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Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
China and Vietnam are two of the remaining constitutionally socialist countries that are single-handedly governed by Communist parties. Their rapid economic growth has gone hand in hand with the deepening commodification of labour and the restructuring of welfare – producing new tensions between workers’ needs and state priorities.
Grounded in rich empirical research from diverse regions of both countries, this book explores how everyday struggles for livelihoods and wellbeing are shaped by increasingly flexible labour regimes and welfare systems offering minimal protection. It reveals how such systems encourage self-entrepreneurship and individual responsibility, while exposing the conflict between ensuring workers’ wellbeing and maintaining the market socialist model.
Connecting labour and welfare transformations to broader political-economic processes – including land restructuring and financialisation – the book offers an unparalleled comparative perspective on two of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.
Minh T. N. Nguyen is Professor of Social Anthropology in the Faculty of Sociology at Bielefeld University.
Jingyu Mao is Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.
Introduction: Introduction: Hyperflexible accumulation – labour, social reproduction and market socialist contradictions – Minh T. N. Nguyen and Jingyu Mao
Part 1: Reproducing labour in hyperflexible accumulation
1. The broken dream of autonomy: precarious working conditions in Ho Chi Minh City’s platform economy – Nguyen Duc Loc
2. The rise of the gig economy and the social protection of gig workers in China – Tao Liu
3. Flexible accumulation, division of labour and hierarchisation of care at global factories in Vietnam – Ngoc Luong
4. Producing the flexible working subject: seasonal bonus, the hyper-flexibilisation of labour and welfare arrangements of migrant factory workers in China – Jingyu Mao and Yueran Tian
Part 2: Rural–urban connectivity and new trajectories of labour mobility
5. High-tech, low security: Vietnam’s electronics boom and the crisis of reproduction – Do Ta Khanh and Pietro P. Masina
6. Transforming migrant household reproduction: commuterisation and land commodification in central China – Yueran Tian
7. Rural migrants, housing politics and the limits of care in Shenzhen – Yang Zhan and Ludan Zhang
Part 3: Marketising social provisioning, degenerating social contract
8. Weakening of social protection in Vietnam: labour legislation, cicada capital and civil society – Angie Ngọc Trần
9. ‘Building the giant nests to host the eagle’: housing and family organisation of FDI workers in Ho Chi Minh City – Pham Thanh Thoi
10. From welfare to real estate: a generational perspective of the financialisation of Chinese steelworkers’ housing – Catrina Schwendener
11. Collateral deposits, the bank of the poor and the caring state: Vietnamese labour migration to the Republic of Korea – Huong Thu Nguyen
Part 4: Contestation and disengagement
12. Early withdrawal of pension and contestations over the right to social protection in Vietnam – Tu Phuong Nguyen
13. The narratives of sacrifice: the Third Front and the left-behind – Fan Zhang