DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Against the Law

Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt

Ching Kwan Lee author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University of California Press

Published:22nd May '07

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Against the Law cover

This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, "Against the Law" finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle together with fine-grained ethnographic detail, the book portrays the Chinese working class as workers' stories unfold in bankrupt state factories and global sweatshops, in crowded dormitories and remote villages, at street protests as well as in quiet disenchantment with the corrupt officialdom and the fledgling legal system.

"An ethnographic and analytic masterpiece... Few sociological studies have combined structural and existential, object and subjective truths so memorably as this one." London Review Of Books "This beautifully written book will catalyse further important debates on the class dimensions of labour protest." Labour History

ISBN: 9780520250970

Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 20mm

Weight: 454g

340 pages