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Revolution, War, and Revenge in Maoist China. Covell Meyskens reviews Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life

Chen Jian, Zhou Enlai: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2024)*

Chen Jian has written an impressive book. For decades to come, it will undoubtedly be the go-to text that scholars consult for questions related to Zhou Enlai. As Chen notes in the introduction, past scholarship on Zhou has tended to fall into two camps. The first group has stressed his political wisdom, moral integrity, and dedication to serving China and its people at home and abroad. This viewpoint has been especially widespread in China where the party-state has used Zhou’s exemplary character to craft a historical narrative that highlights the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) devotion to building China into a world power. A second group has taken a diametrically opposed stance and criticized Zhou, in Chen’s words “for his unfailing loyalty to Mao and Mao’s disastrous revolutionary programs” (Chen, 6). In this framing, Zhou is depicted not as the “moral example of the revolution” (Chen, 5). He is disparaged as a selfish hypocrite who prioritized his own self-protection.

In his monograph, Zhou Enlai: A Life, Chen seeks to produce an interpretation of Zhou’s life that does not fit into either of these frameworks. For Chen, it is too simplistic to just shower Zhou with praise or condemn his moral and political failings. Neither approach will lead to sufficient historical understanding of Zhou Enlai and the revolution to which he dedicated his life. Historians who engage in these moralistic readings miss the mark because, as Chen says, “a revolution is no sin” (Chen, 7), and revolutionary history cannot be reduced to morality. “Revolutions happen for a reason” (Chen, 7). For a historian such as Chen, the analytical task is to delve into source materials to determine what factors caused Zhou and others to take part in China’s revolution in all its complexity, from “the grand aim” of creating a new socialist human to committing “unspeakable violence against humanity” (Chen, 8).

According to Chen, only through a deep examination of available sources can historians “articulate the historical conditions…under which a revolution begins” (Chen, 9). Only then can we comprehend how Zhou and “his comrades made the revolution…[and] were remade by it,” and ultimately became “its prisoners” (Chen, 8). Only in this way can scholars “identify why, where, and how the revolution went wrong and ran counter to the goal of the revolutionaries— the liberation of the people” (Chen, 9). Chen thus immersed himself in Zhou-related source materials for two decades. This sustained engagement led him to conclude that “there exists no single or straightforward formula” that a historian can use to “tell and make sense of Zhou’s story” (Chen, 9). Rather, Chen realized that “Zhou’s life and career” epitomize “the dilemmas and tragedies of China’s revolutionary era” and embody “its deep paradoxes and enduring complexities” (Chen, 9).

To a certain extent, Chen’s empiricist approach is similar to much recent research on Maoist China which has placed a heavy emphasis on the contradictions, unintended consequences, and tensions between ideology and reality in Chinese revolutionary politics. Yet there is one huge difference between Chen’s book and most histories of socialist China published in the past decade or so. Most recent studies are firmly rooted in social, cultural, environmental, and economichistory. While they do not overlook high politics, it is not their primary focus. Their major analytical concern is the everyday problems, patterns, and prospects of different laborers, families, communities, officials, sexes, environments, and ethnic and religious groups.

This kind of interest in the complexity of social, political, cultural, and environmental dynamics is strikingly absent from Chen’s book. Although Chen does at different points discuss how party policies impacted large groups of people, he does so at a significant distance from the warp and woof of daily life. The only point of view he examines at length is the social world of political elites. Chen’s portrayal of CCP leaders, like many other histories of elites, makes it seem as if they spent nearly all their time on affairs of pressing political consequence and had little-to-no social or family life or interests outside of their work. By taking this analytical approach, Chen’s depiction of the social world of CCP leaders occludes the material support networks that went into maintaining their everyday lives of prestige, privilege, and power. While it may not be Chen’s intent, one consequence of his persistent concentration on the upper echelons of China’s party-state is that readers could easily come to think that party elites were the only people with agency in China’s revolution, and that everyone else in China was just a pawn in the plans, policies, and power games of the CCP leadership’s making.

Chen Jian is especially interested in the small group of elite men whose careers at the party-state’s apex were intimately entangled with Mao Zedong’s. This narrative focus certainly centers Zhou Enlai as the book’s core subject, but it seems at times that he also is not, and that occupying center stage instead is Mao himself, “buoyed by vast, unchecked, and unbalanced political power,” exercising his authority over Zhou and everyone else in China to fulfill his “utopian visions” of permanent revolution “fused with grand plans for political, social, and cultural transformation through prolonged mass mobilization campaigns” (Chen, 8).

This interpretation of Mao’s power over the Chinese revolution is emplotted in a revolution-as-disaster narrative. In Chen’s hands, this narrative functions as a literary motor pushing the story forward, giving meaning to the historical record and its significance. This plotline is so pronounced in the book that, in my view, it significantly undermines Chen Jian’s proclaimed intention to attend to the paradoxes and complexities of China’s revolution. The logic of this narrative frame is not at all complex, rather it is quite simple: China’s revolution was a catastrophe, and Mao’s political campaigns were a principal reason for this disaster. Reiterated at several junctures, frequently at the end of chapters, this argument often invokes two political campaigns launched as part of Mao’s continuous revolution – the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

While the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution are undoubtedly momentous episodes in China’s revolutionary period, their repeated mention leaves the impression that they are the primary prism through which the revolution and Zhou Enlai’s life ought to be considered. Of course, there are many scholars and journalists who have argued that this interpretation is correct, and that evaluations of China’s revolution can and should be reduced to the devastations of the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. And yet, we could ask: what does the revolution-as-disaster narrative obscure? This question emerged particularly for me in the early chapters, where I often wondered at the summing up of Zhou’s early decades by Chen’s referencing of later events. This struck me as an anachronistic way of reading the past.

Through this authorial sleight of hand, the future disaster becomes the all-consuming endpoint of the narrative, turning the book into a work not of history, but of sci-fi horror as ferocious ghosts from the future somehow mystically travel back in time and haunt the past not just once, but several times, seemingly through some sort of time loops that enable them to repeatedly venture into and terrorize previous eras. Setting aside the magical realism at play here in Chen’s story, this narrative trick makes it seem as if all of Zhou’s biography were leading to the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution. When the revolution-as-disaster narrative is given such a central place in the book’s narrative arc, earlier periods in time lose their autonomy, agency, and comprehensibility on their own terms. It becomes hard to understand why Zhou and others might have supported the revolution in earlier phases or how revolutionary motivations were maintained over time. While the book takes up these issues, the revolution-as-disaster narrative often crowds out a more sustained examination.

To some extent, Chen Jian balances the revolution-as-disaster narrative by threading through the book another narrative common to histories of the People’s Republic of China: the “standing-up” story. This refers to Mao’s famous words at the PRC State’s foundation in 1949, “We, the Chinese, have stood up” (Chen, 281). This phrase is sprinkled throughout Chen’s text and thus also serves as a semantic engine. The standing-up narrative captures a powerful strain in Chinese nationalism and acts as a metonym for all the angst and anger of the Chinese population about foreign incursions and domestic turmoil in the century preceding 1949. It articulates the pride Chinese leaders and people had in finally relegating the troubled history of imperialist subordination to the past and establishing a new state-society nexus dedicated to rebuilding China on the world stage.

On the other hand, the standing-up narrative is perhaps too sweeping. Like the revolution-as-disaster narrative, this storyline obscures as much as it reveals. It amalgamates a huge chunk of time under a single banner while overlooking the wide variety of experiences that people of different ages and social backgrounds had of China’s Communist revolution. These experiences, as different scholars have documented, ranged from exhilaration, hope, and commitment to despair, resistance, compliance, and resignation.

Another historiographic tendency that Chen Jian shares with many other historians is placing revolution at the center of his narrative. Clearly the importance of revolution in the life of Zhou Enlai and other members of the twentieth-century Chinese elite should not be denied. However, it is arguable that war was as vitally important in their politics and life trajectories. Without a doubt, revolution and war were closely linked in twentieth-century China, as were war and the Chinese people’s drive to “stand-up.” Yet, when many historians of China narrate the last century, they tend to grant revolution center stage and relegate war to the background. This is in marked contrast to histories of twentieth century Europe or the United States which often foreground war in the making of nations, individuals, science, and other historical phenomena. In the past two decades, some historians of China – Rana Mitter, Hans van de Ven, Diana Lary, for example – have focused on the weight of war in modern China’s history. Even so, revolution remains the more dominant explanatory framework.

