The Made in China Journal is a forum that seeks to facilitate critical discussion and engagement with a broad international audience on topics related to labour, civil society, and rights in contemporary China.
Questioning Chinese Labour and Investment in Africa
July–September 2016
The core of this issue is dedicated to a special section on Chinese labour and investment in Africa, with a specific focus on Ghana and Zambia. You will also find an analysis of the current situation of the Chinese working classes and the prospects for the political representation of labour in China, as well as an examination of the struggles that Chinese workers face when they attempt to access the legal system. The issue also includes an overview of recent worker struggles in India and an essay on Zhao Liang’s Behemoth.
A unique contribution to the literature on the resistance of Chinese migrant workers, China on Strike is a collection of stories of collective actions undertaken by migrant workers in the Pearl River Delta since the turn of the century. Authored by Chinese labour activist Hao Ren as part of an activist network and edited in English by […]
On 17 July, Chinese labour activists commemorated the second anniversary of the death of Zhou Jianrong, a forty-nine-year-old worker at a Hong Kong-owned footwear factory in Shenzhen. Two years ago, Zhou committed suicide by jumping out of her dormitory after being fired for her role in organising a strike. Since May 2014, Zhou and her […]
On 16 June, Lu Yuyu and his partner Li Tingyu, chroniclers of protests in China on their website Wickedonna, were detained in the southwestern city of Dali, Yunnan province, where they lived. They are accused of ‘picking quarrels and provoking troubles’, a charge that is often used to silence activists in China. Since 2012, the […]
On 31 May, prosecutors in Inner Mongolia announced the indictment of seventy-four people for the killing of seventeen mine workers. The killings were for the purpose of faking mining accidents in order to blackmail mine owners running unlicensed operations into paying compensation. The compensation payments ranged from five to eight hundred thousand yuan. In a […]
On 16 May, Walmart announced a new flexible scheduling system—the so-called ‘comprehensive working hour calculation system’—to be implemented across its retail stores in China, and asked its employees to sign a written declaration in which they agree to the new system. In contrast to the current standard eight-hour working day for fulltime workers, with the […]
On 28 April, the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, passed the long-awaited Law on the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activities within Mainland China. The new Law, which comes into effect on 1 January 2017, fills a grey area in the Chinese legal system, stipulating that any foreign group wishing to operate in China must […]
On 22 April, the local authorities of Zhengzhou, Henan province, released a set of ‘Draft Regulations on the Construction Market’, giving the public one month to provide feedback. The Regulations, which aimed at ‘standardising the management of the construction market, protecting the order of the construction market, and guaranteeing the legal rights and interests of […]
On 8 April, He Xiaobo, one of the labour activists taken into custody in early December 2015, was released on bail after being charged with embezzlement. A forty-two-year-old former migrant worker, He is the director of the Nanfeiyan Social Work Service Centre, an NGO based in Foshan, Guangdong, that specialises in providing legal aid to […]
According to Yin Weimin, Minister for Human Resources and Social Security, 1.8 million workers in the coal and steel industries will be laid off as part of the government’s efforts to curb industrial overcapacity and pollution. However, other sources say as many as five to six million workers could lose their jobs. The so-called ‘zombie’ […]
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