Laid-Off Workers in a Workers' State: Unemployment with Chinese Characteristics
Publisher:  Palgrave Macmillan | ISBN: 0230613705 | edition 2009 | PDF | 272 pages | 1,3 mb



Communist parties lead revolutions in the name of the industrialproletariat. But in the course of China’s post-Mao reforms, perhaps noclass has experienced downward mobility as steep as the working class.An estimated 30 million of state enterprise workers have experiencedxiagang (laying-off), a stop-gap measure short of full unemployment,leaving them in a sort of limbo without the technical or psychologicalskills to adjust successfully to China’s new marketized, privatized,and globalized economy. In this book, an international team of scholarsexplores not only the politics of xiagang, but also the effect onChineseworkers and their families, and the variety of their responsesto this unprecedented dislocation in their lives.