Drawing on a rich set of original oral histories conducted with retired factory workers from industrial centers across the country, this book provides a bottom-up examination of working class participation in factory life during socialist and reform-era China. Huaiyin Li offers a series of new interpretations that challenge, revise, and enrich the existing scholarship on factory politics and worker performance during the Maoist years, including the nature of the Maoist state as seen in the operation of power relations on the shop floor, as well as the origins and dynamics of industrial enterprise reforms in the post-Mao era.
In sharp contrast with the ideologically driven goal of promoting grassroots democracy or manifesting workers’ status as the masters of the workplace, Li argues that Maoist era state-owned enterprises operated effectively to turn factory workers into a well-disciplined labor force through a complex set of formal and informal institutions that functioned to generate an equilibrium in power relations and work norms. The enterprise reforms of the 1980s and 1990s undermined this preexisting equilibrium, catalyzing the transformation of the industrial workforce from predominantly privileged workers in state-owned enterprises to precarious migrant workers of rural origins hired by private firms. Ultimately, this comprehensive and textured history provides an analytically astute new picture of everyday factory life in the world’s largest manufacturing powerhouse.
About the author
Huaiyin Li is Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Village China Under Socialism and Reform: A Micro-History, 1948-2008 (Stanford, 2009).
A few years ago I blogged about Charles Eisenberg, aka Shanghai Red, a merchant marine sailor originally from Philadelphia who, after serving in World War 1, passed through Shanghai in the early 1920s, liked it, opened a bar, later returned, around 1935, to San Pedro and opened Shanghai Red at #433 Beacon Street. Shanghai Red died in 1957. Looking around a bit the other day I found a picture of the sad end of the bar… both below
Eisenberg became known as ‘the Mayor of Beacon Street’
Shanghai Red ejecting a troublesome patron from his San Pedro bar
This week on The China Project Ultimate China Bookshelf – Tim Clissold’s Mr China (2004) was a masterclass in how to raise and then lose a LOT of money in China in the 1990s, and yet retain your sense of humour and love for the country…. click here…
Wang Jingwei, poet and politician, patriot and traitor, has always been a figure of major academic and popular interest. Until now, his story has never been properly told, let alone critically investigated. The significance of his biography is evident from an ongoing war on cultural memory: modern mainland China prohibits serious academic research on wartime collaboration in general, and on Wang Jingwei in particular. At this critical juncture, when the recollection of World War II is fading from living memory and transforming into historical memory, this knowledge embargo will undoubtedly affect how China remembers its anti-fascist role in WWII. In Poetry, History, Memory: Wang Jingwei and China in Dark Times, Zhiyi Yang brings us a long overdue reexamination ofWang’s impact on cultural memory of WWII in China.
In this book, Yang brings disparate methodologies into a fruitful dialogue, including sophisticated methods of poetic interpretation. The author argues that Wang’s lyric poetry, as the public performance of a private voice, played a central role in constructing his political identity and heavily influenced the public’s posthumous memory of him. Drawing on archives (in the PRC, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, France, and Germany), memoires, historical journals, newspapers, interviews, and other scholarly works, this book offers the first biography of Wang that addresses his political, literary, and personal life in a critical light and with sympathetic impartiality.
Nineteenth century China Trade painting, gouache on paper, Clipper Eagle Wing (built by James O. Curtis at Medford, Massachusetts in 1853), off Hong Kong. Artist unknown.
Taking The 70’s Biweekly—an independent youth publication in the 1970s’ Hong Kong—as the main thread, this edited volume investigates an unexplored trajectory of Hong Kong’s cultural and art production in the 1970s that represents the making of a dissent space by independent press and activist groups in the city. The 70’s Biweekly stands out from many other independent magazines with its unique blending of radical political theories, social activism, avant-garde art, and local art and literature creations. By taking the magazine as a nodal point of social and cultural activism from and around which actions, debates, community, and artistic practices are formed and generated, this book fills gaps in studies on how young Hong Kong cultural producers carved out an alternative creative and political space to speak against established authorities.
Split into three parts, this book provides readers with a panoramic view of the political and cultural activisms in Hong Kong during the 1970s, writings on art and film, and crucially, interviews with former founders and contributors that reflect on how their participation led them to engage ideologically with their activism and community that extended far beyond the temporal and physical bounds of the magazine.
Lu Pan is associate professor in the Department of Chinese History and Culture at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
