StrikingtoSurvive Format: Paperback

In China, capitalist development since the 1980s has given rise to an enormous new industrial working class. In the vast export-processing zones along China’s southeastern coast, countless so-called “migrant workers” or “peasant workers” from interior provinces eke out a living in innumerable factories. Through thirty-five years of struggle, they have gradually established a foothold as part of China’s new industrial working class.

Eli Friedman is assistant professor of international and comparative labor at Cornell University and the author ofInsurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China.