It could be that we may better understand Zhou’s choices and the historical conditions he faced by making war instead of revolution more central to his life and times. By foregrounding war, the violence of the Mao era appears less as a unique attribute of the period and more as an enduring element in Chinese politics from the early twentieth century onwards. War allows the Cultural Revolution to look less like an all-encompassing disastrous endpoint and instead it becomes legible as part of a century-long trend in Chinese history in which stark friend-enemy distinctions, extreme violence, a militarist political economy, and militarized approaches to state-society relations and resolving disagreements were the norm, not the exception. Seen from this standpoint, violence appears less as a unique product of communist revolutionaries. It appears instead as a prominent feature of mid-twentieth century Chinese politics, from warlord battles and the Guomindang’s annihilation campaigns against the CCP to the party’s militant activities to survive, take power, and build a revolutionary China. In this vein, I would suggest that the Cultural Revolution could be read as the last civil war in a long series of civil wars stretching back into the advent of modern history in China.

The Great Leap famine also appears in a different light when it is seen alongside the wars of preceding decades, in which government actors used starvation and ecological destruction as tools of statecraft. Mass death was a recurrence; numbness to huge losses of life became prevalent; and finding a way to move on amidst widespread devastation was not an abnormal experience of only a few people, but a normative touchstone in a nation that was heavily militarized for decades. By drawing these connections, I do not mean to downplay the consequences of the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. Rather, I aim to suggest ways to rethink China’s twentieth century as an era of domestic and foreign wars.

Another facet of Chen’s book with which I had disagreements was the claim that the essential reason Mao Zedong was able to stay in power for so long was that during the Yan’an Rectification Campaign from 1942-1945, Zhou Enlai and “his comrades had handed Mao total power to make and define the revolution’s legitimacy narrative” (Chen, 224). From that point on, “the lofty cause of the Chinese Communist Revolution became centered on a single person’s ‘greatness’ and the supposed brilliance of his ideas” (Chen, 224), and no other CCP leader could “come up with an alternative grand legitimacy narrative for the Chinese revolution” than Mao’s theory of “continuous revolution” which combined Mao’s “Communist utopian vision with Chinese patriotism and revolutionary nationalism” and made “‘we, the Chinese, have stood up’” (Chen, 538) into its motto.

While it is true that Mao had commanding power over discourse during his tenure as the CCP’s top leader, I am less certain that his role as master narrator was such a decisive factor in his political longevity. I am inclined to say that a second factor Chen Jian emphasizes was more important – the party leadership “created no institutions to check and balance” Mao’s power. Although Mao’s narrative authority mattered, his position at the fulcrum of all major institutions was just as crucial, if not more so. This position gave him supremacy over all levers of state power at both the central and provincial levels.

Mao’s power over institutions helps to explain his continued dominance even when the discourse behind his policies became contradictory and disjointed. For instance, when Mao called on the People’s Liberation Army to suppress rebel factions during the Cultural Revolution, this policy shift went against his earlier decree to arm the students in precisely those factions. The Party’s propaganda apparatus engaged in semiotic gymnastics to paper over this contradiction. On the one hand, this shows that Mao’s role rendered narrative coherence less important in the production of Maoist ideology. What mattered more was how various narratives in Mao’s name were generated and how various factions mobilized Maoist discourse to advance competing and divergent interests of their own. On the other hand, one could argue that it was Mao’s power over the gun that mattered most in the suppression of Cultural Revolution factions, not his narrative hegemony. In addition, as many scholars have pointed out, including Chen Jian, the discursive contradictions and jumbles generated by policy shifts led many to lose faith in Mao and his closest advisors.  

According to Chen, Zhou played a crucial role in maintaining Mao’s leadership amid policy inconsistencies and the problems his tenure in power produced. As Chen illustrates, Zhou did not always agree with Mao and sometimes openly expressed disagreement. However, from very early on, Zhou decided to never challenge Mao’s supremacy. He genuflected partially because he lacked the “will and determination to rise to and maintain the position of the revolution’s supreme leader” (Chen, 72). Yet he also bent a knee because he determined after intense conflicts with Mao in the 1930s that the only way “to avoid another deadly clash” with a vengeful Mao was to embrace him “as the paramount leader” and never “pursue the party’s number two position” (Chen, 225). Zhou’s deference to Mao made him invaluable to the Chairman.

As a “man of action” (Chen, 92), Zhou was always there to take Mao’s ideas and turn them into concrete policies, to sense what direction Mao seemed to be moving and guide the ship of state in that direction. When Mao’s political campaigns generated conflict between different political factions, Zhou frequently stepped in, “demonstrated his prowess as a master compromiser” (Chen, 127), and worked to find common ground between competing interest groups. When Mao shifted quickly from one policy to another, Zhou did not dwell on the contradictions in Mao’s thinking or activities. Nor did he waver in his loyalty. He followed Mao’s orders, had state institutions implement them, and managed the consequences. Chen Jian asserts that “without Zhou” manning the essential levers of state machinery, “the big ship that was China, carrying hundreds of millions of passengers, might have sunk” (Chen, 589), especially during the Cultural Revolution.

In addition to claiming that Mao was the revolution’s master narrator, Chen also states several times that Mao was a master of party politics. Yet it is not entirely clear what counts as mastery. If the meaning of mastery is to survive a long time or stay at the party’s helm, then one could plausibly agree with this argument. Yet this is a low bar to evaluate mastery of the party-state. If one employs a different metric for mastery that places more stress on policy effectiveness, this claim stands on less firm ground. Chen’s evidence reinforces this latter view. In Chen’s telling, Mao appears not to be a strategic master. He looks much more like a political bumbler, as Neil Diamant has argued. Mao did not pass from one success to another. He implemented one policy after another in an ad hoc and often arbitrary manner.

Mao’s policies often generated unintended consequences, and so he stopped pursuing one policy and implemented another. This pulling of the party-state back and forth in a hodge-podge of policies appears to have led many people in China at the elite and grassroots level to experience Maoist governance not as masterful, but instead as inducing political whiplash, disorientation, and disillusionment. According to Chen Jian, Zhou was the key communist leader whose indefatigable work ethic and bureaucratic skill kept China’s ship of state afloat amid all the tumult caused by Mao’s policies. While this claim may be true, Chen does not offer enough evidence to back it up. I found myself wanting more information on how exactly Zhou kept institutions functioning on an everyday basis but also in troubled times. Chen keeps his narrative spotlight so narrowly focused on Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong that readers are offered relatively few insights into other party members Zhou interacted with, what sort of relationships they had, and how they worked together to put policies into practice and deal with problems.

One final narrative framework pivotal to Chen’s book is what I would call a revolution-as-revenge narrative. This framework is intimately connected with the revolution-as-disaster narrative that Chen weaves into the entire book. Chen asserts that Mao’s drive to undertake continuous revolution through huge political campaigns, especially the Great Leap and Cultural Revolution, were critical factors behind China’s revolution resulting in calamity. In this telling, another major factor was Mao’s personality. Suspicious and resentful, Mao made revenge into a motor of Chinese revolutionary politics. In Chen’s analysis, rancor and retribution play such a driving role in Mao’s conduct that one is left with the impression that his propensity for revenge was a fundamental plank in his long-term dominance over Chinese party politics and China’s revolution.

As Chen details at length, Mao was full of bile and spite and was not inclined to forget how certain people had wronged him. He rarely buried the hatchet, granted forgiveness, or moved on. He held onto grudges and kept their malice hanging over his comrades’ heads like Damocles’ sword, ever inclined to lash out at others for what they did today, what they did decades ago, and what Mao worried they might one day do to the revolution and his legacy. Zhou’s fear of Mao’s animus was also, as stated above, a major reason for his absolute allegiance even in the worst of circumstances.

Clearly, Mao’s resentment over wrongs, both real and imagined, was an integral factor in the Chinese revolution’s course. However, resentment is granted such a paramount place in Chen’s book, that it appears sometimes that the only motivator behind Mao’s actions was the venting of his spleen. Ideology fades into the shadows in this historiographic light; avenging grievances was what mattered. From this perspective, it can seem as though the political battles between Mao and others over the revolution’s direction were not fueled by differing views on how to build socialism, but by political passions that were more personal, poisonous, and at times profoundly petty. Chen’s past work has asserted the centrality of ideology in understanding China’s revolution. His magnum opus on Zhou Enlai’s life instead seems to suggest that revenge was not only a more powerful driver of Maoism, but angst about Mao’s vengeance was an enduring engine of Zhou’s politics.

*An abridged version of this review will be published on H-Diplo as part of a roundtable.

Covell Meyskens is Associate Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School. He researches the geopolitical, social, and environmental dimensions of security and development in modern China. His first book, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. He is currently writing his second book, The Three Gorges Dam: Building a Developmental Engine for China and the World.

