Chinese Working-Class Lives

Chinese Working-Class Lives PDF Author: Hill Gates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501719920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taiwan’s working class has been shaped by Chinese tradition, by colonialism, and by rapid industrialization. This book defines that class, explores that history, and presents with sensitive honesty the life experiences of some of its women and men. Hill Gates first provides a solid and informative introduction to Taiwan’s history, showing how mainland China, Japan, the convulsions of twentieth-century wars, and the East Asian economic expansion interacted in forming Taiwanese urban life. She introduces nine individuals from Taiwan’s three major ethnic groups to tell the stories of their lives in their own words. The narrators include a fortuneteller, a woman laborer, and a retired air force mechanic. A former spirit medium and a janitor are among the others who speak.

Chinese Working-Class Lives

Chinese Working-Class Lives PDF Author: Hill Gates
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501719920
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Taiwan’s working class has been shaped by Chinese tradition, by colonialism, and by rapid industrialization. This book defines that class, explores that history, and presents with sensitive honesty the life experiences of some of its women and men. Hill Gates first provides a solid and informative introduction to Taiwan’s history, showing how mainland China, Japan, the convulsions of twentieth-century wars, and the East Asian economic expansion interacted in forming Taiwanese urban life. She introduces nine individuals from Taiwan’s three major ethnic groups to tell the stories of their lives in their own words. The narrators include a fortuneteller, a woman laborer, and a retired air force mechanic. A former spirit medium and a janitor are among the others who speak.

In Search of Paradise

In Search of Paradise PDF Author: Li Zhang
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801458196
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new revolution in homeownership and living has been sweeping the booming cities of China. This time the main actors on the social stage are not peasants, migrants, or working-class proletariats but middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs in search of a private paradise in a society now dominated by consumerism. No longer seeking happiness and fulfillment through collective sacrifice and socialist ideals, they hope to find material comfort and social distinction in newly constructed gated communities. This quest for the good life is profoundly transforming the physical and social landscapes of urban China. Li Zhang, who is from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, turns a keen ethnographic eye on her hometown. She combines her analysis of larger political and social issues with fine-grained details about the profound spatial, cultural, and political effects of the shift in the way Chinese urban residents live their lives and think about themselves. In Search of Paradise is a deeply informed account of how the rise of private homeownership is reconfiguring urban space, class subjects, gender selfhood, and ways of life in the reform era. New, seemingly individualistic lifestyles mark a dramatic move away from yearning for a social utopia under Maoist socialism. Yet the privatization of property and urban living have engendered a simultaneous movement of public engagement among homeowners as they confront the encroaching power of the developers. This double movement of privatized living and public sphere activism, Zhang finds, is a distinctive feature of the cultural politics of the middle classes in contemporary China. Theoretically sophisticated and highly accessible, Zhang's account will appeal not only to those interested in China but also to anyone interested in spatial politics, middle-class culture, and postsocialist governing in a globalizing world.

Rural Origins, City Lives

Rural Origins, City Lives PDF Author: Roberta Zavoretti
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029599925X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary China Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.

Building China

Building China PDF Author: Sarah Swider
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501701711
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
Roughly 260 million workers in China have participated in a mass migration of peasants moving into the cities, and construction workers account for almost half of them. In Building China, Sarah Swider draws on her research in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai between 2004 and 2012, including living in an enclave, working on construction jobsites, and interviews with eighty-three migrants, managers, and labor contractors. This ethnography focuses on the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers. It adds to our understanding of China's new working class, the deepening rural-urban divide, and the growing number of undocumented migrants working outside the protection of labor laws and regulation. Swider shows how these migrants—members of the global "precariat," an emergent social force based on vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty—are changing China's class structure and what this means for the prospects for an independent labor movement.The workers who build and serve Chinese cities, along with those who produce goods for the world to consume, are mostly migrant workers. They, or their parents, grew up in the countryside; they are farmers who left the fields and migrated to the cities to find work. Informal workers—who represent a large segment of the emerging workforce—do not fit the traditional model of industrial wage workers. Although they have not been incorporated into the new legal framework that helps define and legitimize China's decentralized legal authoritarian regime, they have emerged as a central component of China's economic success and an important source of labor resistance.

