Wing-Chung Ho 
Occupational health and social estrangement in China 

This book concerns the post-illness experiences of about a hundred occupationally sick workers who suffer from the incurable diseases of pneumoconiosis or heavy metal poisoning in contemporary China. In exploring their struggles and conflicts in their private and social lives, at and away from home, the author hopes to show how the sufferers structure their own lives, their freedoms, rights, and constraints, and how they think and feel about their actions of acquiescence, compromise, resistance, and protest within the existing power relations. Informed by a framework that connects governmentality and the lifeworld of the victim, the books endeavors to shed new empirical and theoretical light on how the socially marginalized encounter and understand domination in everyday life in the specific context of China now and in the foreseeable future.

Table of Content

Preface
Series editor’s foreword
Maps
Part I: Life in perspective
1. Facts, theoretical gaze, and journeys
2. Sick workers as homines sacri
Part II: Responses to marginality
3. Cadmium-poisoned women: contesting for sick role status
4. Pneumoconiosis-afflicted workers: toward rightful resistance
5. Coalminers: the compromising citizenry
Part III: Sick life governed
6. Law as a technique of governmentality
7. The future of Chinese marginality
Appendix
References
Index

About the author

Alexander Smith is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Huddersfield