A fascinating, intimate window onto China’s intensifying youth employment crisisChina’s hypercompetitive job market is stunting and distorting the lives of an entire generation. Forced into a cutthroat doom loop, the people interviewed in Involution highlight how they are pitted against their colleagues, assigned pointless or impossible tasks, and warped by hostile environments. In response to an antisocial work culture, forms of passive resistance have become ende...

As the rivalry between the US and China enters a dangerous new phase, reaffirming the politics of anti-imperialism is a task more important than ever.From trade wars and pandemic politics to rioting workers, intercontinental balloons, and battles over TikTok, the US media tends to present contemporary China—when it’s discussed at all—in sensationalist terms. This portrayal has only intensified as China’s relationship with the United States has grown increasingly hos...

Is there a “Left perspective” on the US-China rivalry?The US-China conflict is no straightforward Great Power rivalry. Understanding it requires wrestling with its multiple dimensions and consequences, from geopolitics to economic interdependence, anti-Asian racism in the US and organizing amongst immigrant diasporas, social movements in China and the character of Chinese capitalism. This ebook groups together insights and perspectives that provide a critical analy...

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship.The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecu...

Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship.The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecu...

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, worker resistance in China increased rapidly despite the fact that certain segments of the state began moving in a pro-labor direction. In explaining this, Eli Friedman argues that the Chinese state has become hemmed in by an "insurgency trap" of its own devising and is thus unable to tame expansive worker unrest. Labor conflict in the process of capitalist industrialization is certainly not unique to China and indeed ha...

In China, capitalist development since the 1980s has given rise to an enormous new industrial working class. In the vast export-processing zones along China’s southeastern coast, countless so-called “migrant workers” or “peasant workers” from interior provinces eke out a living in innumerable factories. Through thirty-five years of struggle, they have gradually established a foothold as part of China’s new industrial working class.

China has been the fastest growing major economy in the world for three decades. It is also home to some of the largest, most incendiary, and most underreported labor struggles of our time. China on Strike, the first English-language book of its kind, provides an intimate and revealing window into the lives of workers organizing in some of China’s most profitable factories, which supply Apple, Nike, Hewlett Packard, and other multinational companies. Drawing on dozens of interview...

As China evolves, so does the global marketplace—all the way down to the consumerThe End of Cheap China is a detailed look at the rise of China, and how it will affect the global marketplace. A thorough exploration of the changes taking place in the Chinese economy, the book explains how much of the Western consumerist culture is built on the back of cheap Chinese factory labor, and warns that the era is coming to a close. Readers will learn why the cheap ...

"A comprehensive primer on the development of these Asian tigers."—Noam Lupu, San Francisco ChronicleThe Elephant and the Dragon is the essential guide to understanding how India and China are reshaping our world. With labor now unbound from geographic borders, we're seeing startling shifts in how—and where—nearly everything we buy is made. In a compelling mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, veteran journalist Robyn Meredith untangles the complex web of bu...

The updated edition of journalist Ted C. Fishman’s bestselling explanation of how China is rapidly becoming a global industrial superpower and how the American economy is challenged by this new reality.China today is visible everywhere—in the news, in the economic pressures battering the globe, in our workplaces, and in every trip to the store. Provocative, timely, and essential—and updated with new statistics and information—this dramatic account of China’s growin...

In this landmark work of investigative reporting, former Financial Times correspondent Alexandra Harney uncovers a story of immense significance to us all: how China's factory economy gains a competitive edge by selling out its workers, environment, and future. Harney's firsthand reporting brings us face-to-face with a world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with ubiquitous corruption and a lack of transparency to exact a staggering toll in human mi...