The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace PDF Author: Mark W. Frazier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace

The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace PDF Author: Mark W. Frazier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139432230
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
State workers in China have until recently enjoyed the 'iron rice bowl' of comprehensive cradle-to-grave benefits and lifetime employment. This central institution in Chinese politics emerged over the course of various crises that swept through China's industrial sector prior to and after revolution in 1949. Frazier explores critical phases in the expansion of the Chinese state during the middle third of the twentieth century to reveal how different labour institutions reflected state power. While the 'iron rice bowl' is usually seen as an outgrowth of Communist labour policy, Frazier's account shows that is has longer historical roots. As a product of the Chinese state, the iron rice bowl's dismantling in the 1990s has raised sensitive issues about the way in which the contemporary Chinese state exerts control over urban industrial society. This book sheds light on state and society relations in China under the Nationalist and Communist regimes.

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.

Vernacular Industrialism in China

Vernacular Industrialism in China PDF Author: Eugenia Lean
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231550332
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 254

Get Book Here

Book Description
In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879–1940) was a maverick entrepreneur—at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen’s career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen’s activities exemplify “vernacular industrialism,” the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China’s economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

Making Of An Economic Superpower, The: Unlocking China's Secret Of Rapid Industrialization

Making Of An Economic Superpower, The: Unlocking China's Secret Of Rapid Industrialization PDF Author: Yi Wen
Publisher: World Scientific
ISBN: 9814733741
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Get Book Here

Book Description
The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.

China's Great Economic Transformation

China's Great Economic Transformation PDF Author: Loren Brandt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139470949
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 887

Get Book Here

Book Description
This landmark study provides an integrated analysis of China's unexpected economic boom of the past three decades. The authors combine deep China expertise with broad disciplinary knowledge to explain China's remarkable combination of high-speed growth and deeply flawed institutions. Their work exposes the mechanisms underpinning the origin and expansion of China's great boom. Penetrating studies track the rise of Chinese capabilities in manufacturing and in research and development. The editors probe both achievements and weaknesses across many sectors, including China's fiscal, legal, and financial institutions. The book shows how an intricate minuet combining China's political system with sectorial development, globalization, resource transfers across geographic and economic space, and partial system reform delivered an astonishing and unprecedented growth spurt.

A Companion to Chinese History

A Companion to Chinese History PDF Author: Michael Szonyi
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118624602
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 475

Get Book Here

Book Description
A Companion to Chinese History presents a collection of essays offering a comprehensive overview of the latest intellectual developments in the study of China’s history from the ancient past up until the present day. Covers the major trends in the study of Chinese history from antiquity to the present day Considers the latest scholarship of historians working in China and around the world Explores a variety of long-range questions and themes which serves to bridge the conventional divide between China’s traditional and modern eras Addresses China’s connections with other nations and regions and enables non-specialists to make comparisons with their own fields Features discussion of traditional topics and chronological approaches as well as newer themes such as Chinese history in relation to sexuality, national identity, and the environment

DILEMMAS OF VICTORY

DILEMMAS OF VICTORY PDF Author: Jeremy Brown
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674033655
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

Get Book Here

Book Description
This illuminating work examines the social, cultural, political, and economic dimensions of the Communist takeover of China. Instead of dwelling on elite politics and policy-making processes, Dilemmas of Victory seeks to understand how the 1949-1953 period was experienced by various groups, including industrialists, filmmakers, ethnic minorities, educators, rural midwives, philanthropists, stand-up comics, and scientists. A stellar group of authors that includes Frederic Wakeman, Elizabeth Perry, Sherman Cochran, Perry Link, Joseph Esherick, and Chen Jian shows that the Communists sometimes achieved a remarkably smooth takeover, yet at other times appeared shockingly incompetent. Shanghai and Beijing experienced it in ways that differed dramatically from Xinjiang, Tibet, and Dalian. Out of necessity, the new regime often showed restraint and flexibility, courting the influential and educated. Furthermore, many policies of the old Nationalist regime were quietly embraced by the new Communist rulers. Based on previously unseen archival documents as well as oral histories, these lively, readable essays provide the fullest picture to date of the early years of the People’s Republic, which were far more pluralistic, diverse, and hopeful than the Maoist decades that followed.

Urbanizing China in War and Peace

Urbanizing China in War and Peace PDF Author: Toby Lincoln
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824854195
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
Urbanizing China in War and Peace rewrites the history of rural-urban relations in the first half of the twentieth century by arguing that urbanization is a total societal transformation and as important a factor as revolution, nationalism, or modernity in the history of modern China. Linking the global and the local in space and time, China's urbanization was not only driven by industrial capitalism and the expansion of the state, but also shaped how these forces influenced daily life in the city and the countryside. Although the conflict that beset China after the Japanese invasion in 1937 affected the development of cities, towns, and villages, it did not derail previous changes. To truly understand how China has emerged as the world's largest urban society, we must consider such continuities across the first half of the twentieth century—during periods of war as well as peace. The book focuses on Wuxi, a city that lies a hundred miles to the west of Shanghai. In the early twentieth century local industrialists were responsible for it quickly becoming the largest industrial city in China outside treaty ports. They built factories, roads, and other infrastructure outside the old city walls and in surrounding towns and villages. Chapters examine the county's transformation as recorded in guidebooks and travel magazines of the time and the role of the state in the early 1920s and into the Nanjing Decade, when new administrative laws led to the continued expansion of the city under both municipal and county officials. They explore the revival of the silk industry during the Japanese occupation and the industry's role in driving urbanization, as well as efforts by Chinese leaders to carry out prewar development plans despite lockdowns and qingxiang (clean the countryside) campaigns. In the midst of the barbed wire and watch towers, plans to shape the built environment in Wuxi County and the region as a whole persisted and were carried out. Ambitious and well researched, Urbanizing China in War and Peace will appeal to scholars and students of Chinese urban history, the Anti-Japanese War of Resistance, and the Republican period. Its engagement with issues of urbanization in general will interest urban historians of other times and places.

Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China

Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China PDF Author: Thomas P. Bernstein
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521813181
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book provides the first, in-depth English study of the tax burden problems farmers face in China.

Banking in Modern China

Banking in Modern China PDF Author: Linsun Cheng
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521811422
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Get Book Here

Book Description
This is the first book to document in English the evolution of modern Chinese banking, from the establishment in 1897 of the first Chinese bank along a Western model, to the abrupt interruption of professional banking by the Japanese invasion in 1937. Drawing from original documents of major Chinese banks, Linsun Cheng explains how and why the banks were able, despite a succession of foreign and domestic crises, to grow into viable and self-sustaining institutions in China. Rich with new, unpublished historical details, this book offers an original, comprehensive narrative of the origins and growth of professional banks.