Enough thought for interests of workers

History can never be reversed, but we sometimes need to look back in time to get a perspective for a solution to today's problems. That explains why history has been described in China as a mirror, which can reflect what we can hardly make sense of at present.

Film director Jia Zhangke's recent book Interviews of Chinese Workers can serve as such a mirror, from which we get a glimpse of the changes that Chinese workers as a whole have undergone in the past decades. Thanks to its truthfulness and its vivid description of individual workers' life of change, it has been selected by Internet portal sina.com as one of 10 best books of the first six months in 2009.

In this country's revolutionary shift from a planned economy to a market one in the past three decades, there has been a dramatic change in the social status of workers.