Workers at War Labor in Chinas Arsenals, 1937-1953 [Hardcover]

This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in the wartime capital, Chongqing. The author argues that China's arsenal workers participated in three interlocked conflicts between 1937 and 1953: a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war.The work adds to the scholarship on the Chinese revolution, which has previously focused primarily on rural China, showing how workers alienation from the military officers directing the arsenals eroded the legitimacy of the Nationalist regime and how the Communists mobilized working-class support in Chongqing. Moreover, in emphasizing the urban, working-class, and nationalist components of the 1949 revolution, the author demonstrates the multiple sources of workers identities and thus challenges previous studies that have exclusively stressed workers particularistic or regional identities. This is a landmark work. Howard does not outright refute existing interpretations but rather convincingly demonstrates that Chinese arsenal workers developed regional, class-based, and national identities simultaneously. Joshua H. Howard is the Croft Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi.This book focuses on the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspectives of the 60,000 workers, military administrators, and technical staff employed in the largest, most strategic industry of the Nationalist government, the armaments industry based in China's wartime capital, Chongqing. Workers at Waris a finely researched and richly documented book based on extensive archive research and oral interviews....[Howard]'s skillful documentary research of using many unexplored archives, local, national, and international, sources, his integration of social and political theories, and his alCx