Factory Politics in the People’’s Republic of China

Over the past seven decades--since the 1949 Revolution--every aspect of Chinese society has been profoundly transformed multiple times. No sector has experienced more tumultuous twists and turns than industry. The eight articles contained in this volume examine these twists and turns, focusing on those aspects of industrial relations that involve contention and power, that is, factory politics. They were selected among articles that have appeared in the Chinese journal Open Times (开放时代) over the past decade. Because Open Times has a well-earned reputation for publishing diverse viewpoints, it has been able to attract some of the very best scholarship in China.

Joel Andreas, Ph.D. (2003), University of California, Los Angeles, teaches sociology at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Rise of the Red Engineers: The Cultural Revolution and the Origins of China’s New Class (Stanford University Press, 2009), analyzes the contentious merger of old and new elites after 1949. His second book, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China (Oxford University Press, 2019), traces radical changes in industrial relations over the past seven decades.