Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of “precarization” besetting the working
class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the “proletariat” now stands the …

Attempts to analyse authoritarianism in China tend towards a static focus on the state that is
homogeneous across time. We argue for a more nuanced approach that captures the …

The past few years have witnessed the revival of mediation as a chief method of labour
dispute settlement in China. While the central government's campaign has reinvigorated the …

This article proposes a new approach to studying China's contentious politics in the post-
1989 era. This approach treats China's central government as an institutional designer …

The stage of state-building in the labor sector at which a working-class movement arose is
crucial for the subsequent development of state–labor relations. In contrast with the …

Claims that China's people are exhibiting a rising “rights consciousness” have become
commonplace, with some suggesting this phenomenon is driving political change. Yet it is …

In contrast to various structural accounts of collective inaction or short-lived contention of
Chinese workers, the authors take an agency-centered approach to explain how the few …

This chapter demonstrates that current studies have depicted the Chinese state in three
major forms: an authoritarian state, a developmental state and a corporatist state. However …

Concurring with the approach stressing the role of contentious politics in (re) shaping state
institutions, this study explores how disorganized popular contentions configure local …

This article examines the case of the Yantian International Container Terminal (YICT) to
consider under what conditions unions can provide effective workplace representation in …