Abstract
Shuxuan Zhou's From Forest Farm to Sawmill: Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State presents a worker-centered, gendered history of forestry during China's transformation from Mao-era socialism to post-Mao state capitalism. The book documents the experiences of forestry workers, often men employed as state workers and women as family dependents or collective workers, and demonstrates how their labor not only contributed to the expansion of the forestry industry in the Mao era but also laid the foundation for China's economic development in the post-Mao period. Through a Marxist analysis of capital accumulation and labor exploitation across these two periods, it argues that China's state capitalist model is deeply rooted in its socialist past—not only in the capital it inherited but also in the systemic structures that enabled such accumulation. The book highlights the structural continuities of inequality that sustained both socialist and state-capitalist systems, particularly the rural-urban divide and the gendered division of labor. It further shows that in the transition to state capitalism, the state actively facilitated the transfer of means of production to private capital, legitimizing new forms of expropriation and exploitation. The book reveals how social transformation in the Mao and post-Mao eras was made possible through the labor of these workers—especially through the construction and reinforcement of systemic inequalities along gender and urban-rural lines. The book also examines the evolution of workers’ collective consciousness. It analyzes their critical reflections on exploitation and expropriation, as well as the gendered strategies and tactics they employed to assert their rights through labor protests that challenged both state and market forces.
With deeply engaging ethnographic research, oral histories, and archival materials, the book skillfully weaves together individual experiences, collective struggles, and broader sociohistorical transformations. The book progresses from personal experiences to knowledge and, ultimately, to collective action. Chapter One examines capital accumulation in forestry under Chinese socialism. It traces how, beginning in the 1950s, the socialist state expropriated rural land, timber, and labor through collectivization, centralized allocation of resources, and mass migration. This process enabled large-scale labor mobilization, particularly by relocating northern peasants in Fujian to develop state forestry. The state leveraged structural inequalities, such as the rural-urban divide and women's unpaid reproductive labor, to facilitate this development. These inequalities persisted beyond the Mao era.
Chapter Two examines gender inequality in employment within China's state forestry sector. In the socialist era, rural women were displaced from their land and migrated to Fujian to fulfill the domestic and sexual needs of male workers while providing unpaid household labor. These women also served as a reserve army of labor, frequently deployed in seasonal and on-demand work and subjected to constant transfers between positions to meet industrial needs. Regarded as dependent workers, their labor—both domestic and industrial—remained uncompensated and unrecognized, rendering them especially vulnerable to exploitation. Through the life stories of two dependent workers, this chapter demonstrates that women's labor both at home and in factories played a significant role in China's socialist project of capital accumulation.
Chapter Three investigates the accumulation of capital during China's transition to state capitalism by tracing the evolving relationship between peasants and forests through the oral history of a peasant woman. Between the 1960s and 2010s, she experienced multiple roles—as a peasant, a timber business owner, and a village leader. Her shifting perspectives and lived experiences reflect how, in the post-Mao forestry industry in Fujian, the role of forests transformed from an integral part of peasant culture to a commodified resource. This shift illustrates not only the commodification of forests but also the growing alienation of human communities from forested and rural land. As some peasants transitioned into timber business owners, they hired and exploited rural migrant workers, further perpetuating the structural inequality in the urban and rural divide. What the state had utilized for capital accumulation under socialism—particularly the exploitation of gender and rural/urban divisions—was inherited and applied under state capitalism.
Chapter Four examines how China's transition to capitalism in the late 1970s stripped workers of their sense of ownership over state industries and the means of production and rendered them as disposable labor in the emerging capitalist economy. The chapter follows the life story of a second-generation female worker. Lina, the woman at the center of this chapter, was classified as “surplus labor” and relegated to the status of a “collective worker”—a feminized, second-class employment category. As state industries underwent privatization, workers once considered essential became “unproductive and costly,” and mass layoffs and privatization reinforced labor hierarchies that disproportionately disadvantaged women. Lina's experiences, intertwined with the post-Mao history of capital accumulation in the state wood-processing industry, illustrate a second wave of expropriation and the intensified oppression faced by the next generation of women workers.
Chapter Five traces how individual feelings of injustice evolved into applied knowledge and collective action. It explores how women, particularly older generations, used the practice of “speaking bitterness” to demand both material and emotional recognition in their personal and public struggles. Originally a Maoist ideological tool, speaking bitterness was designed to foster class consciousness by encouraging marginalized groups to articulate their grievances. Women workers adapted this practice beyond its original purpose and used it not only as a means to appeal to the state but also as a tool to challenge it. The chapter follows the story of a grandmother who strategically employed speaking bitterness to politicize her domestic burdens, compelling the state to acknowledge and address her grievances. On a larger scale, the forest farm workers’ protests demonstrate the power of collectively speaking bitterness. For over a decade, thousands of women engaged in this practice. Speaking bitterness not only influenced state decisions but also transformed the protesters’ self-perceptions, solidifying their collective identity as workers and enhancing their consciousness of oppression and exploitation.
