The danwei, or work unit, occupies a central place in Chinese society. To understand Chinese politics demands a better understanding of this system. This volume provides a systematic study of the danwei system and addresses a variety of questions from historical and comparative perspectives.

This book explores the diversity and dynamism of China’s workplaces and of the wider labour market experiences of its workforce. Drawing on the authors’ extensive recent research, it considers a diverse range of issues and types of workplaces. These changes include: the continuing spread of market-oriented human resource management across public and private sector organisations; greater employment rights for workers; local diversity in regulatory control alongside the governmental priority of a ‘harmonious society’; persistent shortages of skilled labour co-existing with vast underemployment amongst the unskilled; uneven access to education and training across regions; and changes in union behaviour and influence. Unlike other studies - which tend to assume changes to management, work and employment are relatively uniform across modernising parts of the economy - this book conveys the rich variety among contemporary China’s local labour markets by looking at them, and the institutions that influence them, from the bottom-up. It focuses on other under-explored but emerging phenomena such as family-owned firms, the role of private services businesses, and the emergence of employer associations.

After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for some twenty-nine per cent of the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling under appalling sweatshop conditions for extremely low wages. Working in China introduces the lived experiences of labour in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters of this book cover professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, domestic maids and hotel workers, and industrial workers in a variety of factories. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics and workers' voices presented in the book reflect the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace today. Based on extraordinary and thorough field research, this book will have a wide readership at undergraduate level and beyond, appealing to students and scholars from a myriad of disciplines including Chinese studies, labour studies, sociology and political economy.

A study of how China’s changing economy may leave its rural communities in the dust and launch a political and economic disaster. As the glittering skyline in Shanghai seemingly attests, China has quickly transformed itself from a place of stark poverty into a modern, urban, technologically savvy economic powerhouse. But as Scott Rozelle and Natalie Hell show in Invisible China, the truth is much more complicated and might be a serious cause for concern. China’s growth has relied heavily on unskilled labor. Most of the workers who have fueled the country’s rise come from rural villages and have never been to high school. While this national growth strategy has been effective for three decades, the unskilled wage rate is finally rising, inducing companies inside China to automate at an unprecedented rate and triggering an exodus of companies seeking cheaper labor in other countries. Ten years ago, almost every product for sale in an American Walmart was made in China. Today, that is no longer the case. With the changing demand for labor, China seems to have no good back-up plan. For all of its investment in physical infrastructure, for decades China failed to invest enough in its people. Recent progress may come too late. Drawing on extensive surveys on the ground in China, Rozelle and Hell reveal that while China may be the second-largest economy in the world, its labor force has one of the lowest levels of education of any comparable country. Over half of China’s population—as well as a vast majority of its children—are from rural areas. Their low levels of basic education may leave many unable to find work in the formal workplace as China’s economy changes and manufacturing jobs move elsewhere. In Invisible China, Rozelle and Hell speak not only to an urgent humanitarian concern but also a potential economic crisis that could upend economies and foreign relations around the globe. If too many are left structurally unemployable, the implications both inside and outside of China could be serious. Understanding the situation in China today is essential if we are to avoid a potential crisis of international proportions. This book is an urgent and timely call to action that should be read by economists, policymakers, the business community, and general readers alike. Praise for Invisible China “Stunningly researched.” —TheEconomist, Best Books of the Year (UK) “Invisible China sounds a wake-up call.” —The Strategist “Not to be missed.” —Times Literary Supplement (UK) “[Invisible China] provides an extensive coverage of problems for China in the sphere of human capital development . . . the book is rich in content and is not constrained only to China, but provides important parallels with past and present developments in other countries.” —Journal of Chinese Political Science

This book examines a three-way interaction among market, state, and family in China’s recent market reform. It depicts transformations in urban women’s experiences with both paid and non-paid domestic work. The book challenges China’s free-market approach and demonstrates its negative impacts on women’s work and family experiences by revealing labor commodification processes and work-to-family conflicts as the state abandons its commitment to public welfare. Using interview data collected from 165 women of three different cohorts in urban China during the 2000-2008 period, this study uncovers the revival of traditional gendered family roles among urban women and men as one of their strategies to resist market brutality and their struggles to balance work and family demands. The book also explores urban women’s non-market definitions of marital equality, and highlights theoretical and policy implications concerning market efficiency, marital equality, and the state’s role in protecting public good.

Changing Workplace Relations in the Chinese Economy attempts to deal with how China's economic reforms have undermined the 'iron rice-bowl' system which since the 1950s has provided both 'lifetime-employment' and 'cradle-to-the-grave' welfare for many workers, particularly those in state-owned enterprises. It starts by examining the background of these reforms and how they have changed workplace relations in the Chinese economy; it will also look at key themes relating to the role of trade unions and the management of human resources in both state-owned and joint-venture firms; finally, a number of illustrative case-studies involving industrial relations and human resource management are set out. A set of contributors, drawn from a wide range of disciplines and nationalities who are expert in these fields, have contributed chapters to the volume.

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.