Hegemonic Transformation: The State, Laws, and Labour Relations in Post-Socialist China

This book contends that the Chinese economic reform inaugurated since 1978 has been a top-down passive revolution, in Gramsci’s term, and that after three decades of reform the role of the Chinese state has been changing from steering the passive revolution through coercive tactics to establishing capitalist hegemony. It illustrates that the labour law system is a crucial vehicle through which the Chinese party-state seeks to secure the working class’s consent to the capitalist class’s ethno-political leadership. The labour law system has exercised a double hegemonic effect with regards to the capital-labour relations and state-labour relations through four major mechanisms. However, these effects have influenced the Chinese migrant workers in an uneven manner. The affirmative workers have granted active consent to the ruling class leadership; the indifferent, ambiguous and critical workers have only rendered passive consent while the radical workers has refused to give any consent at all.

Published by Palgrave Macmillan, New York (http://www.palgrave.com/la/book/9781349700196), early 2018

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Hegemonic Transformation deftly weaves together breathtaking grand theory, meticulous explication of workers' thinking, and careful middle-range analysis comparing variation amidst the broad similarities. An original, important, persuasive and indispensable account that takes this much-studied topic to a new level—Prof. Marc Blecher, Oberlin College

After forcefully implementing capitalism in a passive revolution since 1978, in view of increasing workers unrest the Chinese party-state has recently moved towards establishing capitalist hegemony based on new labour laws. As Elaine HUI, however, demonstrates in this fascinating book, hegemony is always contested. A must-read for everyone, who is interested in the changing Chinese form of state.'—Prof. Andreas Bieler, Nottingham University