Foreword

Intellectual encounterThe end of the traumatic COVID-19 segregation era brought a group of scholars working on labour and welfare issues in Vietnam and China together at Bielefeld University in March 2024.The intensity of their conversations and debates reflected not only a genuine desire for human connectivity and international solidarity but also a shared pursuit of intellectual mastery over the perplexing realities of workers' lives under the pressures of a rapidly changing world.Thanks to the organisers, Minh T.N.Nguyen and Jingyu Mao, the workshop re-energised our efforts to confront the precarity of workers' lives in both countries and to formulate intellectual critiques of global capitalism's encroachment into their ostensibly socialist economies.This volume, The Contradictions of Market Socialism: Labour, Capital and Welfare in Privatising China and Vietnam, is a testament to this intellectual and solidarity-driven endeavour.This volume examines the reconfiguration of labour and welfare under the so-called 'market socialism' of China and Vietnam.It strives to unravel new forms of labour commodification, the social reproduction of labour, the restructuring of welfare and care systems, the privatisation of collective land, the financialisation of land and labour, and the emotional detachment of politics from the lives of ordinary people.It exposes the inherent contradictions of a system in which the party-state increasingly relies on economic growth and foreign investment in new technologies and industries while still attempting to maintain legitimacy and control through reforms to welfare and labour laws and the provision of new forms of social protection.The result, as Nguyen et al (2024b) argue, is a growing disconnect between workers' social reproduction and the reproduction of market socialism itself.As Nguyen and Mao in the introduction to this volume (pp 6-7) put it,