A World to Lose: Working Class Formation in China, 1900-2020

CSC International Research Webinar Series

Chinese workers have been the subjects of a great deal of analysis by scholars, documentation by journalists and activists, and portrayal by writers, filmmakers and artists. Light has been shone on the rich tapestry of economic, social, cultural and political forces driving them into low-paid, dangerous, degrading, alienating, mind-numbing, transient employment, on the obstacles to improvement, on workers’ understandings of their world and their lives in it, on their passivity and resistance, and on the effects of their responses. A World to Lose seeks the foundation for all this in three questions: what kind of class is the Chinese working class? What are the historical forces and processes that have formed it and how does the pattern of class formation help explain the working class’s reactions historically, presently and even prospectively? It approaches these questions through the lenses of hegemony theory and political development/path (in)dependence.

About the speakers

Marc Blecher is the James Monroe Professor of Politics and East Asian Studies at Oberlin College. He is the author of books and articles on Chinese politics (focusing on labor politics, village politics, and political sociology and political economy) and comparative politics.

Joel Andreas (Chair & Discussant), professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University, studies political contention and social change in China. His first book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford 2009), analyzes the contentious merger of old and new elites following the 1949 Revolution. His second book, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford 2019), traces radical changes that have fundamentally transformed industrial relations over the past seven decades. He is currently investigating efforts to diminish the differences between mental and manual labor in Mao-era China as well as the ongoing transformation of China’s rural society.

Видео A World to Lose: Working Class Formation in China, 1900-2020 канала China Studies Centre