Proletarian China

A Century of Chinese Labour

Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin, Christian Sorace, Nicholas Loubere, Ivan Franceschini, Kevin Lin

• Editorial: Verso
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781839766343
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Chinese History

In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers organised by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labour struggles during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book reconstructs the contentious history of labour in China from the early twentieth century to this day (and beyond). This will be achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century.Contributors: Corey Byrnes, Craig A. Smith, Xu Guoqi, Zhou Ruixue, Lin Chun, Elizabeth J. Perry, Tony Saich, Wang Kan, Gail Hershatter, Apo Leong, S.A. Smith, Alexander F. Day, Yige Dong, Seung-Joon Lee, Lu Yan, Joshua Howard, Bo renlund Srensen, Brian DeMare, Emily Honig, Po-chien Chen, Yi-hung Liu, Jake Werner, Malcolm Thompson, Robert Cliver, Mark W. Frazier, John Williams, Christian Sorace, Zhu Ruiyi, Ivan Franceschini, Chen Feng, Ben Kindler, Jane Hayward, Tim Wright, Koji Hirata, Jacob Eyferth, Aminda Smith, Fabio Lanza, Ralph Litzinger, Jonathan Unger, Covell F. Meyskens, Maggie Clinton, Patricia M. Thornton, Ray Yep, Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi, Joel Andreas, Matt Galway, Michel Bonnin, A.C. Baecker, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Tiantian Zheng, Jeanne L. Wilson, Ming-sho Ho, Yueran Zhang, Anita Chan, Sarah Biddulph, Jude Howell, William Hurst, Dorothy J. Solinger, Ching Kwan Lee, Chlo Froissart, Mary Gallagher, Eric Florence, Junxi Qian, Chris King-chi Chan, Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, Jenny Chan, Eli Friedman, Aaron Halegua, Wanning Sun, Marc Blecher, Huang Yu, Manfred Elfstrom, Darren Byler, Carlos Rojas, Chen Qiufan.

References

Introduction (Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace)

¹ The unabridged translation of Deng Zhongxia’s essay about his trip to Changxindian is included in this volume. See the chapter ‘A Day Trip to Changxindian’ (1920).

² For Deng Zhongxia’s early years and contribution to the Chinese labour movement, see Daniel Y.K. Kwan. 1997. Marxist Intellectuals and the Chinese Labor Movement: A Study of Deng Zhongxia 1894–1933. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.

³ For an account of the Jasic struggle, see Manfred Elfstrom’s essay about 2018 in the present volume.

⁴ Yueran Zhang. 2020. ‘Leninists in a Chinese Factory: Reflections on the Jasic Labour Organising Strategy.’ Made in China Journal 5, no. 2: 82–88.

⁵ ‘Orwell in the Chinese Classroom.’ Made in China Journal, 27 May 2019, available online at: madeinchinajournal.com/2019/05/27/orwell-in-the-chinese-classroom.

⁶ Rebecca Karl. 2020. China’s Revolution in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History. London: Verso Books, 3.

⁷ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels (translated by Samuel Moore). 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. London: Workers’ Educational Association, available online at: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf.

⁸ Jacques Rancière. 2004. The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 113

⁹ Ibid., 107, 114.

¹⁰ Wang Hui. 2020. ‘How Does the Phoenix Achieve Nirvana?’ Made in China Journal 5, no. 1: 94–103.

¹¹ See Lin Chun’s essay about 1921 in the present volume.

¹² For a detailed account of competing political visions of labour in late-Imperial and early Republican China, see S.A. Smith. 2002. Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

¹³ See Gail Hershatter’s essay about 1925 in the present volume; Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 137.

¹⁴ On these debates about the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of the Chinese working class, see Pun Ngai and Chris King-Chi Chan. 2008. ‘The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China.’ Boundary 2 35, no. 2: 75–91; William Hurst. 2016. ‘The Chinese Working Class: Made, Unmade, in Itself, for Itself, or None of the Above?’ Made in China Journal 1, no. 2: 11–14.

