Law and Fair Work in China is a major contribution to the study of Chinese work law. Fair work is understood, on the basis of the jurisdictions of the United States and Australia, as “basic labour standards,” focusing on wages and working time. Law is defined in the broad sense to include law and regulations at national and local levels, but also considering enforcement and compliance. The book follows three themes of work law in China: its evolution, structure and enforcement. However, all three themes can be reduced to one determinant factor: the structure of work law. The central argument of the book is that absent labour standards, abuses and limited enforcement are mainly due to the structure of China's work law. There are three important aspects to this argument. First, the authors identify the continuities and legacies of the structure of work law in China through a historiographical study (chapters two and three). With the interlude of the Maoist period, the origin of the structure of current work law in China can be traced back to the Factory Law (1929) of the Republican Period. This is an important contribution, as the authors show legal continuities beyond the period of the market economy.

Second, the structure of work law determines the “hierarchies of protection” of workers and the limited formalization of labour relations in China, which remain in today's major pieces of legislation: the Labour Law (1994) and the Labour Contract Law (2007). These laws, carefully examined in chapters six and seven, make the labour contract the key constitutive factor of labour relations. The authors propose that, based on the labour contract, work law is exclusionary and fragments workers into six different categories (p. 99). Four of these categories are covered by law: workers in ongoing, fixed-term, dispatch or casual contracts; and two are excluded from the protection and benefits of the legal labour standards, but are covered by commercial Contract Law. These latter workers are employed on a casual or contingent basis, for example independent contractors, agricultural workers, domestic staff and students. This is an interesting categorization because it classifies the workforce on the basis of legal parameters (with certain rights and entitlements) instead of the more commonly used factors like household registration (hukou), industrial sector or enterprise type.

Third, legal enforcement is also affected by the structure of work law. The Labour Contract Law and the Labour Disputes Mediation and Arbitration Law (2007) have increased the formalization of labour relations and standardized a process for dispute resolution. However, these laws have implementation flaws, due to the limited autonomy and enforcement powers they grant to the responsible bodies, namely, arbitration committees and judges in dispute resolution, and labour inspectors in enforcement. Such enforcement limitations, however, leave space for local innovation, such as coordination between different state agencies, and the use of extra-legal methods of enforcement. The authors therefore acknowledge the reverse causation between structure and enforcement, with innovations in law and reforms also being a result of local experimentation or of the use of extra-legal methods of implementation, such as in the case of the Wage Campaign (2004–07).

The book goes beyond the study of the letter of the law and offers a good amount of detail of its historical continuities, improvements, innovations and limitations, with documentary material and primary and secondary empirical evidence. However, given the significant qualitative empirical material gathered by the authors (31 interviews with government officers, labour inspectors, arbitrators, mediators and judges and 38 interviews with firm managers), it is surprising that they do not use this data more directly and frequently in the book, and that they do not elaborate on issues of state capacity in legal enforcement – such as the personnel, skills or resources available to the relevant authorities to handle the increasing number of labour dispute cases and to enforce court rulings or non-compliance penalties. In many cases, in fact, labour inspectorates do not initiate inspections out of their own will, but as reaction to workers' reports and complaints. The authors briefly acknowledge that implementation of work law is “heavily state-centric” and marginalizes “civil society participation” (p. 148), but the fact is that civil society organizations, and most importantly, workers, are crucial actors involved in legal enforcement, bringing cases of non-compliance to the labour bureaucracies' attention and advocating for further reforms.

In this line, the main shortcoming of the book is the absence of attention to workers' role in the development of work law in China. This is of particular relevance given that the focus of the fair work concept is on wage and working time, which have been basic rights enshrined in law as a result of the labour movement, in China and elsewhere. The authors briefly acknowledge this (p. 71), but an elaboration of the role of workers' agency in all three aspects of work law in China – evolution, structure and enforcement – remains as scarce as that of the distinction and relationship between rights and interests (pp. 100–105; 118–120). Surely, workers' interests are largely absent in China's legislation and, despite recent innovations, there is insufficient treatment in the law of the processes to deal with interest-based claims. However, workers' agency in pushing for these innovations has been essential, and incorporation of their voices into the book would have made a rounded account of the development of China's work law.

Overall, Law and Fair Work in China does wonders synthesizing the complex legal regime of work and labour standards in China and its historical development. It provides a comprehensive overview with ample detail of labour law for China experts, and an exposition of China's legal and economic development from the perspective of work and labour relations for a broader audience interested in the topic.