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This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re‐departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired a rebirth of global Marxism and Maoism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism. Meeting this historical conjuncture, this project is situated in the legacy of the Chinese Revolution and its firmly held belief in the class struggles of the working masses who fought for a vision of communism since the early 1920s. As part of a global project in preparation for the new wave of emancipatory movements, this project is also located in a global anti‐capitalism movement and attempts to overcome the parochial and nationalistic approach of existing Chinese Marxism. Specifically, the author conceives that Chinese capitalism has entered a new age of monopoly supported not only by new phases of high technology but also, more importantly, by state power in constructing infrastructural bases such as building projects, new economic zones, highways and high‐speed railways, digital platforms, and logistics, both internally and externally, to reproduce expanded capitalism, resulting in fierce imperial battles among global powers. The article conceptualizes this historical process not only as "infrastructural capitalism," a term that vividly embodies the materiality of expanded capitalism, but also the infrastructural power of labor to take root. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China's unprecedented economic growth in recent decades can largely be attributed to millions of migrant labourers that made China the 'world's factory'. It is well documented, however, that migrant labourers experience discrimination in the labour market. Despite China's phenomenal economic growth, few studies have investigated whether the working conditions of low-skilled migrants have improved. In this study, we ask: in the past two decades, have disparities in working conditions and earnings between low-skilled rural-to-urban migrant workers and their urban counterparts decreased? We contrast the working conditions and earnings between migrants and urban residents who lack a high school degree and age 18-55 years using panel data, the China Health and Nutrition Survey (1993-2015), and individual fixed effects models to account for selection problems. Findings indicate that over a span of twenty years migrants and urban residents had similar trends in employment and earned incomes, but migrants' weekly working hours and tendency to work more than legal work hours increased more than urban residents'. Working longer without earning more suggests persistent social inequality in Chinese society in general and deeper injustice among migrant workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Adolescent behavior is often negatively viewed especially regarding work experience. By introducing a concept of prosocial behavior, our study attempts to provide an alternative view on the effects of teenage job and work experience. We hypothesized that work experience could generate more prosocial behaviors. By surveying a large group of working-class youth (N = 2,860) from eight Chinese vocational schools and using structural equation modeling, we confirmed that the pattern of "having less, giving more" could be found in our sample. Our findings revealed that work experience could facilitate prosocial behavior via the increase of knowledge of both contract-based rights and labor action. By understanding working-class youth's prosocial behavior as a positive outcome of work experience, this study calls for further research on other positive outcomes, such as cooperation, civic engagement, and solidarity, among working-class youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mass protests erupted in June 2019 in Hong Kong due to widespread anger about a proposed amendment to the extradition law. As a global project, could the goal of pursuing democratization be narrowly confined to a single place such as Hong Kong? What can be learned from a leaderless democratic movement, by those who are concerned about the future of Hong Kong? Can we learn some lessons from the Hong Kong movement—from the nuanced actions, complex strategies of mobilization, and the huge number of movement participants—and reflect upon them? Radical refers not only to the escalation of physical force but also the alternative imagination and praxis of democratic visions that should be bigger than the movement at this stage. Hong Kong is a global city; it deserves a radical politics aimed at linking transnational social movements that could possibly transgress the localistic approach of social struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Utopia or dystopia -- to where will the "digital revolution" lead human society?' is a question that remains unanswered. Negotiating between two opposing standpoints, this article, looking at a form of trans-border activism originally driven by suicides and protests of Foxconn workers who produce iPhones, iPads, and many other i-gadgets for the world's consumers, is an attempt to explore a politics of online and offline resistance against anti-digital capitalism. Based in Hong Kong (HK), SACOM is a leftist student group which works to support Chinese workers in campaigning against corporate power and generating transborder networks through media exposure, international activism, and localized organizing. Combining online and offline activism, SACOM strives to extend the reach of their worker--consumer campaign to the worldwide audience by transgressing dominance of capital and political control of the Chinese state. The most intriguing question to us is could this proactive activism be possible and, if so, how could it act at the grid of China's transformation and incorporation into global capitalism? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Competitiveness today requires being able to operate at a global scale. The financial crisis invigorated this requirement, posing new challenges to the economic viability of conventional companies and demanding alternative organizational forms of production. Although a wealth of research has focused on capitalist companies, little attention has been paid to the way these challenges affected worker cooperatives. Drawing from a qualitative case study of the Mondragon Cooperative Group, this article discusses the obstacles to internationalization faced by worker cooperatives, as well as the specific conditions and implications involved. In particular, the article analyzes Mondragon’s contradiction between being forced to expand and trying to keep cooperative values during this expansion. Two main actions aimed at responding to this contradiction are analyzed: the creation of mixed cooperatives and the extension of the corporate management model. The analysis of this process will shed light on actions for the global expansion of worker cooperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that ‘social science’ should never be separated from ‘politics.’ The authors also shed light on how social and economic injustice was creatively challenged by combining the strengths of workers, researchers and transnational movement activists. The study uses both quantitative (semi-structured questionnaires) and qualitative (in-depth interviews and participation observation) methods to gain insights concerning the experiences, world views and collective agency of Chinese workers who are struggling to make sense of the global production regime they inhabit and to contest the forces that shape their working and social lives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the spatial elements of labor in China through a case study of workers at technology company Foxconn, focusing on the role of employer-owned dormitories for workers. Topics discussed include migrant workers from rural households working in urban areas, the Chinese government's labor and land-use policies, and the control that employers exhibit over employees.

