Laid-Off Workers in a Workers' State: Unemployment With Chinese Characteristics

Communist parties lead revolutions in the name of the industrial proletariat. But in the course of China’s post-Mao reforms, perhaps no class has experienced downward mobility as steep as the working class. An estimated 30 million of state enterprise workers have experienced xiagang (laying-off), a stop-gap measure short of full unemployment, leaving them in a sort of limbo without the technical or psychological skills to adjust successfully to China’s new marketized, privatized, and globalized economy. In this book, an international team of scholars explores not only the politics of xiagang, but also the effect on Chinese workers and their families, and the variety of their responses to this unprecedented dislocation in their lives.

Thomas B. Gold was founding Director of the Berkeley China Initiative and is a member of the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

William J. Hurst is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Texas, Austin.

Jaeyoun Won is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea.

Li Qiang is Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Science and Professor of Sociology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.