Jenny Chan
Biographic Data
| ID | 3590997 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jenny Chan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jenny |
| FAMILY NAME | Chan |
| SIGNATURE | CHAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hong Kong Polytechnic University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4980-4048 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 37 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 210 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 37 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Practising Gender Subjectivities in Platform Work
Drawing on interviews from two case studies in China’s food delivery and house cleaning sectors, this research examines workers’ gender subjectivities and their interaction with the labour politics of platform work. Male delivery riders experience a crisis of masculinity, de-flexibilise their labour to maximise income and affirm migrant masculinities, yet their insecurity persists. Female cleaners seek to construct respectable femininities in sti…
‘Extremely reactionary gentlemen’ amidst a ‘modern miracle’
The Labour Advisory Board (LAB) in Hong Kong is a tripartite government body mediating between labour and business. Set up in 1927, it is often overlooked by studies of labour and economic development in Hong Kong due to its relative insignificance in decision-making processes. However, between the 1960s and 1980s, before direct elections for higher legislative bodies took place, the LAB was the only body in which workers’ interests were represen…
Gendered Organisation of Platform Food Delivery Work in China
202602 bcch
L’art rupestre à la lumière de l’écriture chinoise et de la psychanalyse
Re‐Examining the ‘Entrepreneurial Self’
Previous studies in diverse settings have argued that worker subjectivity is infiltrated by the neoliberal discourse of the ‘entrepreneurial self’. This article re‐examines this conceptualisation by looking at worker subjectivity in China's internet sector. Interview data show that Chinese tech workers transition from embracing the entrepreneurial self to distancing themselves from it, prompted by a change in life stage. This shows how workers' (…
The Master in Bondage
202403 bcch
Migrate to (not) be ‘gurus’
Through an intersectional analysis of gender, class, and migration, this article reveals how a hegemonic culture of workplace masculinity, embodied by a group of ‘gurus,’ is constructed in China's tech companies. The guru masculinity is characterized by proactivity and aggressiveness at work, ‘putting work first’ and overwork, and the ability to navigate boundaryless careers and settle down in first‐tier cities. It translates hegemonic masculine …
La haine dans un crime d’infanticide
Le travail psychothérapeutique avec un patient ayant commis un crime d’infanticide permet d’interroger des processus psychiques dans la transformation de l’amour en haine. En référence à Freud dans ses recherches, la culpabilité de l’acte du crime se trouve dans le fantasme de l’accomplissement d’un désir inconscient au regard de l’interdit. Le narcissisme occupe une place centrale lors des intrications/désintrications pulsionnelles. Dans la cont…
Workers and Change in China
Review of the book Elfstrom M. Workers and Change in China: Resistance, Repression, Responsiveness. Cambridge University Press; 2021. ISBN: 9781108923286
Poverty and Pacification
Review of the book Poverty and Pacification: The Chinese State Abandons the Old Working Class, by Dorothy J. Solinger. Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield, 2022
Buy with 1-Click
This article analyzes labor informality in the Chinese platform economy. Drawing on participant observation at a parcel delivery station in Beijing, the author discusses how individual and family lives are impacted by the hectic world of logistics work, and indeed, how companies have increased cost competitiveness through driving exploitation into forms hidden within the household. Migrant family members frequently assist each other by calling cu…
Poverty and Pacification
lassic account of China's rural s her attention to the tens of s China's factories have been ng portrayal of how industrial who had once been promised , Johns Hopkins University; ineers and Disenfranchised dents is a work of meticulous ation presented alongside a emergence of China's social irty years.What marks this as receiving what help the state ey are central to the analysis, D, University of Edinburgh , Solinger offers a masterful with grav…
Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle
Precarious Asia
Review of the book Precarious Asia : global capitalism and qork in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. By Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022
After the Foxconn Suicides in China
We seek to tackle myriad problems of a global production system in which China is the world's largest producer and exporter of consumer electronics products. Dying for an iPhone simultaneously addresses the challenges facing Chinese workers while locating them within the global economy through an assessment of the relationship between Foxconn (the largest electronics manufacturer) and Apple (one of the richest corporations). Eight researchers fro…
Benjamin Selywn (2017) The Struggle for Development
Review of the book Benjamin Selwyn (2017) The Struggle for Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9781509512782. E-Book $19. Paperback $23.75. Hardcover $67.50
Creating the Intellectual
Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism \nand the Rise of a Classification, by Eddy U. \nOakland: University of California Press, \n2019. 226 pp. paper. ISBN: \n9780520303690
Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised
