Professor Lee’s talk will analyze the making of precarity in China and identify the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. For each of the three periods of Chinese development since the Communist Revolution, viz. the Mao era of state socialism 1949-1979, the high-growth reform era 1980-2010, and the current period of crisis and restructuring since around 2010, she will discuss the changing forms and meanings of labor precarity, their political economic drivers, and the shifting and uneven capacity of popular struggling for the recognition, regulation and reproduction of labor.

 

 

 

Ching Kwan Lee is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. She was a Fellow with the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (2013-14) and was awarded a National Science Foundation Grant (2010-2013). She was awarded the 2008 Sociology of Labor Book Award by the American Sociological Association (Labor and Labor Movement Section) for her book Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (UC Press, 2007). Her books include Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (Stanford University Press, 2007, edited with Guobin Yang) and Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (Routledge 2007, edited).