Ching Kwan Lee
Biographic Data
| ID | 124261 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ching Kwan Lee |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ching Kwan |
| FAMILY NAME | Lee |
| SIGNATURE | LEE C K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0672-5283 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 500 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 9 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Forever Hong Kong: A Conversation with Ching Kwan Lee
ix years after the spectacular 'Be Water' rebellion that rippled across national borders, Forever Hong Kong (Harvard University Press, 2025) asks: What historical conditions and precedents precipitated the citywide revolt in 2019?How can we understand Hongkongers' political resistance as acts of decolonial defiance?Weaving cogent historical and political-economy analyses of Hong Kong's colonial history with rich ethnographic data from 2019, C.K. …
Southern interregnum: Remaking hegemony in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa
Forever Hong Kong: A Global City's Decolonization Struggle
Interview: Global China is having a huge impact on the world, but ‘China’ is not a single coherent actor giving orders from the top
The Books of Hong Kong
Four years have passed since the world was transfixed by Hong Kong's six-monthlong pop u lar upris ing, the Anti-Extradition Bill Movement.The global media has since moved on to other head lines: the pan demic, global infla tion, the wars in Palestine and Ukraine, the cli mate cri sis, AI, and more.For many, the strik ing imag ery of the 2019 pro tests-mil lion-strong peace ful marches, ninjalike, black-clad youth on the front lines, the blood sh…
Global China at 20: Why, How and So What?
The recent two-decade-long march of “global China” – manifested as outward flows of investment, loans, infrastructure, migrants, media, cultural programmes and international and civil society engagement – has left sweeping but variegated footprints in many parts of the world. From “going out,” officially announced in the year 2000, to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Made in China 2025, and from the developing world to advanced industrializ…
Ideas Are Bullet-Proof: A Conversation with Ching Kwan Lee
In late 2020, while at the HKUST, Lee drew the ire of pro-Beijing media outlets for participating in an online panel with dissidents
Hong Kong: Global China's Restive Frontier
How did Hong Kong transform itself from a 'shoppers' and capitalists' paradise' into a 'city of protests' at the frontline of a global anti-China backlash? CK Lee situates the post-1997 China–Hong Kong contestation in the broader context of 'global China.' Beijing deploys a bundle of power mechanisms – economic statecraft, patron-clientelism, and symbolic domination – around the world, including Hong Kong. This Chinese power project triggers a va…
The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View
Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement
This book unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The chapters ask, how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? The book argues that the Umbrella Movement was a response to China's internal colonization strategies—political disenfranchisement, e…
The Social Question in the Twenty-First Century: A Global View
Want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness: first recognized together in mid-nineteenth-century Europe, these are the focus of the Social Question. In 1942 William Beveridge called them the “giant evils” while diagnosing the crises produced by the emergence of industrial society. More recently, during the final quarter of the twentieth century, the global spread of neoliberal policies enlarged these crises so much that the Social Question ha…
Taiwan’s Sunflower Occupy Movement as a Transformative Resistance to the “China Factor”
Transgressive Politics in Occupy Mongkok
Take Back Our Future: An Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement
In a comprehensive and theoretically novel analysis, Take Back Our Future unveils the causes, processes, and implications of the 2014 seventy-nine-day occupation movement in Hong Kong known as the Umbrella Movement. The essays presented here by a team of experts with deep local knowledge ask: how and why had a world financial center known for its free-wheeling capitalism transformed into a hotbed of mass defiance and civic disobedience? Take Back…
China’s precariats
This essay offers a stylized account of the trajectory of precarious labour in China over the past seven decades and identifies the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. I define ‘precarity’ not as a thing-like phenomenon with fixed attributes but as relational struggles over the recognition, regulation, and reproduction of labour. For each of the three periods of contemporary Chinese development, i.e. the Mao era of state soci…
Will Africa feed China
The world’s fascination with and fear about China’s presence in Africa have consistently outpaced the painstaking production of scholarly knowledge. Journalists, non-governmental organizations (NGO
Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China
Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of "precarization" besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the "proletariat" now stands the "precariat," for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers' collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past sev…
Inside China's Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance
The Spectre of Global China