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Lili Lin reviews Nellie Chu, Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou

Nellie Chu. 2026. Precarious Accumulation: Fast Fashion Bosses in Transnational Guangzhou. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Since the promotion of the state-endorsed “Mass Entrepreneurship and Innovation” initiative in 2014, entrepreneurship has been framed as a panacea for nearly all socio-economic problems. Individuals across different social backgrounds are encouraged to embrace entrepreneurship, turning the entrepreneur into an aspirational figure. As of March 2026, flexible workers account for around 27 percent of China’s workforce (Tang et al, 2026), reflecting the growing normalization of self-employment and casualization of labor in a time of increasing uncertainty. In this sense, Nellie Chu’s Precarious Accumulation provides timely and critical insights on how entrepreneurial aspirations are lived and constrained within China’s postsocialist transformations and global neoliberal capitalism. The book’s rich and solid ethnographic accounts demonstrate how aspirations and dispossessions are intertwined with processes of capital accumulation amid the shifting dynamics of global supply chains.

Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Guangzhou, Chu examines the labor and livelihoods of migrant entrepreneurs in transnational fast fashion supply chains. She develops the concept of “precarious accumulation” to describe the contradictory experiences of domestic and transnational migrant entrepreneurs, who aspire to achieve entrepreneurial promises of wealth, freedom, and autonomy while being exposed to structural violence of extraction, exploitation, and extortion by both state and market forces. These contradictions produce conditions of “stalled mobility,” defined as “the experience of a treadmill-like effect of chasing after capital and social mobility” (p.19).

Precarious Accumulation bridges a gap between earlier labor studies in China, which have largely focused on waged labor in manufacturing and service sectors, and broader discussions of precarity that often center on middle-class experiences and confined within national boundaries. By focusing on small-scale migrant entrepreneurs from the rural China, West Africa, and South Korea, Chu expands the analytical scope of precarity to include transnational and intersubjective dimensions, and connects it to the fluctuation of capital accumulation, particularly in the fast fashion industry. Her work also contributes to the recent scholarship (e.g., L. Zhang 2023; C. Zhang 2022) on postsocialist China’s transformations of labor and desires and its integration into the neoliberal global capitalism from a bottom-up, transnational perspective.

Across five chapters, Chu’s ethnographic vignettes unfold migrant bosses’ everyday rhythms of labor and their practices of “bosshood” across different nodes of the supply chains in Guangzhou. Each chapter highlights a distinct aspect of precarious accumulation and takes the reader into the lived world of migrant entrepreneurs, from family workshops (jiagongchang) in the Zhaocun urban village, wholesale markets such as Xi Fang Hang building, to the Xiaobei district and underground churches where many West African migrants are concentrated.

Chapter 1 sets the scene by situating the research within China’s postsocialist transformations of labor, land, and personhood, which have facilitated the emergence of global fast fashion supply chain in the household assembly workshops in urban villages and transnational migrant districts in Guangzhou. Different migrant populations seek entrepreneurial opportunities across the supply chains: the rural Chinese migrants, who are historically vanguard of socialist revolution; South Korean entrepreneurs, who take the waves of the global K-pop; and West African traders, who rely on faith-based networks.

Chapter 2 zooms in on labor practices and social relations in the Wong family’s workshop in an urban village in Guangzhou. It illustrates the uneven relations across the supply chain through the Wongs’ interactions with temporary migrant workers, subcontractors, and clients. Importantly, the story of the Wongs’ shows how practices of accumulation are embedded in contingent social relations, including kinship ties, migrant networks, and gendered dynamics. Constrained by the hukou system, the Wongs’ accumulative practices, often reliant on exploitation, requires constant negotiation between mobility and immobility, as well as freedom and unfreedom.

Chapters 3 and 4 offer a nuanced analysis of the multiple forms of surveillance and extraction enacted by both the state and non-state actors operating across the supply chains. In urban villages, the peasant landlords and private security guards maintain an extralegal economy that monitors and surveils the migrant bosses to extract profits from them, constituting what Chu terms a “shenfen (identification) economy.” These regulatory mechanisms—including “arbitrary fee collection from small-scale bosses, the racialization of West African migrants, affective control over rural Chinese and West African migrants, and regulation/valuation via the suzhi discourse” (p.102)—further aggravate migrant entrepreneurs’ conditions of stalled mobility.

Similar extractive and predatory mechanisms are evident in wholesale markets. Through a detailed description of the spatial, temporal, and bureaucratic organization of the Xi Fang Hang wholesale building,Chapter 4 shows migrant wholesalers’ subjection to the risks and vulnerability associated with the market demand, and the debt and extortion stemming from speculative real estate management practices and the police fee extraction. Migrant entrepreneurs respond through design-copying and strategies of “flexible appropriation” including retagging garments, reassembling garment pieces, and “flipping” finished goods. Meanwhile, these strategies reproduce the very hierarchy of debt and extraction that confine their accumulation (p.137).

Chapter 5 investigates the distinct precarious conditions faced by the transnational migrant entrepreneurs from West Africa, South Korea, and Korean Chinese (chaoxian zu) in the fast fashion supply chains in Guangzhou, mirroring the stalled mobility experienced by rural Chinese migrants on a transnational scale. These migrant bosses rely on religious, ethnic, gendered, and nationalist networks to achieve economic success, yet these very same identifications also shape their vulnerabilities and their eventual departure from China. For instance, West African entrepreneurs combine their entrepreneurial activities with Christianity in pursuit of capital and spiritual accumulation, while facing racialized extraction and surveillance on daily base, as particularly evident during the COVID-19. South Korean traders, who perform “bosshood” through masculinized practices, benefit from their connections with Korean Chinese communities and from the global popularity of K-pop, but they are also vulnerable to shifting geopolitical relations, such as the 2017 anti-Korean campaign. The chapter also underscores how migrants’ everyday entrepreneurial activities link China to the globe, extending beyond the nation-state boundaries. As noted in the conclusion, the precarity of these accumulative practices becomes even more apparent in the post COVID-19 period, as fast fashion supply chains shift toward Southeast Asia and other regions, prompting transnational migrant entrepreneurs to follow these changing circuits of production.

Taken together, Precarious Accumulation offers a compelling account of the lived contradictions of entrepreneurship as both an aspiration and a form of structural precarity. By foregrounding the labor practices and livelihood of migrant bosses, Chu not only expands the scope of labor studies but also sheds lights for understanding the broader socio-economic conditions of labor and a structure of feeling in a time “marked by the retraction of state-sponsored welfare and by global market forces” (p.8). Indeed, the stalled mobility experienced by migrant entrepreneurs, the deference of neoliberal promises, resonate with larger social groups, including recent young graduates navigating increasingly uncertain labor markets. In this sense, the figure of migrant boss, as Chu suggests, does reflects the fragmented and individualized conditions. The question of “common prosperity,” raised in the conclusion, becomes particularly salient in the prevalence of flexibility and self-entrepreneurship in post-COVID 19 era.

Chu captures a historical moment in which entrepreneurship is shaped both by top-down official endorsements and by bottom-up everyday practices in a postsocialist China. While the book offers powerful and meticulous examination of the latter, it leaves less room for the broader historical genealogy of entrepreneurship in China. Further elaboration on the policy frameworks shaping China’s openness to transnational migrant capital accumulation, and the wider transformations of the fast fashion sector over the past decade, would help situate the ethnography within a more contextual grounding for readers who may be less familiar with China.

References:

Tang, Hanyu, et al. 2026. “How China’s Growing Gig Economy Has Left a Generation Adrift.” Caixin Global. March 2. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2026-03-02/cover-story-how-chinas-growing-gig-economy-has-left-a-generation-adrift-102418672.html

Zhang, Lin. 2023. The Labor of Reinvention: Entrepreneurship in the New Chinese Digital Economy. New York: Colombia University Press.

Zhang, Charlie. 2022. Dreadful Desires: The Uses of Love in Neoliberal China. Durham: Duke University Press.


Lili Lin is an independent scholar who works on gender and labor in contemporary China. Her writing appears in Chinese media outlets and in publications such as Critical Asian Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature and Culture, and Chinese Literature and Thought Today.

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Burak Gürel, Chinese Capital Meets Labor Unrest in Turkey: The Polyak Eynez Miners’ Struggle

A major labor struggle unfolded in late February and early March 2026 at the Polyak Eynez coal mine in Kınık, a district of İzmir in western Turkey. The action was led by Bağımsız Maden-İş (Bağımsız Maden İşçileri Sendikası, Independent Miners’ Union). The immediate trigger was the December 2025 transfer of a 70 percent stake in the Polyak Eynez coal mine from Fiba Holding, a Turkish company, to Qitaihe Long Coal Mining Sanayi Ticaret Limited Şirketi, an affiliate of Qitaihe Longcoal Mining Co., Ltd. (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a; Rekabet Kurumu 2025).

Before the transfer, about 1,700 of a total of 3,000 miners were dismissed by the Turkish owner. This significant downsizing did not itself trigger resistance, because severance and related payments were reportedly made to the dismissed workers. The conflict that erupted in February 2026 centered instead on the remaining workforce—1,243 workers, to be precise—whose wages, bank promotion payments (lump-sum payments that banks make to workers in exchange for handling payroll accounts), and accumulated rights became uncertain after the transfer. Bağımsız Maden-İş pointed to claims that there were disagreements between the previous and current owners over their respective responsibilities regarding workers’ accrued claims, and stressed that the new Chinese owner failed to provide any credible guarantee on these matters. The union also stated that workplace safety measures had been neglected under the new ownership (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a).

