Inside China's Automobile Factories

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. '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 twenty-first-century labor unrest.' Ruth Milkman, Graduate Center, City University of New York '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 (2005)1. Introduction; 2. Industrial restructuring and labor force transformation in the Chinese automobile industry; 3. The labor market and social composition in the automobile industry; 4. Organization of production and factory social order; 5. Hegemonic consent? Formal worker's compliance and resistance; 6. Temporary workers' struggles and the paradox of labor force dualism; 7. The state's response: the making of labor contract law and boundary-drawing strategy; 8. Conclusion.