In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of capital expansion because of the incomparable speed and scale of its capital accumulation in all regions of China. This article explores how the workers at Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been subjected to work pressure and desperation that might lead to suicides on the one hand but also open up daily and collective resistance on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thirty years since Women on the Line has witnessed great achievement in the literature of gender and work both in the West and Global South. There was a booming literature since the 1970s and 1980s in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women studies, and cultural studies—most of them excellent works that touch upon sophisticated debates on the interplay between gender and work, production and reproduction, dominance, and resistance in an increasingly globalized context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The repositioning of China as a ' world workshop' rests upon the nurturing of a new Chinese working class. This article focuses on questions of collective action of migrant workers who are now the major force of a new working class that actively strives to alter its fate through labour struggles. By studying the collective actions of migrant workers in the gemstone industry, we examine a process in which workers' resistance has developed from a single means to multiple means, from single-factory to cross-factory participation, from engaging only in legal action to launching varied collective action. Three primary questions are raised: first, what forms of collective labour action have arisen and what are their mechanisms of mobilisation? Second, how do shop-floor industrial relationships, legal systems and other institutional arrangements shape such collective resistance? Third, how do workers nurture class consciousness through their participation in collective action and, most importantly, how do they make sense of their struggle through a radicalisation process? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the dormitory labor system, a specific Chinese labor system through which the lives of Chinese women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labor. This dormitory labor system is a gendered form of labor use that underlies the boom of export-oriented industrial production in China, which has been further boosted by China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Combining work and residence under the dormitory labor system, production and daily reproduction of labor are reconfigured for the sake of global production, with foreign-invested or privately owned companies controlling almost all daily reproduction of labor. Drawing upon the findings of a 2003 - 4 case study of an electronics factory in South China, this paper analyzes the operation of the dormitory labor system, detailing both its role in increasing output and profits and its role in supporting workers' resistance to their employers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization of capital accumulation and transnational production highlight a shifting paradigm in labour process theory, which requires a theorization on the spatial politics of production. The shift from Taylorism and Fordism (mass production and welfare-state interventions) to flexible accumulation (flexible production, casual labour, deregulation and privatization) may be a periodization that has become increasingly problematic. What is emerging is the transnational political economy of production that links not only to a new scale of the economic, but a new economy of scale, in which mass production and the space of work-residence are extensively reconfigured for capital accumulation on a global scale. This article aims to explore a new spatial politics of transnational labour process in China at the time of its rapid incorporation into the world economy. We study a distinctive form of labour regime, the dormitory Iabour regime in China, and explore the articulation of production and daily reproduction of labour using two contrasting case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In spite of the increase in transnational codes of conduct and legal mobilisation of labour, despotic labour regimes in China are still prevalent. Globalisation and ‘race to the bottom’ production strategies adopted by transnational corporations militate against the improvement of labour relations in China. The goal of this study is to provide a framework for understanding the working conditions of female migrant workers. While the inhumane working conditions of the women workers have been repeatedly observed, none of the existing studies has provided a solid analysis of the precarious employment system in China. This article aims to span global factors as well as local elements, demonstrating how they each contribute to precarious employment patterns. The hidden costs of the production and reproduction cycles are still unknown.¹ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the play of sexual politics apparent in the process of producing the subject Chinese dagongmei in the workplace and urban environment. Examination on a feminist critique, which questions sex and gender in postsocialist China at the conjuncture of its self-incorporation into global production; Discussion on how heterogeneous social subjects are constructed as a unified social body in the workplace and how the gender identity of dagongmei is construed in contrast to the Maoist term, gongren, which was an asexual subject; Exploration on how dagongmei struggle to be modern selves, especially by participating in everyday life and politics in a workers' dormitory in an urban industrialised space.

Presents an article on the social trauma experienced by Xiaoming who alone of all the migrant women from her village, had survived a factory fire in Shenzhen, China on November 19, 1993. Details of the fire; Labor issues and realities in China; Insights of the tragic incident.

This paper aims to trace the historical role of the city-state in Hong Kong and how it has extensively reshaphed itself in the post-handover period in response to the challenges of globalization. The study of Hong Kong, given its historical specificity, can contribute to the understanding of how the process of globalization takes place. Going beyond the dichotomy of a "strong" version of globalization—the end of nation-state, and a "weak" version of globalization—a state-centred account of globalization, our paper will look at the legacy of the colonial state and its current re-configuration after the 1997 transition. Hong Kong, as a British colony, was never a nation-state, nor, by and large, a city-state either before or after the transfer of sovereignty to mainland China. The rapid change of its urban governance from a philosophy of "positive non-intervention" to "active imagineering" in response to the global economy after the handover period has provided us with a good case-study to illustrate the changing role of city-state and to locate globalization in a specific economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]