Workers of the Socialist World: The Transnational Remaking of Chinese Workers’ Class Consciousness, circa 1980

• In Event: 30426 - Cultural Processes of Worker Mobilization

Abstract

This article provides a transnational account of the crystallization of socialist workers’ class consciousness at a pivotal historical moment. Specifically, it documents how, in China’s early post-Mao era, Chinese workers’ understandings of who they were and what they were to demand were significantly shaped by the inspiration they drew from the Yugoslavian model of heterodox socialism as well as the Polish Solidarity movement. Not only did urban Chinese workers deploy these inspirations to frame their grievances and discontents in a new language, but their (not necessarily factually accurate) understanding of what happened in Yugoslavia and Poland emboldened them to rethink what their positions in society should be and what they are capable of demanding. The result was a nationwide wave of labor unrest in 1980-1981, in which Chinese workers combined pre-existing traditions of rebellious organizing with new lessons gleaned from Yugoslavia and Poland. In telling the story of how this came about, this article challenges us to re-conceptualize the formation of class consciousness as a dynamic and multi-faceted process and transnational socialism as an analytical category grounded in historical experience.

Author

• Yueran Zhang, University of Chicago