Shuxuan Zhou’s concise book is both a deeply personal account of life and work in China’s forest industry and a trenchant analysis of China’s gendered political economy. Based on extensive interviews and archival research, it tells the story of thousands of men and women from rural Shandong who were recruited in the 1950s to work in the forests of Fujian. Men were offered full industrial citizenship: lifelong employment, good wages and benefits comparable to those of urban workers. Women were recruited later, almost as an afterthought, and were considered “household dependents” rather than state employees. Women worked alongside men, but they were made to join collective units and received less pay and fewer benefits than men. Work was equally hard and dangerous for both sexes: men felled trees, drove trucks and worked in sawmills, where they processed timber into chipboard and railway ties. Women cleared the land after cutting, planted trees, and loaded trucks and trains. Most women accepted their lower wages because married couples pooled their incomes. Gender inequality came to the fore in the late Mao era, when the daughters of first-generation workers were organized into separate collective enterprises that subcontracted with the forest farms for specific jobs and offered only limited benefits to workers, and then again in 1999–2000, when the forest farms were privatized and their entire workforce laid off. State workers (mostly men) received pensions and had access to subsidized healthcare, while collective workers (mostly women) did not. In addition, state workers received six times more severance pay than collective workers.

Gender was only one of several inequalities that structured forest workers’ lives. Zhou’s introduction, remarkable for its clarity, lays out a complex matrix of divisions – between men and women, state and collective workers, migrants and local people, peasants and urban workers – that underpinned capital accumulation in the Maoist and post-Mao regimes. Her starting point, borrowed from David Harvey’s work, is that capital accumulation relies on two distinct strategies: expropriation and exploitation. Socialist accumulation in the Mao years began with the expropriation of the original forest owners who, after land reform, retained formal title to the forest and the right to cut firewood, graze animals, or collect wild plants from the forest, but lost the right to cut and sell timber. A second act of expropriation separated peasants from North China from their homes and transplanted them into an environment that they experienced as dangerous and hostile. Even after two generations, migrant workers’ ties to their new home were fragile: most forest workers could identify red pine and Cunninghamia fir, the two kinds of tree that they planted, but remained ignorant of and uninterested in the rich wildlife around them. This dual separation – of local people from the land that used to sustain them, and of forest farm workers from land, local knowledge, and means of production – gave the state full control of the planting and harvesting of trees and ensured steady capital accumulation.

A second round of expropriation took place between 1998 and 2000 when, in response to devastating floods in central China, the government implemented logging bans and transferred the right to cut and sell timber from forest farms to local households. At the same time, it sold the Shaowu forest farms and sawmill to private investors, who promptly laid off the entire workforce. Under the new ownership structure, peasant households leased their forests to private companies who planted and felled trees with the help of cheap migrant labour. Most forest owners moved to Shaowu city, where they lived as rentiers. The laid-off workers of the forest farms continued to live in the rapidly dilapidating residential quarters near the logging camps and the Shaowu sawmill. With land rights, logging rights and timber processing now in the hands of private businesses, the former industrial sites became the main bone of contention between laid-off workers and the local state. Soon after the privatization of the Shaowu sawmill, the owners were told to relocate the plant to an industrial zone outside the city. The vacated site, conveniently located near the centre of the expanding city, became property of the municipal government, which sold it to a private development company. When the mill had closed, state workers had renounced all claims to compensation beyond their severance pay. Collective workers, on the other hand, discovered that their irregular employment status gave them a strong claim for compensation. Parts of the sawmill site had been reclaimed and built by collective workers, and state regulations stated that assets built and developed by collectives belonged to their members rather than the state. Zhou shows in detail how former “household dependents” fought back against discrimination and won recognition for their claims – even though they were still waiting for compensation at the time the book went to print.

From Forest Farm to Sawmill joins a growing list of ethnographic studies that describe economic development in the People’s Republic as a long-term accumulation project, sustained through successive political regimes and powered by manufactured dichotomies (p. 141) between men and women, state and collective workers, urban and rural residents. The story Zhou tells is one of exploitation and dispossession. Nonetheless, this is a hopeful book, as it shows how workers in the forest industry reject these dichotomies and unite around concepts of shared welfare, dignity and mutual care.