Howard (history and international studies, U. of Mississippi) describes the lives, struggles, and contrasting perspective of workers in the Chinese arms industry through a decade and a half that saw a war of national liberation, a civil war, and a class war. He begins with the decision to create an arms industry rather than buy foreign arms, and discusses such topics as the origins and composition of the workforce, conditions of work and life, the Nationalism project, organizing from 1937 to 1946, the labor movement, and organic intellectuals and the moral basis of class. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) 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. 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 Chinas 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.
