Slowdown in the World’s Workshop?: Chinese Labor and the Global Recession

Abstract

In the third and fourth quarters of 2008 the world experienced an economic meltdown of greater proportions and severity than anything seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The global crisis of 2008 caused global GDP to decline for the first time since the Second World War and called into question many of the comfortable assumptions about economic development and social progress that had been in place at least for the past 25 years. In the time since the crisis hit, many have analyzed its effects on employment in advanced industrial economies, as well as on financial markets and long-term growth prospects. Fewer have looked systematically at how it affected labor in the developing nations.

This chapter began life as a conference paper, portions of which were later combined with other material and revised into William Hurst and Christian Sorace, “Recession and the Politics of Class and Production in China,” New Political Science: A Journal of Politics and Culture 33, 4, 511–526. Much of the chapter thus reproduces material published in that article.