The danwei, or work unit, occupies a central place in Chinese society. To understand Chinese politics demands a better understanding of this system. This volume provides a systematic study of the danwei system and addresses a variety of questions from historical and comparative perspectives.

The danwei, or work unit, occupies a central place in Chinese society. To understand Chinese politics demands a better understanding of this system. This volume provides a systematic study of the danwei system and addresses a variety of questions from historical and comparative perspectives.

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor...

This work is an important addition to the rather limited literature on the social history of China during the first half of the twentieth century. It draws on abundant sources and studies which have appeared in the People's Republic of China since the early 1980s and which have not been systematically used in Western historiography. China has undergone a series of fundamental political transformations: from the 1911 Revolution that toppled the imperial system to the victory of the communists, all of which were greatly affected by labor unrest. This work places the politics of Chinese workers...