Solinger's review of WORKING IN CHINA

["Yan Hairong" <hairongy@gmail.com>]

Ching Kwan Lee, ed., WORKING IN
CHINA:  Ethnographies of labor and workplace transformation (London
and New York:  Routledge, 2007).  ISBN 9789415770002. 251 pp.
Index. [I DON'T HAVE THE PRICE.]

This marvelous volume's title suggests a materialist angle on the new
China:  what happens when the reform-period's replacement for the
Maoist proletariat sets out to earn its keep.  Instead of the
practice of labor, however, work itself is often less the focus than is
the switch in mental world that these new-style toilers willy-nilly take
on to earn their wages.  Intendedly or not, Ching Kwan Lee has
edited a set of tales of value shift, stories in which even the novice
employees (to say nothing of their older colleagues), now more than two
decades beyond the market turn, still experience a decisive psychological
jolt as they receive and adapt to their marching orders, so jarringly
different is the working world of today from the one their forebears
knew.  Status, mobility, face and esteem--goods not much in evidence
in the years between 1949 and 1980--have become the stuff of the
workplace.  Cheris Chan's description of the indoctrination to which
insurance sales agents must submit--whereby they must learn that a life
is worth a sum of cash and that the agent must milk his or her
guanxi  for money--is only the most blatant example of the
new mindset.

In the majority of cases the jobs themselves are novel for contemporary
China;  in a few, the work itself--as in domestic service or at a
department store counter--existed under the socialist system, but the
style of engaging in the work has been completely reconstituted in recent
years.  Throughout every piece one sees how the incessant pull of
profit-seeking;  the imitation of Western behavior patterns; 
and the allure of the global and the modern have recast the notion of how
it is proper to run an enterprise today.  Ethan Michelson's
unraveling of the link between injustice and lawyering--according to
which firms press their employees to net large earnings and not to
represent the needy--is a prime illustration.  All of the essays
involve close observation;  a number are the product of participant
observation, sometimes startlingly so.  The rich diversity among the
places of business under inspection here offers the reader a veritable
kaleidoscope of the meanings of shangban  in the metropolis
of the modern PRC.  Experiencing every chapter in this hugely
engrossing collection was, for me, nothing short of pure
pleasure.

This book developed from a workshop of the same title held in June 2004,
so its vignettes are vital and up-to-date.  Lee has assembled a
gathering of twelve mostly brand-(or nearly-) new scholars, all of them,
it seems, fresh from the field, to compose a three-part review of forms
and venues of employment in late 1990s and early 2000's urban
China.  The first part, "Remaking class and community," features
studies by Lee herself on angry workers (but mostly ex-workers, the
laid-off) in the northeast;  on a city neighborhood after the end of
the danwei, by Sian Victoria Liu;  one on home renovation
workers by Lei Guang;   and on sales floors, by Amy
Hanser.  Part II is called "Gendering service work," containing
accounts as worksites of a luxury hotel by Eileen M. Otis;  karaoke
sex bars, by Tiantian Zheng;  and households, by Yan Hairong. 
And in the third part, "New professions and knowledge workers," Ethan
Michelson writes on lawyers;  Andrew Ross, on outsourcing; 
Dimitri Kessler on the information industry;  and Cheris Shun-ching
Chan on insurance selling.  Lee and her authors did a superb job of
stating an argument at the start of their stories and then fleshing it
out with quotations from the workers, thick description of the arena in
question, and sharply analytical, admirably empathetic, perceptive
insights.

Throughout each story, one senses at the very least a vague--sometimes an
intense--tone of unease about the predicament under investigation, either
on the part of the presenter or that of the protagonists in the plot (and
in a few cases, of all of them).  Tiantian Zheng's rehearsal of the
plight of bar hostesses in Dalian--one packed with violence, terror, and
forced prostitution, is clearly the most searing of the stories, but
other entries are shocking in their own way.  Eileen Otis's hotel
staff, for one example, are drilled to personalize future service to
clients by keeping track of every detail of their guests' habits and
preferences (including the names of family members who are not even
present), to be stored in a computer for future reference, These workers'
deportment is manipulated such that each gesture, posture, _expression_ and
utterance is standardized and customized to fit an ideal of femininity,
class, and high etiquette.  Training includes the absorption of 19
different regulations about the young women's hair, the learning of a
modulated, yet nearly ever-present smile, and the ability to perceive
their clients' moods.  Yan Hairong and Amy Hanser both skillfully
pit pre-reform-era styles of performing domestic service and department
store selling, respectively, against the present-day versions of these
practices.  It is difficult not to conclude that household maids and
retail workers in the old days labored in far more emotionally satisfying
circumstances than do their successors today. 

This contrast between the old and the new does raise a question, one of
the very few I had as I meticulously perused these sketches:  In
reporting on the views of their subjects, the slant is often one in favor
of the mores, ethics and ideals of the Mao years (in the care and
benefits once experienced but whose loss is now mourned over by Lee's
laid-off workers;  in the commaraderie still existing among Hanser's
state-owned store's employees but gone among those in its privately owned
and operated counterpart;  in the familiarity, trust and
independence accorded housekeepers in Yan's memories of her own youth but
altogether absent now;  and in the rumors of suicides by those whose
danwei has abandoned them in Liu's neighborhoods).  And yet.
in places (as in Lee's chapter and in Hansen's), the past regime is
portrayed as "despotic."  Is there then no possibility of job
satisfaction in either the old or the current urban workplace in the view
of these authors (or in that of their subjects)?  My other quibble
is with occasional repetition within some of the chapters, and, more
annoying, what appears to have been a less than rigorous proof-reading
(missing periods here and there at the end of sentences, sometimes extra
words that ought to have been eliminated).

Still, this is a powerful, authoritative, wonderfully detailed, tightly
argued, and, for the most part, superbly written digest of
ethnographies.  Its interdisciplinary cast will make it valuable for
a wide range of readers, whether scholars, graduate students setting out
on their own research in the field, or undergraduates in a large variety
of courses.  It serves as a milestone in the field of contemporary
China studies and will surely be a model for any future work of its
kind.

Dorothy J. Solinger
Political Science, University of California, Irvine