| Based upon nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, which includes 75 in-depth interviews with unemployed workers, state officials, and managers as well as archival documents, my dissertation sets out to explain the withering Chinese state-labor relations. To that end, I examined the social consequences of the recent policy Xiagang (lay-off) policy and the Reemployment Project. My inquiry investigates how the socialist principle of welfare, based on work and employment, has been curtailed and how unemployed workers in the new market economy have responded to the imposition of new employment practices.; The first part focuses on the current transformation of post-socialism in China. This part explores the ways in which the new practice of unemployment policies are both connected and disconnected from the past, the socialist legacies from the pre-reform period. Unlike Lenin's expectation for socialism, the socialist party-state is not withering away in post-revolutionary society. Rather, the party-state still exists, but its responsibility for the welfare of workers is withering away.; The second part tries to answer the question of "what comes after socialism?". This part addresses recent shifts in the urban labor regimes and the rise of a new mentality, a new way of thinking about work and welfare in China. It also deals with the question of how unemployed workers responded to the imposition of new employment practices that threatened their livelihoods, and most of all, their status as workers. The actions of unemployed workers are not one-sided or simplistic; rather, they are diverse, both active and passive, conservative and progressive, violent and nonviolent, and aggressive and defensive at the same time.; My finding is that the present Chinese unemployment policy is a hybrid of socialist and neo-liberal rationalities, where an ethic of self-reliance is taken from neo-liberalism, but the ethical work is taken from socialism. I understand the unemployment policy as an attempt by the state to transform old socialist workers into modern, individual citizens in marketized China. In order to transform workers into this new Homo Economicus, ironically, the Chinese party-state is reinventing the old practices of thought work and political education, but toward a new task: the making of post-socialist capitalist individuals. Socialism is dying, but as it lays on its dead-bed, it is giving birth to capitalism. |
