If you’re interested in labor in China (and if you’re not, you should be), then hurry over to the South Atlantic Quarterly where you’ll find four great articles on the topic that have been temporarily emancipated from their paywall:
Ralph Litzinger: The Labor Question in China: Apple and Beyond
Ngai Pun and Jenny Chan: The Spatial Politics of Labor in China: Life, Labor, and a New Generation of Migrant Workers
Tim Pringle: Reflections on Labor in China: From a Moment to a Movement
Ho-fung Hung: Labor Politics under Three Stages of Chinese Capitalism

Issue #4 of the web-journal China Left Review is now online. The latest issue is tightly focused on the issue of workers, including general overviews and in-depth original pieces on recent large-scale labor struggles involving SOE workers and migrant workers. This marks the second fully bilingual edition of CLR. Producing an issue in two languages takes a great deal of effort, and if you’d like to help out with translating, revising or writing for future issues, please contact [email protected].

China Strikes is a great new site that maps labor unrest across China. It is easy to add strike reports to the map, and anyone can do that.
http://chinastrikes.crowdmap.com/
About This Site:

The purpose of this site is to track strikes, protests and other collective actions by Chinese workers to defend their rights and interests. We hope that over time the site will serve as a resource to those wishing to better understand and support the labor movement in China.
The categories we use for strikes are based on the type of …

Extracts from and comments on Ho-fung Hung’s article on class relations in Hong Kong politics, “Uncertainty in the Enclave,” in the new issue of New Left Review. I focus on working class formation and resistance in the 1950s-1960s, and the recent revival of HK’s anti-authoritarian left through mobilizations against the WTO and urban renewal evictions, and as part of the left wing of HK’s democracy movement, whose distance from the right wing seems to grow as life becomes more precarious for much of HK’s younger population.

Between May and July of this year a series of high-profile strikes in foreign-owned auto parts plants spread throughout China’s coastal regions. Strikes in China are nothing new, but the recent strike wave was remarkable in at least three respects: the amount of concessions granted to workers; the degree of publicity it initially received in the Chinese media; and the prospects for showcase union reform that it has helped push onto the agenda. Although the strikes were directed primarily at unfair wages, there were some attempts to address the more political question of union representation. Lance Carter visited the Pearl River Delta a few weeks after the last strike ended and was able to meet up with and interview several workers who had participated in the strikes. This article is based largely on those interviews.