Book Launch & Lecture Tour

Dialectics of Chinese Labor: Trade Unions under Market Socialism is now available open access from Brill. To mark the launch, I will be speaking at a series of universities and labor institutes over the coming months.

The talks will focus on the book's central argument: that the Chinese labor regime is neither the state-capitalist caricature of Western liberal accounts nor a finished socialist project, but a contested, dialectical arrangement whose outcome depends on the balance of forces inside the country (see the concluding chapter, Ness, Dialectics of Chinese Labor, pp. 204–208).

For a preview of that argument in practice, see Organizing China's Delivery Workers and Shifts in Guangdong's Industrial Zones.

Dates and venues will be posted here as they are confirmed. If you would like to host a talk or arrange a reading group, please use the contact page.