China’s Urban Frontier: Migration, Labor Militancy and Labor Rights

Abstract One must understand the condition and revolutionary nature of the Chinese working class to properly comprehend the major demographic transformation from 1978 to the present. During the post-Mao era, China has transformed from a fundamentally agrarian society to an urban one and, concomitantly, the primarily rural working class economy has become an urban industrial and service society. Under Deng Xiaoping and his successors, the rural economy has transformed into an urban “market socialist” economy which has set the stage for the application of a developed form of socialism. The contradiction of socialism without development was solved by releasing the forces of production. Under any dialectical process, contradictions are not resolved without adversity and struggle. If Mao’s era was characterized by the application of socialism in 1949, Deng’s rise in 1978 was directed at the institution of market reforms under a socialist state, preparing the foundation for the emergence of a more effective socialist state dedicated to the expropriation of capital under Xi Jinping from 2012 to the present (Bu 2022).