No Working Class On The Prairie

In the context of China,"development" always means the transformation production from traditional agriculture into modern industry. One of these social consequences is that farmers and herdsmen transformed into a "working class" accompanied by the process of modernization and urbanization. This thesis will focus on one building enterprise on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia counties. Through the field work, I will reveals why the urbanization is only a change of the physical space for the local people in the current reality environment, despite the cities and towns on the prairie is developing day and night. The locals did not change their situation and identity. The famers and herdsmen who lost their land because of urbanization are being excluded from the process of urbanization and modernization.The core of this paper is the ethnography of a construction enterprise, which is a specific sample taken place in the urbanization process on the prairie. But its significance is not limited to the change of living space and the environment of tens of thousands of local people.This papers including five chapters:The first chapter introduces the origin and background of this study, review of relevant theory and empirical studies, and the research methods.The second chapter concentrates on the social profiles of the research sites, especially in the local construction industry. This chapter also focuses on the object of this paper, that is a construction enterprise which contracts to build town road.The third chapter starts from the experience of investor of construction enterprises, and then describes how a businessman can access to contracting opportunities and run a company. This process precisely corresponds to the employers and the workers, and also reflects local economic and environmental conditions.Chapter IV is about corresponding to the operation of the construction companies, the situation of workers, including the content of their work, job classification, and the difficulties they encountered.Conclusion, I believe that although urban construction brings large-scale construction projects and provides many opportunities for selling their labor to the local labor force, these temporary workers that forced to leave the land cannot be the so-called "working class". In a government-lead process of urbanization, the enterprise rational choice of action strategies results in the absence of the local community and the local labor force in the construction of cities and towns-the local labor force is only the loose group of temporary employment waiting in the street. The combination of capital and power builds bustling city on grasslands,but it does not form the working class.