Chinese Labor Research Articles

Riding Jane Eyre's Stagecoach Rhythm in Jane Re's New York Subway

In the Victorian era, innovations in infrastructure, notably the revolutionary stagecoach, redefined women's travel experiences and offered them a means to break free from domesticity. While the rapid pace of the stagecoach initially unsettles individuals like Jane Eyre in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847), she accustoms herself to its motion to evade perilous situations. Bearing in mind the cadence of the stagecoach, I suggest that Patricia Park's modern retelling of Jane Eyre, Re Jane (2015), adapts the rhythm of the coach by recasting it as the motion of the New York City subway. Revising in this way, Park incorporates positive racial representation through the subway and its passengers. By re-creating the rhythm of the coach through the subway train, Park considers two historical ideas: the New York City subway was built by racial and ethnic minorities such as Irish immigrants and African Americans, and the subway also softly calls back to the beginnings of the American transcontinental railroad that erased the visibility of Chinese immigrant laborers. This essay contends that the transportation systems in nineteenth-century England and twenty-first-century New York created changes that liberated women from the rooted domestic ideologies of their respective periods.

How can industrial intelligence change the employment structure of the floating population?

As the wave of industrial intelligence (AI) swept, the demographic dividend era in the Chinese labor market continued to decrease. This study aimed to explore how AI reshaped the labor employment structure of the floating population. Additionally, it clarified the internal mechanism of AI on the employment structure of the floating population based on the existing AI model and the theoretical model of AI technology. At the same time, the workforce was divided into high-, medium-, and low-skilled groups according to education level. Empirical analysis was conducted using relevant data from 31 Chinese provinces spanning from 2012 to 2018. The aim was to test the impact of AI technology on the employment of different types of floating populations. The results indicated that: (1) industrial robots impacted heterogeneous skilled floating population labor by bipolar promotion and central substitution. (2) The application of industrial robots had a promotion effect on unfinished school and primary school groups, a substitution effect on middle school, high school/technical secondary school, and college specialties, and a promotion effect on college undergraduate and graduate students. (3) Distinguish employment status, industrial robot application had a significant negative impact on low-skilled employees and significant positive effects on high-skilled employers. Hence, it was recommended to put forward corresponding policy suggestions to address this issue.

Чайна-таун в России: судьба символа «китайской экспансии»

The massive Chinese labor migration to post-Soviet Russia has posed a difficult task in understanding this new phenomenon and assessing its consequences. A popular response to this request was the idea that the immediate and obligatory consequence is the formation of Chinatowns - places of cohabitation, concentration of economic activity and social life of migrants. Chinatown was seen as an immanent characteristic of Chinese migration, its way of life, a mechanism of social organization and control. In many geopolitical constructions and in the mass media, Chinatowns were considered as already existing numerous and uncontrolled enclaves in cities - the main tool of “Chinese expansion”. The empirical basis for the formation of such constructions was provided by vague fragments of historical memory of pre-revolutionary Chinatowns and images of American Chinatowns drawn from Western popular culture. However, this syndrome, which was powerful at the beginning of the process, began to quickly lose energy and influence. Nobody could find Chinatowns in Russian cities due to their absence. The horror of “Chinese expansion” gradually changed to the already familiar migrant phobia. People became used to decreasing quantitative Chinese migration and became accustomed to benefiting from it. As a result, Chinatown gradually transformed from a very concrete, material phenomenon into a metaphor, a designation of Chineseness as such. Therefore, this syndrome loses its mobilizing power. The authors declare no conflicts of interests.

Skill Shifts and Retraining Initiatives: Adapting to Post-Pandemic Labor Market Dynamics

This paper thoroughly explores the intricate dynamics of the Chinese labor market in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, examining consequential shifts in skills and the retraining initiatives undertaken to navigate this evolving landscape. A comprehensive analysis explores the broader economic ramifications of the pandemic, including contractions in economic output and disruptions in global supply chains. Emphasis is placed on changes in employment rates, reflecting both the initial surge in unemployment and subsequent recovery with altered employment patterns. The study scrutinizes industry disruptions, particularly the accelerated adoption of technology, and evaluates macroeconomic factors, such as government stimulus measures and evolving labor market policies. The importance of ongoing research and adaptive policies is emphasized to address the evolving skill requirements in the post-pandemic Chinese labor market.

