Ching Kwan Lee
PROFESSOR
PhD, University of California at Berkeley
Office: 270 HAINES HALL
Phone: 310-206-2691
Fax: 310-206-9838
E-mail:
cklee@soc.ucla.edu
Mailing Address:
\nHaines Hall
\nBox 951551 Los Angeles
\nCA 90095-1551
Subfield
Labor, Rights, Citizenship, Development, Global and Comparative Ethnography, China
Research Interests
I am currently working on two projects. One is on the politics of rights and changing citizenship regime in China. I am looking at the effects of three major national laws respectively giving citizens labor rights, land rights, and property rights. By examining how ordinary Chinese mobilize legal and extra-legal resources to battle for their rights as citizens, engaging the legal profession, the local and central governments, I want to understand the micro-foundations or the lack thereof, for the formation of new citizenship regimes in China. The second project I am working on is Chinese investment and labor practices in Africa. The key question is whether Chinese capitalism, as it becomes a global force, represents an alternative form of modernity bringing development outcomes in the third world different from previous colonial powers. Or, whether or not China merely unleashes another round of imperial domination. This is a long term project involving comparisons of Chinese investment projects in several industries and countries. So far, I have focused on Chinese firms in copper mining in Zambia and the construction industry in Tanzania, Zambia and Ghana.
Selected Publications
Books
1. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (UC Press, 2007):(Sociology of Labor Book Award 2008, American Sociological Association; finalist for the C. Wright Mills Award, SSSP)
2. Re-envisioning the Chinese Revolution: Politics and Poetics of Collective Memory in Reform China (Stanford U Press, 2007, edited with Guobin Yang):
3. Working in China: Ethnographies of Labor and Workplace Transformation (Routledge 2007, edited):
4. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (UC Press 1998) : (American Sociological Association, Asia and Asian American Section Best Book Award 2000; Best Book Award, Labor Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 1999)
5. Reclaiming Chinese Society: the New Social Activism. London: Routledge (Co-edited with You-tien Hsing, 2009)
Articles
“Raw Encounters: Chinese Managers, African Workers and the Politics of Casualization in Africa’s Chinese Enclaves,” The China Quarterly, forthcoming
“The Paradox and Possibility for a Public Sociology of Labor in China,” Work and Occupations (co-authored with Yuan Shen)forthcoming
"Rights Activism in China" Contexts 7(3): 14-19, 2008.
"From the Specter of Mao to the Spirit of the Law: Labor Insurgency in China," Theory and Society 31(2): 189-228, 2002.
"The Revenge of History: Collective Memories and Labor Protests in Northeastern China," Ethnography vol. 1(2): 217-237, 2000.
"Engendering the Worlds of Labor: Women Workers, Labor Markets and Production Politics in the South China Economic Miracle," American Sociological Review vol. 60(3): 378-397, 1995
Awards
2008 Sociology of Labor Book Award, American Sociological Association, Labor and Labor Movement Section (for Against the Law)
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Member, 2006-7
Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars.Fellow, 2003-4
Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, Asia and Asian American Section, 1999 (for Gender and the South China Miracle)
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