Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour
In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since its humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for the Party: its claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. History, however, tells a more complex story. 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 reach today, Proletarian China reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the late imperial era. Each chapter revolves around a specific historical event, making the volume a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what being a worker meant, and how it was experienced, in China over the past century.
The book, co-edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, is available for purchase from Verso Books or for free download from our website.
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The Proletariat Is Dead, Long Live the Proletariat! | PDF
Ivan FRANCESCHINI and Christian SORACE
1898
‘A Cheaper Machine for the Work’ | PDF
Corey BYRNES
1902
Techno-Utopias and Robots in China’s Past Futures | PDF
Craig A. SMITH
1915
An Extraordinary Journey: Chinese Labourers on the Western Front during the Great War | PDF
XU Guoqi
1920
A Day Trip to Changxindian | PDF
DENG Zhongxia (translated by ZHOU Ruixue)
1921
Setting Sail: The Foundation of the Chinese Communist Party | PDF
LIN Chun
1922
The Anyuan Strike of 1922: Lessons in Leadership | PDF
Elizabeth J. PERRY
1923
The 7 February Massacre | PDF
LUO Zhanglong (translated by Tony SAICH)
1925
From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton–Hong Kong Strike | PDF
Apo LEONG
1925
Everyday Politics in Tianjin Factories | PDF
Gail HERSHATTER
1925
The Founding of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions | PDF
WANG Kan
1927
The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre | PDF
S.A. SMITH
1927
Organising Rural Society: Disintegrating Rural Governance, Peasant Associations, and the Hailufeng Soviet | PDF
Alexander F. DAY
1928
Feminist Agitation inside Chinese Factories | PDF
Yige DONG
1929
Striking for Rice: The Struggle for the ‘Rice Allowance’ in Republican China | PDF
Seung-Joon LEE
1938
Resurgence of Labour Activism in Prewar Hong Kong | PDF
LU Yan
1941
The New China Daily and the Moral Language of Class in Wartime Chongqing | PDF
Joshua H. HOWARD
1942
The Rise and Fall of Wu Manyou, China’s First Labour Hero | PDF
Bo Ærenlund SØRENSEN
1946
Production in Revolution: Agricultural and Political Labour during Land Reform | PDF
Brian DEMARE
1948
Women Workers and the Shanghai Cotton Mill Strike of 1948 | PDF
Emily HONIG
1949
On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship (Excerpt) | PDF
MAO Zedong
1949
Continuity and Change: Women Workers in the Early People’s Republic of China | PDF
Robert CLIVER
1949
A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II (1945–1950) | PDF
Po-chien CHEN and Yi-hung LIU
1951
Li Lisan on the Relationship between Management and Unions | PDF
LI Lisan
1951
Revolutionising the Factory through the Mass Political Campaign | PDF
Jake WERNER
1952
Housing the New Socialist Worker: The ‘Workers’ New Village’ in Shanghai | PDF
Mark W. FRAZIER
1952
The First Patriotic Locust Extermination Campaign: Rural Labour Mobilisation and Pest Control in the Early People’s Republic of China | PDF
John WILLIAMS
1955
The Short-Lived Eternity of Friendship: Chinese Workers in Socialist Mongolia (1955–1964) | PDF
Christian SORACE and Ruiyi ZHU
1957
How Do Unions Handle Contradictions among the People? | PDF
LAI Ruoyu
1957
Confronting the State: The Strike Wave of 1957 | PDF
CHEN Feng
1958
Beyond the Wage: Zhang Chunqiao, Bourgeois Right, and Maoism as Theory | PDF
Benjamin KINDLER
1958
Reorganising Chinese Labour: The Establishment of the Household Registration System | PDF
Jane HAYWARD
1960
Workers’ Peril in the Workers’ State: The Laobaidong Colliery Disaster | PDF
Tim WRIGHT
1960
The Angang Constitution: Labour, Industry and Bureaucracy during the Great Leap Forward | PDF
