Labor, Class Formation, and China’s Informationized Policy of Economic Development

In Labor, Class Formation, and China’s Informationized Policy of Economic Development, Yu Hong examines crucial connections between the evolving political economy of information and communications technology (ICT) and the reconstitution of class relations in China. Situating China’s ICT development over the last thirty years at the intersection of transnational trends, domestic policies, and institutional arrangements, Hong shows how evolving class relations in the ICT sector are shaped by and shaping the transnational capitalist dynamics and domestic socio-economic transformations. She goes on to argue that the huge and still expanding pool of Chinese ICT workers and their newly attained identities-as wage labor rather than consumers-constitute a missing but important dimension of human experiences of the rise of the information society.