Building China is a remarkable and important book. Sarah Swider’s research breaks new ground in examining the employment configurations, daily lives, and contentious resistance of the millions of rural-to-urban migrant construction workers who pour more concrete and erect more buildings across China’s cities each year than their counterparts in most countries do in decades or even centuries. What makes this work such an essential addition to a literature that may rightly be seen as already well-populated with scholarship on workers in export manufacturing, service industries, and the old state sector, is precisely that it puts migrant construction workers front and center. Swider offers us by far the best and most comprehensive picture of workers in this sector to date. But she also goes beyond this, giving her readers a refined and nuanced theory of the micro-level politics of production in a vital, yet insufficiently understood, segment of the Chinese economy.

The first five chapters form the core of the book. Chapter One explains Swider’s theory of employment configurations, tracing how specific pathways into employment interact with specific mechanisms that regulate the employment relationship (p. 8). She explains that three configurations dominate the migrant construction industry in China: mediated, embedded, and individualized employment (pp. 9–10).

In mediated employment, teams of workers are recruited en masse by contractors in their home provinces. Different teams on a jobsite are thus often segregated by native place, as well as by trade—e.g. all iron workers come from Henan, while all plasterers come from Sichuan, etc.—and work teams often share dormitory housing accommodations on jobsites enclosed behind walls. Workers are paid in lump sum only at the end of their contracts (usually just before Chinese New Year), but they receive food, transport, and housing from their employers in the meantime.

In embedded employment, workers tend to live in migrant enclaves on the outskirts of cities, where they are recruited by contractors into much more flexible teams. Workers with multiple skills work together—often on finishing work—and are paid by the job rather than by the amount of time worked. During slack periods, workers must fend for themselves, and the rates of burnout are high.

Individualized employment thrives in the brutal, informal day-labor markets that have sprung up around transport hubs. Workers are frequently subjected to physical violence, both in the markets and on jobsites, are very often paid less than they bargained for, and sometimes are not paid at all. Destitute and often homeless workers have little choice but to accept these dire conditions as they eke out a living as best they can.

Chapter Two reads almost like a holdover from the book’s earlier life as a dissertation. It is relatively short (16 pages) and covers basic background on the macro-level politics and history of economic and labor reform in China. More thorough revisions might well have led the author to pare back much of this material and include a streamlined version of the chapter as a section in Chapter One. Had she done so, the reader could move more quickly into Chapters Three through Five, where the story gets much more interesting.

Chapter Three presents richly detailed ethnographic data to describe the contours of mediated employment relations, especially on several jobsites in central Beijing. The dynamics of workers’ lives, that play out mostly behind tall walls and in makeshift dormitories, are explored in more detail than can be found in any other source. Swider’s explanation of the mechanisms through which exclusion from the urban world structures the labor process and daily life for these workers (pp. 47–54) is especially illuminating.

Chapter Four tells of drug abuse, intense pressures, and ruthless self-discipline among workers in embedded employment, again with particularly rich details from Swider’s field research in Beijing. Particularly impressive is how she maps out the interactions between workers on teams, between work teams, and between the worlds of work and life in migrant enclaves (pp. 72–77).

Finally, Chapter Five tells harrowing tales of extreme violence, broken promises, and rule by gangsters and thugs that permeate the lives of mostly homeless workers who congregate each morning at Beijing markets to look for work as day-laborers. Taken together, these three chapters give readers a clearer and more nuanced picture of workers’ lives and employment relations than can be found in any other scholarship to date. If the whole book were limited only to these three chapters, Swider would still have offered a strong and meaningful contribution to the field.

Chapter Six, on workers’ collective action and resistance, includes some fascinating and valuable material on how mediated employment facilitates work slowdowns and sickouts, while embedded and individualized employment configurations give rise to conflicts over land and abuses by local authorities (in particular the thuggish para-police known as the chengguan). The data and narratives of how protests unfold and especially of how workers perceive and come to frame their substantial grievances are gripping, honest, and new to the field. But there is not enough here for a stand-alone chapter. Swider would have been wiser instead to include smaller sections on resistance and patterns of contention in each of the chapters on employment configurations.

Building China, for all its strengths, carries some unfortunate flaws. First, though Swider is careful not to draw too much from her data and she did do significant field research in Shanghai and Guangzhou, there is something of a regional bias visible in her ethnographic analysis, almost all of which seems to be based primarily on research in Beijing. This, plus the very small total number of interviews, raises questions about generalizability. Even if we accept the picture painted of China’s three most atypical cities, what about migrant construction workers across the rest of the country? Would we see the same patterns in Chengdu or Xi’an, or would we find something very different in Changsha or Shenyang? Without research from beyond China’s largest coastal metropolises, Swider cannot address these questions effectively. These issues are mentioned in the appendices, but much more thorough discussion of such problems and potential shortcomings really should have been included in the main text.

On a more theoretical level, Swider also fails—surprisingly—to engage prior research on Chinese migrant or laid-off workers sufficiently deeply so as to situate her contributions squarely in broader debates. Dorothy Solinger’s work on migrant urban villages and enclaves, for example, is clearly relevant to Swider’s analysis of embedded employment, but is mentioned only briefly. My own earlier findings, and those of other scholars, on competition between laid-off state sector workers and migrants in forms of individualized employment (especially in places far away from the East Coast) could also have been usefully updated and substantially refined with Swider’s new data and fresh perspective on the situation of migrants. Guang Lei’s insights on “guerilla workfare” and Eli Friedman’s analyses of migrants’ contention could also have been discussed in more depth and more directly in light of the new data Swider presents. That she mostly fails to do this (even in a concluding Chapter Seven that is far too lengthy and repetitive) weakens what otherwise is a very solid study and a most welcome contribution to the study of labor politics and informalization in China and beyond.

Such quibbles notwithstanding, Swider’s book sets a new standard for research on a critical component of China’s emergent migrant working class. Every researcher and student interested in Chinese labor or political economy will need to read and respond to it in the years ahead.