N Pun
Biographic Data
| ID | 5736 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Pun |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Pun |
| SIGNATURE | PUN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | Chinese University of Hong Kong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5725-6988 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 106 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 830 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 106 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 15 |
Demystifying big data in China
To date, much of the discussion of big data in China remains caught between fears of authoritarian threats and dreams of developmental alternatives. Such mythifications reduce China's techno-development to a monolithic, state-led master plan, and conceal the labour, frictions and relations of power these data infrastructures depend on. Drawing on infrastructure studies, this Special Theme approaches data infrastructures as relational, contingent …
Unthinking Digital Fascism
This article examines the rise of digital fascism in China amid the youth crisis, economic instability, and tensions between the state and capital within global infrastructural capitalism. Digital fascism is understood as a decentralised, digital form of fascist ideology that appropriates nationalist and pseudo-leftist sentiments and discourses to undermine social movements. We argue that this ideology’s rise is deeply rooted in the collapse of s…
Honoring Michael Burawoy (1947–2025)
This introduction honors Michael Burawoy’s life and scholarship by examining the influence of his labor process theory, production regime framework, extended case method, and public sociology on China labor studies. We first situate Burawoy’s work within Marxist sociology, tracing his movement from Manufacturing Consent to The Politics of Production , his comparative analysis of capitalism and state socialism, and his later reflections on the lim…
Living at work
There is no stable, standard or typical relationship between work and home under global capitalism. Rather we witness shuffling similar cards in new circumstances, with changing forms of accommodation-work arrangements that organize the relation between labour and dwelling, shaping how labour is recruited, fixed, reproduced and valorized. These arrangements bring production and social reproduction into a shifting and often tense unity, making vis…
Reflecting Michael Burawoy’s labor process and factory regime theory and its influence on Chinese labor studies
Michael Burawoy’s labor process and factory regime theory have been landmark contributions to labor studies and Marxist sociology, substantially influencing Chinese labor studies. This article, however, offers a critical reflection on his theory, as a genuine salute to his life as a Marxist and his contributions to labor studies. We argue that the core of labor regime theory is a striking epistemological paradox rooted in two mutually reinforcing…
Introduction
‘Re-coupling site’ of social media and the workplace in digital nomadism
We observe that a new, minor genre of resistance has emerged among female worker vloggers. Whether working in manufacturing plants or on construction sites, these female worker vloggers actively produce videos about the laughter and tears of their work lives. Their workplaces constitute the central source of their daily vlog production. We develop a concept of ‘re-coupling site’ to explore how these female vloggers transform conventional workplac…
Introduction
Critique of creative labour
In contrast to the concept of bonded labour or agency labour, we coin the concept of indebted labour to analyse the creative workers in Hong Kong’s filmmaking industry. Unlike bonded labour, which involves forced labour to repay debts, and agency labour, which is a form of mediated labour subcontracted by third parties to work in various industries, the concept of indebted labour refers to a nuanced and interesting labour process that turns free …
Policy Effects of the Statutory Minimum Wage in Hong Kong
This article examines the policy effects of Hong Kong’s Statutory Minimum Wage (SMW) on underemployment, working hours, and wages. Using a Difference-in-Differences methodology on General Household Survey data (2011–2019), we assess five SMW adjustment cycles. We define a ‘most disadvantaged’ treatment group and a ‘less disadvantaged’ group based on the concentration of minimum wage earners in their industry-occupation cell, relative to an unaffe…
Mirror China
Labor Market Theory as a Tautology or Theoretical Construct? Toward a Marxist Labor Market Theory
Labor market theory often functions as a descriptive framework, subordinated to other theoretical models, failing to explain the capitalist nature and internal logic of the labor market. The crisis of neoliberal capitalism and its reaction, paradoxically, highlights the importance of the labor market, which has been long neglected and overshadowed by Marxist labor studies. To remedy this, we propose integrating labor market theory within the Marx…
Infrastructural capitalism in China