China’s overseas expansion has unsettled Western commentators. In this striking ethnographic study, Ching Kwan Lee investigates the labour regimes, investment patterns and management ethos of the PRC’s state-owned firms on the Central African Copperbelt, in contrast to the giant multinationals. Surprise findings include Zambia’s first SEZs and a distinctive, quasi-Weberian ethic of ‘eating bitterness’
State & Social Protest
This essay sketches an array of cultural, political, and bureaucratic mechanisms that mediate the Chinese Communist state's relationship with the major types of social protests, in the process exploring how governance and contention have transformed each other in the past six decades. In particular, it spotlights a noteworthy development in recent years: the increasingly salient market nexus between state and protest. While the regime response of…
The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China
This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market excha…
The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States
Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rathe…
From iron rice bowl to informalization: Markets, workers, and the state in a changing China
Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys
Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective
Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working‐class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss …
The Power of Instability: Unraveling the Microfoundations of Bargained Authoritarianism in China
This article develops an interactive and relational conception of infrastructural state power for studying the capacity of authoritarian regimes to absorb popular protests. Based on an ethnography of the grassroots state in moments of unrest in China, the authors identify three microfoundations of Chinese authoritarianism: protest bargaining, legal-bureaucratic absorption, and patron-clientelism. Adopting, respectively, the logics of market excha…
Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa's Chinese Enclaves
This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow - the pursuit of flexible labour regimes - as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It analyses the respective "politics of casualization" in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill in the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted …
Engendering the Worlds of Labor: Women Workers, Labor Markets, and Production Politics in the South China Economic Miracle
L'A. presente une etude comparative menee dans deux entreprises du sud de la Chine appartenant au meme groupe industriel, dirigees par les memes gestionnaires, fabriquant les memes produits et utilisant les memes techniques de production. Il montre comment ces deux usines ont developpe la meme politique d'autoritarisme a l'endroit des femmes qui composent la quasi totalite de leur personnel. Il montre que la structure sociale du marche du travail…
From the specter of Mao to the spirit of the law: Labor insurgency in China
The `Revenge of History: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in North-Eastern China
In the Rustbelt of China, state workers have become restive as market reforms have undermined their entrenched way of life. By comparing cases of worker protest in an industrial city in northeastern China, once the cradle of its planned economy, this article analyses the configuration of conditions underlying these labor protests. I have found that collective memories of Maoist socialism, enterprise residential communities and enterprise property…
Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China
Labor scholars have highlighted the predicament of "precarization" besetting the working class everywhere in the twenty-first century. Beneath the "proletariat" now stands the "precariat," for whom exploitation seems like a privilege compared to constant exclusion from the labor market. Amidst worldwide employment informalization and decimation of workers' collective capacity, media reports and academic writings on Chinese workers in the past sev…
The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States
Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rathe…
China’s precariats
This essay offers a stylized account of the trajectory of precarious labour in China over the past seven decades and identifies the various contested terrains constitutive of its politics. I define ‘precarity’ not as a thing-like phenomenon with fixed attributes but as relational struggles over the recognition, regulation, and reproduction of labour. For each of the three periods of contemporary Chinese development, i.e. the Mao era of state soci…
The Labor Politics of Market Socialism: Collective Inaction and Class Experiences Among State Workers in Guangzhou
Labor has become an economic and political challenge a China plagued by unemployment among the ranks of state the proclaimed masters of the Chinese state. Five and a quarter million urban state workers are officially registered as unemployed, and another estimated twenty million have become surplus or off-duty (xiagang) workers (Zhongguo laodongbao, 9 Nov. 1996). Labor officials have responded by launching a nationwide reemployment campaign since…
China: The Paradox and Possibility of a Public Sociology of Labor
This article examines the predicament and possibility for the development of a public sociology of labor in China. Labor studies that take seriously workers' class experience and capacity have been stymied by a Communist regime keen on censoring and domesticating sociology as a profession as well as fragmenting the interests, identities, and mobilization of the working class. Yet, in recent years, persistent struggles by Chinese workers themselve…
