ABSTRACT
Post-socialist economic reform and the concomitant re-insertion of the Chinese economy into global capitalism have triggered a vast process of commodification of labour which has generated a diversification of labour regimes. The passage from a “de-commodified” employment system to a commodified one has meant a fundamental double movement (Carrillo and Goodman 2012; Jacka et al. 2013). On the one hand, rural labour has been constituted as the core element of a “labour-squeezing strategy of development” (Friedman and Lee 2010) providing the bulk of manpower in the export-oriented manufacturing, construction and service sectors – i.e. “the making of the global peasant worker”. On the other hand, the former workers and employees of state-owned enterprises lost their life-long employment and subsidized access to the regime of public goods (Solinger 1999, 2002). This latter process has been called “the remaking of the socialist worker” and “the unmaking of the redundant worker” by Lee Ching-Kwan in a 2002 paper (Lee 2002).
