Disenfranchised: The Rise and Fall of Industrial Citizenship in China

by Joel Andreas

In the decades following World War II, factories in many countries not only provided secure employment and a range of economic entitlements, but also recognized workers as legitimate stakeholders, enabling them to claim rights to participate in decision making and hold factory leaders accountable. In recent decades, as employment has become more precarious, these attributes of industrial citizenship have been eroded and workers have increasingly been reduced to hired hands. As Joel Andreas shows in Disenfranchised , no country has experienced these changes as dramatically as China. Drawing on a decade of field research, including interviews with both factory workers and managers, Andreas traces the changing political status of workers inside Chinese factories from 1949 to the present, carefully analyzing how much power they have actually had to shape their working conditions.

Genres: China, History, Nonfiction, Asia, Politics

320 pages, Paperback

Published September 2, 2019

About the author

Joel Andreas is an American author and college professor. He holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California in Los Angeles, and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Prior to the publishing of Rise of the Red Engineers in 2009 many of Andreas's published writings had been graphic novels. The first of these was The Incredible Rocky, an unauthorized biography of the Rockefeller family. Although Andreas wrote the book while still in high school, it went on to sell nearly 100,000 copies. Next came Made with Pure Rocky Mountain Scab Labor, meant to support a strike by Coors Brewing Company workers. His latest graphic novel is Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can't Kick Militarism, which has been approved by the San Francisco School District as a supplemental book to be used by high school history teachers.