Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations

Abstract

The lives and struggles of the working class in China have never ceased to be a fertile ground for scholarly exploration. Pun Ngai, one of the most cited scholars in this field, will again fascinate the readers with her recent book Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations. Her book covers a topic that has received wide coverage, yet this work displays the vigour and passion of an activist scholar who used to complete her ethnography by working and living as a factory worker.

The first two chapters trace the history of the Chinese working class back to the Mao era, when workers were hailed as a leading political force and then the economic reform era, which has changed that political status. In order to fully appreciate the lives and struggles of the Chinese working class, one needs to first and foremost understand the nature of the state’s neo-liberal projects, which turned its socialist vanguards into new capitalist subjects who have since then borne the brunt of economic development. The author provides a sharp and succinct critique of neo-liberalism as an ideology and a political project that has never failed to create paradoxes and contradictions in the societies that it sweeps through. The influx of global capital across China “on an unimaginable pace and scale” (4) was accompanied by a massive flow of rural migrants to urban areas, and subsequently the making of a new working class that seeks its potential futures in factories rather than on the farm. Yet the striking reality of alienation, exploitation and marginalisation has stifled their dreams and suppressed their dignity and, consequently has sown the seeds of despair but also of resistance.