Long known as the world's factory, China is the largest manufacturing economy ever seen, accounting for more than 10% of global exports. China is also, of course, home to the largest workforce on the planet, the crucial element behind its staggering economic success. But who are China's workers who keep the machine running, and how is the labor process changing under economic reform? Pun Ngai, a leading expert in factory labor in China, charts the rise of China as a world workshop and the emergence of a new labor force in the context of the post-socialist transformations of the last three decades. The book analyzes the role of the state and transnational interests in creating a new migrant workforce deprived of many rights and social protection. As China increases its output of high-value, high-tech products, particularly for its own growing domestic market of middle-class consumers, workers are increasingly voicing their discontent through strikes and protest, creating new challenges for the Party-State and the global division of labor. Blending theory, politics, and real-world examples, this book will be an invaluable guide for upper-level students and non-specialists interested in China's economy and Chinese politics and society.

Her analysis focuses on the human experiences and strategies that precipitate shifts in national and local policies for economic development; she also examines the responses of migrants, nonmigrants, and officials to changing circumstances, obstacles, and opportunities. This pioneering study is rich in original source materials and anecdotes and also offers useful, comparative examples from other developing countries."--Jacket.

China's rise over the past several decades has lifted more than half of its population out of poverty and reshaped the global economy. What has caused this dramatic transformation? In China's Great Migration: How the Poor Built a Prosperous Nation, author Bradley Gardner looks at one of the most important but least discussed forces pushing China's economic development: the migration of more than 260 million people from their birthplaces to China's most economically vibrant cities. By combining an analysis of China's political economy with current scholarship on the role of migration in economic development, China's Great Migration shows how the largest economic migration in the history of the world has led to a bottom-up transformation of China. Gardner draws from his experience as a researcher and journalist working in China to investigate why people chose to migrate and the social and political consequences of their decisions. In the aftermath of China's Cultural Revolution, the collapse of totalitarian government control allowed millions of people to skirt migration restrictions and move to China's growing cities, where they offered a massive pool of labor that propelled industrial development, foreign investment, and urbanization. Struggling to respond to the demands of these migrants, the Chinese government loosened its grip on the economy, strengthening property rights and allowing migrants to employ themselves and each other, spurring the Chinese economic miracle. More than simply a narrative of economic progress, China's Great Migration tells the human story of China's transformation, featuring interviews with the men and women whose way of life has been remade. In its pages, readers will learn about the rebirth of a country and millions of lives changed, hear what migration can tell us about the future of China, and discover what China's development can teach the rest of the world about the role of market liberalization and economic migration in fighting poverty and creating prosperity.

This book examines rural-urban migration policies in China, and considers how Chinese workers cope with migration events in the context of these policies. It explores the contribution of migrant workers to the Chinese economy, the impact of changes within the ‘hukou’ system (household registration) and the impact of recent migration policies promoting rural-urban migration and targeting key events during migrant workers’ migration trajectories - job-seeking, wage exploitation, work injuries and illness - namely the corresponding ‘Skills Training Program for Migrant Workers’, the ‘Circular on Managing Wage Payment to Migrant Workers’, the ‘Circular on Migrant Workers Participating in Work-Related Injury Insurance’, and the ‘New Rural Medical Cooperative Scheme’ (Health Insurance). Through in-depth interviews, it examines how when facing such challenges, migrant workers choose to either make a claim under existing policies, or use other coping strategies. The book notably proposes a typology of “coping” which includes a variety of administrative coping, political coping and social coping, and considers how workers in China harness the power of civil groups and social networks.

China has an estimated 120?150 million internal migrants from the countryside living in its cities. These people are the engine that has been driving China's high rate of economic growth. However, until recently, little or no attention has been given to the establishment of a social protection regime for migrant workers. This volume examines the key issues involved in establishing social protection for them, including a critical examination of deficiencies in existing arrangements and an in-depth study of proposals that have been offered for extending social security coverage. Featuring contributions from leading academics outside China who have written on the topic as well as experts from leading Chinese academic institutions such as Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Development Research Center in the State Council, this volume provides a comprehensive account from both inside and outside China.

This book offers an engaging and unique view of the governance of Chinese rural migrants in non-factory areas of manufacturing towns. By asking how authorities govern migrants as an ongoing source of cheap labor, this book demonstrates and interprets authorities’ power exercised in the form of governing rationalities, regulations, programs, activities, and designated non-factory spaces—town and village centers and migrant living zones. These power exercises take place routinely in migrants’ everyday lives but typically veil themselves, producing knowledge that legitimates our understanding of migrants. Based on their power exercises, authorities’ governance of migrants, like multiple “invisible filters” that select and help create migrant labor in non-factory areas, leads to an inclusion of a certain number of migrants as cheap factory workers and an exclusion of the rest. Nevertheless, by exercising their unique power techniques, migrants can resist and alter authority governance; thus the authorities’ power exercises are deficient and may ultimately be futile. This book details these power exercises, offers rewarding insights, and can greatly enrich our understanding of China’s local governance of migrants and migrant resistance.

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.