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The China e-Special Issue brings together 11 articles on the sociology of contemporary work and employment in China which have been published in WES in the past two decades, highlighting the increasing frequency of submissions, and also reflecting the diversity, complexity and plurality of work and employment in the region. The foci of debates include the changing fault lines of work and employment; the changing relationships between state, employers and workers; the impact of rural to urban migration and urbanisation on the labour process and employment configurations; the interrelations between production and social reproduction and its gendered dimensions; and the need to develop established methodologies further given the changing nature of the research subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since two million Hong Kong people took to the streets in the largest protest in the city's history to demonstrate against the proposed extradition of criminal suspects to Mainland China in the summer of 2019, Hong Kong continues to be gripped by an ongoing political crisis. He writes about culture and everyday life at: https://notjustaboutculture.com B Maggy Lee b is a Professor in the Department of Sociology at The University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. Author Biographies B Milan Ismangil b is a PhD candidate in the School of Journalism and Communication at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in Hong Kong. [Extracted from the article]

This paper draws on ethnographic data about Filipino migrant domestic workers' perceptions of and responses to the use of surveillance cameras in the home to intervene in recent debates about surveillance, care and social control. On the one hand, our participants disclose what we refer to as the gendered ironies of care and control. Digital surveillance practices in the home not only produce tactics for evading control but also reduce the capacity of migrant workers to deliver the best possible care that is ostensibly the basis for the deployment of new forms of watching. On the other hand, the responses we document here speak to critiques of the Foucauldian vision of surveillance derived from the panopticon that are 'abstract, disembodied and distrustful'. In contrast to the Benthamite reading of God's all seeing eye, Filipino migrant workers invoke a relational vision which speaks to connectedness, trust and the possibility of mutual concern. While the use of covert surveillance cameras especially was perceived as undermining the trust necessary for care relationships, some respondents used the devices to provoke face to face encounters deemed necessary to re-establish relations of trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]