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 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 explores the experience of China's migrant labourers in Shanghai from anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the big cities in search of fame, fortune, or just a living. The author also examines the gender dynamics at work, in intimacy and leisure of this marginalized, yet huge population. With an in-depth and multidisciplinary examination of the experience of restaurant workers in Shanghai, this book sheds humanising new light on the experience of the megacity from the inside and will be of direct value to policymakers, demographers, feminist scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and responsible citizens.

This book studies some important issues in China’s labor market, such as rural labor migration, employment and wage discrimination, the new dual labor market, and economic returns on schooling, using the newer and representative data and advanced estimation models. This approach has yielded many interesting results, including a solution to the dilemma of two ongoing crises since 2004: the rural labor surplus and severe shortage of migrant labor. While male workers generally received less favorable treatment and consequently enjoyed a lower average employment probability than female workers in 1996, they also received preferential treatment over female workers, who otherwise had identical worker characteristics in 2005. We provide new estimates for male-female hourly wage differentials in urban China, and our results indicate that the hourly wage differentials and the unexplained part of the hourly wage differentials are smaller than the differentials obtained by ignoring the sample selection bias. We study China’s new dual labor market, which is shifting from a rural migration versus urban workers setup to informal workers versus formal workers setup, and present some interesting results. Our study is the first to adopt the IV methodology and the Heckman (1979) two-step procedure simultaneously for the estimation of economic returns on schooling in China.

Comprises 12 papers which explore the extent and nature of rural-urban migration in China during the 1980s and 1990s. Examines the characteristics of migrants at the individual, household and community levels and investigates the organizational aspect of labour flows. Analyses the effects of migration on rural and urban areas. Includes a chapter on the development of labour migration from Mexico to the USA.