The development of peasant workers’ class consciousness after 1978 : A case study of Chongqing’s construction site

Abstract

As an important community in China, many scholars have conducted numerous studies on the living conditions and citizenship of peasant workers, but class analysis of this community is less common. This research took Chongqing, which has a large labor force, as the experimental group and Hong Kong, a developed capitalist society, as the control group, and qualitative interviews were conducted with sixteen interviewees who are working on the construction sites in the two study areas and examined the similarities and differences between peasant workers in Chongqing and workers in Hong Kong in the aspects of class identity, class formation, and class consciousness. This research found that workers in Chongqing and Hong Kong did not form a stable class, and their class consciousness did not reach the state expected by Lukács. The most significant difference between the two groups is that peasant workers have an additional identity of a peasant, which is influenced by the level of social development. The analysis of the peasant workers’ class provides a new perspective for understanding China’s development and the logic of the Communist Party of China governance. In conducting the class analysis of peasant workers, it is necessary to take attention to their specificity as both peasants and workers, and to place the research on the causes of this situation in the macro context of China’s social development.