Contrasting existing scholarship in ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, this article builds on the theorisation of infrastructural capitalism as an emerging global-capitalist project entangled with both China’s state-socialist ideology and the latest nationalistic revitalisation agenda, serving both political and commercial goals, yet also rendering discontent and resistance in daily business and employment practices. Through participant ob…
Dialogue with Antonio Negri
On November 27 and 29, 2014, Prof. WANG Hui, the Director of Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Beijing, invited Prof. Antonio Negri, one of Italy's most leading Marxist philosophers and activists, to give a series of lectures. I was invited by Prof. WANG Hui to offer comments and reflections on one of Prof. Antonio Negri’s lectures, titled “The Metropolis as Post-Industrial Factory”. New Bloom published th…
A Critique of the Chinese Radical Net-Philosophy Community
This article delves into the dynamics of the Chinese net-philosophy community, a unique digital and radical subculture where young enthusiasts engage with philosophical ideas outside of traditional academic frameworks. We examine how radical knowledge was produced, validated, and circulated within these net communities, focusing on the aestheticisation of knowledge and its impact on political engagement. This study reveals how alternative intelle…
Elephant in the room
‘Asia as Method’ is widely and significantly discussed in Cultural Studies in Asian societies as a cultural praxis to confront Western imperialism and formulate alternative politics. In search of methods of transformative politics in the Hong Kong context, in which we understand the situation as the ‘elephant in the room’, we re-open the debate on methods of cultural studies, suggesting ‘commoning’ as an embedded pathway to achieve potential soci…
Icoop puzzle
China's Infrastructural Capitalism and Infrastructural Power of Labor
This article anticipates a political project that underlines China's infrastructural capitalism and the infrastructural power of labor in the making of the Chinese working class. This project embarks a re-departure of the left movement after the Jasic struggle, which inspired a rebirth of global Marxism and Maoism that attempts to confront the failure of the first wave of socialist movements and the neoliberal turn of global capitalism. Meeting t…
Clashing Gender in the Age of Transnational Infrastructural Capitalism
Accompanying the “China Dream” as a symbol of the advent of Chinese transnational infrastructural capitalism, a new project of subject making is emerging: an increasing number of Chinese youth, especially those from working-class backgrounds, have entered the expanded urban vocational education system for training as future workers. As a national project attempting to (re)invent educated, skilled labor subjects to serve the state goal of industri…
The Scarring Effect of First Job Precarity
Does entering the labour market via precarious employment have a long-term scarring effect on one's career? Prior research proposes diverse arguments, but firm conclusions remain elusive. Using panel data from Hong Kong, this study rekindles this debate by revealing the long-lasting effect of first job precarity on workers' subsequent career prospects. A comprehensive measure of precarious employment is constructed to simultaneously account for e…
Youth work, prosocial behaviour, and micro-foundation of working-class solidarity among vocational school students in China
Despite the large number of working-class students having to work while attending schools, their work experience and the potential of class solidarity have been largely unaddressed. By bringing in a social psychological perspective, this article revives the sociological debates of working-class solidarity and challenges the defeatist view of solidarity since the neoliberal turn of the global economy. This article comprises two studies. In Study 1…
Global Consciousness Predicts Behavioral Responses to the Covid-19 Pandemic
COVID-19 has drastically changed human behaviors and posed a threat to globalism by spurring a resurgence of nationalism. Promoting prosocial behavior within and across borders is of paramount importance for global cooperation to combat pandemics. To examine both self-report and actual prosocial behavior, we conducted the first empirical test of global consciousness theory in a multinational study of 35 cultures ( N = 18,171 community adults stra…
Techno-nationalism as the cultural logic of global infrastructural capitalism
This article contributes to a theoretical formulation of techno-nationalism as the cultural logic of infrastructural capitalism by revisiting Debord and Situationist International's discussion of Spectacle and digital struggles. We deconstruct the concept of techno-nationalism into three interlocking but contradictory media events: techno-nationalism as the "integrated Spectacle," signifying the power of the state and capital; the disintegrative …
Confronting global infrastructural capitalism
We take infrastructure as a ‘keyword’ in foregrounding the production and the reproduction of contemporary capitalism as well as its complexities and contradictions. To tease out the capitalist dynamics of the contemporary moment as infrastructural capitalism, this paper moves beyond a dichotomous constellation of the logic of capital and the territorial logic of power, to argue how a triple logic- capital, power, and culture informs the cultural…