DIGITAL LABOR UNDER THE STATE/CAPITALIST DUOPOLY: STATE LABOR AND PLAYFUL WORKAHOLICS IN CHINESE DIGITAL SPACE

With the rise of Multi-Channel Networks (MCNs), Chinese digital creative industries are no longer a realm of self-entrepreneurship but are dominated by professional service agencies and platforms. At the same time, the Chinese-style market economy and state-led platformization have spawned a unique platform ecology, shaping Chinese digital creative industries and labor subjectivity in its own unique way. This study contributes to digital entrepreneurship in a non-Western context by exploring the characteristics and risks of Chinese digital laborers amid state-led platformization. Through a qualitative analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of major MCNs in China, the finding reveals that Chinese digital laborers are trapped in a state/capitalist duopoly. On the surface, recruitment advertisements posted by MCNs create a low-threshold, flexible working environment. But in essence, they reflect the precarious working conditions of contemporary digital laborers under MCNs’ systematic business model. In a crude way, MCNs transformed digital entrepreneurs who previously relied on self-promotion into aesthetic laborers in front of the camera. At the same time, laborers behind the camera are a group of playful workaholics at great risk of being exploited for free. They are compelled to involuntarily internalize the pressures of hyper-productivity and undertake trivial emotional labor. Beyond the risks of the platformed digital economy, I argue that digital laborers of MCNs have become a form of state labor that is expected to contribute to national development agendas while embodying the national character that the state promotes.

Searching for desirable bodies: How recruiters value physically exertive extracurricular activities for graduate hiring at elite professional firms in China.

The field of research in evaluating and applying Bourdieu's theories has seen growing interests in studying how the formation and effect of cultural capital vary in different contexts and fields. While existing studies have increasingly focussed on evaluating the role of cultural capital in creating educational inequalities in the Chinese context, little is known about how activities and taste are valued in the Chinese labour market. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 73 recruiters in elite professional firms in China, this article presents a study on how recruiters interpret physically exertive extracurricular activities (ECAs) for graduate hiring. It shows that these ECAs were valorised for assessing individual qualities and competences in job interviews, while other cultural activities, leisure or tastes carried little value. The notion of the body appeared central to this valorisation, conferring symbolic value onto physical exertive ECAs. The value of these activities was twofold, serving to convey candidates' possession of physical and embodied capital, which resonated to the normative dimension of elite professional firms. Recruiters thus used these activities to seek new professional bodies consumable for demanding professional work and resonating with the normative discourses of professionalism. This study provides more nuanced understandings of cultural capital in a non-Western context and the role of ECAs in elite hiring. It also contributes to the development of physical and embodied capital by integrating perspective that links the body with labour process and professional control.

The Application of "Three Comprehensiveness " Model in Chinese Primary School Labor Education

Objective: This paper focuses on the comprehensive development of the five education programs in schools, truly leveraging the important role of labor education. The school conducts practical research on the "Three Comprehensiveness" model curriculum system of labor education, which involves full participation, comprehensive implementation， interdisciplinary integration, to enable students to acquire labor skills, learn cooperation and cultivate new generations who understand, know and love labor.
 
 Method: Conduct research using sampling and testing methods.Using a simple random sampling method, 100 Grade 6 students were selected from Min’an Primary School, Nantou Town, Zhongshan City. The research was conducted by questionnaire survey of students, teachers and parents, teacher interview.Through SPSS reliability and validity analysis, students' labor concepts, labor skills and labor values are analyzed.Through the action research method, observe the changes of students in labor habits and labor values.
 
