Occupational Health and Social Estrangement in China

This book examines the experiences of individuals suffering from occupational diseases in contemporary China. It illustrates how the experience of most Chinese sick workers can be understood as examples of Agamben’s notion of homo sacer – the ultimate biopolitical subject whose life is located within a domain of ‘double ambivalence’ in which they are constantly and disturbingly caught in-between the public and private, the productive and unproductive, and the culturally normative and the culturally deviant. 

The study looks at two of the most common occupational diseases in China – pneumoconiosis and heavy metal poisoning. Through a corpus of qualitative, ethnographic data solicited from one hundred individuals, this study details the experiences of four different groups of employees – battery workers, gemstone and jewellery workers, Japanese mat workers, and coalminers – as well as their family members, non-governmental organization workers, and healthcare and legal professionals in Guangdong, Sichuan, Chongqing, Hunan, Beijing, and Hong Kong.

Covering a wide range of issues related to occupational disease in China, this book focuses on the lived experiences of occupationally sick workers at the actor-power interface. Through their stories as well as the descriptions of their life-worlds and power relations they are living with, this book aims to shed light on how the socially marginalized encounter and understand domination in their everyday life in China, now and in the foreseeable future.