Internet as an ideology
Ideology works. This article examines how the Internet as a capital actor has become a nationalist ideology in China. Disclosing how nationalism serves to facilitate the expansion of China-based Internet platforms in the age of informational capitalism, we directly confront the Chinese Internet as an ideology apparatus that works to fulfill a dual logic of capital and territorial power. This article contributes to the study of three types of Chin…
Putting transnational labour process in its place
Globalization of capital accumulation and transnational production highlight a shifting paradigm in labour process theory, which requires a theorization on the spatial politics of production.The shift from Taylorism and Fordism (mass production and welfare-state interventions) to flexible accumulation (flexible production, casual labour, deregulation and privatization) may be a periodization that has become increasingly problematic. What is emerg…
Unfinished Proletarianization
As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the “world’s factory” and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns and cities. What is the process of proletarianization of peasant-workers in China today? In what way…
Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in "Globalizing" China
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…
Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls)
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…
A Culture of Violence
Class and Precarity
In refuting Guy Standing's precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf's reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are used to define the current formation of the working class in China. Class is not defined by status, i…
Women workers and precarious employment in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, China
In spite of the increase in transnational codes of conduct and legal mobilisation of labour, despotic labour regimes in China are still prevalent. Globalisation and 'race to the bottom' production strategies adopted by transnational corporations militate against the improvement of labour relations in China. The goal of this study is to provide a framework for understanding the working conditions of female migrant workers. While the inhumane worki…
Gendering the dormitory labor system
This article discusses the dormitory labor system, a specific Chinese labor system through which the lives of Chinese women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labor. This dormitory labor system is a gendered form of labor use that underlies the boom of export-oriented industrial production in China, which has been further boosted by China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Combining work and residence under the …
Global Production, Company Codes of Conduct, and Labor Conditions in China
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…
Renegotiating Belt and Road cooperation
In what way can societal actors in transitional polities play a role in influencing bilateral economic agreements? Societal actors are often ignored in the state-centric international relations literature. We, however, contend that social resistance to a foreign development project can reshape the international outcome, even under an asymmetric bargaining structure, if two conditions are met: the host country’s policy options are conditioned by c…
Gender ideologies of youth in post-socialist China
In dialogue with the new gender ideology “egalitarian essentialism” which reveals uneven transformation of gender equity in public and private spheres, this study looks into the nuanced gender ideologies among Chinese youth, their antecedents and socio-psychological impacts on the young people. We apply latent class analysis to data on gender-role attitudes that were collected in 12 vocational colleges in China (N = 4,793). The three gender ideol…
The Radicalisation of the New Chinese Working Class
The repositioning of China as a ‘ world workshop’ rests upon the nurturing of a new Chinese working class. This article focuses on questions of collective action of migrant workers who are now the major force of a new working class that actively strives to alter its fate through labour struggles. By studying the collective actions of migrant workers in the gemstone industry, we examine a process in which workers' resistance has developed from a s…
Double contradiction of schooling
Situating in the different social, political and cultural contexts of schooling in China, which is more embedded in mixed neoliberal value, authoritarian state control and collective morality, we use a somewhat different theoretical angle to understand the process of ‘learning to labour’ and the reproduction of working class at school and at work. Our study extends the horizon of Willis’ analysis of cultural reproduction at school by seriously an…
The Subsumption of Class Discourse in China
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own
Transgressing North-South Divide