China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement
The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen Movement, there is today hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, a long-term decline in worker power at the point of production is going on even as workers gain more power (at least on paper) outside the workplace. New labor laws have broadened workers' …
Familial Hegemony: Gender and Production Politics on Hong Kong's Electronics Shopfloor
Drawing on Burawoy's framework of 'factory regimes' and concepts of power and practice from Foucault and de Certeau, this article depicts a production regime of 'familial hegemony' found in a Hong Kong electronics factory. It suggests that the social construction of gender has to be inserted into a theory of production politics if the specific forms and processes of this hegemonic regime are to be explained. In this particular case, ethnographic …
State & Social Protest
This essay sketches an array of cultural, political, and bureaucratic mechanisms that mediate the Chinese Communist state's relationship with the major types of social protests, in the process exploring how governance and contention have transformed each other in the past six decades. In particular, it spotlights a noteworthy development in recent years: the increasingly salient market nexus between state and protest. While the regime response of…
The Spectre of Global China
China’s overseas expansion has unsettled Western commentators. In this striking ethnographic study, Ching Kwan Lee investigates the labour regimes, investment patterns and management ethos of the PRC’s state-owned firms on the Central African Copperbelt, in contrast to the giant multinationals. Surprise findings include Zambia’s first SEZs and a distinctive, quasi-Weberian ethic of ‘eating bitterness’
Will Africa feed China
The world’s fascination with and fear about China’s presence in Africa have consistently outpaced the painstaking production of scholarly knowledge. Journalists, non-governmental organizations (NGO
Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys
The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market
After the Hong Kong Miracle: Women Workers under Industrial Restructuring
Research Article| August 01 1997 After the Hong Kong Miracle: Women Workers under Industrial Restructuring Stephen W. K. Chiu; Stephen W. K. Chiu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Ching Kwan Lee Ching Kwan Lee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1997) 37 (8): 752–770. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645448 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video …
Familial Hegemony: Gender and Production Politics on Hong Kong's Electronics Shopfloor
Drawing on Burawoy's framework of 'factory regimes' and concepts of power and practice from Foucault and de Certeau, this article depicts a production regime of 'familial hegemony' found in a Hong Kong electronics factory. It suggests that the social construction of gender has to be inserted into a theory of production politics if the specific forms and processes of this hegemonic regime are to be explained. In this particular case, ethnographic …
Engendering the Worlds of Labor: Women Workers, Labor Markets, and Production Politics in the South China Economic Miracle
L'A. presente une etude comparative menee dans deux entreprises du sud de la Chine appartenant au meme groupe industriel, dirigees par les memes gestionnaires, fabriquant les memes produits et utilisant les memes techniques de production. Il montre comment ces deux usines ont developpe la meme politique d'autoritarisme a l'endroit des femmes qui composent la quasi totalite de leur personnel. Il montre que la structure sociale du marche du travail…
After the Hong Kong Miracle: Women Workers under Industrial Restructuring
Research Article| August 01 1997 After the Hong Kong Miracle: Women Workers under Industrial Restructuring Stephen W. K. Chiu; Stephen W. K. Chiu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Ching Kwan Lee Ching Kwan Lee Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Asian Survey (1997) 37 (8): 752–770. https://doi.org/10.2307/2645448 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video …
Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women
Methodological Appendix: The Ethnographic Labyrinth
The Labor Politics of Market Socialism: Collective Inaction and Class Experiences Among State Workers in Guangzhou
Labor has become an economic and political challenge a China plagued by unemployment among the ranks of state the proclaimed masters of the Chinese state. Five and a quarter million urban state workers are officially registered as unemployed, and another estimated twenty million have become surplus or off-duty (xiagang) workers (Zhongguo laodongbao, 9 Nov. 1996). Labor officials have responded by launching a nationwide reemployment campaign since…
From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labour Regimes in Chinese Factories
Like opening Pandora's box, Chinese reforms have unleashed institutional and social forces which have led to a variety of production regimes co-existing under the permissive banner of “market socialism.” The industrial scene of Guangdong, which boasts of itself as one of the first, the most and the best reformed provincial economies, bears witness to the profound and wide-ranging transformation in production politics. Compared to the era of state…
Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women
