Colours of Money, Shades of Pride

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In June 1986, a Japanese watch factory in Hong Kong tried to fire 36 of its women workers. This provoked an unprecedented sit-in by 300 of the women employed at the plant. The sit-in lasted for 13 days and accounted for over half the days lost to labour unrest that year.

At the time Fred Chiu, an ex-prisoner of consciousness in Taiwan, was studying industrial conflicts in Hong Kong. Although an anthropologist, he became deeply and personally involved in the strike. In this account of those intense days, he 'combines the art of the story-teller with the wizardry of the sophisticated social theorist' to report the events and to interpret them in a style characterized by clarity, vigour and honesty.

Fred Yen Liang Chiu is Associate Professor of Sociology at Hong Kong Baptist University. He is the author of Politics ofPost-Modernity: On Social Movements and Their Discourses (1995, in Chinese); editor of Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies; and co-editor with Marshall Johnson of Subimperialism, a special issue of positions: east asia cultures critique, vol. 8, no. 1., 2000.

'The book flouts the canons of professional social sciences and supplies an unapologetic, deprofessionalized ethnology. ... Such an ethnography demands a distinct style of participant observation that views social knowledge itself as a craft or vocation, open to conversations with workers' tacit visions of work-as-a-vocation, to become a new basis of radical dissent in contemporary capitalism. This dissent may find expression not merely in industrial actions such as strikes,th...