Against the Law

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is author of Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (UC Press) and editor of Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation and Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: The Politics and Poetics of Collective Memories in Contemporary China (with Guobin Yang).

"An ethnographic and analytic masterpiece... Few sociological studies have combined structural and existential, object and subjective truths so memorably as this one." London Review Of Books "This beautifully written book will catalyse further important debates on the class dimensions of labour protest." Labour History

• Preface PART I: DECENTRALIZED LEGAL AUTHORITARIANISM 1. Chinese Workers' Contentious Transition from State Socialism 2. Stalled Reform: Between Social Contract and Legal Contract PART II: RUSTBELT: PROTESTS OF DESPERATION 3. The Unmaking of Mao's Working Class in the Rustbelt 4. Life after Danwei: Surviving Enterprise Collapse PART III: SUNBELT: PROTESTS AGAINST DISCRIMINATION 5. The Making of New Labor in the Sunbelt 6. Dagong as a Way of Life PART IV: CONCLUSION 7. Chinese Labor Politics in Comparative Perspective Methodological Appendix: Fieldwork in Two Provinces Notes Bibliography Index