Despite the book's title, this study is not about Chinese workers. Rather, it focuses only on people who have been laid off from industry. The cover photo is more accurate than the book title, portraying four sorry-looking men trying to sell their trade on a street.

William Hurst estimates that some 60 million publicly employed workers lost their jobs between 1993 and 2006, and so this is not a minor topic. Pursuing it, Hurst conducted some 300 interviews between 2000 and 2006 in nine cities. His basic argument is that the political economy of different regions led to variations in layoffs, with different impacts on workers. He asserts that five dimensions—local state capacity, the business environment for state workers, working-class society, market opportunity, and central–local relations—account for the differences. Four regions that have experienced large numbers of laid-off workers have been chosen as case studies—the Northeast, the Central Coast, North-central China and the Upper Yangtze—each with its own pattern in dealing with layoffs. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a general historical description of the fate of state enterprise workers in these regions. For instance, in the Northeast insolvent firms had to shed workers, while in the Central Coastal region workers were laid off even when firms were healthy.

Chapter 3 describes how, having broken the socialist work-unit's social security system, the Chinese government had to rebuild another one, and how local governments had to adjust their policies using informal initiatives, resulting in a variegated pattern. Chapter 4 shows the differences in the implementation of reemployment policies. Localities with few resources to provide reemployment saw workers descend into poverty, while localities with greater local government revenues were able to provide start-up capital for laid-off workers to invest in self-employed initiatives.

Chapter 5 is about contention, protests, and social order. How did those workers who fell by the wayside struggle to have their voices heard? Hurst points out that the existing studies have not systematically addressed the effects of working-class society, local state capacity, and the business environments faced by state-owned enterprises in shaping workers' grievances. In regions of the Northeast that were hard hit by the collapse of inefficient and outmoded heavy industry, where employment alternatives were absent and local governments were strapped for funds, the grievances and claims of laid-off workers tended to be broached in general terms, stressed morality, and were subsistence related. On the generally prosperous Central Coast, by contrast, workers' grievances and claims were nearly always contractual and even legalistic, with more specific demands. The concluding chapter reemphasizes the usefulness of a subnational comparative framework in a study of Chinese politics.

While it is not difficult to convince readers that the situation of laid-off workers differed in the various regions of China, I am not convinced by the author's attempts to sharply categorize these differences in the form of tables. Hurst's empirical data tend toward historical narratives, without systematically explaining the terminology or factors used in the tables. The book lacks quantitative data—not even readily available official statistics—to back up his assertions. A discussion of regional differences, one would have thought, would present the basic regional statistics on layoffs, wages, rates of reemployment, the amount of welfare subsidies calculated by the various regions, the number of protests, and so on. The absence of such information is, unfortunately, a major flaw in the book's argument.

A book published in 2009 should have put the period of massive layoffs into perspective. During the current period, when the remaining state firms are often functioning properly and making profits and have reasonably stable employment, the narrative seems out of synch with an emerging reality. It is not that studying an earlier period is unimportant—and Hurst's book does have something to contribute—but the study needs to be placed into its historical context.