Proletarian China

A century of complex relations between Communists and workers in China

In 2021, the Chinese Communist Party celebrated a century of existence. Since the Party's humble beginnings in the Marxist groups of the Republican era to its current global ambitions, one thing has not changed for China's leaders: their claim to represent the vanguard of the Chinese working class. Spanning from the night classes for workers, organized by student activists in Beijing in the 1910s to the labor struggles, during the 1920s and 1930s; from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution to the social convulsions of the reform era to China's global push today, this book, reconstructs the contentious history of labor in China, from the early twentieth-century to this day (and beyond). This will be, achieved through a series of essays penned by scholars in the field of Chinese society, politics, and culture, each one, of which will revolve around a specific historical event, in a mosaic of different voices, perspectives, and interpretations of what constituted the experience of being a worker in China in the past century.