Abstract
Manning the Unmanned Machines: Automation, Labor Narratives, and the Meanings of Work in Late Twentieth-Century Hong Kong and South China reconceptualizes “automation” in Hong Kong and South China during the two regions’ rapid industrialization from the 1950s through the 1990s. This period was marked by a sheer fantasy around automation that far exceeded its actual technological development. This project reads worker literature and culture as a narrative intervention into that fantasy, revealing the complexities obscured by the industrial campaign of automation. The corpus includes a garment worker’s novel series, workplace fiction by a quality-control officer, epistolary exchanges involving a factory worker who later became a cultural icon, and a collection of Cantonese factory films. Written by factory workers and/or circulated widely within working-class communities, these works took up and reworked the language of automation. The analysis centers on four technical objects at the heart of automation hype: the spindle, the sewing machine, the assembly line, and the defect tag. By attending to how these objects are represented in worker literature and film, and by reading these representations against industrial discourse (as shown in industrial advertisements, trade bulletins, and commercial newspapers), this project foregrounds the tensions between the two discourses. Worker literature and film foreground the skills and effort required of factory workers to operate the so-called “automatic” machinery, their sensorial experiences of time and space around the continuous operation of machines, their problematization of identities imposed by their jobs, and their attempts to imagine possibilities beyond them. In doing so, these texts resist the manufacturing industry’s campaigns for “unmanned factories,” which purported to have already rendered workers obsolete. This resistance, however, is deeply ambivalent. In asserting workers’ agency within mechanized production, these works also reproduce some of the industry’s imperatives that compel workers to work more, work harder, and work more efficiently. The project thus reframes automation as a contested process of human adaptation and agency. This dissertation is grounded in the “Ironies of Automation,” one of the most influential analytical frameworks in human-machine interaction research. The framework captures a paradox that, as technological systems become more automated, they rely more heavily on human operators for monitoring and emergencies. Its account of how automation intensifies skill requirements, workload, and responsibility provides a useful framework for analyzing the narratives discussed here. At the same time, because the concept of the human in the framework remains abstract, the analysis also turns to Marxist and Marxist-feminist theories of labor, including the work of Paolo Virno, Carlo Vercellone, Judy Wajcman, and Kathi Weeks, to develop a more historical, embodied, and gendered understanding of human labor. This project pushes beyond the conventional boundaries of literary research. Its interdisciplinary approach complements existing histories of technology that focus on a single social group’s engagement with technological change. By placing workers’ perspectives alongside those of industrialists, the project shows that ideas about automation developed through their interaction. Industrialists’ ideas of automation were shaped not only by technological change, but also by the ways workers adapted to and worked with machines in everyday life. Ultimately, the dissertation shows how competing visions of automation emerged through struggle and how that struggle continues to shape the way technology is understood today.
Committee Chair
Lingchei Letty Chen
Committee Members
Ban Wang; Chris A. Eng; Diane Wei Lewis; Uluğ Kuzuoğlu
Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Author's Department
Chinese Language & Literature
Document Type
Dissertation
Date of Award
8-13-2026
Language
English (en)
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7936/x2zh-4712
Recommended Citation
Chow, Ki, "Manning the Unmanned Machines: Automation, Labor Narratives, and the Meanings of Work in Late Twentieth-Century Hong Kong and South China" (2026). Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations. 3865.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.7936/x2zh-4712