1 The Paradox and Possibility of Public Labor Sociology in China

China now has the world’s largest labor force and is the leading recipient of foreign direct investment worldwide. Yet, in a country many see as the engine of growth for global capitalism, where labor and capital meet in a historic and massive scale, labor sociology, public or not, arguably did not exist at all until recently. Accounts of working conditions and worker politics in China have come primarily from scholars based and trained outside of China, while sociologists in China have largely avoided labor studies as politically too sensitive. Even among those studying workers, they shun class analysis and define away labor issues as those of mobility, migration and stratification. This paradox-- of the poverty of labor studies against the backdrop of momentous working class formation, export-driven industrialization, and influx of capital-- becomes even more puzzling if one considers the long ideological and intellectual dominance of Marxism in Chinese official and academic discourses. In this article, we want to unravel this China paradox through an analysis of the evolving triangular relationship among the Chinese state, Chinese sociology, and Chinese labor. Compared to other semi-peripheries considered in this special issue, it is not authoritarianism that distinguishes China, but the effectiveness of the one party regime to censor and domesticate sociology as a profession as well as fragment the interests, identities and mobilization of the working class. Unlike the organic growth and linkages between labor studies and labor movements that have developed i