The Trading Crowd: An Ethnography of the Shanghai Stock Market
Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women
The `Revenge of History: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in North-Eastern China
In the Rustbelt of China, state workers have become restive as market reforms have undermined their entrenched way of life. By comparing cases of worker protest in an industrial city in northeastern China, once the cradle of its planned economy, this article analyses the configuration of conditions underlying these labor protests. I have found that collective memories of Maoist socialism, enterprise residential communities and enterprise property…
Revisiting the South China Miracle
From the specter of Mao to the spirit of the law: Labor insurgency in China
Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism
Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt
This study opens a critical perspective on the slow death of socialism and the rebirth of capitalism in the world's most dynamic and populous country. Based on remarkable fieldwork and extensive interviews in Chinese textile, apparel, machinery, and household appliance factories, Against the Law finds a rising tide of labor unrest mostly hidden from the world's attention. Providing a broad political and economic analysis of this labor struggle to…
Revolution in the Making of the Modern World
Since the early 1980s, China has been hailed as the success story of post- socialist transition, shifting its revolutionary course via a reform that has generated the world’s most dynamic growth over a quarter of a century and elevated it to the forefront of nations attracting foreign investment. Often eclipsed in this glowing picture are enduring, even exacerbated, structures of inequality and the vibrant forms of popular resistance these have s…
Reclaiming Chinese Society: The New Social Activism
1. Social Activism in China: Micro-foundations, Local impetus and Global Resources Ching Kwan Lee and You-tien Hsing Part 1: Politics of (Re)distribution 2. Urban Housing Mobilizations You-tien Hsing 3.Workers and the Quest for Citizenship Ching Kwan Lee 4. Barefoot Lawyers and Rural Conflicts Ying Xing 5. Peasant Resistance against Nature Reserves Melinda Herrold-Menzies Part 2: Politics of Recognition 6. Feminist Networks Zheng Wang 7. Civic En…
China Since Tiananmen: The Labor Movement
The twenty years since 1989 have brought two major developments in worker activism. First, whereas workers were part of the mass uprising in the Tiananmen Movement, there is today hardly any sign of mobilization that transcends class or regional lines. Second, a long-term decline in worker power at the point of production is going on even as workers gain more power (at least on paper) outside the workplace. New labor laws have broadened workers' …
Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa's Chinese Enclaves
This article examines one of the pre-eminent logics of global capital flow - the pursuit of flexible labour regimes - as a window to explore the interaction between Chinese investments and African communities. It analyses the respective "politics of casualization" in the Chambishi mine on the Zambian Copperbelt and the Tanzania-China Friendship Mill in the port city of Dar es Salaam. Both Zambian and Tanzanian workers have witnessed and resisted …
China: The Paradox and Possibility of a Public Sociology of Labor
This article examines the predicament and possibility for the development of a public sociology of labor in China. Labor studies that take seriously workers' class experience and capacity have been stymied by a Communist regime keen on censoring and domesticating sociology as a profession as well as fragmenting the interests, identities, and mobilization of the working class. Yet, in recent years, persistent struggles by Chinese workers themselve…
Remaking the World of Chinese Labour: A 30‐Year Retrospective
Over the past 30 years, labour relations, and, indeed, the entirety of working‐class politics in China, have been dramatically altered by economic reforms. In this review, we focus on the two key processes of commodification and casualization and their implications for workers. On the one hand, these processes have resulted in the destruction of the old social contract and the emergence of marketized employment relations. This has implied a loss …
Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers, and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves
China has returned to Africa since the late 1990s, building on the foundation of "proletarian internationalism" it forged on the continent between the 1950s
From iron rice bowl to informalization: Markets, workers, and the state in a changing China
Hong Kong: Migrant Lives, Landscapes, and Journeys
The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States
Drawing on experiences in the global south and western Europe, this commentary identifies 3 focal points of precarity politics that a singular focus on the United States may have eclipsed: (a) In the global south, precariousness at work creates a crisis not just of job-quality but also of social reproduction; (b) precarious employment is often an integral part of the development strategies of states and international financial institutions, rathe…
Political science (33 works) · Law (27 works) · China (25 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (22 works) · Politics (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Economics (16 works) · Political economy (13 works) · History (10 works) · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics (9 works)