University Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the Leiden University Institute for Area Studies
Limin Teh’s research interests include the social history of twentieth-century China; urban history; the history of work; Japanese imperialism; and the co-evolution of states and markets.
Currently, she is working on on a collaborative project looking at global labor migration and racial hierarchies. A related article, “Race at work: a comparative history of mining labor and empire on the Central African Copperbelt and the Fushun coalfields, ca. 1907–1945,” written with Duncan Money, was published in 2022 in the journal International Labor and Working Class History (vol. 101: 100–117). The article explored a basic fact readily apparent to even casual observers about both sites: that racial hierarchies governed life and work in the mines.
Other research projects have included studies of migrant labor in China; marriage, law, and gender in revolutionary China (1940–1960); footbinding and women’s labor in Sichuan province; and the relationship between the ILO and labor groups in republican China (1919–1938).
Panel 1 | Global Regimes and 20th-century China
Universal Labor Standards, National Sovereignty and the Engendering of Industrial Labor in Republican China
Abstract
This paper examines the relationship between the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the Nationalist state in the years 1927–1949.
During these years, the ILO and the Nationalist state collaborated over the promulgation of labour legislations based on ILO Labor Conventions and the uniform enforcement of Chinese labour laws throughout China. This collaborative relationship emerged from the convergence of the ILO’s mission of using universal labor standards to achieve social justice and secure lasting peace, and the Nationalist state’s goal of recovering Chinese sovereign rights from foreign powers.
This paper focuses on the 1929 Factory Act and 1930 Factory Inspection Act that the Nationalist state promulgated, along with a series of labor-related laws, and the 1930 ILO Technical Mission to China to assist in the establishment of a factory inspectorate.
Using English- and Chinese-language archival documents from the ILO, Nationalist government agencies, factory personnel files, and newspapers, this paper charts the circular paths of these two labor laws through international debates over national sovereignty and labor governance, and local debates over the protection of women workers.
Drawing on Prasenjit Duara’s theorization of the nation form, this paper aims to illustrate a global context in which the governance of labour became fundamental to the sovereignty and legitimacy of a nation-state, and the regulation of female labor became central to labor governance.
