When it comes to the political nature of China’s government today, there has been much rhetoric about “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and “capitalism with Chinese characteristics.” Teemu Ruskola suggests that the history of the PRC should instead be understood within the dual framework of global capitalist and socialist transformations. Invoking England’s enclosure movement as a historical analogy, he explains how the Chinese urban working class and peasantry have undergone interconnected transformations. Specifically, after the reform and opening-up period, the dismantling of state-owned enterprises and the migration of peasants to cities have culminated in the emergence of a new Chinese proletariat. In turn, China’s rise as an economic superpower has pushed late-stage capitalism to its ecological limits.
Teemu Ruskola is an interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work addresses questions of history and theory from multiple perspectives, comparative as well as international, frequently with China as a vantage point. He is the author of The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class: How Communism Built a Capitalist Superpower (Verso Books, forthcoming October 2026) and Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law (Harvard University Press, 2013). He is also co-author of Schlesinger’s Comparative Law (Foundation Press, 2009) and author of numerous contributions to periodicals ranging from the American Quarterly to the Yale Law Journal. He is also co-editor (with David L. Eng and Shuang Shen) of a special double issue of the journal Social Text on “China and the Human.”
Ruskola received undergraduate and graduate degrees in East Asian Studies from Stanford University and his JD from Yale University. Before entering academia, he worked as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, in New York and Hong Kong. Prior to joining Penn, he was the Jonas Robitscher Professor of Law at Emory University. He has been a visiting professor at Cornell Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, among other places.
Alice Liu: Dr. Ruskola, your book The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class is being published this October. Will you tell us briefly what the book is about? Specifically, you wrote that this is not another account of “socialism or capitalism with Chinese characteristics. “What is it about then?
Teemu Ruskola: The book began as an attempt for me to understand the global transformations I’ve seen in my lifetime. I’m interested in the changing forms of capitalism and socialism and the way they’ve transformed in the 20th and 21st centuries. China, of course, has been a critical part of those global transformations.
My book offers a structural account of the remarkable political and economic changes that have occurred in China from 1949 to the present, in a historical and comparative frame. But it is also an analysis of China’s role in the global transformations of socialism and capitalism. In that sense, I’m not just focused on the specificity of Chinese capitalism/socialism as such. I’m ultimately interested in thinking about socialism and capitalism in China within a global context.
AL: Looking at the title, what do you mean by the “unmaking of the working class”?
TR: Modern Chinese history saw the making and then the unmaking of the working class. The Chinese working class in the Maoist era was originally a favored labor elite. During the 1950s, China turned to the Soviet model for establishing an indigenous heavy industry. Lacking access to external capital, the state began to extract resources from the countryside to set up elite production units in cities, which took the form of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Each urban resident was assigned to a work unit (danwei), which was much more than a production division. A classic SOE constituted a miniature welfare state, providing not only guaranteed lifetime employment—the famous “iron rice bowl”—but also a cradle-to-grave system of care and control, including benefits such as housing, childcare, educational, medical, athletic, and cultural facilities, and provision for retirement. In short, the labor force in SOEs constituted a favored class, a kind of socialist labor aristocracy.
Of course, all of this was funded by extracting and directing resources from the countryside to the cities, because China then did not have access to foreign capital. This was what I meant by the original “making” of this working class. To keep peasants—literally—in their place, the PRC enacted a strict household registration (hukou) system in 1955. This was essentially a legally enforced caste system that tied a range of state-conferred benefits to residence, ranging from food rations to schooling to medical care. Under this regime of rural-urban segregation, to be categorized as a “peasant” (nongmin), as opposed to a city-dwelling “worker” (gongren), was not only to carry a social label but also to occupy a legally enforced administrative status. Peasants did not have access to these same benefits even though they were the ones who funded them.
With the turn in the 1990s to state capitalism and the breaking of the “iron rice bowl”, China surrendered its obligation to state workers. Deficit-ridden state-owned entities were transformed into the legal form of the shareholding corporation, allowing them to acquire non-state capital to help stabilize their finances. This restructuring was accompanied by SOE workers being put on ordinary employment contracts, subject to the vagaries of hiring and firing. Workers became an ordinary working class in the capitalist sense, fully commodified. This “breaking of the iron rice bowl” revolutionized the state’s relationship to labor, with consequences that have cascaded throughout society.
At this stage, a new group comes into being: migrant workers. In sociological terms, a migrant worker is a hybrid. Legally speaking, he is a contradiction in terms. The colloquial term for migrant labor is nongmin-gong—literally, “peasant-worker.” In the administrative logic of Chinese socialism, this is an oxymoron. A “peasant” in the proper sense is engaged in tilling the land, while a “worker” toils in urban industry. There is no coherent legal or structural position for a person who is both.
