{"title":"Hundred Flowers","description":"\u003cdiv\u003eIn 1956, seven years after his victory in China’s Communist Revolution, Mao Zedong extended an invitation to the country’s intelligentsia: “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred different schools of thought contend.”  As criticism of the Chinese Communist Party swelled, the Hundred Flowers project morphed into something cynical, known as the Anti-Rightist Campaign. As a result, many who had, in good faith, produced texts and essays critical of the party faced repression; many careers were destroyed.\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\n\u003cdiv\u003eVerso’s Hundred Flowers series aims to fulfill Mao’s promise in earnest by publishing writing on China from the mainland, the diaspora, and elsewhere. Once a key American ally, China has emerged over the course of this century as the only serious challenger to US global economic hegemony. Yet China remains largely opaque to the West, which is too often ignorant of both the country’s history and its contemporary internal dynamics. Books, newspaper articles, and magazine essays abound but at best present simplistic views of China; at worst, these accounts are misleading or scaremongering. Hundred Flowers offers a more nuanced perspective to facilitate serious debate in analyzing China’s past, present, and future.\u003c\/div\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"3527-involution","title":"Involution","description":"China’s hypercompetitive job market is stunting and distorting the lives of an entire generation. “Involution” is the term they have popularized for the ever-intensifying pressures of a job market where the rewards and conditions only worsen. Forced into a cutthroat doom loop, the people interviewed in \u003ci\u003eInvolution \u003c\/i\u003ehighlight how they are pitted against their colleagues, assigned pointless or impossible tasks, and warped by hostile environments. In response to an antisocial work culture, forms of passive resistance, such as “lying flat” and quiet quitting, have become endemic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough conversations with young workers from across China, the Gonglao Collective paints a haunting picture of involution’s chokehold on young lives. As Eli Friedman highlights in his foreword, the experiences described will resonate with workers across the Western world. This is essential reading for anyone looking for a way out of fruitless competition and into solidarity.","brand":"Verso Books","offers":[{"title":"paperback","offer_id":42814762221629,"sku":"9781836742951","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (UK)","offer_id":42814762287165,"sku":"9781836742968","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (US)","offer_id":42814762254397,"sku":"9781836742975","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0569\/3869\/2669\/files\/getimage_44bbfb82-7e7f-4c15-82dc-0c9e6d9b1139.jpg?v=1781497809"},{"product_id":"3395-the-unmaking-of-the-chinese-working-class","title":"The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class","description":"This groundbreaking book tells the story of China's stunning economic rise over the last half-century. Since initiating economic reforms in the late-1970s, China has transformed into one of the strongest competitors on the world's stage. Far from a rejection of its communist political economy, it was China's communist foundation that allowed the country to transition to a robust state-capitalist economy. Ruskola’s engaging and accessible account focuses on the organization of land and labor as the key to understanding China's success, explaining how their commodification has remade not only the Chinese nation-state but global capitalism itself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eChallenging dominant narratives of economic development, this book demonstrates how the evolution of Chinese state capitalism diverges from both England’s passage from feudalism to capitalism and the Soviet Union’s post-socialist transformations. Highlighting the planetary limits of development, The Unmaking of the Chinese Working Class is an urgent call to rethink our relationship to labor and land, production and nature.","brand":"Verso Books","offers":[{"title":"paperback","offer_id":42814762483773,"sku":"9781836741367","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (UK)","offer_id":43193825263677,"sku":"9781836741374","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (US)","offer_id":42814762549309,"sku":"9781836741381","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0569\/3869\/2669\/files\/getimage_943054d4-9323-4c89-90aa-fb6b6df22f1b.jpg?v=1781499369"},{"product_id":"3495-the-women","title":"The Women","description":"Part memoir and part literary nonfiction, The Women captures the harsh and unequal experience of being a woman in 1970s and 80s rural China. Written by the award winning author Yan Lianke, the book is both a tribute to the women who shaped his life and a sociological critique of China’s treatment of women. “In the countryside, the human being is a worker,” but rural women’s work is diminished, their hardship ignored. Through humor and tragedy, Lianke shares their story and reveals a side of Chinese life rarely accessed by the West.","brand":"Verso Books","offers":[{"title":"paperback","offer_id":43137388281917,"sku":"9781836742852","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (UK)","offer_id":43137388314685,"sku":"9781836742876","price":29.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"ebook (US)","offer_id":43137388347453,"sku":"9781836742883","price":9.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0569\/3869\/2669\/files\/getimage_8efd8557-6452-4e06-9814-aac1b01bc881.jpg?v=1781499404"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0569\/3869\/2669\/collections\/Hundred_Flowers_Square.jpg?v=1780413085","url":"https:\/\/www.versobooks.com\/en-ca\/collections\/hundred-flowers.oembed","provider":"Verso","version":"1.0","type":"link"}