Joshua H. Howard's fascinating book examines the experiences of Chinese arsenal workers in Chongqing, China's wartime capital in three wars: the Anti-Japanese War, the Civil War, and class war from 1937 to 1953. Several clear and compelling arguments presented in Professor Howard's study have brought new approaches to the field of Chinese labor and new ways of seeing twentieth century China.

The author argues that ever since the Anti-Japanese War had forced the relocation of China's heavy industry to Chongqing, an unprecedented concentration of skilled and unskilled and migrant and local workers in the arsenals transformed the region not only into the center of China's defense industry but also the fertile breeding ground of working class consciousness. Wartime demand for labor and the unfair political, social and economic treatment labor received in the state controlled factory system enabled the arsenal workers, local and migrant alike, to see what they contributed to the nation did not match what they received in terms of social, economic, and political benefits from the state. This recognition, Professor Howard argues, prompted the development of a strong class-consciousness among the arsenal workers and “a complex amalgam of regional, national, and class-based identities”(10). During 1937–1953, arsenal workers acted in class ways, fighting military, political, and class wars against foreign invaders, state and political parties' control, and unfair mental and their manual labor division. By recognizing the formation and development of working class consciousness and their multiple identities, Professor Howard's book challenges the previous studies that stress the particularity, regional identity, and class fragmentation of Chinese labor.

Howard's study integrates the unexplored triumvirate of labor, wars, and political movements in modern Chinese history. By weaving arsenal workers' experience into China's social and political fabric, in this study Chinese labor is placed in the context of local and national history and interacted with larger political and social forces. In his treatment, the class formation of China's arsenal workers was multidimensional and did not simply stem from everyday work and life experiences. It included workers' mediated experiences with labor activists and underground Communists, their desire for “greater social status and political freedom”(6), and their participation in political movements during the Anti-Japanese and Civil wars and the early 1950s. Workers were both subjects and agents of history and their political actions reflected as well as shaped the China's history before and during the early People's Republic.

The study of urban and working-class experience from 1937–1953 also challenges existing scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has mainly focused on rural China and on the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to win over the Chinese peasants. His study demonstrates that the CCP's effort in winning the support of working-class people (not just intellectuals) in the Guomindang (GMD) controlled urban sector was equally important to the CCP's victory in 1949. He points out that working-class people's alienation in the arsenals that were controlled by the GMD state and their desire for and political activism directed at a better economic life, greater social status, and more political freedom paved the way for labor mobilization by the CCP.

This study opens a new window to show that modern Chinese state-building and the Chinese revolution cohere as a historical process in which both the CCP and the GMD made important contributions. Instead of giving credit to the CCP, the victor of the 1949 revolution only, Howard's book confirms what Esherick suggests: “GMD rule was as much the precursor of the Chinese Revolution as its political enemy” (Joseph W. Esherick, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” Modern China 21 1 [January 1995]: 4). During the war years, the GMD made as much intensive effort in politicizing, mobilizing, and indoctrinating arsenal workers as the CCP did in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It also provides one more concrete example in demonstrating that many of the post-1949 Chinese Communist government's industrial welfare policies and practices, for example, medical care, retirement pensions, and housing allocation, as well as its social organization of the work unit system in mainland China, have origins dating back to pre-1949 GMD system (363).

In his study Howard demonstrates that during the war years because the defense industry was the backbone of Nationalist military and state power the class-conscious arsenal workers became a political force to be reckoned with by both the CCP and the GMD. His analysis places the workers' interaction with the two political parties into the discourse of Chinese revoltuion. He believes that workers' gradual alienation in the GMD controlled arsenals caused the Nationalist state to lose legitimacy and provided opportunity for the workers' aspirations to converge with the CCP program and movements, essentially integrated into the revolution. Alternatively, the rise of a class-conscious working class as a political force in wartime time China can be seen as an indicator of the plural nature of wartime Chinese politics in which multiple political forces were at work. It offers us an opportunity to see “the role of total warfare rather than total revolution as the agency of enduring social change. Above all, it challenges a simple minded opposition between the Nationalists and the Communists, thereby sketching the outlines of an alternative historical narrative that breaks the constraints of the revolutionary chronology” (Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passage to Modernity and Beyond [Berkeley, 2000] 11).

Workers at War is a finely researched and richly documented book based on extensive archive research and oral interviews. The inclusion of oral interviews adds a human dimension by giving emotional depth and personal voices to the study of Chinese labor and its role in structural reform, party politics, and radical movement. His skillful documentary research of using many unexplored archives, local, national, and international sources, his integration of social and political theories, and his adoption of interdisciplinary approaches make his book an exemplary work of scholarship.

With the current resurgence of labor unrest in China, it is obvious that Chinese workers are still at war. Howard's historical analyses of structural reform and the relations of state and working-class people amidst internal and external pressures in the defense industry during the late Republican and early People's Republican period will undoubtedly help us better understand current events.