The struggle began with a work stoppage on February 20, continued with a seventeen-kilometer march to Kınık town center on February 25, escalated into the occupation of the mine on March 2 after a written payment commitment was not honored, and ended on March 5 with a union-declared victory securing the claims of 1,243 workers, which Bağımsız Maden-İş put at roughly 1 billion Turkish liras (about US$23 million) (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a, 2026e).

This conflict should be situated within Turkey’s broader political economy. Between the currency shock in 2018 and the presidential and parliamentary elections in May 2023, the economic policy of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan relied on credit expansion and low interest rates to sustain productive investment and private-sector job creation even as inflation soared and external vulnerabilities deepened. Following Erdoğan’s victory in the elections, economic policy was recalibrated toward orthodoxy, resulting in significant interest-rate hikes by the Central Bank at the expense of productive investment and job creation. This shift, coupled with the lack of meaningful relief from the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, increased pressure on the working class.

The Polyak struggle belongs to a broader pattern of labor conflict within Chinese-invested enterprises in Turkey. As Chinese investment has grown, class conflict has followed. In earlier research with Baran Şahinli and Deniz Tuzcu, I identified thirty-nine labor-unrest incidents across twenty Chinese-invested enterprises between 2010 and 2022. Most were conflicts over wages, unionization, and labor rights; others represented backlashes against Chinese construction and mining companies’ reliance on imported Chinese labor, leading to demands for local hiring (Gürel, Şahinli, and Tuzcu 2025). This trend has intensified since then. A prime example is the successful 114-day strike (October 2025–February 2026) at Smart Solar, a Chinese-owned solar panel factory in the İstanbul-Gebze industrial corridor (Cumhuriyet 2026a).

Agrarian Crisis, Mining Expansion, and the Making of a Local Labor Regime

The Polyak conflict also emerged from a wider regional history in which deagrarianization, mining expansion, and the proletarianization of the peasantry became tightly intertwined. Kınık belongs to the broader Soma Coal Basin, which encompasses Soma and Kırkağaç in Manisa, Kınık in İzmir, and Savaştepe in Balıkesir. Until the 2000s, the material basis of small-scale family farming remained relatively strong in the basin. Local peasants with access to land did not generally work in the mines, as farming income was sufficient for household reproduction. The turning point came with the neoliberal restructuring of tobacco farming. The implementation of tobacco production quotas and the subsequent privatization of Tekel ended the era of guaranteed state purchases, subjecting smallholders to a reproduction squeeze that effectively forced them out of agriculture and toward the mines. This was followed by a gendered reorganization of livelihoods, in which men moved into mining while women remained in agriculture through a shifting combination of family farming and wage labor on capitalist farms or in textile enterprises. The Polyak case must be placed in precisely this setting: a local economy weakened first by the erosion of its agrarian base and then by rising extractive investment, increasingly dependent on mining wages for survival, and therefore acutely vulnerable to layoffs and delayed wage payments (Çelik 2023, 7–9; Çelik 2024, 7–17).

Engaging with Chinese Capital and the State

The Polyak conflict quickly evolved into a struggle over the legitimacy of the transfer itself. In a statement on February 23, Bağımsız Maden-İş referred to public allegations that the mine had been transferred for the symbolic price of 100 TL (approximately US$3), despite the presence of equipment reportedly worth at least €60 million (approximately US$69.5 million). The union used these figures to argue that the transfer was dubious, that the new owner lacked both credibility and sufficient financial guarantees, and that workers’ rights had once again been subordinated to an opaque corporate arrangement (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a).

This is where one of the findings of my recent collaborative work becomes directly relevant. In our research on Chinese enterprises in Turkey (Gürel et al. forthcoming), we extensively searched the Turkish Trade Registry Gazette and found that many firms declare strikingly low registered capital. This is not unique to Chinese companies, nor does registered capital mechanically indicate real investment capacity. However, such figures can become politically consequential when workers use them to challenge the credibility of ownership transfers. At Polyak, Bağımsız Maden-İş did exactly that. Union lawyer Mürsel Ünder publicly argued that there was only a minimal trade-registry footprint behind the Chinese-linked firm and that its declared capital was far too low to make the transfer believable (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026c). Başaran Aksu, the union’s organizing specialist, sharpened this point by arguing that if a company with such a weak public profile could acquire the mine and claim the right to operate it, then the people of Kınık and the coal miners—to whom hundreds of millions of liras were owed—could make the same claim far more credibly (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026d). The union thus turned corporate opacity into an argument about legitimacy, capacity, and social entitlement.

Qitaihe’s website adds another layer to the story. It presents the company as active in mining planning and design, construction, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) operations, coal washing, equipment procurement, and international trade, with overseas entities in Turkey and Indonesia. In a statement on its website dated January 2, 2025, the company also lists a “Türkiye POLYAK Coal Mine Vertical Air Shaft Reconstruction Project” (Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. 2025). In our earlier research, we also found Qitaihe involved in the Hema projects in Bartın, one of the most conflict-ridden Chinese-linked mining complexes in Turkey (Gürel, Şahinli, and Tuzcu 2025, 169). Polyak was therefore not Qitaihe’s first encounter with Turkey’s contentious mining sector. This shows that Chinese capital was entering an already conflict-ridden sector through arrangements that workers experienced as fragile from the beginning.

The struggle’s China dimension gained traction on February 24, 2026, when Bağımsız Maden-İş published a trilingual appeal on X/Twitter. By tagging the Chinese Ambassador to Turkey and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, the union framed the dispute as a state concern. They explicitly identified Qitaihe Longcoal as an affiliate of the state-owned Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, calling on the Chinese state to intervene in the conduct of its enterprise (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026b). That characterization cannot be stated as a verified ownership fact on the basis of publicly accessible materials alone. Qitaihe’s website does not identify Heilongjiang Longmay as a shareholder or parent. At the same time, Qitaihe’s corporate materials state that the company was restructured in 2015 and “changed to mixed ownership” in 2019 (Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. n.d.). That formulation does not prove a current state shareholder. But it does matter politically. Combined with the union’s public characterization, the absence of any public rebuttal I have been able to locate in Chinese, Turkish, or English sources, and the union’s March 5 statement that it would continue to facilitate the agreed process in coordination with the Chinese Embassy (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e), the question of state ties became highly salient even if not fully verifiable.

In the same February 24 X post, Bağımsız Maden-İş appealed directly to Chinese regulatory norms on overseas conduct. It argued that the company’s behavior violated the “Guidelines for Chinese Enterprises’ Overseas Social Responsibility Compliance” (Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China 2025). To support this claim, the union listed unpaid wages, unpaid retroactive entitlements, the absence of severance guarantees, unsafe working conditions, and the refusal to establish lawful dialogue with workers and their union. It then cited specific provisions on labor-law compliance, occupational health and safety, grievance mechanisms, contractual obligations, and corrective action. The union thereby internationalized the conflict in a skillful way, using Chinese regulatory language to reinforce workers’ demands. The point was that if Chinese capital claimed legitimacy through overseas expansion, it could also be called to account through the norms it officially professed to follow (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026b).

Furthermore, Bağımsız Maden-İş’s March 5 victory statement envisaged a role for Chinese state institutions equivalent to Turkey’s General Directorate of Mining and Petroleum Affairs—the main state authority overseeing mining licenses, technical compliance, and related regulatory matters—in clarifying the mine’s production status. In other words, the dispute developed to the point where a local labor struggle in Kınık involved not only the company, local Turkish authorities, and the former owner, but also the Chinese Embassy and other Chinese state institutions named as relevant to implementation and future production (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e).

The role of union politics is also central here. Bağımsız Maden-İş was not the legally authorized union at Polyak. Formal bargaining authority remained with Öz Maden-İş, which, in Bağımsız Maden-İş’s account, adopted a pro-corporate stance and failed even to inform workers properly during the layoffs and transfer process (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a, 2026e). By contrast, Bağımsız Maden-İş organized the work stoppage, the march, the occupation, and the wider solidarity campaign that spread from Kınık to larger cities through demonstrations involving numerous labor unions, socialist organizations, youth organizations, and an intensive social media campaign. The Polyak case thus suggests that a small combative union can alter the balance of forces on the ground.

