In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Workers at War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937–1953
  • Tim Wright
Workers at War: Labor in China's Arsenals, 1937–1953. By Joshua H. Howard (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2004) 452 pp. $70.00

Workers at War is an important new analysis of class formation among the Chinese proletariat, focusing on workers in the arsenals at Chongqing between the outbreak of war in 1937 and the consolidation of Communist power in the early 1950s. This long and richly textured book contains chapters on China's armaments industry before and during the war, and on economic, social, and political aspects of workers' lives, concluding with (slightly less well-integrated) chapters on Yu Zusheng, a worker-intellectual in the 1940s and on the early period of the Communist regime.

The book makes many innovative contributions to the discourse on modern Chinese history, while always being ready to use comparative insights from historical study of Europe—particularly Italy and Germany. It brings issues of class back to center stage. Though not denying the importance of ethnicity and locality, it argues that the arsenal workers often had multiple sources of identity and increasingly came to see their situation in class terms. Moreover, in contrast to works that counterpose the appeals of class and of nationalism, Howard follows Smith in showing how workers could be mobilized along both class and nationalist lines at the same time.1

Howard points out that the availability of sources is crucial in determining his methodology and the questions that he can ask (368). He marshals with great skill a wide range of sources, which he approaches in a properly balanced and critical fashion. He consults mainly the municipal archives of Chongqing, but he also uses other archives in China and the United States, as well as interviews and memoir literature. The turning of management into a bureaucracy, which is a major theme of the book, and the fact that the arsenals were run by the government probably created more plentiful sources than for other industries. These factors, however, might limit the degree to which the findings of this study [End Page 670] could be applied to workers in other sectors of the Chinese economy. Yet, many of the phenomena described in the book were as resonant of the situation of post-1949 enterprises as they were of labor before the revolution.

The book is essentially a work of history, informed primarily by its sources, but Howard's theoretical take on class formation is highly sophisticated and nuanced, making use of a wide range of ideas from other disciplines. From political economy, he borrows Hirschman's model of exit, voice, or loyalty as a response to political repression.2 He is also well aware that economic factors of supply and demand were at least as important in determining the situation of labor as were social or political influences. Most importantly, the book draws on ideas such as those of Katznelson in analyszing class formation through four levels—structure, ways of life, disposition, and collective action.3 Despite his extensive use of theoretical and comparative work on class formation, however, Howard might have made more use of studies of factory organization and its implications for class. He argues (31) that "mass production changed the social landscape of the shop floor, creating structural conditions conducive to class formation," but only briefly cites Braverman and not at all the work of Beynon, Burawoy, or Nichols.4

This major new contribution brings both theoretical sophistication and imaginative use of sources to the study of a particular, but important, segment of China's working class.

Tim Wright
University of Sheffield

Footnotes

1. Steve Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895–1927 (Durham, N.C., 2002).

2. Albert Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations and States (Cambridge, Mass, 1970).

3. Ira Katznelson, "Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons," in idem and Aristide R. Zolberg (eds.), Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States (Princeton, 1986), 3–41.

4. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974); Huw Beynon, Working...

pdf

Share