Precarious knowledge workers in China’s social transformation—a study of editors in the Chinese publishing industry

Contributing to contemporary studies on knowledge workers, this paper aims to conceptualize the four critical challenges for editors in the Chinese publishing industry under the framework of political economy. These challenges, as a result of fundamental social changes, including technological, political and economic ones, and, most importantly, changes in class relations and power dynamics are the following: challenges related to technological change, challenges of how to follow the political principle in the media marketization process, challenges brought about by the smashing of the work-unit system, and challenges resulting from internal divisions within knowledge workers. Moreover, by incorporating findings discovered in the case studies of two publishing houses in Shanghai, this paper addresses the wider social relationship between communication and the institutional power structure in which editors, and knowledge workers in general, are situated.