About the book
In Inside China’s Automobile Factories, Lu Zhang explores the current conditions, subjectivity, and collective actions of autoworkers in the world’s largest and fastest-growing automobile manufacturing nation. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews conducted at seven large auto factories in various regions of China, Zhang provides an inside look at the daily factory life of autoworkers and a deeper understanding of the roots of rising labor unrest in the auto industry. Combining original empirical data and sophisticated analysis that moves from the shop floor to national political economy and global industry dynamics, the book develops a multilayered framework for understanding how labor relations in the auto industry and broader social economy can be expected to develop in China in the coming decades.
Advance praise
“Lu Zhang's highly readable and insightful book offers a fascinating perspective on the recent wave of strikes in China’s vast and growing automobile industry, drawing on extensive fieldwork in seven different auto factories. Highlighting the militancy of young, highly educated temporary auto assembly workers, who live in factory dormitories and often use social media as an organizing tool, Zhang shows how they leverage the ideological legacy of state socialism to challenge the logic of profit maximization in the world’s most dynamic market economy. It is difficult to imagine a more intriguing case study of 21st-century labor unrest.” – Ruth Milkman, CUNY Graduate Center
“Essential reading for anyone interested in
labor’s fate, not just in China, but throughout a new world of work in which
states and corporate managers have created a diabolical set of legal and
occupational categories that have divided workers and subverted solidarity. The
power of Zhang’s scholarship arises both from her gritty fieldwork in a series
of Chinese factories as well as her sophisticated understanding of contemporary
capitalism.” – Nelson Lichtenstein, MacArthur Foundation
Chair in History, University of California, Santa Barbara
“A worthy successor to the pioneering labor
and social movement studies of Burawoy, Silver, Perry, and Lee.” – Mark Selden, Senior Research
Associate, East Asia Program, Cornell University
“A must-read ethnography… Zhang contributes
to the study of Chinese working-class formation with an excellent case.” - Pun Ngai, author of Made in China: Factory Women Workers in a Global Workplace
