1st Edition

How China Works Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Industrial Workplace

Edited By Jacob Eyferth Copyright 2006
    176 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    176 Pages 9 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Spanning the whole of the twentieth century, How China Works examines the labour issues surrounding the workplace in China in both the Republican and People's Republic epochs. The international team of contributors treat China's twentieth-century revolution as an industrial revolution, stressing that China's recent emergence as the new workshop of the world was a gradual change, and not a recent phenomena led by external forces.

    Providing the reader with extensive ethnographic research on topics such as culture and community in the workplace, the rural-urban divide, industrialization, subcontracting and employment practices, How China Works really does ground the study of Chinese work in the daily interactions in the workplace, the labour process and the micropolitics of work.

    1. How China Works: Perspectives on the Twentieth-Century Workplace  Jacob Eyferth  2. Village Industries and the Making of Rural-Urban Difference in Early Twentieth-Century Shanxi  Henrietta Harrison  3. Socialist Deskilling: The Struggle over Skills in a Rural Craft Industry, 1949-1965  Jacob Eyferth  4. Commanding Heights Industrialization and Wage Determination in the Chinese Factory, 1950-1957  Mark W. Frazier  5. Industrial Involution: Recruitment and Development within the Railway System  Lida Junghans  6. Serving the State, Serving the People: Work in a Post-Socialist Department Store  Amy Hanser  7. Capital's Incorporation of Labor Rights and Corporate Codes of Conduct in a Chinese Dormitory Labor Regime  Pun Ngai  8. Work, Conformity, and Defiance: Strategies of Resistance and Control in China's Township and Village Enterprises  Calvin Chen  9. Labor on the "Floating Native Land": A Case Study of Seafarers on PRC Ocean-Going Ships  Minghua Zhao

    Biography

    Jacob Eyferth is assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He is the co-editor of Rural Development in Transitional China: The New Agriculture (London: Frank Cass 2003) and author of articles in The China Quarterly and the Journal of Peasant Studies.