Inside China's Automobile Factories

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.

• 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's highly readable and insightful book offers a fascinating perspective on the recent wave of strikes in China's vast and growing automobile industry, drawing on extensive fieldwork in seven different auto factories. Highlighting the militancy of young, highly educated temporary auto assembly workers, who live in factory dormitories and often use social media as an organizing tool, Zhang shows how they leverage the ideological legacy of state socialism to challenge the logic of profit maximization in the world's most dynamic market economy. It is difficult to imagine a more intriguing case study of twenty-first-century labor unrest.' Ruth Milkman, Graduate Center, City University of New York