Inside China's Automobile Factories The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance

In Inside China's Automobile Factories, Lu Zhang explores the current conditions, subjectivity, and collective actions of autoworkers in the world's largest and fastest-growing automobile manufacturing nation. Based on years of fieldwork and extensive interviews conducted at seven large auto factories in various regions of China, Zhang provides an inside look at the daily factory life of autoworkers and a deeper understanding of the roots of rising labor unrest in the auto industry. Combining original empirical data and sophisticated analysis that moves from the shop floor to national political economy and global industry dynamics, the book develops a multilayered framework for understanding how labor relations in the auto industry and broader social economy can be expected to develop in China in the coming decades.

1. Introduction; 2. Industrial restructuring and labor force transformation in the Chinese automobile industry; 3. The labor market and social composition in the automobile industry; 4. Organization of production and factory social order; 5. Hegemonic consent? Formal worker's compliance and resistance; 6. Temporary workers' struggles and the paradox of labor force dualism; 7. The state's response: the making of labor contract law and boundary-drawing strategy; 8. Conclusion.

Lu Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Temple University. Her work has been published in International Labor and Working Class History and the International Journal of Automotive Technology and Management. She has contributed to five books: Workers in Hard Times: A Long View of Economic Crises (2014), China and Global Governance: The Dragon's Learning Curve (2014), From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China (2011), Globalization and Beyond: New Examinations of Global Power and its Alternatives (2011), and China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism (2009). She received the Thomas A. Kochan and Stephen R. Sleigh Best Dissertation Award from the Labor and Employment Relations Association and the Best Dissertation Prize from the journal Labor History. She is currently researching capital relocation strategy and labor politics in China and Vietnam and teaching globalization, labor, development, and political economy in China and East Asia.