Infrastructural Power of Labor: The Making of the Working Class (Pun Ngai)
Schedule
Mon, 18 May, 2026 at 03:00 pm
UTC+02:00Location
Die Faktory | Wien, WI
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Event Format: on siteEvent Venue: FAKTory
Street Address: Universitätsstraße 9, 1010 Vienna
The event will feature a lecture by Prof. Pun Ngai (Lingnan University), moderated by Li Yaner (RECET).
In Europe, discussions about China often revolve around state power, geopolitical rivalry, and economic strength. But who built China’s rise? Drawing on the concept of infrastructural power of labor, hundreds of millions of Chinese workers whose labour has powered one of the most profound economic transformations of our time.
Sociologist Pun Ngai is one of the most influential scholars of Chinese labour. Since the mid-1990s, her fieldwork among women factory workers in China’s electronics industry laid the foundation for her award-winning book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Duke University Press, 2005), recipient of the C. Wright Mills Award and now a classic in global labour studies. Her later research on Foxconn—the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer and a key supplier for global brands such as Apple—reveals the labour regimes behind global supply chains and the close entanglement of state power and global capital.
Beyond the electronics industry, her research also examines labour regimes in sectors such as toy manufacturing and construction. At the centre of her work is China’s vast population of rural migrant workers, whose labour has powered both the country’s export industries and the rapid expansion of its cities. From factory floors assembling smartphones to construction sites building new megacities, Pun’s work has profoundly shaped our understanding of labour relations and the formation of a new working class in contemporary China.
For audiences in Central and Eastern Europe, her work also raises intriguing comparative questions: what similarities and differences emerge when China’s development is viewed alongside post-socialist transformations in Europe?
Yaner Li is a Doctoral Researcher with RECET. Her doc.funds project covers “The Transformation of China’s Shipbuilding Industry since the 1970s: Ownership, Labor, and Emerging Entrepreneurism.”
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Interested in the topic? This lecture is a prelude to the 2026 RECET History and Social Sciences Festival “Transformations of Labor”. June 9–11 we will explore some of the facets of the past and present of this ubiquitous phenomenon in our RECET Festival tent on the University Campus.
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This event is organized in co-operation with FAKTory (www.faktory.at)
More information on this event: https://www.recet.at/event-news/events/detail/infrastructural-power-of-labor-the-making-of-the-working-class
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Where is it happening?
Die Faktory, Universitätsstraße 9,Wien, Österreich, AustriaEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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