Review of the book Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019; 312 pp.: ISBN 9780190052607, £64.00 (hbk), 9780190052614, US$27.67 (pbk)
The 8th Wonder of the World
In the context of transnational production, China remains the heart of Foxconn's global electronics empire and its profitability. For seventeen consecutive years between 2002 and 2018, Taiwanese-owned Foxconn ranked number one as China's largest exporter. Today it operates more than thirty industrial parks across coastal and interior China, creating a 24-hour, high-speed production network predicated on vertical integration and flexible coordinat…
State and labor in China, 1978-2018
China's reintegration into global capitalism has greatly transformed migration patterns and labor relations since the late 1970s. This article focuses on worker activism in this transformation. It shows that the dynamic interactions between worker mobilization and government reaction have continued to shape the forms and outcomes of labor contention. Aggrieved workers have used legal and extralegal strategies to defend their rights and interests.…
Precarization and Labor Resistance
Precarization, in its form and consequences, varies across workers, sectors and geographies. The five articles in this special issue examine ways that workers have struggled with and against precarious labor in different contexts, from low-wage retail and service workers in Canada and the USA, to manufacturing and construction workers in India and China. In particular, they show that the role of the state has been crucial in shaping the terrain o…
Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of…
The Labour Politics of China’s Rural Migrant Workers
This article analyses the Chinese rural migrant workers’ collective struggles within a framework that highlights the deepening of contradictions among labour, capital, and the state. At times of labour crisis, aggrieved workers have taken legal and extra-legal actions to defend their rights and interests in the absence of leadership by trade unions. From 1 January 2015, Guangdong provincial government was compelled to enforce new collective barga…
Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers' struggles from a global labor perspective
To enrich the discussion of global labor, between 2010 and 2016, we studied Apple's value chain, Foxconn's mode of labor control, and Chinese workers' struggles. Through our fieldwork in China we also examined Apple's and Foxconn's responses to the spate of worker suicides, workers' resistance, the activism of scholar and student groups, and transnational justice campaigns. We conclude with reflection on global labor studies in light of the debat…
Working for two bosses
Based on interviews with students and teachers at one electronics company, we analyse the use of student interns to do regular manufacturing work in China. We argue that student workers need to be seen as a distinct category of constrained labour; part of a growing insecure workforce in China. We find that students enrolled in vocational schools are moved into internships, without their consent, to suit the needs of employers. This results in a m…
Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of…
The politics of global production
Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to A sia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at C hina's leading exporter—the T aiwanese‐owned F oxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer‐driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of A pple in price setting and the timing of product deli…
Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers' struggles from a global labor perspective
To enrich the discussion of global labor, between 2010 and 2016, we studied Apple's value chain, Foxconn's mode of labor control, and Chinese workers' struggles. Through our fieldwork in China we also examined Apple's and Foxconn's responses to the spate of worker suicides, workers' resistance, the activism of scholar and student groups, and transnational justice campaigns. We conclude with reflection on global labor studies in light of the debat…
The Spatial Politics of Labor in China
China's capitalist transformation offers us a non-Western perspective to understand the contradictions of transnational capital mobility, the working people's lives, and the changing role of the state. This economic and social transformation continues to require the acceleration of a specific proletarianization-successive generations of rural migrant workers (nongmingong) have become the mainstay of the country's export-processing sector, but the…
Working for two bosses
Based on interviews with students and teachers at one electronics company, we analyse the use of student interns to do regular manufacturing work in China. We argue that student workers need to be seen as a distinct category of constrained labour; part of a growing insecure workforce in China. We find that students enrolled in vocational schools are moved into internships, without their consent, to suit the needs of employers. This results in a m…
A suicide survivor
In 2010, 18 employees working for F oxconn in C hina attempted suicide. These shocking events focused the world's attention on the manufacturing supply chains of C hina's export industry and the experience of working within them. What had driven these young, migrant, assembly line workers to commit such a desperate act? This article provides a first‐hand account of the experiences of one of those who survived a suicide attempt, 17‐year‐old T ian …
Precarization and Labor Resistance
Precarization, in its form and consequences, varies across workers, sectors and geographies. The five articles in this special issue examine ways that workers have struggled with and against precarious labor in different contexts, from low-wage retail and service workers in Canada and the USA, to manufacturing and construction workers in India and China. In particular, they show that the role of the state has been crucial in shaping the terrain o…