¹⁵ See, for instance, Andrew G. Walder. 1986. Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

¹⁶ On labour activism in the Maoist era, see, for instance, Jackie Sheehan. 1998. Chinese Workers: A New History. London: Routledge; Joel Andreas. 2019. Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China. New York: Oxford University Press. On continuity, see Robert Cliver. 2020. Red Silk: Class, Gender, and Revolution in China’s Yangzi Delta Silk Industry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

¹⁷ On the right to strike in China, see Fang Lee Cooke and Chang Kai. 2015. ‘Legislating the Right to Strike in China: Historical Development and Prospects.’ Journal of Industrial Relations 57, no. 3: 440–55.

¹⁸ See the essays by Chen Feng about 1957, by Patricia Thornton about 1967, the 1951 speech by Li Lisan, and the 1957 interview by Lai Ruoyu in the present volume.

¹⁹ On the dossier, see Michael Dutton. 2004. ‘Mango Mao: Infections of the Sacred.’ Public Culture 16, no. 2: 161–88; Jie Yang. 2011. ‘The Politics of the Dang’an: Spectralization, Spatialization, and Neoliberal Governmentality.’ Anthropological Quarterly 84, no. 2: 507–33; Jie Li. 2020. Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Ch. 1.

²⁰ Timothy Cheek. 2016. ‘Attitudes in Action: Maoism as Emotional Political Theory.’ In Chinese Thought as Global Theory: Diversifying Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences and Humanities, edited by Leigh Jenco. Albany: SUNY Press, 75–100.

²¹ Andreas, Disenfranchised, 8–9.

²² Kevin Lin. 2019. ‘Work Unit.’ In Afterlives of Chinese Communism: Political Concepts from Mao to Xi, edited by Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere. Canberra and London: ANU Press and Verso Books, 331–34.

²³ Christian Sorace. 2020. ‘Metrics of Exceptionality, Simulated Intimacy.’ Critical Inquiry 46: 555–77.

²⁴ See Andrea Piazzaroli Longobardi’s essay about 1968 in the present volume.

²⁵ Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 219.

²⁶ On anamorphosis, see Slavoj Žižek. 1992. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

²⁷ Feng Chen. 2007. ‘Individual Rights and Collective Rights: Labor’s Predicament in China.’ Communist and Post-Communist Studies 40, no. 1: 59–79.

²⁸ Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui. 2017. Hegemonic Transformation: The State, Laws, and Labour Relations in Post-Socialist China. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. On the instrumental use of the law by the Party-State in China, see also Mary Gallagher. 2017. Authoritarian Legality in China: Law, Workers, and the State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

²⁹ On this subject, see also Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace. 2019. ‘In the Name of the Working Class: Narratives of Labour Activism in Contemporary China.’ Pacific Affairs 92, no. 4: 643–64.

³⁰ Alessandro Russo. 2019. ‘Class Struggle.’ In Afterlives of Chinese Communism, 29–35, at p. 34.

³¹ See Jude Howell’s essay about 1995 and Chloé Froissart and Ivan Franceschini’s essay about 2015 in the present volume.

³² Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, 224.

³³ Jacques Rancière (translated by John Drury). 2012. Proletarian Nights: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. London: Verso Books, 10.

³⁴ Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party.

³⁵ For analysis of the preservation of communist leaders’ corpses, see Alexei Yurchak. 2015. ‘Bodies of Lenin: The Hidden Science of Communist Sovereignty.’ Representations 129, no. 1: 116–57.

³⁶ Russo, ‘Class Struggle’, 35.

³⁷ Peter Sloterdijk (translated by Sandra Berjan). 2020. Infinite Mobilization. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 60.

³⁸ Mark Fisher. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 11.

³⁹ Li, Utopian Ruins, 156.

⁴⁰ Ibid.

⁴¹ On emergent private utopias, see Zhang Li. 2010. In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press; Jiwei Ci. 1994. Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

⁴² ‘A Strategy for Ruination: An Interview with China Miéville.’ Boston Review, 8 January 2018, available online at: conversations.e-flux.com/t/china-mieville-we-live-in-a-utopia...