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2020 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

1. Introduction: Journey to Resistance

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Abstract

The Chapter provides a brief overview of the book. It first shares the author’s own journey through the fieldwork in China, particularly his experience of poor shop floor conditions and worker strike with unconventional tactics. It then explains why the book takes the focus back to workers themselves and uses a psychological and cognitive approach to address the central issue—Chinese labor resistance. This book argues that workers as societal individuals actually become a part of the apparatus of state repression by their conscious participation, and the Chinese working class has fallen into a ‘psychic trap’ that hinders labor activism from developing further into social movement. This chapter introduces the following chapters that examine the central issue by studying workers’ everyday interpretation of the source of their problems, their prospect of labor movement, and their sense of solidarity.

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Metadata
Title
Introduction: Journey to Resistance
Author
Jake Lin
Copyright Year
2020
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23902-2_1