Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2024. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503638235.
The study of Chinese labour in transnational and colonial contexts has flourished in recent years, yet many works remain trapped within national frameworks or narrow thematic concerns. Selda Altan’s Chinese Workers of the World presents an ambitious intervention, situating the construction of the Yunnan-Indochina Railway, constructed between 1898 and 1910, within the broader dynamics of racial capitalism, European colonial expansion, and the making of a modern Chinese working-class identity. By shifting the focus away from elite narratives to the lives and struggles of the railway labourers, Altan seeks to uncover the agency of Chinese workers in resisting colonial exploitation. The result is a compelling, if at times overdetermined, argument about the interplay between labour, empire, and race.
At the heart of Chinese Workers of the World is a paradox: the railway, conceived by the French colonial authorities as a tool for commercial and strategic domination, became instead a site of resistance and defiance. The book traces how Chinese workers, through mass desertions, everyday acts of disobedience, and negotiations with labour recruiters, disrupted the colonial-imperial logic that sought to discipline them. In doing so, Altan frames these workers as active agents who shaped the transnational labour market, even as they were subject to brutal working conditions, racialized medical policies, and the legal apparatus of French extraterritoriality.
The book is divided into six chapters, moving from French imperial ambitions in Yunnan to the political economy of labour recruitment, the role of medicine and law in disciplining workers, and the broader implications of railway construction for Chinese nationalism. The first half of the book relies heavily on French colonial sources, offering a rich analysis of the motivations behind the railway project and the challenges faced by European managers in controlling the labour force. Altan highlights the contradictions in French colonial discourse—how workers were simultaneously depicted as indispensable yet ungovernable, as both vital to the railway’s success and responsible for its failures.
One of the book’s strengths is its examination of the labour recruitment process. Altan skillfully shows how Chinese workers navigated an exploitative labour market, leveraging their mobility and knowledge of contract negotiations to improve their conditions, even if only marginally. This insight adds a layer of complexity to the standard narrative of powerless coolies, revealing instead a workforce that was both constrained and surprisingly strategic.
Yet, for a book that claims to centre worker agency, the absence of direct worker voices is striking. This limitation is not entirely Altan’s fault—working-class archives, particularly for semi-literate railway labourers in early twentieth-century China, are notoriously difficult to recover. However, the book often compensates by reading resistance into the archival silences, at times stretching the available evidence. While Altan makes a strong case that desertion was a form of political action, her argument that it constituted a nascent form of class consciousness remains speculative. It is unclear whether these workers saw themselves as part of a coherent social class or simply sought to escape intolerable conditions.
The final two chapters shift the focus to Chinese nationalist reactions to the railway. Altan argues that Chinese elites, despite their anti-colonial rhetoric, failed to see the revolutionary potential of the labouring class. Instead, they viewed workers as passive subjects to be mobilized for the nationalist cause rather than as agents of social transformation in their own right. While this critique is important, the book could have engaged more deeply with alternative nationalist perspectives—such as those of early Chinese socialist movements—that did recognize labour’s political significance.
One of the book’s more provocative claims is its comparison of the Yunnan railway workers with Chinese indentured labourers in the broader global coolie trade. Altan suggests that experiences of racial capitalism abroad shaped worker consciousness at home, but this connection is not always convincingly established. The comparison is intriguing, but the book would have benefited from a more explicit discussion of how Chinese labourers themselves conceptualized their position within a global racial order.
In terms of historiographical contribution, Chinese Workers of the World builds upon and extends existing studies on labour and colonial infrastructure, particularly the works of Jean-François Rousseau, Joshua H. Howard, and David Wilson Del Testa. However, it is perhaps most indebted to recent scholarship that foregrounds worker agency in colonial and semi-colonial settings, including Ken Kawashima’s work on Korean day labourers in Japan and Rana Behal’s studies on indentured plantation labour in British India. By positioning Chinese workers within a broader transnational labour history, Altan broadens the scope of Chinese labour studies in meaningful ways.
Despite some of its interpretive overreach, Chinese Workers of the World is a valuable contribution to the study of labour, colonialism, and capitalism in modern China. Altan’s insistence on seeing Chinese workers as historical actors, rather than mere victims of imperial exploitation, is refreshing and important. While the book raises more questions than it answers about the formation of working-class identity, it nonetheless challenges historians to rethink the connections between labour mobility, empire, and resistance. For scholars of Chinese history, labour history, and colonial studies, Chinese Workers of the World is an engaging and thought-provoking read.
Yin Cao
Peking University, Beijing