The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class : How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower

This groundbreaking book tells the story of China's economic rise from the establishment of the People's Republic to the present. Since the reforms in the late 1970s, China has grown at an extraordinary rate. This transformation did not signify the state's retreat from the economy. Indeed, it was China's communist foundation that enabled this astounding development. Yet at the same time, those reforms saw China give up on the idea of equality, unmaking a working class that the revolution had forged. Teemu Ruskola's engaging and accessible account focuses on the organization of land and labor as the key to understanding China's rise, explaining how their commodification has remade not only the Chinese nation-state but global capitalism itself. Challenging dominant narratives of economic development, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Chinese state capitalism diverges from both England's passage from feudalism to capitalism and the Soviet Union's post-socialist transformations. Highlighting the planetary limits of development, The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class is an urgent call to rethink our relationship to labor and land, production and nature.