Marc Blecher presents a seminal analysis of the development of the urban working class in China. Chinese workers have been the subjects of a great deal of analysis by scholars, documentation by journalists and activists, and portrayal by writers, filmmakers, and artists. The Making of China’s Working Class: A World to Lose seeks the foundation for all this in three questions: What kind of class is China’s working class? What are the historical forces and processes that have formed...

Examining the interaction between the Communist Party of China (CCP) and specific social categories (including peasants, workers, the middle classes, and the dominant class), with a focus on class and class discourse, this volume analyses the CCP’s impact on social change in China between 1921 and 1978.By exploring the CCP’s evolving discourse of class, this book demonstrates that, while class has retained its centrality, its meaning has been re-articulated from an ideological-poli...

In Politics as a Science, two of the world's leading authorities on Comparative Politics, Philippe C. Schmitter and Marc Blecher, provide a lively introduction to the concepts and framework to study and analyze politics.Written with dexterity, concision and clarity, this short text makes no claim to being scientific. It contains no disprovable hypotheses, no original collection of evidence and no search for patterns of association. Instead, Schmitter and Blecher keep the t...

Over the past two decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has paradoxically steered the development of a thriving capitalist economy. Unlike many faltering post-socialist states with fragile economies and weakly institutionalised democratic structures, China has witnessed a tide of economic entrepreneurialism that has raised living standards and the country's global economic stature. However, the strains of rapid economic change and the tensions between an increasingly liberalized econo...

By examining the changing political economy in China through detailed studies of the peasantry, workers, middle classes, and the dominant class, this volume reveals the Communist Party of China’s (CCP’s) impact on social change in China between 1978 and 2021.This book explores in depth the CCP’s programme of reform and openness that had a dramatic impact on China’s socio-economic trajectory following the death of Mao Zedong and the end of the Cultural Revolution. It also goes on to...

This volume adopts a multidisciplinary and comparative approach to development that brings together issues that are characteristic of the lifelong scholarship of Professor Gordon White. These include a focus on the state, civil society, welfare and globalization.