More than three decades of economic reforms have fundamentally transformed the organization of production in both rural and urban China, and rising social inequalities are visible in every corner of the country and in every sector of the economy. In this context there is an obvious need to look at the emerging social landscape from a class perspective and asking how the ideas and concepts introduced by Karl Marx and Max Weber can help us understand what is happening among present-day peasants, migrants and urban workers. The six chapters included in this volume take up this challenge.

Jonathan Unger's contribution is a case study of Chen village, which he has followed for more than 30 years. Unger shows that while the villagers during the Mao era were divided into Weberian status groups according to their class labels, all local Chens are now, through their lineage, part of a privileged status group and at the same time members of a “leisured rentier class” (p. 32). They live a comfortable life surrounded by around 50,000 migrant workers who do all the dirty, low-paid work in this now completely industrialized area.

In Luigi Tomba's chapter we stay in the Pearl river delta but are presented with models that differ from the economically successful single-surname village described by Unger. Tomba finds a complex picture of transformed social relations in the delta and identifies a new rural middle class that owes its status to control over collective land. However, this group is highly fragmented according to locality and does not seem to be developing the kind of collective identity that would qualify them as a class in a Marxist sense.

The remaining four chapters all look at China's workers with a particular focus on the migrants and their possible development of class consciousness. Parry P. Leung and Alvin Y. So point out that the period 2005–2010 represented a “golden opportunity for the formation of the migrant working class in South China” (p. 64) due to the formation of a second generation of migrant workers, the passing of the Labour Contract Law, and a wave of strikes and other labour actions. The authors find that members of the new generation think of themselves as workers rather than as peasants; they have also started raising political claims, thus breaking out of the isolation that characterized earlier strikes and actions. Although they carefully warn against premature conclusions, Leung and So see a potential for the formation of a class consciousness. This optimism is not shared by Anita Chan and Kaxton Siu, at least not in the short term. They remind us how long it took to develop such a consciousness among European workers and argue that most Chinese migrant workers are “still waging isolated and uncoordinated rights-based protests and strikes” (p. 82) and are not ready to fight for their rights to be represented by their own unions. Rather than contradicting each other, the two chapters reflect a situation in flux where all prophecies are uncertain.

Joel Andreas uses Marx and Weber to tell the story of how work units (danwei) since the early 1990s have been transformed into capitalist enterprises separating workers from the means of production. Employees have become hired labour while many top leaders have bought shares in their companies and become proprietors. As a result, the status group hierarchy of the danwei system has been replaced by a structure based on property and class. In the final chapter Jack Linchuan Qiu and Hongzhe Wang compare cultural activities in a traditional workers’ culture palace in Anshan, catering mainly for (retired) workers from state-owned enterprises, with developments in Picun village in Beijing where new (i.e. migrant) workers have established a centre for workers’ culture. While activities in Anshan seem to have lost most of their working class flavour the authors find clear efforts to express working-class consciousness among the migrant workers in Picun village who run a migrant workers’ museum and arrange culture and arts festivals.

The changing of Chinese class identities is a huge topic, which deserves much more attention than it has received so far. This volume raises the discussion, but of course leaves much ground uncovered. The peasants mentioned in the title only materialize as migrant workers and as a privileged group in Guangdong's heavily industrialized and urbanized “villages” while there are no discussions of changes in the social structure in agricultural areas. The traditional urban workers of the former SOEs also receive limited attention. The migrant workers clearly stand out as the most intriguing group when it comes to the formation of new class identities. Several authors point out that it is still too early to say whether a class consciousness is being formed among the migrants, but the evidence they present and their balanced arguments make this volume a good starting point for further investigations into the issue. All chapters are clearly written and argued, and the historical perspective that characterizes most of them makes them useful for courses on stratification and social change in China.