Chapter Six traces a decade-long series of collective worker protests, examining the strategies employed, documenting the protests, and analyzing the gendered tactics used. It shows that the workers’ tactics drew from a broad range of frameworks: legal, social, economic, and ideological. The protesters combined ideas inherited from collectivization, privatization, socialism, and capitalism for their activism. They alternated between expressing bitterness about their past labor conditions, discussing property rights within a legal framework, and making moral arguments centered on individual equality. Their evolving understanding of the state, government, legal institutions, and economic development allowed them to critically assess their position in the economy and pursue collective action. The chapter especially highlights the leading roles of older women workers, who took literal “front-line” positions in protests, navigated negotiations, and developed creative strategies.
At the beginning of the book, Zhou sets out to challenge the prevailing view that a complete rupture occurred between the Mao and post-Mao eras—the former characterized by class struggle and the latter by economic development, the undervaluation of the legacies of women workers and peasants, and the concealment of the operations of expropriation and exploitation in socialist China. Zhou successfully accomplished these goals.
One of the book's key contributions is that it demonstrates the evolving yet interconnected nature of the Mao and post-Mao periods in terms of capital accumulation, production relations, and labor politics. It offers a compelling (and ironical) Marxist analysis of how the socialist state exploited forest workers, appropriating their labor and natural resources to accumulate state capital for “socialist modernization.” The book further reveals that this exploitation did not disappear in the post-Mao era but rather was transformed, as the same structural mechanisms persisted with new agents of capital—shifting from state control to private sector dominance. The book draws a powerful parallel between state-led extraction and exploitation in the socialist era and the post-Mao privatization process, and the consequent abandonment of these workers as “surplus disposable labor” in the new round of accumulation, appropriation. The book also underscores the role of the socialist state in capital accumulation through land expropriation, labor exploitation, and strict control over population flows. The findings blur the boundaries between socialism and capitalism, showing how both systems accumulate capital by dispossessing marginalized groups. A broader contextualization of forestry across China, particularly comparisons with the northeast, would strengthen the analysis, and the discussion could be expanded to connect the construction of surplus populations to global neoliberal transitions.
In recent years, scholarship has begun to investigate the dispossession and exploitation of rural residents during the Mao era. This book contributes to these inquiries by highlighting the dispossession and exploitation of women, workers, and peasants under socialism. A central theme in this book is the gendered nature of labor and the exploitation of female workers before and after China’s market reforms. The book vividly documents how women's labor has been systematically undervalued and exploited. Furthermore, while many studies on women and labor in the Mao era have focused on state-sanctioned “model workers,” this book reveals that among the glorified “laborers” of the Mao era, significant gendered inequalities and internal hierarchy existed. Women were often positioned as dependent, supplemental labor—first to be hired when needed and first to be discarded as surplus. While privatization brought structural changes, the gendered division of labor persisted, albeit in a different form.
The book also provides a fascinating account of the process and tactics of the workers’ collective labor protests. It is especially compelling to see how narratives of suku (speaking bitterness) and other socialist rhetorical traditions have been internalized and strategically mobilized in the post-Mao era for memory-making, individual agency, and collective struggle.
This book bridges historical and contemporary analyses of labor, gender, and economic transformation. Its emphasis on historical continuity marks a notable departure from dominant narratives that treat the Mao and post-Mao periods as fundamentally distinct. The book also highlights the ironic persistence of ideological and political discourses from the Mao era, which continue to shape post-Mao labor activism. Zhou's attention to workers’ evolving perceptions of the state and economy—and how these shaped their activism—adds a crucial dimension to studies of labor and resistance.
This book is highly original and timely, arriving at a critical moment when the world is experiencing another wave of technological and economic transformation driven by artificial intelligence, leading to labor restructuring with gendered and intersectional implications. Its analysis of labor, gender, and economic transformation in China offers essential conceptual tools for understanding contemporary and future shifts in labor and capital relations, as well as ongoing struggles over labor rights and economic inequality. By highlighting historical continuities, this book provides valuable insights into how past labor struggles inform present-day movements and how state capitalism continues to shape labor politics.
Writing about the non-English world in English is an act of labor and translation, and Zhou excels in bringing six decades of forest workers’ lives from a remote Chinese town to an English-speaking audience. The book balances vivid storytelling with complexity and nuance while maintaining a clear focus on the broader macroeconomic and political transformations at play. Its shorter chapters make it particularly well suited for teaching.
The book's theoretical and empirical contributions, combined with its accessibility, engaging narratives, and pedagogical value, make it essential reading for those interested in sociology, labor studies, gender studies, and political economy. It is particularly valuable for examining topics such as economic transformation, labor restructuring, gendered labor dynamics, labor protests, environmental change, industrialization, market transitions, migration, and the intersections of forests and labor economies.