Carrying the old in the new: Economic reforms and livelihoods in the steel industry

The steel industry's history and the social context in which it is embedded in offer insight into China's shifting development path. The industry has served as a backbone to China's rapid economic development. Now, as China's model of growth is adapting to the 'new normal' growth level by changing from a focus on manufacturing and heavy industry to a knowledge-based, innovation-driven, 'green' economy, the steel industry is also due to change. On the one hand shifting policies in how and where steel is produced has resulted in local deindustrialisation and worker lay-offs in the sector. On the other hand, China continues to strengthen its State Owned Enterprise (SOE) sector, despite the Washington Consensus assumption that state-ownership is an obstacle to economic growth. Therefore, the Chinese reform policies differ in important ways from the deindustrialisation and privatisation that has been observed in post-Fordist and post-Soviet contexts, highlighting China's unique political economy.

My research focuses on worker families in China's steel industry. It asks what the implications of changing industrial policy might be on the ways in which workers devise socially, economically and culturally valued livelihoods and how this may influence workers expectations of the future. Thereby the study contributes to the understanding of industrial workers place within China's changing economic development model and sheds light on an understanding of China's political economy from the ground up.