Roughly 260 million workers in China have participated in a mass migration of peasants moving into the cities, and construction workers account for almost half of them. In Building China, Sarah Swider draws on her research in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shanghai between 2004 and 2012, including living in an enclave, working on construction jobsites, and interviews with eighty-three migrants, managers, and labor contractors. This ethnography focuses on the lives, work, family, and social relations of construction workers. It adds to our understanding of China's new working class, the deepening rural-urban divide, and the growing number of undocumented migrants working outside the protection of labor laws and regulation. Swider shows how these migrants-members of the global "precariat," an emergent social force based on vulnerability, insecurity, and uncertainty-are changing China's class structure and what this means for the prospects for an independent labor movement.

1. Building China and the Making of a New Working Class2. The Hukou System, Migration, and the Construction Industry3. Mediated Employment: A City of Walls4. Embedded Employment: A City of Villages5. Individual Employment: A City of Violence6. Protest and Organizing among Informal Workers under Restrictive Regimes7. Informal Precarious Workers, Protests, and Precarious AuthoritarianismAppendix A. Methods, Sampling, and AccessAppendix B. List of Construction SitesAppendix C. List of InterviewsNotesReferencesIndex