Selda Altan’s essay – extrapolated from her recently published book Chinese Workers of the World (Stanford University Press 2024) – takes up the constitutive nature of “coolie” labor in late-Qing China to the formation of forms of class consciousness among Chinese workers in China in the early twentieth century.  Tracing out the ways in which labor contracts and other mechanisms of recruitment became instruments of worker solidarity and collective action, Altan’s essay leads us to the construction of the Yunnan-Indochina railway, where Chinese workers of the world incipiently became a class for itself. By placing these very local workers into a global context of labor servitude, Altan shows that Chinese workers have long been of and in the world.

Joshua Howard’s essay extends his long-standing concern with Chongqing labor politics during and at the end of the War of Resistance Against Japan and into the Civil War period (1930s-1940s) – most concisely previewed in his essay “The Politicization of Women Workers at War: Labor in Chongqing’s Cotton Mills during the Anti-Japanese War” Modern Asian Studies Vol.47, Issue 06 (November 2013), pp. 1888-1940. Documenting three instances of labor activism and the ways in which the Communist newspaper in Chongqing, New China Daily, promoted and provided perspective on the incidents, Howard’s piece demonstrates the centrality of labor to post-War, pre-1949 Communist political organizing and mobilization. It also highlights the ways that Chongqing workers – in the belly of the repressive anti-labor Guomindang regime – managed to maneuver and form class-conscious coalitions to better their working conditions and push against their capitalist bosses.

Yueran Zhang’s essay is part of his ongoing research on workplace and worker democracy in the immediate post-Mao period – most recently completed as his dissertation, Whither Socialism? Workers’ Democracy and the Class Politics of China’s Post-Mao Transition to Capitalism, which is now being turned into a book. This essay opens genuinely new perspectives and allows for creative new thinking about China, socialism, workers, and the 1980s. By emphasizing the legacies of the Cultural Revolution and its worker mobilizations in worker activisms around workplace democracy in the immediate post-Mao period, Zhang clarifies both what was perceived as possible by workers at that time and what was at stake in their demands for better working and living conditions. As Zhang documents, worker rebelliousness combined with new state policies to boost production while pacifying worker discontent to force factory managers into making concessions. The moment was fleeting, but its importance to the later 1980s reconfigurations of worker-factory relations is undeniable.