Laid-Off Workers in a Workers' State Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics

by Gold, Thomas B.; Hurst, William J.; Won, Jaeyoun; Li, Qiang

• ISBN13: 9780230613706
• ISBN10: 0230613705
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-03-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Communist parties lead revolutions in the name of the industrial proletariat. But in the course of China's post-Mao reforms, perhaps no class has experienced downward mobility as steep as the working class. An estimated 30 million of state enterprise workers have experienced xiagang (laying-off), a stop-gap measure short of full unemployment, leaving them in a sort of limbo without the technical or psychological skills to adjust successfully to China's new marketized, privatized, and globalized economy. In this book, an international team of scholars explores not only the politics of xiagang , but also the effect on Chinese workers and their families, and the variety of their responses to this unprecedented dislocation in their lives.

Author Biography

Thomas B. Gold was founding Director of the Berkeley China Initiative and is a member of the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

William J. Hurst is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, Austin.

Jaeyoun Won is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Li Qiang is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science and Professor of Sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Class Politics
Broadening the Debate on Xiagang: Policy Origins and Parallels in History	p. 15
Xiagang and the Geometry of Urban Political Patronage in China: Celebrated State (once-) Workers and State Chagrin	p. 39
Class Formation of Fragmentation? Allegiances and Divisions among Managers and Workers in State-Owned Enterprises	p. 61
Frames and Framing
Voices of Xiagang: Naming, Blaming, and Framing	p. 95
The Power of the Past: Nostalgia and Popular Discontent in Contemporary China	p. 115
Workers' Welfare and Reemployment
China's Older Workers: Between Law and Policy, Between Laid-Off and Unemployed	p. 135
The Professional Reintegration of the "Xiagang"	p. 159
Explaining the Lack of Contention
Farewell to Socialist Labor in China	p. 185
State Policies and Chinese Laid-off Workers' Limited Resistance	p. 203
The Reemergence of Street Protests: State Workers Challenge the Chinese State	p. 225
Notes on Contributors	p. 245
Index	p. 249
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