By using the concept of "global production pressure chains", the book expounds how the global production networks affect the labour conditions in the third world factory, taking Vietnam as an example.
Under the global production pressure, Vietnamese workers are not submissive. They actively exploit different social spaces, or "structural cracks", created by different contradictory structural forces, to fight against the capital domination. It compares the role of Vietnamese and Chinese states in the labour disputes process caused by the global production chains, and contends that the former as “defensive” while the latter “aggressive” to intervene the process.
This is a comprehensive book linking dominant Western capital, Asian semi-peripheral capital, and the third world worker to illustrate how the current neo-liberal capitalist system functions in a remote Asian country for capital accumulation and the rise of worker's resistance. This is the first book to discuss the impact of Asian semi-peripheral capital on the labour standards in the global production system.