 Result: All students participate in labor education, which is carried out through a combination of on campus and off campus education, integrated with the seven disciplines of Chinese, mathematics, English, science, art, physical education, and information technology. This enables students to increase their labor knowledge, acquire labor skills, cultivate good labor habits, and establish correct labor values.
 
 Conclusion: Understand the level of labor awareness, attitude, skills, daily life, labor education, labor value, and labor habits of sixth grade students; The integration of labor education in the seven disciplines of primary school Chinese, mathematics, English, science, art, physical education, and information technology; By investigating students, education, and parents' attitudes towards labor education, we can understand the methods and approaches for cultivating labor education both on and off campus.

At the Roots of Neocolonialism: Forced Labor of the Indentured Chinese Miners in the British Transvaal

The paper deals with the historical use of the Chinese indentured laborers on the gold mines of the Transvaal shortly after the end of the Second Boer war. In the short span of four years some 60 thousand Chinese laborers were imported under 3-year contracts, and then repatriated, after having contributed greatly to the restoration and expansion of the Rand gold mines. By analyzing the legal framework of the process and documented witnesses’ accounts of the “Chinese slavery” in the Transvaal, the author comes to the conclusion that the colonial administration of the Transvaal was ignoring the conventions agreed upon by the British and Chinese side, while the Chinese side did not possess the actual means to enforce the agreements. In the author’s opinion, this can be viewed as the roots of the West’s neocolonial approach to the international relations.

Digital labor in the state-led/capitalist complex: State labor and playful workaholics in the Chinese digital space

Contemporary Chinese digital creative industries are no longer a realm of self-entrepreneurship, with multi-channel networks (MCNs) playing a significant role in shaping the digital labor market. This study focuses on the multifaceted Chinese digital labor regimes characterized by capitalism, national agendas, and state regulation. Through a qualitative analysis of 203 recruitment advertisements of major MCNs and 17 interviews of digital laborers, the findings reveal that the digital labor of MCNs operates in a state-led/capitalist complex. Beyond the risks of the capitalist industries, MCNs’ recruitment logic and management align with the state's agenda of economic development. Whether intentionally or not, the digital labor of MCNs has been swept into China's entrepreneurial solutionism, evolving into a form of state labor that integrates creative power and individual entrepreneurship into national building.

The financial shape of things to come

The global financial system is undergoing its most significant change in the last four decades. A highly leveraged consumption-driven model undergirded by US fiat currency, Chinese labor arbitrage and US geopolitical primacy, is facing questions. This comes at a time when the global power balance is shifting from the West to the East at the fastest rate in the last three centuries. Economic and security risks are at a multi-decade high and manifest in economic crises and wars. The kind of equilibrium achieved by major and emerging powers after this period of transition will depend on how they derisk supply chains, re-globalize trade and mitigate conflicts

Research on the impact of artificial intelligence on the employment environment of labors in China

Purpose: The development of artificial intelligence technology can undoubtedly trigger profound changes in the labor market. Empirical analysis of the impact of artificial intelligence on the employment environment and its mechanism can propose effective paths to optimize the employment environment, which can effectively promote the improvement of the employment environment for Chinese labors and the stability of the employment situation. Based on the limitations of the development of artificial intelligence technology in China, this study focuses on studying its impact on the employment environment in the short term, and the long-term effects on the employment environment in China will become the author's future focus and research direction. Methodology: This study uses quantitative research methods, based on Panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2009 to 2019, and uses program computer software Stata 17.0 for data processing and empirical analysis. Conclusion: AI technology has a significant positive role in promoting the employment environment, and the new Information infrastructure represented by the Internet is conducive to promoting the positive moderating of AI on the employment environment. Through further research, it was found that the employment environment improvement effect of AI technology has regional differences, with a greater impact on the employment environment in the eastern region than in the western region, while the impact on the central region is not significant.

