From Forest Farm to Sawmill: Stories of Labor, Gender, and the Chinese State

Socialist China’s state forestry and timber industries employed men as state workers and women as family dependents and collective workers who, beginning in the 1950s, turned rural land into urban-industrial space. These features make forestry a unique case with which to investigate how state policies constructed and reinforced intertwined and co-constitutive dualisms between humanity and nature, urban and rural places, production and reproduction, and male and female labor. Centering on oral histories in Fujian, Shuxuan Zhou situates firsthand accounts of labor and resistance in forestry and wood processing within the larger context of postrevolutionary socialist reforms through China’s rapid economic development after the 1990s. Zhou shows how, in response to state development projects that exploited female labor, immigrants, rurality, and forests, workers created a space for their personal and political demands. In considering how sawmill and forest farmworkers creatively reconfigured state projects and challenged authority, this book opens a conversation among the fields of gender studies, labor studies, and environmental studies.