Workers at war : labor in China's arsenals, 1937-1953 / Joshua H. Howard.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Howard, Joshua H., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

War.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (454 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2004]

Summary:

This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers' alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers' identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers' particularistic or regional identities.

Contents:

Intro

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Contents

Tables

Maps and Figures

Foreword

Introduction

1. To Buy or to Build? Economic Development and the Arms Industry

2. Fortresses of the Great Rear: The Wartime Economy of the Arms Industry

3. Finding Work: Origins and Composition of the Arsenal Workforce

4. Inside the Arsenals: Conditions of Work and Life

5. Chongqing's Most Wanted: The Mobility and Resistance of Arsenal Workers

6. The Nationalist Project: Coercion, Consent, and Conflict

7. Organizing, 1937-1946

8. The Labor Movement, 1946-1949

9. Yu Zusheng: Organic Intellectuals and the Moral Basis of Class

10. Deepening the Revolution, 1950-1953

Conclusion

Appendix: The Sources

Notes

Select Bibliography

Interviews

Character List

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Other Format:

Print version: Howard, Joshua H. Workers at War

ISBN:

9781503624481

150362448X