Editor's Introduction

The material translated here consists of selected chapters from a much longer study conducted in 1986 by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions and released for internal circulation in January 1987.>sup>1>/sup> The study is divided into seven sections as follows: (1) The general overview, pp. 3-33; (2) nine chapters analyzing the data from the questionnaires, pp. 37-99; (3) twenty chapters reporting on specialized topics, pp. 109-231; (4) eight investigative reports on enterprises in selected provinces and municipalities, pp. 235-327; (5) representative comments from fifty-one workers (identified by name, sex, age, enterprise, and job) out of more than twenty thousand sets of individual comments collected, pp. 331-386; (6) nine chapters introducing the "typical experiences" of a variety of enterprises, pp. 389-439; and (7) two chapters on methodology and statistics, including the survey instrument and detailed tables reporting the results from the responses to the sixty-one questions, broken down by such socioeconomic variables as age, sex, education, income, political affiliation, size and nature of enterprise, and so forth, pp. 443-596. The key parts of the survey were excerpted in >i>Weidinggao>/i>, the restricted-circulation journal of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The present translation includes all seven parts published by >i>Weidinggao>/i>âwhich in fact covers only seven of the nine chapters from section 2âplus two of the twenty specialized topic chapters from section 3, one on women workers and the other on problems in the daily lives of workers.