Koji HIRATA
1960
Production First, Life Second: The 1960 Ban on Hand Spinning and Hand Weaving | PDF
Jacob EYFERTH
1961
Anatomy of a Woman Worker: Collectivisation and Labour during the Great Leap Forward | PDF
Aminda SMITH and Fabio LANZA
1962
Working Together in Agricultural Production Teams: The Work Lives of the Majority of Chinese Under Mao | PDF
Jonathan UNGER
1963
Gods, Ghosts, and Workers: ‘Feudal Superstition’ and the Socialist Education Movement, 1963–1966 | PDF
S.A. SMITH
1964
Learning from the Daqing Oilfields | PDF
Maggie CLINTON
1964
The Third Front Campaign | PDF
Covell F. MEYSKENS
1967
The January Storm of 1967: From Representation to Action and Back Again | PDF
Patricia M. THORNTON
1967
The Hong Kong Riots of 1967 | PDF
Ray YEP
1968
The Establishment of the First Workers’ University | PDF
Andrea PIAZZAROLI LONGOBARDI
1969
‘Oppose Restoring the Old!’: The Culmination of the Rebel Workers’ Movement in Wuhan during the Cultural Revolution | PDF
Joel ANDREAS
1970
Building Uhuru: Chinese Workers and Labour Diplomacy on the Tan–Zam Railway | PDF
Matthew GALWAY
1972
Transforming Urban Youth into Peasants: The Maoist Rustication Movement of the 1960s–1970s | PDF
Michel BONNIN
1976
The Blank Exam: Crises of Student Labour and Activism in the Late Cultural Revolution Film Juelie | PDF
A.C. BAECKER
1980
Echoes of the Rise of Solidarity in Poland | PDF
Jeanne L. WILSON
1981
Abandoning Collective Farming and the Effects on Labour | PDF
Jonathan UNGER
1983
Dagongmei: Gendered Troubles in the City of Dreams | PDF
Mary Ann O’DONNELL
1986
Sex Workers in China: From Criminalisation and Abuse to Activism | PDF
Tiantian ZHENG
1988
The Lifting of Martial Law and the Rise of Taiwan’s Independent Labour Movement | PDF
Ming-sho HO
1989
Workers on Tiananmen Square | PDF
Yueran ZHANG
1993
Voices from the Zhili Fire: The Tragedy of a Toy Factory and the Conditions It Exposed | PDF
Anita CHAN
1994
One Law to Rule Them All: The First Labour Law of the People’s Republic of China | PDF
Sarah BIDDULPH
1995
From Green Shoots to Crushed Petals: Labour NGOs in China | PDF
Jude HOWELL
1995
The Blocked Path: Political Labour Organising in the Aftermath of the Tiananmen Crackdown | PDF
Kevin LIN
1997
Xiagang: The Fifteenth Party Congress and Mass Layoffs in State-Owned Enterprises | PDF
William HURST
2001
China Joins the World Trade Organization: Implications for Workers | PDF
Dorothy J. SOLINGER
2002
The Liaoyang Strike and the Unmaking of Mao’s Working Class in China’s Rustbelt | PDF
Ching Kwan LEE
2003
The Sun Zhigang Case | PDF
Chloé FROISSART
2007
Slaving Away: The ‘Black Brick Kilns Incident’ of 2007 | PDF
Ivan FRANCESCHINI
2008
The Labour Contract Law and Its Discontents | PDF
Mary E. GALLAGHER
2008
‘Make Contributions and Offer Your Youth for Tomorrow’s Dream’: The Establishment of the Shenzhen Migrant Worker Museum | PDF
Eric FLORENCE and Junxi QIAN
2009
Zhang Haichao’s ‘Open-Chest Case’ | PDF
Ralph LITZINGER and Yanping NI
2010
The Nanhai Honda Strike | PDF
Chris King-Chi CHAN and Elaine Sio-Ieng HUI
2010
The Foxconn Suicide Express | PDF
Jenny CHAN
2011
Rupture at the Centre: Evicting Migrant Schools in Beijing | PDF
Eli FRIEDMAN
2013
Chinese Workers on the Belt and Road | PDF
Aaron HALEGUA
2014
Bearing Witness to History: Dagong Poets from the 1980s to the Present | PDF
Wanning SUN
2014
The Yue Yuen Strike | PDF
Marc BLECHER
2015
Replacing Humans with Machines | PDF
HUANG Yu
2015
Labour NGOs under Assault | PDF
Chloé FROISSART and Ivan FRANCESCHINI
2018
The Jasic Struggle | PDF
Manfred ELFSTROM
2018
Factories of Turkic Muslim Internment | PDF
Darren BYLER
2019
The Birth of a New Trade Union Movement in Hong Kong | PDF
Anita CHAN
The Future
Folding Time: Futuristic Reflections on Class Divisions in Contemporary China | PDF
Carlos ROJAS
The Affective Fallacy | PDF
CHEN Qiufan
Acknowledgments | PDF
References | PDF
Contributors | PDF
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