In this process, the original socialist working class of Maoist China becomes an ordinary industrial proletariat. They are joined by a growing migrant labor force as global capital starts coming into urban China. The laid-off state workers and migrant workers from the countryside form a new global proletariat. So that’s what I mean by the unmaking of the working class, the transformation of a formerly privileged labor aristocracy into a global industrial proletariat.
Because of the all-encompassing nature of the SOE work unit, in the end, its unwinding has reconfigured the relationship among the state, the family, and the market. It is no exaggeration to say that the unmaking of the Chinese working class has led to the remaking of Chinese society as a whole. It is this new regime that became the foundation for the China we see in global media today: megacities with futuristic skylines, funded by global capital and built by armies of migrant labor.
AL: You disagree with two widely held views: (1) that capitalism’s triumph, signified by the end of the Cold War, was inevitable, and (2) that the PRC’s economic miracle is evidence of capitalism’s superiority. How do you challenge these two perspectives?
TR: There has been this prevailing sense after the end of the Cold War that the collapse of the Soviet Union is indeed evidence of capitalism’s victory and inevitability. And many people have interpreted China’s economic transformation into a global superpower as an indicator of capitalism’s superiority. But the book argues that China actually has succeeded economically, in a lot of ways, not despite but because of its communist legacy. A lot of China’s economic success, I put forth, has been and continues to be subsidized by a set of surviving socialist legacies, some of which are even embedded in kinship institutions that date from China’s imperial past. That’s really the key point here. Paradoxically, China’s global rise is a story of how communism built a capitalist superpower.
AL: Can you say more about how China’s capitalism is built on a communist legacy? In what ways do you see this happening?
TR: When China opened itself up to foreign capital in the mid-1990s and to the WTO in 2001, the resulting transformation was a marriage of global capital and “cheap labor.” The socialist compounds of SOEs are gone, but the new labor regime that has replaced them is no less totalizing in its scope, albeit without the leavening effects of socialist paternalism. While the classic SOE was a factory cum miniature welfare state, migrant laborers who work for mega-corporations are warehoused in enormous dormitories that are essentially corporate labor camps. In global media, these high-security facilities with military-style labor discipline are exemplified by Foxconn, the infamous multinational electronics manufacturer. Its facilities in Shenzhen, known satirically as the “Forbidden City,” include dozens of dormitories, shops, and a hospital, with public order maintained by over 1,000 security officers. Notoriously, the company’s CEO referred to his employees in 2011 as “one million animals,” although he later clarified that he did not intend his words as an insult.
It is a commonplace in the discourse of globalization that China’s “comparative advantage” is its cheap labor. But it’s not just the wages in China that attract global capital, as much cheaper labor can be found in many other parts of the world. Numerous countries far poorer than China are able to provide far cheaper labor, yet they do not hold the same appeal for global capital. China’s real advantage is at least threefold: the high quality of its workforce, its superior infrastructure, and its socio-political stability—all of which are results of socialism. Improvement in health, education, and literacy—all those factors that make Chinese workers attractive—are direct legacies of the state socialist era.
But it is not only socialism’s past but also its lingering presence in rural China that continues to subsidize the urban economy. The reason why global capital, or Chinese private capital, for that matter, can pay migrant workers cut-rate wages is that, instead of moving to the city permanently as the British proletariat did in the nineteenth century, they actually shuttle back and forth between their workplaces and their villages. With the hukou registration system in place, rural newcomers’ presence in the city is still temporary, at least legally. Accordingly, they end up in the most precarious parts of the economy, such as industrial factories and construction.
When they lose their jobs (which happens regularly), do not get paid (not unusual), or suffer injuries at work (also not unusual), they move back to the villages where they are legally registered and where they still have a plot of land to till. For example, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crisis, an estimated 25 million migrant workers lost their jobs and returned to their homes. Buffeted by fluctuating economic forces and changing personal circumstances, they traverse continuously back and forth between city and country.
Unlike its socialist peers, China never expropriated its peasantry by nationalizing the ownership of all land. Even today, it distinguishes between two different forms of public ownership: urban land owned by the state and rural land owned by the collectives that cultivate it. Peasants’ continuing collective ownership of land in the countryside is, in effect, what subsidizes the flexibility of migrant labor. Employers are able to pay them very low wages because they continue to rely on both the land that they had in their villages and the rural kinfolk who stayed behind—often women and older people—who take care of them and provide for them when they lose their jobs or need assistance. Paradoxically, migrant workers’ ownership of rural land allows them to be continuously exploited by urban employers.
AL: Why do you find the English Enclosure Movement a useful analogy for considering the transformations of the Chinese working class?
TR: My key comparative and historical example is the English working class. Indeed, my title is a deliberate nod to E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, a classic study about the emergence of working-class consciousness in England. The English working class was the paradigmatic proletariat in the early stages of industrial capitalism in the West. I use it as a lens for thinking about the emergence of another proletariat of global significance on the opposite edge of the Eurasian landmass—the Chinese working class, which to me exemplifies late-stage capitalism.
