ABSTRACT
The political and economic status of workers in Chinese public firms has declined significantly as the planned economy gives way to a marketoriented one since the 1980s. Politically, the Chinese Communist Party has modified its definition of the vanguard class in China, which used to consist only of workers, to include private entrepreneurs. Perhaps more important, workers’ guaranteed economic welfare, in particular the lifetime employment system, is becoming history. Since the 1990s, tens of millions of workers in public firms have been thrown out of jobs. The number of workers in the state and collective sectors plummeted more than 48 million between 1995 and 2000, a number equal to the population of South Korea.1 Laid-off workers and retirees of public firms have become the largest portion of the poverty-stricken population in urban China.2