Has the digital economy improved income inequality for ethnic minorities? The case of China

This paper examines how China's ethnic minorities' income equality has changed due to the digital economy's development. The study focuses on the critical analysis of the legal system by juridical analysis combined with doctrinal and textual analysis. Furthermore, the article makes the argument convictive by developing econometric models and heterogeneity analysis. Through a dialectical discussion, this paper shows a shared understanding of what the term “digital economy” means in Chinese society, and that income equality for ethnic minorities in the digital economy has both positive and negative effects. On the one hand, the digital economy is conducive to raising income levels and reducing the income gap between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities; however, on the other hand, the digital economy exacerbates the income gap between Han Chinese and ethnic minorities among low-income groups. As a result, disputes over income equality for ethnic minorities in the digital economy are more pronounced among low-income groups. The institutional causes of these problems include the inadequacy of China's digital economy policies for ethnic minorities and the shortcomings of China's legal system for labor protection. The Chinese government should renew the Chinese Constitution, labor law, and employment protection policies to improve the present situation. Based on China's experience, other countries should have pragmatic attitudes to revise the laws and regulations and explore some target measures, such as the digital services tax, to help ethnic minorities.

The Three-child Policy and Its Positive Impacts on Female Labor Engagement in China

With the implementation of the three-child policy in July 2021, many worry that womens role in the Chinese labor market will be further diminished due to the tradeoff between fer-tility and labor commitment, worsening the already lowered female labor engagement. However, after evaluating the new models for female employment, this paper finds that the new policy might have a positive impact on womens labor participation for two reasons. Firstly, the increased availability of public and commercialized childcare as well as pro-gression in social values means that the motherhood penalty for childbirth has largely di-minished compared to past decades, and there might be a positive correlation between fer-tility and female labor engagement. Secondly, the government subsidies and parental leave schemes implemented along with the three-child policy could further reduce the opportuni-ty of childbirth for women and therefore increase female labor participation. In conclusion, this paper finds that family planning policies such as the three-child policy can well en-courage womens engagement in the labor force and foster female employment.

The Immigrant Backstories of Asian American Surgeons.

The stories of Asian immigrants have both shared themes and ones that are unique to the histories of their homelands. Their labor was essential to the settlement and economic development of America, yet their presence incited riots and official restrictions to their rights to immigration and citizenship. Chinese laborers mined the Gold Country, built the transcontinental railroad, and reclaimed tillable land in the Central Valley. Yet they were denied the immense bounty they created, and their immigration was blocked by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.Japanese, Asian Indians, and Filipinos replaced them on farms as migrant laborers. As foreign nationals they were not allowed to own land, but they thrived as independent farmers on leased plots. Their success attracted discrimination and racist violence. They, too, were barred from immigration and citizenship (Johnson-Reed Act, 1924).World War II was a watershed event for Asians in America. Japanese Americans, ethnically identical to the enemy, were imprisoned in concentration camps in the American interior. China, the Philippines, and India, all allies of the US, were rewarded with naturalization rights for their nationals. In 1965 Congress liberalized immigration quotas and reversed the 1924 restrictions, with priority given to those with advanced technical ability in science, including medicine. Asians from Taiwan and India took advantage of the new regulations and predominated among the newcomers. After the fall of Saigon in 1975, America accommodated yet another Asian population in the country, the tens of thousands of refugees from Southeast Asia.

Liquidity and Liquefaction

This article considers the collision of earthly and monetary phase shifts. It situates itself in Richmond, British Columbia, a seam where multiple and disparate processes of landing collaborate in the ongoing transformation and modulation of the earth’s surface. It poses a Chinese-funded construction boom on an island in western Canada as a geological formation, a physical outcropping at the collision of nineteenth-century Chinese terraforming labor and twenty-first-century flyaway Asian wealth. These collisions articulate fault lines in transpacific tectonic and geopolitical relations, even as the fluid dynamics of wealth and islands of impounded silt evince multiple figurations of Asian-ness. Through the juxtaposition of two permutations of land, economics, and racial formation across multiple centuries in the Fraser River Delta, I offer a notion of orogeny, the geological process of mountain building and crustal deformation, to attend to the earthmoving dynamisms of rivers, wealth, and Asian racialization.

