Chinese workers: A new history - Jackie Sheehan

This 1998 book traces the development of workers' struggles in China from the 1950s to the Tianenmen movement of 1989 and beyond. It looks at the role played by worker discontent in the direction taken by state campaigns such as the 1956-7 Hundred Flowers movement, the Cultural Revolution and the April Fifth Movement of 1976, as well as in the Democracy Wall movement and the 1989 Democracy Movement. The author is keen to demolish the myth of Chinese workers as politically conformist supporters of the Communist Party and makes a convincing case for a basic continuity in forms of workers' self-organisation and "economic" and "political" demands, right from the 1950s through to the 1990s.