Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/68742

This paper focuses on migrant workers in urban areas in China who suffer from pneumoconiosis, a lung disease caused by the inhalation of factory dust and PM2.5. It approaches this situation as a key aspect of the compressibility of China’s modernization, and explores how industrial society - with its production and distribution of wealth - is created in parallel with a risk-society (Beck 1986) social system that makes the mitigation and handling of risk possible. In addition, it explores the intersection between the social system afforded to these migrant workers and the level of detachment they exhibit in terms of their attitudes and risk awareness. The paper concludes that it is only possible to understand these elements when the workers are viewed as existing simultaneously but fragmentally in three periods of history: traditional society, the first modernization and second modernization.