In this Special Issue of Asian Labour Update entitled ‘Pandemic, Crisis, and the Working Class on the Continent of Labour’ we present a collection of writings from around the Asia region that document how the COVID-19 pandemic impacted workers during the outset in 2020. The writings contained in this issue come from a variety of industries, including healthcare, platform economy, domestic work, garment, forest produce collectors, and more.
Since China first commenced with its reform and open policy in 1979, it has undergone a gradual process of economic change, resulting in dramatic transformations domestically for the lives of Chinese people, at the same time that such changes have resulted in China having become a crucial component of the global capitalist economy. As the Chinese government pursued policies which encouraged FDI to begin to pour into China, particularly from the early 1990s, China transformed itself into the ‘world’s factory’ built largely on the exploitation of Chinese migrant labour.
Since 2011, Myanmar has been one of the main countries to draw international attention. Before that year, international news coverage on the country was mostly related to oppression and political turmoil caused by military dictatorship. However, after 2011, the reasons were quite different. Several political and legal reforms brought by the civilian-led government, although backed by the military group, have made a drastic shift of international climate towards the country.