The story of the English class is usually linked to the so-called enclosure movement. This was a process by which the feudal commons were privatized (or “enclosed”), and peasants and other occupants of the commons were expropriated. Once deprived of access to land, these people had no option but to sell their labor, becoming the foundation for the English working class. Essentially, the commodification of land resulted in the expropriation of land, which then gave rise to the commodification of labor.
Interestingly, in China, too, in the last couple of decades, there has been a movement sometimes described as “the new enclosure movement.” The arrival of large-scale commercial actors in the Chinese countryside has resulted in the largest displacement of peasants in the history of the world. Just between 1990 and 2008—even before the movement’s subsequent acceleration—an estimated 88 million peasants lost their land for development, joining a rapidly expanding population known as “land-losing peasants” (shidi nongmin). A lot of these peasants are being displaced permanently into cities. What I find striking is, first of all, that the enclosure movement in England took several centuries, but in China, these processes are being telescoped into a few decades.
What is more, in China, the processes of commodification of land and commodification of labor are occurring in reverse order. Given that the peasants already became a massive migrant labor force in the ‘90s, why bother dispossessing or expropriating their land now, in contrast to the English case? So that’s why I think that focusing on the commodification of land and labor is a useful lens for understanding both China and the broader transformations of capitalism.
AL: Apart from comparing the China case to the British experience, you also compare it with the former Soviet Union. How does the Chinese story resemble and differ from the Soviet one?
TR: China initially borrowed heavily from the Soviet model, especially in organizing its state-owned enterprises and developing its industrial base. But Chinese socialism became much less centralized over time, as more and more control was delegated to provincial and local governments.
The two economies also took very different approaches in their experiments with capitalism. The Soviet Union notoriously adopted the so-called Big Bang approach: rapid privatization of state property and instant price liberalization. Tragically, that resulted in a big bang indeed—namely, the nearly total collapse of the economy as the overnight privatization of state property turned into a giant orgy of looting of public assets by a handful of oligarchs. China, too, did consider the use of “shock therapy” in the form of price liberalization, but it ultimately rejected that approach and has pursued a far more gradual approach instead.
One way to understand that difference is that both Soviet socialism and post-Soviet capitalism relied on highly abstract and idealized models—even if those models themselves were built on diametrically opposed assumptions—whereas the Chinese approach to both socialism and capitalism has been gradual and pragmatic. And at least thus far, it has certainly been a much more successful approach.
AL: You also examine how economic planning has shaped familial and kinship relations. Can you list a few examples?
TR: As I’ve noted, the Maoist work unit in a state-owned enterprise was a total institution that provided not only employment but also housing, education, healthcare, retirement benefits, and so on. Part of the motivation for that arrangement was to uproot Confucian kinship notions and to institute a different notion of family—a larger collective family, as it were.
But when SOEs were dismantled, many of their welfare responsibilities were shifted to the market or back to the family—harking back to more traditional notions of intergenerational care. In the countryside, the return to household-based cultivation since the 1980s has also allowed older gender and kinship norms to reassert themselves.
AL: What lessons do you wish that your readers draw from the China case? About global capitalism, about its past, its present, and its future.
TR: With this so-called new enclosure movement in China, peasants are increasingly being dispossessed and incorporated into the urban working class. As capitalism reaches the countryside, and surviving socialist legacies disappear, I want to draw attention to the proletarianization of the peasantry—the process of migration by which migrant workers move to the city permanently and become fully dependent on wages for their survival. Previously, they could still rely on land and kinship networks in the countryside, which made them first-rate workers but lousy consumers.
Today, China’s export-led growth is reaching its limits. It has plenty of capital and plenty of labor. What it needs now are markets, including domestic markets for its products. The proletarianization of the peasant, in a sense, helps China complete its transition to “mature capitalism.” Capitalism will now be both an urban and rural phenomenon.
Marx argued that for capitalism to get started as a system, the initial startup capital, as it were, has to be accumulated through non-capitalist means. He called this phase “primitive accumulation.” In the case of England, this consisted of expropriating the feudal commons and expelling the peasants who became the labor force for capitalism. Later theorists such as Rosa Luxemburg and, more recently, David Harvey, have argued that even so-called mature capitalism continues to rely on resources drawn from an “outside.” In the 19th century, that outside was colonialism. The colonies were sources of capital, markets, and labor. Even today global capitalism remains deeply reliant on China for cheap labor for producing cheap goods.
But with the arrival of capitalism in the countryside and the proletarianization of its peasantry completed, China too is going to need its own “China”—new markets, natural resources, and so on. Running out of lands and people to expropriate at home, it is, in fact, increasingly setting up resource extraction projects and Sinocentric production chains everywhere from the Indian Ocean to Latin America.
The larger question is, then, how much economic development can the planet tolerate. Given its size and its central role in the global economic system, China’s transformation into a capitalist superpower raises profound questions about the ecological limits of economic development.