In Europe, as elsewhere in the global North, the label 'Made in China' has become synonymous with low wages, excessive overtime, and exploitative working conditions. Conventional literature on the international division of labor reifies the North-South divide in particular with respect to class formation and labor agency. Contrasting the working conditions in China to those in Europe sets these up as opposites in their managerial practices and tr…
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 …
Affording worker solidarity in motion
Worker solidarity is a recurring theme in the digital labour debate. While recent studies of the on-demand platforms contribute to highlighting digital affordances in fostering solidarity among gig workers, few have explored how this works in depth and offered a theoretically informed evaluation of this potential. This study of Didi drivers in China fills this gap by looking at how agential practices amplify or constrain the effects of digital co…
Revival of social work education in China
Reconceptualising Youth Poverty through the Lens of Precarious Employment during the Pandemic
Risks of youth poverty in relation to employment have largely been overlooked both internationally and locally, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Moving beyond the concepts of income, economic factors and in-work poverty as applied to the general population, we examine the multi-scalar employment risk confronting highly educated working youth (aged eighteen to twenty-nine) in Hong Kong by assessing the intersection of precarious employment a…
Reflecting on Hong Kong protests in 2019-2020
Mass protests erupted in June 2019 in Hong Kong due to widespread anger about a proposed amendment to the extradition law. As a global project, could the goal of pursuing democratization be narrowly confined to a single place such as Hong Kong? What can be learned from a leaderless democratic movement, by those who are concerned about the future of Hong Kong? Can we learn some lessons from the Hong Kong movement-from the nuanced actions, complex …
A “World-Class” (Labor) Camp/us
The fact that in 2010 eighteen young workers attempted suicide at Foxconn production facilities in China has attracted worldwide attention. Drawing on research conducted in Foxconn factories in three regions of China—the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and West China—the authors trace the development of the Foxconn Technology Group as a case that demonstrates the aggressive nature of capital expansion in China and its impact on the li…
Revival of social work education in China
China's youth work in rural areas
Participation in Youth Center Activities
Youth centers both develop youths' sense of citizenship and their social integration and discourage their delinquency. These centers, numerous in Hong Kong, provide essential social services for youths. Promoting youths' continuous participation in youth centers is, therefore, a recurrent issue in Hong Kong. A model-the sequential specificity model-appears to be useful in addressing this goal. This model differentiates the sequence of participati…
Becoming Dagongmei (Working Girls)
Family Stress on Adolescents in Hong Kong and the Mainland of China
Assessing the significance of the family, a notion of the family emerges as a system that provides important resources for its members, but also creates stress upon them. Despite the importance of family effects, no study has examined large samples of Chinese adolescents in both the mainland of China and Hong Kong. To fill the empirical void and extend the research focus on individual family stressors, the present study surveyed 2,142 Chinese sec…
Opening a Minor Genre of Resistance in Reform China
positions: east asia cultures critique - Volume 8, Number 2, Fall 2000
Service Role Commitment Among Participants in Centers For Children and Youth
Promoting youths' commitment to a service role to serve the community is a developmental goal of both psychological and political significance. Children and youth (C and Y) centers in Hong Kong shoulder this developmental goal. To amass more thorough evidence, this study analyzed data from 1068 participants in these centers, drawn from a representative sample of high school students in Hong Kong. Results of regression analysis showed that, among …
Other Modernities
Reworking China's Proletariat . Sally Sargeson
China's youth policy formulation and youth participation
Am I the Only Survivor? Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in China
Research Article| May 01 2002 Am I the Only Survivor? Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in China Pun Ngai Pun Ngai Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2002) 14 (2): 341–348. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-14-2-341 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Pun Ngai; Am I the Only Survivor? Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in Chi…
Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in "Globalizing" China
Women workers and precarious employment in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone, China
In spite of the increase in transnational codes of conduct and legal mobilisation of labour, despotic labour regimes in China are still prevalent. Globalisation and 'race to the bottom' production strategies adopted by transnational corporations militate against the improvement of labour relations in China. The goal of this study is to provide a framework for understanding the working conditions of female migrant workers. While the inhumane worki…