The Polyak struggle was militant and advanced despite repeated instances of state suppression. The gendarmerie repeatedly intervened against the miners and their union. On February 27, union leaders, including general president Gökay Çakır, were detained and later released (Cumhuriyet 2026b). On March 2, when workers moved to enter and occupy the mine after the promised payment date had passed, the gendarmerie tried to block them with barricades and then used force against them. Başaran Aksu, union lawyer Abdurrahim Demiryürek, and several miners were detained (Çelik 2026). Yet this pressure did not break the action. The miners pushed forward, entered the mine (Reuters 2026), and sustained the occupation until the settlement was won. It was a persistent confrontation that endured repression and forced a resolution in the workers’ favor. 

Another politically significant aspect of the Polyak struggle was the union’s open move toward the language of workers’ ownership and management. Before the occupation, Bağımsız Maden-İş declared that, if its demands were not met, 1,243 miners would manage and operate the mine themselves. While Fiba Holding’s payment of all accrued claims ended the struggle and removed workers’ management from the immediate agenda, the union’s March 5 victory statement stressed that the struggle had inspired hope for workers’ self-management across the basin and dedicated the victory to the miners who created the Yeni Çeltek self-management experience of 1975–1980 (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e), an episode of heightened class conflict in the history of modern Turkey (Öztürk 2022). In recent labor unrest in Turkey, occupations and militant confrontation are not unknown. Much rarer is such a clear and public movement toward a claim to managerial and productive authority itself. That is one reason Polyak deserves close attention.

Conclusion: Chinese Capital in a Crisis-Ridden Social Terrain

Mainstream discussions of Sino-Turkish relations overwhelmingly privilege diplomacy, trade, infrastructure, and geopolitics. Labor usually remains marginal to the picture. But if Polyak is any indication, that omission is no longer tenable. Chinese capital in Turkey does not enter an empty field. What was at issue in Kınık was not only unpaid wages or an opaque ownership transfer, but the reproduction of an entire social order in which agriculture, mining, proletarianization, and class conflict had become inseparable. When Chinese capital entered that terrain through a contested transfer, labor did not disappear behind geopolitics. At Polyak, it returned in a form that combined unpaid wages, contested ownership, public appeals to Chinese authorities, coercive state pressure on workers, and an unusually explicit demand for self-management. That combination is what makes the case so revealing. 

References

Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026a. “POLYAK EYNEZ MADENCİLİK A.Ş. Devri, Yaşanan Hak İhlalleri ve İş Bırakma Eylemlerine İlişkin Bilgi Notu.” February 23. https://bagimsizmaden.org/2026/02/23/polyak-eynez-madencilik-a-s-devri-yasanan-hak-ihlalleri-ve-is-birakma-eylemlerine-iliskin-bilgi-notu/.

Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026b. Post on X. February 24. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2026235035259686980.

Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026c. Post on X. March 2. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2028454984702955648.

Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026d. Post on X. March 3. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2028901378970534051.

Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026e. “Victory for the Polyak Miners in Türkiye: Miners Fight, Miners Win.” March 5. https://bagimsizmaden.org/2026/03/05/victory-for-the-polyak-miners-in-turkiye-miners-fight-miners-win/.

Cumhuriyet. 2026a. “Smart Solar’da 114 Günlük Grev Kazanımla Sonuçlandı: Yüzde 50 Zam ve 44 İşçi İşe İade Edildi.” February 12. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/turkiye/smart-solar-da-114-gunluk-grev-kazanimla-sonuclandi-yuzde-50-zam-ve-44-isci-ise-iade-edildi-2478338.

Cumhuriyet. 2026b. “Bağımsız Maden-İş Yöneticileri Gözaltına Alındı.” February 27. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/turkiye/bagimsiz-maden-is-yoneticileri-gozaltina-alindi-2482553.

Çelik, Coşku. 2023. “Extractivism and Labour Control: Reflections of Turkey’s ‘Coal Rush’ in Local Labour Regimes.” Critical Sociology, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 59–76.

Çelik, Coşku. 2024. “The Social Reproduction of Natural Resource Extraction and Gendered Labour Regimes in Rural Turkey.” Journal of Agrarian Change, vol. 24, no. 3, https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12535.

Çelik, Ebru. 2026. “We Will Tear Down the Bosses’ Barricade with Our Bodies.” BirGün Daily, March 3. https://www.birgun.net/haber/we-will-tear-down-the-bosses-barricade-with-our-bodies-697062.

Gürel, Burak, Baran Şahinli, and Deniz Tuzcu. 2025. “Labor Unrest in Chinese-Invested Enterprises in Turkey: Local Dynamics and Global Implications.” Asian Perspective, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 157–182. 

Gürel, Burak, Kadir Selamet, Baran Şahinli, Alperen Şen, and Deniz Tuzcu. 2026. “The Political Economy of Chinese Investment in Turkey: Recent Trajectory and Structural Constraints.” Asian Perspective, vol. 50, no. 2 (forthcoming).

Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China. 2025. “商务部关于印发《企业境外履行社会责任工作指引》的通知” (Notice of the Ministry of Commerce on Issuing the Guidelines for Chinese Enterprises’ Overseas Social Responsibility Compliance). December 30. https://hzs.mofcom.gov.cn/zcfb/qtzcfg/art/2025/art_b449a9c25d384ad1b03bbba2a1e546c4.html.

Öztürk, Zeynep. 2022. The Social Struggle in the Yeni Çeltek Coal Basin (1975–1980): Sources of Politicisation in Self-Management Practices. M.S. thesis, Ankara: Middle East Technical University.

Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. n.d. “About Us.” https://www.qitaihelongcoal.com/?a=index&c=Lists&m=home&tid=1&lang=en.

Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. 2025. “Türkiye POLYAK Coal Mine Vertical Air Shaft Reconstruction Project.” January 2. https://www.qitaihelongcoal.com/?a=index&aid=95&c=View&lang=en&m=home.

Rekabet Kurumu. 2025. “Polyak Eynez Enerji Üretim Madencilik Sanayi ve Ticaret AŞ.” December 25. https://www.rekabet.gov.tr/tr/SonKurulKarari/bbc56f33-0fea-f011-93f4-0050568585c9.

Reuters. 2026. “Turkish Mine Workers Clash with Police during Protest over Wages.” March 2. Video. https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW015202032026RP1/.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Umut Kocagöz, president of the Agricultural Workers’ Union (Tarım İşçileri Sendikası), for helping fact-check the details of the Polyak struggle and for sharing his insights into the regional context. 

Burak Gürel is an associate professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Asian Studies at Koç University in İstanbul, Turkey.

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In memoriam, Laurence Coderre (1984-2026)

Laurence Coderre (30 July 1984 – 8 January 2026) was our colleague, our friend, our inspiration. Born in Canada, she went to high school in Binghamton NY; her undergraduate degree is from Harvard and her PhD from Berkeley. She spent a postdoc period in Michigan before coming to NYU, where she was a tenured Associate Professor in East Asian Studies. Her book, Newborn Socialist Things (Duke 2021) immediately was hailed as a pathbreaking study of Maoist China, and it continues to make waves in the China field and beyond. Her parents, Shirley Smith and Jacques Coderre, along with the East Asian Studies Department at NYU, organized a “celebration of life” event on January 29, 2026. These four testimonials for Laurence were among the many delivered at that moving and joyous event.

S.E. Kile

For the past decade, Laurence and I have met weekly for a writing group of two. It is fitting, I suppose, that I first encountered Laurence in writing, in 2014, when I read her application to the Michigan Society of Fellows. On that first meeting, I sensed a patience, a curiosity, an openness in her approach to her objects, particularly in the way that recorded sound and the human body figured as things in the process of subject formation. What struck me even more was the way that that imagination and flair in the conception of her topic shifted, in their execution, to a methodical, bold, and very compelling working out of how those things thus refused to confirm the stories people had been telling about them. I remember thinking, then, that that voice sounded fearless. I remember thinking, I have got to meet this person. After a decade of friendship, I think I understand something of the relationship that this masterful, defiant, typo-free, and utterly unmistakable written version of Laurence held to her life off the page – that is, to a daily refusal on her part to confirm the presumptions people made about her, the assumptions they made about what her own body meant, absent the cloak of her meticulously crafted words.

As it happened, a spot in the Society of Fellows that year wasn’t in the cards, but Laurence was selected for one of the inaugural postdoctoral fellowships at Michigan’s Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, so she ended up at Michigan that fall anyway. At the end of some academic lecture early in the fall semester, I remember chasing unceremoniously after her as she made her way to the elevator, eager to introduce myself. We got to talking, and at some point that year, Laurence suggested that we form a writing group. We met at Sava’s in Ann Arbor for a time, and shifted to that glitchiest of videoconferencing apps, Bluejeans, when she moved to New York to start her job. As we started out on the tenure track, our writing group remained fundamentally a place to think and talk about what to write, but it morphed into also being a place to think about our lives and their many competing priorities, about how to apportion time to write in the midst of new responsibilities. Writing group was also a shared identity, a pronoun even: we referred to each other in the singular and collective mostly as writing group, abbreviated WG.

