Proletarian Power

This pathbreaking book offers the first in-depth study of Chinese labor activism during the momentous upheaval of the Cultural Revolution. The authors explore three distinctive forms of working-class protest: rebellion, conservatism, and economism. Labor, they argue, was working at cross-purposes through these three modes of militancy promoted by different types of leaders with differing agendas and motivations. Drawing upon a wealth of heretofore inaccessible archival sources, the authors probe the divergent political, psychocultural, and socioeconomic strains within the Shanghai labor movement. As they convincingly illustrate, the multiplicity of worker responses to the Cultural Revolution cautions against a one-dimensional portrait of working-class politics in contemporary China.

Author Biography

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is associate professor of history at Indiana University. Elizabeth J. Perry is professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley. Elizabeth J. Perry is Robson Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Li Xun is a visiting researcher in the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California at Berkeley.