Abstract
China’s socialist proletariat has been consigned to history. In China today, there is no readily identifiable or clearly defined working class. Rather, workers, having been expelled from the Communist Party’s firm embrace and pushed off political center stage, cling to fragmented subjectivities through their memories of the recent socialist past, amidst demands placed upon them to adapt to the labor discipline of the market, and a profound and pervasive sense of normative and material uncertainty (Lee 2007, pp. 140, 153, 221–31; Solinger 2004, pp. 50–66).
For where the earlier crowd, its members unified in collaboration, was allegedly accomplishing miracles, the crowd before us now is composed of people struggling, usually singly, just to stay alive.
Dorothy Solinger (2004, p. 54)
They are in great mental distress because there is a contrast between their past and their present.
Mao Zedong (1971, pp. 14–15)
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© 2010 James Hudson, William Hurst and Christian Sorace
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Hudson, J., Hurst, W., Sorace, C. (2010). Workers in Post-Socialist China: Shattered Rice Bowls, Fragmented Subjectivities. In: Chu, Yw. (eds) Chinese Capitalisms. International Political Economy Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230251359_5
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