Made in China is a theoretically ambitious book based on impressive field research among factory workers in Shenzhen in south China working on the line and living in the factory dorms. Shenzhen is an important part of the coastal regions of China that have become the factories of the world. Eighty percent of the suppliers of the world’s largest retailer, Walmart, are based in China, and they supplied that company with $12 billion worth of goods in 2004. The nature of the work processes and their impact on Chinese workers and society, more generally, are thus extremely important topics and have become politically contentious issues around the world. While carefully documenting the abuses and health risks of the predominantly female labor force of an electronics factory, Pun Ngai also demonstrates how the agency of workers limits the domination of managers and creates social spaces of mutual support and hope. Her ethnographic accounts of their interactions among themselves and with their superiors, and of their dreams and fears for their futures are richly described and clearly written.

One of the key theoretical tasks taken on by Pun is to revitalize class analysis to make sense of the new groups of workers emerging under China’s economic reforms since 1979, particularly in foreign-invested enterprises. She argues that Maoist class analysis “from above” has become a “dead language because of its hegemonic nature” (p. 12). Despite this interpretive gap, for class analysis to be a useful “weapon of social struggle,” it must be “reactivated by rooting it in class experience from below—that is, in the everyday infrapolitics of the Chinese workers themselves” (p. 11). Female factory workers, confronted with the “triple oppression” of state, capital, and patriarchy, “have to live out their own class experience as part of their life struggles” (p. 11). Beyond this worthy goal, Pun also invokes Michel Foucault, to consider technologies of the self and of control, and cultural studies, to explore “minor genres” of resistance in the form of nightmares and menstrual problems. These theoretical excursions are all interesting and well supported by insightful ethnographic analysis but partake somewhat too much of homage to the “usual suspects.” Given the topic, I would have liked to see reference to work outside the canon, such as studies in eastern Europe and Latin America. There is a great deal of unexploited potential for comparative analysis. For example, there is no mention of very comparable work by anthropologists on migrant laborers living in crowded dormitories in central and southern Africa. Here, Pun partakes of a common tendency in the anthropology of China to neglect parallels and interpretive resources that have become more salient as the communist giant becomes more like other Third World nations. Similarities with early factory towns in the 19th century could also be discovered.

Anyone concerned with the contemporary world economy, not just those with a specific interest in China, should find this book of interest. While occasionally jargon heavy, the book is written in a compelling manner with evident sympathy for the workers, which should make it more approachable to students.