Worker-intellectual unity
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that …
The Labour Politics of China’s Rural Migrant Workers
This article analyses the Chinese rural migrant workers’ collective struggles within a framework that highlights the deepening of contradictions among labour, capital, and the state. At times of labour crisis, aggrieved workers have taken legal and extra-legal actions to defend their rights and interests in the absence of leadership by trade unions. From 1 January 2015, Guangdong provincial government was compelled to enforce new collective barga…
Migrate to (not) be ‘gurus’
Through an intersectional analysis of gender, class, and migration, this article reveals how a hegemonic culture of workplace masculinity, embodied by a group of ‘gurus,’ is constructed in China's tech companies. The guru masculinity is characterized by proactivity and aggressiveness at work, ‘putting work first’ and overwork, and the ability to navigate boundaryless careers and settle down in first‐tier cities. It translates hegemonic masculine …
After the Foxconn Suicides in China
We seek to tackle myriad problems of a global production system in which China is the world's largest producer and exporter of consumer electronics products. Dying for an iPhone simultaneously addresses the challenges facing Chinese workers while locating them within the global economy through an assessment of the relationship between Foxconn (the largest electronics manufacturer) and Apple (one of the richest corporations). Eight researchers fro…
Interns or Workers? China's Student Labor Regime
In the summer of 2010, Taiwanese-based Foxconn Technology Group-the world's largest electronics manufacturer-utilized the labor of 150,000 student interns from vocational schools at its facilities all over China. Foxconn is one of many global firms utilizing student intern labor. Far from being freely chosen, student internships are organized by the local state working with enterprises and schools, frequently in violation of the rights of student…
Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers
A startling 13 young workers attempted or committed suicide at the two Foxconn production facilities in southern China between January and May 2010. We can interpret their acts as protest against a global labor regime that is widely practiced in China. Their defiant deaths demand that society reflect upon the costs of a state-promoted development model that sacrifices dignity for corporate profit in the name of economic growth. Chinese migrant la…
Chinese Women Workers Organize in the Export Zones
Jenny Chan. 2006. "Chinese Women Workers Organize in the Export Zone." New Labor Forum: A Journal of Ideas, Analysis and Debates 15(1): 19-27
Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers
A startling 13 young workers attempted or committed suicide at the two Foxconn production facilities in southern China between January and May 2010. We can interpret their acts as protest against a global labor regime that is widely practiced in China. Their defiant deaths demand that society reflect upon the costs of a state-promoted development model that sacrifices dignity for corporate profit in the name of economic growth. Chinese migrant la…
Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of…
A suicide survivor
In 2010, 18 employees working for F oxconn in C hina attempted suicide. These shocking events focused the world's attention on the manufacturing supply chains of C hina's export industry and the experience of working within them. What had driven these young, migrant, assembly line workers to commit such a desperate act? This article provides a first‐hand account of the experiences of one of those who survived a suicide attempt, 17‐year‐old T ian …
The politics of global production
Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to A sia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at C hina's leading exporter—the T aiwanese‐owned F oxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer‐driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of A pple in price setting and the timing of product deli…
The Spatial Politics of Labor in China
China's capitalist transformation offers us a non-Western perspective to understand the contradictions of transnational capital mobility, the working people's lives, and the changing role of the state. This economic and social transformation continues to require the acceleration of a specific proletarianization-successive generations of rural migrant workers (nongmingong) have become the mainstay of the country's export-processing sector, but the…
The politics of global production
Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter-the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn-the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures. Power asymmetries assure the dominance of Apple in price setting and the timing of product delivery,…
A Suicide Survivor
In 2010, 18 employees working for Foxconn in China attempted suicide. These shocking events focused world attention on the manufacturing supply chains of China's export industry and the experience of working within them. What had driven these young migrant assembly line workers to commit such a desperate act? This article provides a first-hand account of the experiences of one of those who survived a suicide attempt, 17-year-old Tian Yu. Her pers…
Dying for an iPhone
The presented sociological research analyses the ways in which the integration of the electronics manufacturing industry in global supply chains has intensified labour conflicts and class antagonism. The Taiwanese transnational corporation Foxconn Technology Group holds more than 50 percent of market share in global electronics manufacturing. Its 1.4 million employees in China far exceed its combined workforce in 28 other countries that comprise …
