Quality and Quantity of Chinese Wage-Labor

Yanan Wang ()
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Yanan Wang: Xiamen University

Chapter Chapter 22 in The Basic Theory of Chinese Economy, 2026, pp 145-147 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract This section provides a rough statistical profile of Chinese wage labor in order to clarify its scale and structure. Using contemporary estimates, it argues that although tens of millions of people depended primarily on manual labor, only a small fraction qualified as modern industrial workers. Most wage earners were concentrated in agriculture and in older urban and rural employments, while “new-style” industrial workers numbered only a few million. The section then uses this imbalance to explain why the mere existence of a large proletarian population did not automatically generate modern capitalist wage relations in China: without broader social and institutional reforms, labor could take the outward form of a commodity while retaining tributary or dependent features. The discussion concludes by emphasizing the importance of examining not only the quantity of wage laborers but also the quality of their labor relations.

Date: 2026
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DOI: 10.1007/978-981-95-6330-2_22

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