Proletarian China

Reviews / Votes

This volume offers an exciting engagement with the extended historical event of the proletariat in China. Through dialogue between past and present and among scholars across the globe, the anthology's chronological organization makes it ideal for teaching, research, and casual reading. More important, the march of time demonstrates how workers as a class made themselves into a proletariat even as they were simultaneously unmade through state repression, capitalist advance, internal division, and globalized diffusion. In its insistence that any genuine commitment to communism take seriously the proletariat as a specifically laboring class, this book marks out a clear political position. The individual chapters are short, readable, informative, and passionate. -- Rebecca E. Karl, New York University, History Department This is not a history of Chinese labour or the Chinese labour movement. Proletarian China is rather a chronicle of insurgency, of a proletarian politics that again and again opens and disrupts spaces of representation. The Chinese Communist Party is of course implied in this history, which nevertheless goes well beyond it and often challenges it. A century of proletarian struggles, uprisings, and dreams parades before readers' eyes composing another history of contemporary China and at the same time inciting to imagine the future anew - in China and beyond. This is a remarkable book! -- Sandro Mezzadra, University of Bologna A tour de force! A single book that covers an entire century of the Chinese working class, its various phases, diverse voices, and hopes for the future. As it is customary for the Made in China Journal, the most salient thoughts and reflections are collected here. -- Luigi Tomba, University of Sydney Praise for Christian Sorace's Shaken Authority:
With his detailed knowledge of the politics of Sichuan, and his ability to integrate specific policies into broader ideological formations, he has demonstrated the vital insights that can be gained through analysing the Communist Party on its own terms. One of the most fascinating of these insights is the fact that ideology can easily be transformed into a burden for the Party. -- Chris Courtney * PRC History Review * Sorace forces us to confront the truth that ideological framing has made the party remarkably resilient because it is difficult to weaken the shaper of reality itself. By holding up a mirror to those of us who study China, his honest reflections force us to face how easily we view the country through the lens of hypothetical fantasies. -- Gina Anne Tam * Journal of Asian Studies * Praise for Afterlives of Chinese Communism:

What makes Afterlives particularly commendable is the way that it navigates the difficult terrain of Chinese Communism...The result is a volume of essays in which easy answers are not forthcoming. We are asked to "approach the Chinese Revolution...to stand in relation to it, and to feel something towards it." What we feel is often a mix of discomfort and inspiration. We encounter the euphoria of liberation, the state-organized cruelty of "speaking bitterness" to one's oppressors, the simultaneously positive and catastrophic consequences of collectivization, the Cultural Revolution's empowerment of the working classes and its chaotic collapse, the creation of new kinds of revolutionary class consciousness and their eventual disintegration. This is the complex history and fraught present of Chinese Communism and it is brought brilliantly to life across this collection of essays. -- Kai Heron * Jacobin * Afterlives at once performs an important documentary function, capturing the symbolic worlds of communist China in the past and present within a convenient index format; but it should also be praised for its analytical contribution, which offers a call to action for new ideas and politics to come. -- Aaron Su * China Review International *