{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.014646649578908825, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.8626609442060085, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Walmart in China

and contributes little in the way of new insights into the lives or livelihoods of China’s millions of migrants. The final section on trade unions and NGOs contains two chapters, one by Mingwei Liu, the other by Ching Kwan Lee and Yuan Shen, as well as a conclusion collectively authored by the book’s editors. Liu’s chapter is the stronger of the two, based on a series of careful case studies of union organizing in Guangdong and Zhejiang. He details several patterns of union organizing and discusses the impact of labor law reforms on each. His chapter is one of the most thorough and wellgrounded examinations of Chinese trade unionism in some time and will be a welcome addition to a still underdeveloped literature. Lee and Shen provide a nice discussion of the politics and activism of Chinese labor NGOs, but do not add as much to our understanding of NGO politics in general. Indeed, other recent research, though not centered specifically or exclusively on the labor sector, has taught us more about the evolving relationships between NGOs and the state. Empirically, we can learn something from this chapter, even though its primary finding that NGOs fail to promote solidarity or collective action is intuitive and hardly arresting. In fact, the authors likely could have gone much further to explain in more detail how specific NGOs accomplish or fail in key objectives and exactly how and why this undermines or impedes the development of worker solidarity or collective action. The conclusion mostly just sums up the main points of the introduction and various chapters, without striking out on many new paths of its own or forcefully pointing the way toward new research agendas. Overall, From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization is a solid contribution to the literature on Chinese labor politics. Not only is this volume the first to attempt explicitly to link the fates of state sector workers and those in other areas of the economy but also this collection is the first to lay out a master narrative of informalization in the context of Chinese industrial relations. As such, it is essential reading for all students of labor politics in China and anyone seeking to understand the changing dynamics of industrial relations in the world’s workshop. If the book’s greatest strength is this breadth and conceptual clarity, its greatest weakness is the lack of more empirically grounded research, especially microlevel studies of migrant workers and others in the informal sector. That a book on informalization contains only one chapter on migrants is unfortunate. Despite this shortcoming, however, it deservedly will be widely read and all future scholars will need to react to it.