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Hengfa Handbag Company, a Taiwanese-invested factory, brings an anomalistic phenomenon in the labor-intensive Pearl River Delta area: Although coercive means of labor control were enfeebled or even abolished, workers worked assiduously. Coercion based on punishment was replaced by an organization of consent, and a hegemonic factory regime rather than a despotic one now runs the shop-floor. The primary task of this study is to explain how the hegemonic regime was generated and how it obscured and secured surplus value, using Michael Burawoy's analytic concept, "making out as a game." In Hengfa's shop-floor, interventions by state and workers' social networks protected workers from physical and economic punishment, and in this plight for coercive labor control, a Burawoyian "game" was generated and replaced punishment. Output quotas were assigned every day, while only after completing the quotas could a worker leave, and the co-location of factory and dormitory, a curfew, and a desire for an urban lifestyle encouraged workers to work hard to increase their leisure time outside the factory. Furthermore, the process of pursuing this substantial reward organized the social relations among workers and produced workers' experience of the labor process to guarantee workers' voluntarily efforts to work hard. At the end of this article, these arguments bring about an attempt to identify the social context in which Hengfa was embedded: the hukou (household registration) system deeply rooted in modern Chinese society generated and legitimated the dormitory and curfew system, which in turn influenced the form of workers' activities and initiated the game on the shop-floor. The lack of citizenship reduced workers' safety and led workers to regard the dormitory and curfew system as protection rather than restraint. Through the hukou system, workers were constructed as "non-citizen subjects," and through these subjects, "state politics" and "production politics" encountered each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unable to become either industrial working class or citizens. Facing this special group of workers, we still believe in their power of self-liberation. Drawing on Touraine’s action sociology and sociological intervention, and Burawoy’s public sociology and praxis-oriented research, we modify “sociological intervention” according to the reality of Chinese society and propose the methodology of “strong sociological intervention” whose vehicle is “Baigou Migrant Worker Night School.” The night school provided workers with courses of labor law, English, and computer based on their actual needs. Labor law is the core to evoke the self-consciousness of the workers. Through communications in the night school and workers’ real living circumstances, we collected their true information and treated it as the source of sociological knowledge. After three sessions of night school training, workers showed changes in skills, social, and psychological aspects, laying a foundation for the growth of self-consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]