This concise book addresses several issues regarding the layoffs of employees in the public industrial sector in China in the 1990s and early 2000s. Several major issues are discussed in the book: how and why state sector lay-offs occurred; how the state addressed layoffs and workers' welfare; how workers coped with their unemployment; and patterns of worker resistance and state response. It has to be acknowledged that all these issues have been touched upon or addressed in some existing research, but this book nicely links these issues together in a logical way and highlights the regional variation.
The book has five chapters, excluding the Introduction and the Conclusion. Chapter one introduces the regional political economy and shows the regional differences in terms of layoffs. It also gives a brief introduction to the five cities where the author did his fieldwork (i.e. Benxi, Shanghai, Chongqing, Datong and Luoyang). Chapter two discusses the different causes for layoffs in different regions. North-eastern firms laid off workers largely because of budget constraints. North-Central and Upper Chang [Yangtze] river state firms experienced sector-specific pressures, leading to varied responses in different sectors. All regions, but particularly the Central Coast, laid off many workers after 1997, because of the policy shift by the central government.
Chapter three discusses how the government and the firms dealt with layoffs. Because of the lack of a nation-wide welfare system, the provision of welfare varied across regions or even firms within the same region. Local governments' ability to provide welfare benefits were constrained by patterns of central–local relations and diverging levels of local state capacity. Chapter four discusses the problems faced by laid-off workers in securing new employment and explains why laid-off workers in most regions rarely succeeded in finding new jobs in the non-state sector. Many laid-off workers lacked competitiveness in both higher- and lower-end jobs in the non-state sectors. Many of them resorted to self-employment which was also conditional, often depending on one's social connections and financial resources.
Chapter five addresses a number of issues with respect to worker resistance, including workers' grievances and claims, frames, mobilization structures, tactics and local state response. Workers in different regions might have different claims or ways of framing. In the north-east, for example, workers framed their claims based on the logic of moral economy. But workers elsewhere tended to blame management for their economic plight. Expectedly, local governments' response to worker resistance also varied, ranging from making concession to using suppression or ignorance.
The greatest strength of the book is that, unlike existing research, it introduces regional variation in explaining the issues mentioned above. The variation reveals the complex impact of layoffs and economic transition in China and partly explains why such massive layoffs and the resulting problems have not posed an insurmountable challenge to the Chinese government. Specifically, the problems arising from the retrenchment were very serious in a limited number of places (i.e. the north-east). This allows the government to address the problems using limited resources by targeting those most seriously hit areas.
The book is also rich in data. A major source of data of the book is the 300 in-depth interviews with workers and officials conducted by the author in nine cities in China between 2000 and 2006. These first-hand interviews provide a sensible picture of the grassroots situations in different cities. But there are also other sources of information that the author could have used to make a more systematic comparison. For example, the yearbooks (not statistical yearbooks) of each city contain useful information about layoffs and workers' collective petitions.
Overall, this is a very well-written book that describes and analyses the process of the unprecedented industrial restructuring or the critical period of the economic transition in China. It should be of interest to those who wish to understand social changes and economic transition in contemporary China. The book is suitable for courses on Chinese politics, Chinese society, and transitional economies at both graduate and undergraduate levels.
