Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (review)

206 China Review International: Vol. i, No. i, Spring 1994 the ShiJi) to sets ofpre-Qin and early Han philosophers. The Huang-Lao Boshu demonstrates the frequent cross-fertilization and use of common vocabulary among pre-Qin and Han philosophers. Separating out technical and very specific use ofvocabulary from broader, shared use may never be cut and dry. Those interested in the Bodde-Needham debate on the existence of laws of nature in ancient China and the implications of this for China's development of science would also find this text fascinating. The natural-law thought of the Huang-Lao Boshu adds support for Bodde's claim that natural law is grounded in laws of nature in early China. In yet another field of early Chinese studies Peerenboom challenges Chad Hansen's view that pre-Han Chinese lacked a semantic theory of truth, by the crucial counterexample offered in the Huang-Lao Boshu. There a semantic, correspondence theory oflanguage is exemplified, where language refers to the real world, unlike other philosophies oflanguage in the pre-Han and early Han periods which focused on the social, conventional nature oflanguage. I have touched on only a few of the many areas illuminated in this fascinating study. Undergraduates would probably find its detailed technical arguments rough going, but graduate students and specialists in Chinese intellectual history, as well as comparative law scholars, would find it rich in careful and worthwhile textual analysis as well as in fascinating insights about early Chinese legal and cosmological thought. This carefully and powerfully argued work makes a fine addition to the exciting series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture being published by SUNY Press. Steve Davidson Southwestern University at Georgetown, Texas Elizabeth J. Perry. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics ofChinese Labor Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1993. ix, 327 pp. $49.50. copyright1994 by University of Hawai'i Press This most welcome addition to the slowly growing scholarly literature on the modern Chinese labor movement is remarkable in several respects. First, this is a social history of the Shanghai working class written by a political scientist, not a historian. Second, this is the first volume of a projected two-volume work by the same author which will chronicle the politics oflabor in Shanghai from the early Republican era to the early 1990s, transcending the common periodization demarcation of 1949 in Chinese studies. (Volume 2, more political analysis than social history, starting with the political strikes of the mid-i920s, will examine the interactive relationship ofthe Chinese Communist party/state with the politicized labor force.) Third, this volume is neatly organized in several thematic sections, which are refreshingly different from other recent Western academic works on Reviews 207 Chinese labor history. Fourth, in the manner oftrue comparative perspective, the author draws quite extensively on the empirical and conceptual scholarship on European, American, and third-world labor movements. In her conclusion, explicit comparisons are made with "Artisans and the European Labor Movement" and "Semiskilled Workers and the American Labor Movement." Elizabeth Perry divides her book into three parts. Part 1, "The Politics of Place, 1839-1919," traces the geographical and sociocultural origins ofthe Shanghai laboring masses to delineate the unfolding ofearly labor collective action along native-place lines. She makes a particularly sharp distinction between "South China Artisans" who were highly skilled workers coming from the Canton Delta and the Lower Yangtze region, and "North China Proletarians," who were unskilled persons ofimmediate rural background, coming from areas north of Shanghai. Part 2, "The Politics of Partisanship, 1919-49," highlights the major course ofthe Shanghai labor movement from the 1919 May Fourth strikes to the Chinese Communist liberation ofthe city in 1949. She reveals how outside radical agitators, despite their ideological persuasions, had to adapt and accept particularistic interpersonal ties and a conservative institutional framework that were often regarded as traditional or even feudal in order to advance their revolutionary agenda among the Shanghai workers. Part 3, "The Politics of Production ," offers highly informed case studies of the tobacco, textile, and transport industries in Republican Shanghai. The rich details of these cases reveal some of the really interesting and contrasting responses of Shanghai labor to the political currents, economic pressures, and...