Worker-intellectual unity
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the premise that …
Worker-Intellectual Unity
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional campaigns that gradually developed into a global campaign. This experience confirms the important pol…
Working for two bosses
Based on interviews with students and teachers at one electronics company, we analyse the use of student interns to do regular manufacturing work in China. We argue that student workers need to be seen as a distinct category of constrained labour; part of a growing insecure workforce in China. We find that students enrolled in vocational schools are moved into internships, without their consent, to suit the needs of employers. This results in a m…
Interns or Workers? China's Student Labor Regime
In the summer of 2010, Taiwanese-based Foxconn Technology Group-the world's largest electronics manufacturer-utilized the labor of 150,000 student interns from vocational schools at its facilities all over China. Foxconn is one of many global firms utilizing student intern labor. Far from being freely chosen, student internships are organized by the local state working with enterprises and schools, frequently in violation of the rights of student…
The Labour Politics of China’s Rural Migrant Workers
This article analyses the Chinese rural migrant workers’ collective struggles within a framework that highlights the deepening of contradictions among labour, capital, and the state. At times of labour crisis, aggrieved workers have taken legal and extra-legal actions to defend their rights and interests in the absence of leadership by trade unions. From 1 January 2015, Guangdong provincial government was compelled to enforce new collective barga…
Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese workers' struggles from a global labor perspective
To enrich the discussion of global labor, between 2010 and 2016, we studied Apple's value chain, Foxconn's mode of labor control, and Chinese workers' struggles. Through our fieldwork in China we also examined Apple's and Foxconn's responses to the spate of worker suicides, workers' resistance, the activism of scholar and student groups, and transnational justice campaigns. We conclude with reflection on global labor studies in light of the debat…
Global Capital, the State, and Chinese Workers
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of…
State and labor in China, 1978-2018
China's reintegration into global capitalism has greatly transformed migration patterns and labor relations since the late 1970s. This article focuses on worker activism in this transformation. It shows that the dynamic interactions between worker mobilization and government reaction have continued to shape the forms and outcomes of labor contention. Aggrieved workers have used legal and extralegal strategies to defend their rights and interests.…
Precarization and Labor Resistance
Precarization, in its form and consequences, varies across workers, sectors and geographies. The five articles in this special issue examine ways that workers have struggled with and against precarious labor in different contexts, from low-wage retail and service workers in Canada and the USA, to manufacturing and construction workers in India and China. In particular, they show that the role of the state has been crucial in shaping the terrain o…
Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised
Review of the book Joel Andreas, Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China, Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2019; 312 pp.: ISBN 9780190052607, £64.00 (hbk), 9780190052614, US$27.67 (pbk)
The 8th Wonder of the World
In the context of transnational production, China remains the heart of Foxconn's global electronics empire and its profitability. For seventeen consecutive years between 2002 and 2018, Taiwanese-owned Foxconn ranked number one as China's largest exporter. Today it operates more than thirty industrial parks across coastal and interior China, creating a 24-hour, high-speed production network predicated on vertical integration and flexible coordinat…
Benjamin Selywn (2017) The Struggle for Development
Review of the book Benjamin Selwyn (2017) The Struggle for Development. Cambridge: Polity Press. ISBN 9781509512782. E-Book $19. Paperback $23.75. Hardcover $67.50
Creating the Intellectual
Creating the Intellectual: Chinese Communism \nand the Rise of a Classification, by Eddy U. \nOakland: University of California Press, \n2019. 226 pp. paper. ISBN: \n9780520303690
Poverty and Pacification
lassic account of China's rural s her attention to the tens of s China's factories have been ng portrayal of how industrial who had once been promised , Johns Hopkins University; ineers and Disenfranchised dents is a work of meticulous ation presented alongside a emergence of China's social irty years.What marks this as receiving what help the state ey are central to the analysis, D, University of Edinburgh , Solinger offers a masterful with grav…
Workers’ Inquiry and Global Class Struggle
Precarious Asia
Review of the book Precarious Asia : global capitalism and qork in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia. By Arne L. Kalleberg, Kevin Hewison and Kwang-Yeong Shin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022
Political science (21 works) · China (20 works) · Law (18 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Economics (15 works) · Business (13 works) · Labor Movements and Unions (13 works) · Politics (11 works) · China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance (10 works) · Law (8 works)