I was impressed, from the beginning, with how organized a thinker Laurence was, how absent the scattered thoughts and false starts that litter my own notebooks and legal pads and hard drive were from her process — she would work through ideas in her mind to near final form before sending them on their way in elegant, finished prose. She set modest writing goals, but her 500 words or three paragraphs would come out fully formed in her inimitable style. She held on fiercely to that style, to the frustration of many a copy editor.

Already virtual, when the pandemic came, writing group felt somehow prescient. We switched to Zoom, where we found escape in the virtual beach background with animated waves. Laurence and her family had been traveling to Aruba some winters, and now that no one could travel anywhere, that shared virtual background made the Zoom room feel like a real destination. One day on that beach, I told Laurence that my editor had insisted I give up the long-planned title for my book. After some exhausted brainstorming, I had sent my editor a list of six equally awful titles, one of which she had already chosen and installed in the proofs. It was too late, I told writing group (that is, Laurence Coderre), to change anything. Over the next seven or so minutes, Laurence made clear that writing group could not live with, that I could not live with, my book being known by any of those mealy titles. She prompted me to think of a phrase from my primary sources that might encapsulate some of the arguments I was trying to make, and she approved, heartily, and with substantial relief on her face, of the first one that came to mind.

We finished our books; we got our tenure. We then both started working on new projects: reading scholarship, hunting for primary sources, trying out arguments. But the writing was slow. In October 2025, after another weekly report of getting everything done but writing, we decided we needed to put some pressure on our weekly writing goals. We came up with the “Writing Group Negative Incentive Post-Tenure Plan,” which would require us to donate $20 to a cause we found vaguely unappealing if we missed our weekly writing goals. With money on the table, Laurence finally came out with the problem that had delayed her progress on her planned second scholarly monograph. She was unable to shake the feeling, she said, that she could write nothing until she had written a memoir about her experience living with her disability.

It worked – Laurence started her memoir, and I started my monograph, and we both met our goal every week. (When Jacques found out how cheaply we could be motivated, he didn’t let us hear the end of it.)

On December 19th, Laurence’s writing goal was not numerical, but to “finish the damn preface.” Which she did.

The next week, even though we had waived the penalty for the holidays, Laurence began writing the first chapter of the memoir.

On December 26th, she sent a text: “Reporting to wg: Inspired by wg’s example, I now have a new document with 309 words. Look at us go!”

A few minutes later, another text: “Update: 423 words. I decided to keep going with a quote.”

In the final months of 2025, that is to say, Laurence began to work through, for a reading public, how it was for her to be in the world. In closing, I’d like to share those last 423 words with you:

Season 1 of Netflix’s The Witcher turns, in large part, on a choice made by a young mage, Yennifer of Vengerberg (Anya Chalotra), to remake her body at the expense of her ability to bear children. We first meet Yennifer in Episode 2, “Four Marks,” as a gnarled and abused girl who escapes a beating by accidentally performing magic. She is subsequently sold by her father to the head mistress of a sorcery academy for the dirt cheap price of four marks, less than the price of the pigs she is forced to tend and bed down with. Her humped back, serpentine spine, and crooked jaw are attributed to the poisonous contamination of elf blood. Yennifer’s remarkable magic initially stems from her rage at her forced helplessness, a helplessness rooted in the world’s revulsion at her disfigurement. She becomes fixated on a need for power and control over her own destiny. Attaining that power and control requires a drastic change in the way she looks. That is, within the context of the show, power and beauty go hand in hand. The former is predicated on the latter.

Yennifer is in luck, here, for her the end of her magical education or “ascension” to the Brotherhood of mages is accompanied by two things: “the enchantment” and an appointment as advisor to/manipulator of a royal court. The enchantment, which we later learn in Season 3 was specifically designed to help get women a seat at the Brotherhood’s table, is a one-time opportunity to completely remold one’s body from head to toe exactly as one desires. In a triumph of imagination over nature, the body becomes a medium sculpted by a magician’s hand, always with a view towards the maximization of beauty in the quest for power. Talk about a position of singular privilege. As headmistress Tissaia De Vries (MyAnna Buring) tells Yennifer in Episode 3, ”Betrayer Moon,” “There is not a person alive that does not look into the mirror and see some sort of deformity. Except for us. We remake ourselves on our terms. The world has no say in it.” As for the specifics of Yennifer’s new look, Tissaia counsels her to “[i]magine the most powerful woman in the world. Her hair, the color of her eyes, yes, but also the strength of her posture. The poise of her entire being.” She thereupon magically transfers the image in Yennifer’s mind onto the mirror. Kept hidden from the viewer, it is nonetheless meant to serve as blueprint for the transformation to come.

S.E. Kile is Associate Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Michigan

Rebecca E. Karl

What can I say about a friend I knew so well and yet so little? About a person whose expansive life exceeded every parameter I could have imagined? About someone I thought I had time to deepen a friendship with, but whose time ran out too soon, too early, too young? I miss her already so much: her wit, her intelligence, her self-knowledge, and her impatient generosity towards the abled world, in which she had to operate but which sometimes – often even? — did not recognize or yield to her needs and desires. As I was preparing for this semester’s teaching, which I would normally be doing with Laurence for a course we’ve collaborated on for over a decade on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I have had occasion to think intensively and frequently about her. I was tempted to remember the first time we taught together, in Spring 2017, when, after the assistants in EAS set up her computer and linked it to the classroom tech, I nevertheless busied myself about the classroom pretending to know what she needed and what I could do. Several weeks in, I finally saw I had no idea how to help and I asked her what she needed me to do. Laurence quipped: “It is always a source of amusement to see how long it takes able-bodied people to admit they have no idea how to handle themselves around me; you’re no better than average: it took you a few weeks.” That’s when I knew for sure that we’d not only be co-teachers, but we’d be friends and allies in the institution, in the field, in our lives.

I wanted to say a bit about Laurence as a teacher and advisor, in the classroom and with her graduate students. I’ve taught at the undergraduate level with Laurence a lot, and I learned consistently from her stern but sympathetic mode of interaction with students. While I tend towards the overtly gruff; she tended towards the playfully strict. She treated students with great respect and a certain wry humor, and they would sometimes develop a misconception and think that they could get the better of her; were they ever mistaken! She had a steel spine and a steel will, well disguised by the wheelchair and her easy demeanor. Sitting in her classroom, witnessing her unspool an analysis was a real privilege: it modeled for students (and for me) how to approach learning, and how to appreciate the act of thinking itself. Since her passing, I have heard from a number of the students we co-taught in years past, many of whom write of how much they loved learning from her, how much they appreciated her generosity and erudition, and how much she impacted their sense of possibility and accomplishment.

I also have co-advised graduate students with Laurence, and it is in this setting that her brilliance shined so brightly while her patience was sometimes tried so fully. Her probing questions based in her close readings indicated how seriously she took the task of instruction and how much she valued intelligent students who challenged and pushed us to be better. By the same token, I marveled at how patient she could be with students: her intellectual commitments to them and her persistence in encouraging them to live up to their potential are enduring lessons in what it means to be an educator and a mentor.

Of course, Laurence’s writing, her research, and her publications will stand as enduring legacies to the largeness of her mind and the range of her capacities. In the near future we will be holding some workshops devoted to exploring her work and her intellectual legacy more fully. For starters, at this year’s AAS (Association for Asian Studies), I along with Emily Wilcox (who worked with her at Michigan) and Andrew Jones (who was her advisor at Berkeley) will host a special session on Laurence and her work. Those of you intending to be at Vancouver, please do plan to join us at the Convention Center, West Meeting Room 201, on Saturday March 14 at 12:15-1:45pm.

I’ll end on a small anecdote. In the first year we co-taught our Cultural Revolution class – in Spring 2017 – we had a group of perhaps 24 students. We started each class with an image from the CR, to try to help students build a vocabulary and capacity for “seeing” what was the visual landscape of social life at the time. About three weeks in, one of the students commented that they noticed that many of the posters we asked them to look at focused on torsos and hands. Laurence deadpanned: “I’ve always thought legs were overrated.” I guffawed while the students looked around in panic, until Laurence made it clear they could laugh. Of course, I cannot know what living in her body was like for her, and I know that she had started writing explicitly about her relation to her disability. What I also know is that she inspired me with her courage and her intellect, and, most of all, I know how I will miss her so.

Rebecca Karl is Professor of History at NYU

Todd Foley

We all know what an outstanding scholar Laurence was, and many people at NYU got to know her as a gifted teacher and caring mentor. For my part, I’m not really best positioned to speak to the special ways she fulfilled these roles, although she was sometimes a teacher and mentor to me, and we did sometimes talk about scholarship – or “the content,” as we called it. But to me, Laurence was mainly a good friend. She was my regular drinking buddy, and, as she called me in her acknowledgements, a “partner in crime.” I’m finding it hard to describe something so feelings-based and ineffable as a good, true friendship. But maybe our criminal activity is one place to start: we had such a good time sharing our unvarnished opinions, exchanging our not always laudatory observations on academia, and sneaking a Guinness before class (although to be honest that was usually just me). I loved dropping by her office, and seeing her give a wry smile and say “shut the door,” which was always a prelude to some entertaining remarks. 

