The papers examine, in chronological order, how the implications of Chinese workers’ historical agency extended beyond China’s national borders. Selda Altan traces the emergence of this global agency to the age of Euro-American colonialism when the competing colonial powers maintained their economies with racialized Chinese (and Asian) labor after the abolition of slavery. She argues that nineteenth-century labor migrations set the stage for the rise of the Chinese communist movement in the 1920s by turning Chinese laborers into a global working class. Jennifer Yip examines the role of civilian menial labor in China’s resistance against Japanese occupation in 1937–1945. Yip demonstrates how both the Nationalists and Communists used modern notions of nationalism, citizenship, and revolution to describe their labor regimes even while such mobilization carried coercive and exploitative characteristics. Joshua Howard turns to workers’ authentic voices in the same period by bringing worker letters published in the Communist newspaper New China Daily to our attention. The workers’ use of a moral class discourse against the government and factory authorities helped them develop class consciousness, empowering the workers against capitalists and buttressing their struggles in the postwar period. Finally, Zhang Yueran’s paper reiterates the panel’s premise of worker agency by examining the Chinese Communist Party’s experimentation with workplace democracy in the late 1970s and early 1980s as the country’s demand for production increased exponentially with the integration into the global economy. While party leaders expected to increase productivity, China’s industrial workers maneuvered this top-down policy to demand better welfare systems. Zhang sees the failure of workplace democracy initiatives as an outcome of the socialist political economy’s inherent conflicts, including the one between “producing” and “living.” Finally, Gail Hershatter will comment on the continuities and discontinuities of Chinese labor struggles and their significance in reinterpreting the history of marginalized groups and radical movements in the twentieth century.