The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class (Hundred Flowers)

An unrivalled account of China’s transition from a poor agrarian economy to a global economic powerhouse

This groundbreaking book tells the story of China's stunning economic rise over the last half-century. Since initiating economic reforms in the late-1970s, China has transformed into one of the strongest competitors on the world's stage. Far from a rejection of its communist political economy, it was China's communist foundation that allowed the country to transition to a robust state-capitalist economy. Ruskola’s engaging and accessible account focuses on the organization of land and labor as the key to understanding China's success, explaining how their commodification has remade not only the Chinese nation-state but global capitalism itself.

Challenging dominant narratives of economic development, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Chinese state capitalism diverges from both England’s passage from feudalism to capitalism and the Soviet Union’s post-socialist transformations. Highlighting the planetary limits of development, The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class is an urgent call to rethink our relationship to labor and land, production and nature.

Teemu Ruskola is Professor of Law and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania. He writes on questions of legal history and theory from a comparative and international perspective, often with China as a vantage point. He is the author of Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law.