The Chinese Women's Movement between State and Market . Ellen R. Judd
Engendering Chinese modernity
In this paper I analyse this subject-making process. Dagongmei is a specific ethics of self construed at the particular moment when private and transnational capital engulfed contemporary China. As a new social identity it reveals the story of how a state socialist system is giving way to the capitalist global economy and how capitalist practices depend entirely on a complex web of regulations on class rural-urban differences and sexual relations…
Humanist Approaches to Youth Development in the Summer Youth Program of Hong Kong
Promoting social integration and meaning derived from activities can be effective approaches to facilitating basic and advanced development among young participants in the Summer Youth Program of Hong Kong. Its rationale rests on the humanist perspective, which emphasizes the individual's deriving meaning and maintaining affiliation with people. To examine the effects of these experiences in the program, the study employed a prepost design to sur…
Made in China
China has a long history in commerce and marketing. For many centuries, 'Made in China' was a high quality, prestige label imported exclusively for the royals and the rich. This paper traces the history of Made in China and reports current branding practice in the world’s largest market.
Differential Effects of Service Experience and Classroom Reflection on Service-Learning Outcomes
This study examines the ways in which service experience and classroom experience, as principal components of a service-learning program, interact to affect student outcomes in such areas as personal development, respect for diversity, social commitment, and overall gain from the program. The basic premise is that these two service-learning components may have main effects and an interaction effect on the outcomes. To test this, the present study…
Global Production, Company Codes of Conduct, and Labor Conditions in China
Predictors of the Likelihood of Delinquency
Different theories offer different factors, each of which partially explain delinquency in young people. An integrated framework incorporating these theories would provide a more complete explanation. Theories that need to be built into such a framework include social control, social learning, strain, and cognitive development theories. Data were collected from 229 marginal youth recruited through outreaching social work teams in Hong Kong. The r…
Young people's existential concerns and club drug abuse
Taken into consideration the limitations of conventional approaches in understanding the problem of young drug abuse, this paper shows how stresses emerging in adolescents' confrontation with the fundamental concerns of existence lead to drug taking behavior. Based on a qualitative study conducted in Hong Kong, this paper suggests that young people take illicit drugs in order to relieve anxiety arising from some existential issues at this life st…
Gendering the dormitory labor system
This article discusses the dormitory labor system, a specific Chinese labor system through which the lives of Chinese women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labor. This dormitory labor system is a gendered form of labor use that underlies the boom of export-oriented industrial production in China, which has been further boosted by China's accession to the World Trade Organization. Combining work and residence under the …
Putting transnational labour process in its place
Globalization of capital accumulation and transnational production highlight a shifting paradigm in labour process theory, which requires a theorization on the spatial politics of production.The shift from Taylorism and Fordism (mass production and welfare-state interventions) to flexible accumulation (flexible production, casual labour, deregulation and privatization) may be a periodization that has become increasingly problematic. What is emerg…
Service Participation, Hardiness and Developmental Outcomes among Low-Income Young People in Hong Kong
This study examines the ways in which service participation and hardiness interact to affect youth development in such areas as academic success, work achievement, mental health, behavioral adjustment and overall accomplishment. The basic premise is that these two factors may have main effects and an interaction effect on the outcomes. To test this, the present study employed survey data collected from 405 low-income young people recruited from 1…
When Wal‐Mart and the Chinese dormitory labour regime meet
This paper analyses the characteristics of the dormitory labour regime in China's post‐socialist period and the collusion of this regime in the process of the ‘Wal‐Martization’ of global toy production. This collusion has shaped labour relations and CSR labour practices in China. This paper focuses on three factories, located in the industrial zone of Shenzhen, South China, that supply toys to Wal‐Mart. It begins with an examination of the dormit…
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