In the spring of 2010, the employees of a Honda spare-parts plant in Foshan, Guangdong province, went on strike for 19 days, demanding a significant pay increase and the ability to elect their own union representatives at the factory level. Curiously, the strike was widely reported not only in the international media but also in the Chinese press, with many reports hailing it as the sign of an “awakening” of the new generation of migrant workers. Eventually, the strike ended in victory for the workers, but that was not the end of the story: five years later, this event remains largely debated among Chinese labour scholars and is widely quoted as a turning point for labour activism and industrial relations in China. If anything, the strike has challenged the narrative of Chinese workers as passive and unaware, cogs in the wheel of Chinese industrialization.

Given the relevance of the Honda strike for the debate on Chinese labour and considering the importance of the Chinese automobile industry in terms of size and global connections – China is currently the largest vehicle manufacturing nation, accounting for one-quarter of total global automobile production – the paucity of serious ethnographic studies of labour activism in this sector is quite surprising. This is even more appalling when we consider the wide array of research on this industry from economic and managerial points of view. Luckily, Lu Zhang's Inside China's Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance has finally filled the void and has done so in a superb way, drawing from plentiful interviews collected over 20 months of ethnographic research inside seven large automobile assembly factories in six cities in China.

Zhang's research focuses on the auto assembly industry, with only sporadic references to the auto parts industry (and therefore little discussion of the Honda strike). However, since the Chinese automobile sector “exemplifies the broader labor market dynamics of flexibilization and dualization” (p. 80), her analysis constitutes a valuable addition to the literature on labour activism and labour relations in contemporary China. The book is structured in eight chapters: after a general introduction, chapter two traces the development of China's automotive industrial policy since the 1950s and its impact on the transformation of the production workforce; chapter three looks into the labour market and social composition in the automobile industry today; chapter four examines the organization of production, working conditions and factory social order; chapters five and six investigate, respectively, the contradictory dispositions of the “core” segment of formal workers and the struggles of temporary workers against unequal treatment and arbitrary management control; chapter seven considers how national labour laws and policies have been influenced by and have influenced labour unrest; finally, chapter eight discusses possible future scenarios.

The author presents “a multi-layered analysis of how shop-floor, national and global processes interact in complex ways to produce the specific labor relations in the Chinese automobile industry” (p. 20). In particular, Zhang challenges the dominant narrative that describes Chinese autoworkers as quiescent and satisfied due to their relatively high wages and generous benefits. Instead, adopting a theoretical framework based on hegemony and consent, she argues that the necessity to increase profitability – while simultaneously maintaining legitimacy with their workforce – has led major automakers in China to follow a policy of labour force dualism that draws boundaries between formal and temporary workers. In light of this finding, “to simply conclude that China's labor system has moved to general ‘informalization’ or ‘casualization’ – as some scholars have argued, would be to miss its distinctive, persistent dualist feature” (p. 54). Furthermore, in Zhang's opinion, it was the inequality entrenched in this dualism that paradoxically ended up creating and strengthening a new generation of temporary autoworkers with growing workplace bargaining power, a development that also reverberated on national policies: in China, labour politics “is not a settled fact” but is better understood as a “state-centered, dynamic process, carried out through contestation, negotiation, and compromise” (p. 181).

Many studies of the new generation of migrant workers resort to anecdotes and generalizations, arguing for or against the idea of a “rights awakening” among their ranks; however, thanks to her extraordinary access to the shop floor, Zhang has been able to offer a more nuanced portrait of these younger workers, setting them on the complex and often contradictory background of the dualistic evolution of the Chinese labour market. Stimulating for the reader, although not always developed to their full potential, are the author's digressions in the field of labour history, especially the suggestion (inspired by the path-breaking works of Elizabeth Perry) that there is “a striking historical parallel of divided workers and strong labor activism throughout the Chinese revolutionary and socialist era” (p. 172). In light of this, this book is a must-read for anyone who has an interest in labour issues – not only in China and not only in the automobile sector.