Growing up in 1990s China, Yangyang Cheng encountered two contradictory narratives about what it meant to be a worker. In older periodicals and occasionally in state media, workers were hailed as the ‘master class’ and being one was glorious. Many of her relatives and teachers, however, held up laid-off state-enterprise workers as a stern warning: if you did not excel, you would be weeded out.
The shifting status of workers in Chinese society embodied the country’s transition from socialist revolutionary power to market capitalism. How did Chinese workers see themselves before and during this transition? Has the Party-State ever lived up to its promises to the working class? And what did workers demand during waves of labour militancy? For this episode, Yangyang Cheng spoke with sociologists Eli Friedman and Yueran Zhang about the stirring history of labour activism in China and what it can teach us today.
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