Ching Kwan Lee

CK Lee is a sociologist at UCLA. Her research interests include global and comparative issues related to labor, political sociology, global development, decolonization, comparative ethnography, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, and Africa.

She is the author of three award-winning monographs on contemporary China, forming a trilogy of Chinese capitalism through the lens of labor and working class experiences. Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (California 1998) documents the organization of gender and work in factory regimes in Hong Kong and Shenzhen when South China first emerged as the workshop of the world. Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (California 2007) chronicles the unmaking and making of the Chinese working class in two regional economies experiencing the death of socialism and the rise of capitalism respectively in one country. The Specter of Global China: Politics, Labor, and Foreign Investment in Africa (Chicago 2017) follows the footsteps of Chinese state investors to Zambia and compares its relation with African state and labor to other global private investors.

Her most recent publications include an open access book titled Hong Kong: Global China’s Restive Frontier (Cambridge 2022), and two co-edited volumes — Take Back Our Future: an Eventful Sociology of the Hong Kong Umbrella Movement (Cornell, 2019) and The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View (California 2019).  

She is the series editor of Cambridge Elements in Global China, and a convener of the Global Hong Kong Studies @UC initiative. Her forthcoming book, under contract with Harvard University Press, is tentatively titled Forever Hong Kong: A Global City’s Struggle for Decolonization.