Freeing Chinese Men on the María Luz: Gender and the Latin American Coolie Trade

AbstractThis essay analyzes a Japanese court’s criminal conviction of a Peruvian shipmaster for abusing Chinese contract workers and the subsequent release of all Chinese passengers except a lone girl. Using the case as a lens onto gender dynamics within the coolie trade to Latin America, I argue that overlapping patriarchal practices made Chinese contract labor overwhelming male and prioritized men in debates over freedom. The María Luz trials upheld women’s domestic sexual bondage while condemning men’s enslavement.

Forced Labour, Indenture and Convict Transportation: A Case Study of the Western Australian Pastoral Industry, 1830–50

This article analyses Western Australian pastoralists’ agitation for, and their expanding reliance upon, forced labour in the Avon valley in the 1830s and 1840s. I argue that coercive labour practices were already well established by the time the York Agricultural Society began lobbying for convict transportation in the late 1840s, and that this effort reflected a desire to intensify already existing patterns of unfree labour rather than a brand-new intervention. The shift to forced labour occurred soon after the settler conquest of Ballardong Noongar country facilitated the establishment of a profitable pastoral industry. Pastoralists struggled to hire sufficient numbers of free white workers to work their fields and stations, and to pay the exorbitant wages demanded by them; and they turned instead to Noongar workers, often using coercive methods to maintain labour discipline. Even so, it was clear by the mid-1840s that the settler and Aboriginal labour pool was too small to secure the pastoral industry’s long-term success; and initiatives to augment the colonial workforce by sending out juvenile offenders from Parkhurst prison, and by recruiting Chinese and Indian indentured labourers, were insufficient to meet demand. The Avon valley pastoralists therefore mounted a vigorous campaign to introduce convict labour to Western Australia.

Naamyam, Creative Music, and Immigrant Act: Meditations on Jon Jang’s Musical Setting of Genny Lim’s “Burial Mound”

Abstract Jon Jang, an American composer, bandleader, and activist of Chinese descent, begins his five-movement Island: The Immigrant Suite No. 1 (1995) with a musical setting that is sonically and stylistically unconventional. He introduces a curious adaptation of naamyam (“southern tones”)—a Cantonese genre of narrative singing that originated in the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong—into this musical setting of Genny Lim’s Chinglish poem “Burial Mound” so as to make audible the politics of representation concerning Sinophone Americans of particular ancestries, generations, and immigration histories. Not only does he associate this setting with Chinese laborers of the transcontinental railroad and naamyam in American Chinatowns, he also demonstrates in this setting his embrace of “creative music” as an American framework of cultural performance.

Unveiling Class Discourse: Its Articulation and Generation in Chinese Labor Struggles

ABSTRACT While the term “class” has largely vanished from China’s public discourse, class discourse has endured within the country’s labor struggles over the last four decades. Nevertheless, class discourse has been articulated in distinct ways across three instances of labor activism: state workers’ opposition to industrial restructuring, worker-initiated collective bargaining, and Marxist-inspired agitation, manifesting as nostalgia, collective rights, and labor emancipation, respectively. This article delves into the origins of these distinct articulations of class discourse by delineating three modes of their emergence: endogenous, exogenous, and symbiotic. It further elucidates how these modes materialize through the interplay of workers’ experiences and the roles undertaken by labor activists from both shopfloors and civil society. The article’s objective extends to evaluating the degree to which these three discursive expressions encapsulate class consciousness, while also delving into their underlying ideological implications.

Research on the Solutions to the Chinese Labor Shortage Caused by Population Aging

China is facing the serious problem of population aging, and the labor shortage caused by population aging will also impact the future Chinese labor market. This paper uses the research method of literature review to compare the policies adopted by countries with severe aging, and then seeks a population policy suitable for China's aging. Labor mobility and multiple birth policies are not suitable for China's current national conditions. Based on China's current national conditions, the Chinese government can implement the two policies of extending the retirement period and training the elderly labor force, especially technological innovation, to further help China effectively solve the problem of population aging.