the First Workers’ University – Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi
- 1969: ‘Oppose Restoring the Old!’: The Culmination of the Rebel Workers’ Movement in Wuhan during the Cultural Revolution – Joel Andreas
- 1970: Building Uhuru: Chinese Workers and Labour Diplomacy on the Tan–Zam Railway – Matthew Galway
- 1972: Transforming Urban Youth into Peasants: The Maoist Rustication Movement of the 1960s–1970s – Michel Bonnin
- 1976: The Blank Exam: Crises of Student Labour and Activism in the Late Cultural Revolution Film Juelie – A.C. Baecker
- 1980: Echoes of the Rise of Solidarity in Poland – Jeanne L. Wilson
- 1981: Abandoning Collective Farming and the Effects on Labour – Jonathan Unger
- 1983: Dagongmei: Gendered Troubles in the City of Dreams – Mary Ann O’Donnell
- 1986: Sex Workers in China: From Criminalisation and Abuse to Activism – Tiantian Zheng
- 1988: The Lifting of Martial Law and the Rise of Taiwan’s Independent Labour Movement – Ming-sho Ho
- 1989: Workers on Tiananmen Square – Yueran Zhang
- 1993: Voices from the Zhili Fire: The Tragedy of a Toy Factory and the Conditions It Exposed – Anita Chan
- 1994: One Law to Rule Them All: The First Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China – Sarah Biddulph
- 1995: From Green Shoots to Crushed Petals: Labour NGOs in China – Jude Howell
- 1995: The Blocked Path: Political Labour Organising in the Aftermath of the Tiananmen Crackdown – Kevin Lin
- 1997: Xiagang: The Fifteenth Party Congress and Mass Layoffs in State-Owned Enterprises – William Hurst
- 2001: China Joins the World Trade Organization: Implications for Workers – Dorothy J. Solinger
- 2002: The Liaoyang Strike and the Unmaking of Mao’s Working Class in China’s Rustbelt – Ching Kwan Lee
- 2003: The Sun Zhigang Case – Chloé Froissart
- 2007: Slaving Away: The ‘Black Brick Kilns Incident’ of 2007 – Ivan Franceschini
- 2008: The Labour Contract Law and Its Discontents – Mary E. Gallagher
- 2008: ‘Make Contributions and Offer Your Youth for Tomorrow’s Dream’: The Establishment of the Shenzhen Migrant Worker Museum – Eric Florence and Junxi Qian
- 2009: Zhang Haichao’s ‘Open-Chest Case’ – Ralph Litzinger and Yanping Ni
- 2010: The Nanhai Honda Strike – Chris King-Chi Chan and Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui
- 2010: The Foxconn Suicide Express – Jenny Chan
- 2011: Rupture at the Centre: Evicting Migrant Schools in Beijing – Eli Friedman
- 2013: Chinese Workers on the Belt and Road – Aaron Halegua
- 2014: Bearing Witness to History: Dagong Poets from the 1980s to the Present – Wanning Sun
- 2014: The Yue Yuen Strike – Marc Blecher
- 2015: Replacing Humans with Machines – Huang Yu
- 2015: Labour NGOs under Assault – Chloé Froissart and Ivan Franceschini
- 2018: The Jasic Struggle – Manfred Elfstrom
- 2018: Factories of Turkic Muslim Internment – Darren Byler
- 2019: The Birth of a New Trade Union Movement in Hong Kong – Anita Chan
- The Future: Folding Time: Futuristic Reflections on Class Divisions in Contemporary China – Carlos Rojas
- The Future: The Affective Fallacy – Chen Qiufan
Reviews
‘This volume offers an exciting engagement with the extended historical event of the proletariat in China. Through dialogue between past and present and among scholars across the globe, the anthology’s chronological organization makes it ideal for teaching, research, and casual reading. More important, the march of time demonstrates how workers as a class made themselves into a proletariat even as they were simultaneously unmade through state repression, capitalist advance, internal division, and globalized diffusion. In its insistence that any genuine commitment to communism take seriously the proletariat as a specifically laboring class, this book marks out a clear political position. The individual chapters are short, readable, informative, and passionate.’ – Rebecca E. Karl, New York University, History Department
‘This is not a history of Chinese labour or the Chinese labour movement. Proletarian China is rather a chronicle of insurgency, of a proletarian politics that again and again opens and disrupts spaces of representation. The Chinese Communist Party is of course implied in this history, which nevertheless goes well beyond it and often challenges it. A century of proletarian struggles, uprisings, and dreams parades before readers’ eyes composing another history of contemporary China and at the same time inciting to imagine the future anew—in China and beyond. This is a remarkable book!’ – Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna
‘A tour de force! A single book that covers an entire century of the Chinese working class, its various phases, diverse voices, and hopes for the future. As it is customary for the Made in China Journal, the most salient thoughts and reflections are collected here.’ – Luigi Tomba, University of Sydney
