Back in 2017, the Discovery Channel aired China: Time of Xi, a slick documentary series presenting China as a dynamic nation on the cutting edge under the stewardship of its ‘people-centred’ President, Xi Jinping. While by most accounts the series was simply good programming featuring renowned international personalities, this essays takes a more critical look at the circumstances surrounding the production, arguing that there was more to it than it meets the eye.

Photography has always been a powerful tool to depict the lives of workers in China. Whereas during the Mao period political control over image production in China created a visual hegemony that glorified socialism and class struggle, more recent digital developments have enabled ordinary Chinese citizens and workers to document their lives and circulate these images online.

The increasing popularity of social media usage in the workplace, as well as rapid advancements in workplace surveillance technology, have made it easier for employers in China—as elsewhere—to access a vast quantity of information on employees’ social media networks. Considering that Chinese privacy and personal data protection laws have been relatively weak, there have been a growing number of cases brought before courts in China involving employer access to, and use of, employee social media content. This essay examines a number of these cases.

The recent growth of China’s platform economy is jaw-dropping. What Chinese platform workers have experienced is the epitome of the intertwining transformations that digital technologies have engendered, not only in the Chinese economy and society, but also in global capitalism more generally. This essay argues that a better understanding of the situation of these workers will inform us about China’s economic conditions and provide a glimpse into the future of Chinese labour struggles.

Representations of workers in public discourse in China have changed dramatically over recent decades. Taking a long historical view, this essay retraces the shifting narratives of the Chinese working class since the Maoist era. It does so by describing the role played by the media, not only in determining and framing working-class identity politics, but also in influencing the outcomes of worker struggles.

We’ve entered a grey area: we’re not organisations anymore, and maybe in the future we’ll be reduced to only a few individuals.   This was the ominous prediction of one Chinese labour activist in Shenzhen in 2016. If we consider that these words were proffered in the midst of the worst crackdown that labour NGOs […]

With China being the world’s largest market for industrial robots, robotisation has become a hot topic in the Chinese public discourse. While media reactions have been polarised between those who fear large-scale displacement and those who emphasise the rise of newly created jobs, there has been little solid research looking into the impact of robotisation on labour market and shop floor dynamics. In this essay, Huang Yu assesses both the ‘robot threat’ and the ‘robot dividend’ discourses, offering some views on how workers should react to the ongoing technological revolution.

In recent years, there has been rising activism among temporary agency workers—workers who are hired through labour agencies and are now a main component of the Chinese workforce across sectors. Several high-profile struggles by agency workers in the automotive industry have highlighted their grievances and their ability to mobilise. This includes collective actions from workers […]

In recent years, rising labour costs and unstable market conditions characteristic of China’s garment manufacturing sector in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region have prompted former migrant workers and small-scale entrepreneurs to move their wholesaling and informal manufacturing activities to interior provinces. Their entrepreneurial activities restructure global supply chains by using logistical and transport systems […]

After four decades of rural-to-urban migration, the class identity of more than 280 million rural migrant workers in China remains ambiguous. Many scholars have attempted to capture the transformation of their identity from ‘peasants’ to ‘workers’ by resorting to such labels as ‘new industrial workers’ (xin chanye gongren), ‘semi-proletariat’, ‘full proletariat’, ‘precarious proletariat’ (buwending wuchanzhe), […]