| Book Review | Labour History, 95 | The History Cooperative

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BOOK REVIEW

*Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007. pp. xiv + 325. US $21.95 paper.*
This is an excellent book on labour protest in the Peoples' Republic of China since the 1990s. Lee's fieldwork is impressive: the ethnographic observations of managers, Labour Bureau and court officials etc, together with the many in-depth interviews with workers involved in protests, give the reader a strong sense of the ways in which members of divergent classes in PR China have built ideas shaping their worlds.	1
The research focuses on two regions: the rustbelt region of Liaoning in the northeast, characterised by massive layoffs of workers from bankrupt or near-bankrupt state-owned heavy industry enterprises; and the sunbelt province of Guangdong, to which young people from impoverished rural provinces migrate for jobs in export-oriented factories. Lee argues that the Communist regime's economic and political framework – 'decentralized accumulation and decentralized legal authoritarianism' – generates the impetus for working-class mobilisation while imposing constraints on it.	2
This framework has generated common dimensions in labour protests. Uneven economic development, corresponding with the decentralisation of economic decision-making from the central to the provincial, local and enterprise levels, fragments workers' interests across localities and work units: 'This fragmentation of the working class into cellular interest groups does not paralyse collective action, but it does provide wedges among workers and channels them into dispersed units of activism' (p. 121). While popular resistance utilises the central government's laws and decrees as weapons to safeguard workers' rights, legalism remains the 'hegemonic ideology' of the country's rulers (p. 238). China's legal and other institutional reforms over recent decades have contributed to the making of co-existing subjectivities in which workers see themselves as citizens of the nation-state, as members of a proletarian class and, in the case of rural migrants, as members of subaltern strata of the proletariat.	. . .

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