The following is an excerpt from Eli Friedman’s Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China, available now.

For years, a strong alliance between capital and the lowest levels of the Chinese state meant that strikes were dealt with either through police repression or through an ad hoc system of mediation by union and government officials that was focused almost exclusively on resuming production, regardless of the outcome for workers.

But by 2010, the Chinese central government and Guangdong provincial authorities not only were ready to seek a new model of accumulation in the Pearl River Delta but were willing to (indirectly) ally with insurgent workers to realize this goal.