ABSTRACT
The beginning of the twenty-first century has seen the People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerging as a major maritime power with one of the largest fleets in the world. While this has generated great interest in Chinese shipping, little is known about seafarers and their ships. This chapter examines the dynamics of the workplace in one important sector of the country’s transport industry, merchant shipping, against the background of economic reform since the 1980s, when China transformed itself from a planned economy to a “socialist market economy.” Empirical data are drawn from the author’s interviews with senior managers in a number of major state-owned shipping companies in China during several research trips between 1998 and 2001, interviews with Chinese seafarers aboard six PRC container ships1 in Hong Kong and some major European ports during the same period, and recently completed studies of political commissars on Chinese merchant ships and the seafarers’ labor market in China.
