Chinese Capitalism (2)

"Dereliction in the rustbelt, super-exploitation in the sunbelt: the treatment of labor is pitiless in either zone." - Perry Anderson

Perry Anderson also reviews Ching Kwan Lee's Against the Law (California, 2007), on labor protests in the Manchurian rustbelt and the Guangdong sunbelt. "Its first half is a study of the destruction of the proletariat that built China's principal industrial base, as the great state-owned enterprises were scrapped or sold off, leaving their workers jobless and often near-penniless, while officials and profiteers lined their pockets with what was left of all they had created. The second part explores the emergence of a new working class of young migrant laborers from the countryside, about half of them women, without collective identity or political memory. They have low-wage jobs, but no security; toiling up to 70 or 80 hours a week in often atrocious working conditions, with widespread exposure to abuse and injury."