Working Class Formation in Taiwan

Working Class Formation in Taiwan PDF Author: Ming-sho Ho
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781137404763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book offers a fresh look at Taiwan's state workers in from the postwar period to the present day and examines the rise and fall of labor insurgency in the past two decades. Challenging the conventional image of docile working class, it unearths a series of workers resistance, hidden and public, in a high authoritarian era.

China on Strike

China on Strike PDF Author: Zhongjin Li
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608465802
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Get Book Here

Book Description
China has been the fastest growing major economy in the world for three decades. It is also home to some of the largest, most incendiary, and most underreported labor struggles of our time. China on Strike, the first English-language book of its kind, provides an intimate and revealing window into the lives of workers organizing in some of China’s most profitable factories, which supply Apple, Nike, Hewlett Packard, and other multinational companies. Drawing on dozens of interviews with Chinese workers, this book documents the processes of migration, changing employment relations, worker culture, and other issues related to China’s explosive growth.

Live Working Or Die Fighting

Live Working Or Die Fighting PDF Author: Paul Mason
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608460703
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 325

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This is micro-historical writing at its best."--Walden Bello, author of Dilemmas of Domination "Brilliant."--Ken Loach The stories in this book come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child laborers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America's Wild West, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War I. It is a story of urban slums, self-help cooperatives, choirs and brass bands, free love, and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world, it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism, and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book. Paul Mason is an award-winning journalist who reports regularly on labor rights and social justice stories as economics editor for BBC World News America and BBC Newsnight. In addition to Live Working or Die Fighting, which was shortlisted as a 2007 Guardian First Book Award, Mason is the author of Meltdown: The End of the Age of Greed (Verso Books).

Made in China

Made in China PDF Author: Pun Ngai
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822386755
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Get Book Here

Book Description
As China has evolved into an industrial powerhouse over the past two decades, a new class of workers has developed: the dagongmei, or working girls. The dagongmei are women in their late teens and early twenties who move from rural areas to urban centers to work in factories. Because of state laws dictating that those born in the countryside cannot permanently leave their villages, and familial pressure for young women to marry by their late twenties, the dagongmei are transient labor. They undertake physically exhausting work in urban factories for an average of four or five years before returning home. The young women are not coerced to work in the factories; they know about the twelve-hour shifts and the hardships of industrial labor. Yet they are still eager to leave home. Made in China is a compelling look at the lives of these women, workers caught between the competing demands of global capitalism, the socialist state, and the patriarchal family. Pun Ngai conducted ethnographic work at an electronics factory in southern China’s Guangdong province, in the Shenzhen special economic zone where foreign-owned factories are proliferating. For eight months she slept in the employee dormitories and worked on the shop floor alongside the women whose lives she chronicles. Pun illuminates the workers’ perspectives and experiences, describing the lure of consumer desire and especially the minutiae of factory life. She looks at acts of resistance and transgression in the workplace, positing that the chronic pains—such as backaches and headaches—that many of the women experience are as indicative of resistance to oppressive working conditions as they are of defeat. Pun suggests that a silent social revolution is underway in China and that these young migrant workers are its agents.

Japanese Working Class Lives

Japanese Working Class Lives PDF Author: James Roberson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113469282X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This ethnographic study examines the lives of Japanese workers in small firms and analysis their experiences of working life, leisure and education. This unique case study of the Shintani Metals Company illustrates the ways in which employees lives extend beyond their work. Japanese Working Class Lives provides a valuable alternative view of working life outside the large corporations. Roberson demonstrates that the Japanese working class is more diverse than Western stereotypes of be-suited salary-men would suggest.

Against the Law

Against the Law PDF Author: Ching Kwan Lee
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520250974
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
This powerful study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law dissects the world of Chinese workers today and finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Intense working-class agitation is being spurred by massive unemployment of Mao's socialist proletariat in the northern rustbelt and by the exploitation of millions of young workers in the southern sunbelt. Providing a broad comparative political and economic analysis of the vast mosaic of this labor struggle together with unprecedented fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the multi-faceted humanity of the Chinese working class as their stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at heroic moments of street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.