I first met Laurence almost exactly ten years ago, at the ACLA at Harvard. At one point a friend of mine asked me if I knew her, as she had just gotten the tenure-track job at NYU. That was news to me, and I have to admit, given her no-nonsense seminar performance, I was a little worried—this person means serious business, I thought, and I was not anticipating a new friend. But as soon as I talked to her on one of the breaks, I knew I was wrong. I think we could both tell right away that we were signing off the same hymn sheet, so to speak, and I remember us tittering together right up until the final dinner.

That was one of the great things about Laurence–she often did mean serious business, but she was also fun. I think part of the reason for this was her impeccable judgment–she knew what was funny, or what I’d think would be funny, at the right times, but she was also a solid rock of professionalism who never compromised her intellectual rigor. I recall meeting with a prospective graduate student a few years ago who was wondering about the graduate program’s structure and professional outcomes–don’t worry, I said, we have Laurence. It might have been a weirdly ambiguous answer, but that’s how I thought of her: totally dependable, able to steer any ship in any weather. I called her “laoshi,” like she was one of my college Chinese language teachers–it was a joke, but also an expression of the real awe and respect I had for her.           

Laurence was genuinely caring and thoughtful. At the end of the semester she’d present me with Scotch eggs to eat on the train, a nod to my favorite snack at one of our regular hangout spots. For a while she’d also give me bags of Sixlets for my son Cliff, until I sheepishly had to reveal he didn’t really like them anymore and I’d just been eating them myself. Before the pandemic, my dad and father-in-law teamed up to build a ramp so she could get into our house in New Haven. She used it once, and we had a great time. I’d always assumed we’d be using it again, but the circumstances never allowed it. I’m so honored to have gotten to know Laurence, and I’m going to miss her very much.

Todd Foley is Adjunct Assistant Professor in East Asian Studies at NYU

Christine Ho

I first met Laurence at a conference in Ann Arbor. She wheeled her way toward me and said, “Why haven’t I met you before?” Thus, I was lucky enough to have been befriended by Laurence.

Over the next few years, no conference on socialist culture was complete without Laurence and her mom Shirley, the indefatigable travelers. Many greater minds than mine have attested to Laurence’s tremendous standing as an intellectual, teacher, mentor, colleague. Certainly her approval—and actually Shirley’s approval, too—was very important to me. But what I really loved about Laurence was how she was so unrelentingly pugnacious and, above all, deeply stylish. When I think back to my memories of Laurence, I remember her sparring with coolheaded tenacity with an esteemed historian of Chinese consumption, refusing to give an inch; I think of her assuring her dad at the National Gallery that I was not going to yap on about color; I think of her going back and forth in front of The Ambassadors looking at its anamorphic skull and saying drily, “Cool trick”; I think of her telling stories about viciously bargaining over porcelain sculpture in Jingdezhen; I think of her airy office, the only scholar’s office I have ever seen where the books were beautifully arranged around works of art placed on stands.

Above all, I remember the talk on Zoom she gave at Berkeley during the late pandemic. At the end, Laurence appended some advice to the gathered graduate students, jittery with tension as they waited to give their own papers. She described her own writing blocks and occasional doubts, and talked about how she got herself out of the valleys of academic work. Then she concluded with– “At the end of the day, everything’s work.” Then she repeated herself: “It’s all work.” At the time, as a new parent, I felt both seen and also completely exhausted by this advice. But now I understand it as she intended it, that all experiences high and low mattered and enriched. From video games to bubble teas to music to vampire shows to reading, and everything else that Laurence took pleasure in, all informed each other, and were inseparable from a life of thinking about being human. And this was perhaps what we all loved about Laurence, that she was so deeply humane.

I did not know you well, Laurence. There were aspects of your life and work that I could only partially glimpse. But I thank you for asking us to go back to work.

Christine Ho is Associate Professor of East Asian Art, UMass-Amherst

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Anish Vanaik reviews Esmat Elhalaby, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization

Esmat Elhalaby, Parting Gifts of Empire: Palestine and India at the Dawn of Decolonization (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025)

Parting Gifts of Empire (henceforth PGE) explores the history of anti-colonial thought as it flowed between Palestine and India in the heyday of mid-twentieth century decolonization. We can return to this history today only with a sense of the acute limitations of South-South solidarity. Amid India’s response to the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Ukraine, it is evident that neither an enduring anti-colonial outlook nor a capacious nationalism were necessary outcomes of decolonization. Nor yet can there be any illusions about the benevolence of the international order, with the twenty first century fast racking up its own list of globe-spanning horrors to rival the twentieth. New visions for the global order are urgent. PGE joins a growing list of works that return to supposedly superseded forms of twentieth-century internationalism in search of resources of hope and solidarity.1 Elhalaby’s contribution, however, is more circumspect, a tone well captured in the final sentence of his introduction: “Lessons, and warnings, abound” (27).

Elhalaby has had criticisms of existing postcolonial approaches to history and the need for a sharper and clearer anti-colonialism to avoid appropriation by non-Western chauvinist projects.2 PGE offers three defining features of anti-colonial thought: First, “a realization… that imperial knowledge is a lie” (22). Second, a “constructivist project to build a new world” (23) through often novel and autonomous institutions. Third, a willingness to identify knowledge production with “a political and social project” (24), often in the face of dismissal by Western scholars. For Elhalaby, then, studying anti-colonial thought needs, a “social history of ideas”(4); one in which the decolonization of the mind is a central concern, but where ideas must be conjoined with an understanding of the material projects in which they were embedded. This sets Elhalaby’s project apart from those for which postcolonial thought is measured by its distance from “Western” or “modern” ideas. As PGE points out, this latter approach leads to peculiarities like viewing Sayyid Qutb’s Social Justice in Iran as a key work in anti-colonial thought. Attention to the circumstances of its distribution, however, would reveal that it was promoted by the highest levels of the American Cold War establishment and Saudi Aramco.

PGE’s five chapters trace the circulation of ideas about and between the Arab world and India from the early 20th century to the 1970s. Knowledge about South and West Asia in this period moved from being produced in the disciplinary protocols of “Orientalism” to those of “Area Studies”. Each chapter is built around a few key figures. Those from the Arab world (especially Egypt and Lebanon) dominate the narrative with complementary individuals and organizations from India in four chapters, while the final chapter reverses this pattern. Uniting these figures, are two concerns – Palestine and India. Palestine, in this work, then, is consciously approached from the outside in. For Elhalaby, this proud history of broad and principled solidarity with Palestine in the global South is important in itself but also because it has generated ideas well beyond Palestine.

The first chapter, ‘Empire’, follows Wadi al-Bustani (1886-1953), a Palestinian-Lebanese Maronite poet, translator, lawyer and activist, known as one of the earliest analyzers of the dangers of the Balfour declaration. Early in his career, though, Bustani eagerly imbibed the disciplinary protocols and approaches of Orientalist scholars at the very heart of Empire. His travels within Empire and experiences of anti-colonial ideas through these travels, moved him to find a very different set of connections. During his time in India from 1914-16, he met Nobel Laureate writer Rabindranath Tagore and became his first translator into Arabic. Soon after leaving India, his stay in colonial Palestine rapidly made him a critic of British colonialism. The political outlook he articulated harked back to an Ottoman ecumenical culture and forward to Arab nationalism, in particular through its emphasis on cross-religious solidarity and Arab identity. Bustani continued projects of translating South Asian texts into Arabic in parallel to this activism. Empire created the possibility of connections between figures like Bustani and Tagore: prejudices and misconceptions were products of an Imperial milieu. But, PGE suggests, their understanding of the violence of Empire meant that they did something that producers of colonial knowledge never did – they hunted for more liberatory connections in each other’s literary and cultural oeuvres.

