Atomized Incorporation (forthcoming at CUP)
Chinese Workers and the Aftermath of China's Rise
In this book, I ask whether the Chinese regime’s selective toleration of labor protests has appeased factory workers’ discontent. As the export-led growth becomes unsustainable, the regime began to face new challenges in state-labor relations. The rural-born migrant workers, who comprise the majority of low-skilled workforce in factories, have engaged in factory-based protests to demand better pay and working conditions. The central and local governments adopt a relatively tolerant approach to these protests but ensure that workers' demands remain job-specific. This approach, which I call atomized incorporation, has been assumed to ensure the authoritarian society's long-term resilience.

I theorize and empirically examine both the advantages and limits of atomized incorporation from workers’ perspectives. Based on quantitative and qualitative data collected from two years of in-depth fieldwork, I argue that atomized incorporation has been successful at demobilizing labor movement because it encourages those workers with collective action resources to receive rewards. Yet, this also means that a large number of workers who are aggrieved about the central government are left out because they do not have access to such resources. When the regime only tolerates workers' claim-making as atomized economic agents but disregard their non-material discontent about the broader society as a social and political being, I suggest that its selective material co-optation is not able to depoliticize labor discontent.