Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies – serie

Based on numerous qualitative interviews, this cutting edge book investigates how Hong Kong's economic structure and neoliberal policies have contributed to class inequality in China's global city. Inspired by Bourdieu's approach to class, the author examines class stratification in education, works, and political attitudes and argues that the lack of explicit class identifications among the people does not imply irrelevance of class. Relying upon empirical field data to question the applicability of the reflexive modernization theory, the text debates whether individualization makes class a redundant concept in advanced capitalist societies.

With an increasing number of elders moving into nursing homes, the shift from family to nursing home care calls for an exploration of caregiving decision-making in urban China. This study examines how a rapidly growing aging population, the one-child policy, and economic reform in urban China pose unprecedented challenges to the country’s ingrained tradition of family caregiving. It presents interviews of matched elders and their children from a government-sponsored nursing home in Shanghai and analyzes the decision-making process of institutionalization. This book offers fresh insight into the evolving culture and arrangements of caregiving in contemporary Chinese society, illuminating the diverse needs for long-term care of Chinese elders–the world’s largest aging population–in the coming decades.

This book contends that the Chinese economic reform inaugurated since 1978 has been a top-down passive revolution, in Gramsci’s term, and that after three decades of reform the role of the Chinese state has been changing from steering the passive revolution through coercive tactics to establishing capitalist hegemony. It illustrates that the labour law system is a crucial vehicle through which the Chinese party-state seeks to secure the working class’s consent to the capitalist class’s ethno-political leadership. The labour law system has exercised a double hegemonic effect with regards to the capital-labour relations and state-labour relations through four major mechanisms. However, these effects have influenced the Chinese migrant workers in an uneven manner. The affirmative workers have granted active consent to the ruling class leadership; the indifferent, ambiguous and critical workers have only rendered passive consent while the radical workers has refused to give any consentat all.

Based on numerous qualitative interviews, this cutting edge book investigates how Hong Kong's economic structure and neoliberal policies have contributed to class inequality in China's global city. Inspired by Bourdieu's approach to class, the author examines class stratification in education, works, and political attitudes and argues that the lack of explicit class identifications among the people does not imply irrelevance of class. Relying upon empirical field data to question the applicability of the reflexive modernization theory, the text debates whether individualization makes class a redundant concept in advanced capitalist societies.

This book contends that the Chinese economic reform inaugurated since 1978 has been a top-down passive revolution, in Gramsci’s term, and that after three decades of reform the role of the Chinese state has been changing from steering the passive revolution through coercive tactics to establishing capitalist hegemony. It illustrates that the labour law system is a crucial vehicle through which the Chinese party-state seeks to secure the working class’s consent to the capitalist class’s ethno-political leadership. The labour law system has exercised a double hegemonic effect with regards to the capital-labour relations and state-labour relations through four major mechanisms. However, these effects have influenced the Chinese migrant workers in an uneven manner. The affirmative workers have granted active consent to the ruling class leadership; the indifferent, ambiguous and critical workers have only rendered passive consent while the radical workers has refused to give any consentat all.

This collection provides a comparative analysis of care arrangements in relation to issues of gender and transnational migration, social policy and labour migration in East Asia. Bridging the key topics of migration and gendered cared work through cross country comparisons, it examines how care work and welfare arrangements have been shaped by national and global forces against the backdrop of changing gender relationships, the rise of female labour force participation, low fertility rates and population aging in East Asia. It particularly addresses the ‘feminization of migration’ which is a salient feature of migration in Asia today as more women from developing countries undertake domestic work and care work in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Addressing the issue of care in relation to employment, care and migration regimes in East Asia and the interaction among welfare regimes, labour markets and work-care balance, this collection provides an up-to-date assessment of gendered transnational migration in the region and sheds light on local and transnational policies and practices which aim to improve the welfare of families and migrant workers.

This collection provides a comparative analysis of care arrangements in relation to issues of gender and transnational migration, social policy and labour migration in East Asia. Bridging the key topics of migration and gendered cared work through cross country comparisons, it examines how care work and welfare arrangements have been shaped by national and global forces against the backdrop of changing gender relationships, the rise of female labour force participation, low fertility rates and population aging in East Asia. It particularly addresses the ‘feminization of migration’ which is a salient feature of migration in Asia today as more women from developing countries undertake domestic work and care work in Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong. Addressing the issue of care in relation to employment, care and migration regimes in East Asia and the interaction among welfare regimes, labour markets and work-care balance, this collection provides an up-to-date assessment of gendered transnational migration in the region and sheds light on local and transnational policies and practices which aim to improve the welfare of families and migrant workers.

This book explores three major changes in the circumstances of the migrant working class in south China over the past three decades, from historical and comparative perspectives. It examines the rise of a male migrant working population in the export industries, a shift in material and social lives of migrant workers, and the emergence of a new non-coercive factory regime in the industries. By conducting on-site fieldwork regarding Hong Kong-invested garment factories in south China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, alongside factory-gate surveys in China and Vietnam, this book examines how and why the circumstances of workers in these localities are dissimilar even when under the same type of factory ownership. In analyzing workers’ lives within and outside factories, and the expansion of global capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, the book contributes to research on production politics and everyday life practice, and an understanding of how global and local forces interact.