“Islam”, the second chapter, offers a contrasting mode of solidarity – one rooted in the ambitions of globalizing religions. Elhalaby tells two stories about limitations here. The first relates to the treatment of a Christian from Syria – Paul Dimishky – in a missionary enterprise that was enmeshed in empire and keen to counter pan-Islamism. The missionary enterprise was acutely aware that converting Muslims in India required a knowledge of the Quran and familiarity with Arabic. Dimishky brought all these things, and an eagerness to work in India. His Christian will to prosyletize, however, proved weaker than colonial racial hierarchies, with his European colleagues seeing him as a “difficult” individual and eventually lobbying to have him sent back to Syria. The complementary narrative in this chapter relates to pan-Islamism in the 1930s. The 1924 abolition of the Caliphate by Turkey left in its wake squabbles over whether the title might continue to be a basis for a pan-Islamic movement and, if it were, who might become the Caliph. The Egyptian monarch was one such hopeful and, in 1934, the newly elevated rector of the famous mosque and seminary of Al-Azhar was a key player in conceptualizing this Egyptian claim. In that year, too, the pre-eminent Dalit activist in India B.R. Ambedkar announced that, in view of the caste system’s centrality to Hinduism, he would convert to another religion before he died. Ostensibly inspired by this declaration, Al-Azhar sent a delegation to India to investigate the possibility of winning Dalit converts to Islam. The final report of the delegation, however, offered an unsubstantiated denigration of Indian Islamic cultures and the suggestion that the solution lay in a sectarian unification behind Egyptian claims to the Caliphate. For Elhalaby, both the global Christianity counterposed to pan-Islam and pan-Islamism proved to be dead ends in anti-colonial solidarity since these weren’t projects interested in the actual texture of the lives of South Asians.

The ambitions of the Indian National Congress (INC) to articulate a new internationalism are the focus of the next two chapters. Chapter three takes up the effort to build a pan-Asian politics. Here, too, PGE points to the limitations of an Islam-centric international solidarity and contrasts it with the greater potential of a more independent and secular pan-Asian vision. The operative contrast in this chapter is between the March 1947 pan-Asian conference called by the INC and the 1969 founding conference of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) which eventually became the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. The former conference saw thin participation from Arab countries, partly in response to calls for a boycott by the Muslim League, and the extension of an invitation to a delegation from Hebrew University. In PGE’s account, investigating this 1947 conference beyond the well-known organizational hiccups yields telling details. For one, the conference served as the start of a cycle of Afro-Asian solidarity that was to lead to the Bandung conference. For another, it saw a feisty exchange on the question of Palestine. The Palestinian side of that exchange was articulated by members of the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) delegation who punctured any attempt by Hebrew University to present Israeli colonialism as an “old Asian people” returning to their “Asian motherland” (89). In turn, EFU’s intervention had older solidaristic roots. Two years previously, the EFU delegation’s presence at the All-India Women’s Conference had been pivotal to the passage of that body’s resolution in support of Palestine. Elhalaby points out, also, that pan-Asian and non-aligned conferences after this one excluded Israeli participation with the aim of building a deeper and more thoroughgoing solidarity with Palestine among decolonizing nations. In contrast, the OIC’s founding conference in 1969, which did take up the cause of Palestine, situated that call within a broader appeal that ignored the Global South to address the governments of France, UK, US and Soviet Union. This represented a decisive scaling back of political ambitions and a stance taken in alignment with global power and in opposition to the world decolonizing people (at their best) had hoped to create.

The fourth chapter, “Non-Alignment”, carries forward the narrative of INC’s support for a new internationalism. The central figure in this chapter is the Lebanese scholar-diplomat Clovis Maksoud. Maksoud’s career was spent building up the causes of Arab socialism and “positive nonalignment” in close conjunction with the Indian experience. There were more conventionally diplomatic aspects to this role, of course, but PGE devotes particular attention to Maksoud’s efforts to create a “rich center of Indo-Arab contact” in Delhi. In particular, the Arab League’s ambitious journal – Al Arab – which brought discussions of Arab literature, culture and history to an Indian audience. This included an eclectic selection of cultural production ongoing in Arabic: translations of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, Kama Boullata’s manifesto for “A Revolutionary Arab Art”, and an introduction to Ibn Rushd. Elhalaby points out that the conviction that wide-ranging and cutting-edge cultural exchange might lay the basis for deeper regional bonds was shared by Indian diplomats like K.M. Panikkar whose role in establishing the Indian government’s Arabic magazine Sawt al-Sharq resulted in a similarly fertile and sophisticated cultural engagement with the Arab world. Maksoud’s formulation of the broader aim of these efforts – “[to] know each other through each other and not through others” (121) – seems almost perfectly tailored to the kind of anti-colonial knowledge formation Elhalaby would like to see flourish. Indeed, PGE suggests, Maksoud’s “epistemological vision” of non-alignment, as a slow intermingling of thought which might lead to a deeper humanist synthesis, leaves behind an unfinished agenda.

The final chapter of PGE is a study of West Asian Area studies in Indian academic institutions. If orientalism was imperial knowledge production of the era of European empire, area studies enacted a characteristically American shift in perspective. It de-emphasized languages and classical texts and, in their place, installed a more utilitarian and positivistic social scientific production of knowledge geared towards predicting future outcomes. Together with a funding structure that relied on philanthropic foundations, this area studies paradigm quickly became hegemonic in the Cold War world. With decolonization proceeding in parallel, newly independent nations enacted a variety of relationships to this project. The domestic context for area studies in India was, however, more specific. Triple crises relating to the partition of India and Pakistan, persisting communal violence, and the exodus of Muslims from India, meant that there were difficulties in finding the requisite expertise. The field was also freighted with a hope that, when established, West Asian studies might contribute to deeper inter-faith understanding within India. Elhalaby traces the establishment in 1955 of the Institute for Islamic Studies at the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), and the Indian School of International Studies (ISIS), both primarily focused on West Asia. For a while at least, Elhalaby points out, these centers nurtured an expertise distinct from the broader Area Studies tradition: through an interest in the Indo-Arab past, through work that drew on Indo-Arab “idioms of friendship, understanding and solidarity” (160). While never entirely separated from the broader imperial and social-scientistic outlook of the field, area studies in India in the age of decolonization offered a distinct variant.

By far the most striking contribution of Elhalaby’s work is the excavation of a range of new archives. In particular, the range of Arabic periodicals and reports offer a valuable and unique window on South Asian history. Together with the significance of the region in post-colonial institution-building efforts that Elhalaby sketches, this points to the significance of the vantage afforded from these journals. While this reviewer is not as familiar with the range of source materials typically used in histories of the Arab countries, it is likely that many of the materials PGE employs from Indian archives offer novel and consequential perspectives on West Asian history. In this regard, it is easy to advocate for others to follow Elhalaby’s lead..

Elhalaby’s call to recognize the significance of the record of solidaristic efforts he chronicles in PGE is also well-taken. As he points out there is an abiding importance to fighting for and around the ideas first generated during this early postcolonial moment. Even as he does so, Elhalaby does sound the caution about simple celebrations of “post-colonial” ideas or, even more, “global connections”. As Elhalaby himself points out in PGE, method is no replacement for substantive ideas and a moral compass. We arrive at the moral compass he might favor, however, only through implication. He is bracingly strident about projects he views as being in the spirit of anti-colonial thought (Egyptian feminism, cultural translation between cultures, positive non-alignment) and those that he feels aren’t (missionary enterprises, religion-state enmeshments, American power structures in the Cold War). A sharper articulation of what guides his choice to include in one camp or the other would have been very welcome and might have productively sharpened his framework for anti-colonial thought.

A final methodological quibble to viewing this work as a social history of ideas. Elhalaby’s approach falls between two methodological stools in the history of ideas. His characteristic move through ideas is not to reconstruct a zone of discursive contest in the manner of the Cambridge School. Nor does Elhalaby consistently discuss material conditions as shaping the content of ideas, as might be typical of a more Marxist approach. His approach, instead, is to trace a broad history of institutions and people and to juxtapose their ideas (Bustani and Tagore, Maksoud and Panikkar, Dimishky and the Al-Azhar delegation, Aleem and Agwani). One is left wanting more attention to connections – logical or institutional. What, for example, were the explicit or implicit approaches to translation that Bustani was contesting in his work? Alternatively, there could be a productive way to follow the question of the Lebanese peasants who asked the pro-non-alignment Lebanese parliamentarian Ali Bazzi: “The [US] Point Four [program] gives us aid, so why doesn’t the Third Force?” (113).  Did the inability to offer more material connections force the project of epistemological non-alignment onto the terrain of largely high-cultural exchanges? Are these signs of deep engagement or relatively shallow implantation? The addition of these connections might, perhaps, yield an answer to a question that hangs over the projects Elhalaby champions – why did these positive visions fade? Perhaps this would make for a larger or different project, perhaps it would draw our attention away too quickly from the visons themselves?

PGE is about Palestine “from the outside in” (12-16). One meaning of this phrase is in its choice of scholars and activists – largely non-Palestinians who identify with the Palestinian cause from a range of vantage points – personal experience, pan-Arab sentiment or feminist solidarity. In spotlighting the engagement of such scholars with India, and the reciprocal engagement coming from India, PGE reorients the search for global connections away from pathways that run through Europe and shows us alternative routes to global solidarity. If the Palestinian cause is one touchstone for any truly anti-colonial vision, PGE also reminds us that the project of building a more just global order is a crucial correlate, and one to which the scholarly community has something important to contribute.

Anish Vanaik is Clinical Associate Professor, John Martinson Honors College, Purdue University