Gender, Modernity and Male Migrant Workers in China

Becoming a 'Modern' Man

Xiaodong Lin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135069735
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios étnicos

Rural-urban migration within China has transformed and reshaped rural people's lives during the past few decades, and has been one of the most visible phenomena of the economic reforms enacted since the late 1970s. Whilst Feminist scholars have addressed rural women's experience of struggle and empowerment in urban China, in contrast, research on rural men's experience of migration is a neglected area of study. In response, this book seeks to address the absence of male migrant workers as a gendered category within the current literature on rural-urban migration.

Examining Chinese male migrant workers' identity formation, this book explores their experience of rural-urban migration and their status as an emerging sector of a dislocated urban working class. It seeks to understand issues of gender and class through the rural migrant men's narratives within the context of China's modernization, and provides an in-depth analysis of how these men make sense of their new lives in the rapidly modernizing, post-Mao China with its emphasis on progress and development. Further, this book uses the men's own narratives to challenge the elite assumption that rural men's low status is a result of their failure to adopt a modern urban identity and lifestyle. Drawing on interviews with 28 male rural migrants, Xiaodong Lin unpacks the gender politics of Chinese men and masculinities, and in turn contributes to a greater understanding of global masculinities in an international context.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese culture and society, gender studies, migration studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Shortlisted for this year's BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

1 Introduction

Background of the book

In contemporary China, a key element of the changing social structure has been the major impact of the new market economy as part of the economic reforms of the late 1970s. This was initiated by the central government’s modernization project, named as ‘reform and opening up’. Rural–urban labour migration is one of the most visible phenomena of the economic reforms, in terms of urbanization and industrialization, offering rural people opportunities to work in non-agricultural sectors, and to leave the rural household, so as to generate income and thus overcome poverty. It has been a remarkable intervention in both developing urban industrialization and rural household economic development and modernization. In response, studies on Chinese rural–urban labour migration have focused on the macro level of economic, social and political structures; for instance, many studies have addressed the household registration system accompanying the rural/urban division and social inequality.

I grew up as part of a generation at the beginning of the Chinese government’s modernization project. It was a time of rapid social, cultural and economic transformations. These transformations have taken place across public and private domains of ordinary Chinese people’s lives. At a personal level, we experienced a wide range of changes in our lives that included: a move from buying limited daily necessities using government-issued ration coupons to choosing a variety of commodities at large shopping malls; having increasing access to western popular culture, listening to Westlife and the Backstreet Boys when we were teenagers; witnessing local and overseas entrepreneurs setting up new businesses in the city, alongside a fast-changing landscape with economic growth enabling the building of skyscrapers in the city centre. Most significantly, the increasing ownership of automobiles replaced the stereotypical images of Chinese cities in the western media with thousands of bicycles on the streets. At an institutional level, ‘meeting the west’, in terms of development has become a central aim of the government. Modernization in terms of economic prosperity has been unprecedented in the last few decades. Within such a fast-changing socio-economic context, China has experienced major population movement, with thousands of rural people moving to work in the cities of the southern provinces – including the city in which this study is located, Shantou.¹ In so doing, they were taking part in the modernization project, while seeking to ‘have a better life’ and to ‘make their fortune’. This group of people is what the government describes as ‘peasant workers’, or ‘nong min gong’ in Chinese. The term mainly refers to those people whose household registry is classified as agricultural, moving from rural villages to work in non-agricultural labour markets in economically developed urban regions (Chinese State Council, 2006a, 2006b).

Rural–urban migration has become a central government issue in its development plans, as a key part of a policy to establish a ‘harmonious society’² (

, hè xié shè huì). In order to achieve this, the government needs to resolve the material conditions of inequality and the attendant social tensions resulting from the post-Mao economic and social development. However, within this context, public representations of peasant workers are highly contradictory. On the one hand, there are narratives in the media describing these migrants as a potential threat or national burden to the social order of the new cities.³ On the other hand, there are political representations of peasant workers that portray them as the heroes of China’s modernization project. Meanwhile, there is also, within the government and media narratives, concern and sympathy for migrants as victims of discrimination and social injustice in urban areas. However, it is important to stress that the dominant image – the ‘preferred reading’ in Stuart Hall’s (1980) terms – that circulates across the society is that peasant workers constitute a major problem in modern cities. Such representations of peasant workers resonated with my experience of growing up in China. I was told when I was a child to keep a distance from peasant workers. There are still some parts of the small city of Shantou to which I have never been, as I was warned that migrants lived in such areas and it was not safe to go. These childhood memories initially informed my methodological approach.

The book was initially informed by the cultural habitus of my earlier life, that is, I began by sharing some common public stereotypes about these migrant men as a problematic working class group. It is explicitly located within the social and cultural conditions emerging from China’s economic reform and modernization. From a western perspective, it is difficult to understand the dramatic shift in the representation of these men: from heroic peasant during the Mao period to current modernization ‘loser’ in the post-Mao era. There is a need to understand how peasant workers make sense of their new social position and experience the process of rural–urban migration, in terms of their constrained and creative responses in a transitional modern globally-inflected Chinese society. Therefore, it is important to critically move beyond the assumption of definitions that suggest that these rural men’s low status is a result of their continuing to occupy a traditional cultural habitus, thus failing to take up a modern urban identity and lifestyle. In turn, such a position assumes that tradition and modernity exist in an oppositional logic, with the former being displaced by the latter. We can place this position within a dominant understanding of Chinese modernization and modernity, as ‘catching up with the west’.

All starts from here: the pursuit of modernization in China

Modernization is one of the most important concepts in Chinese history, which political leaders and academic elites have been dedicated to pursuing for centuries. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the discourse of western modernity was introduced into China, alongside the invasion of western imperial forces. While western imperialists were materially exploiting the old dynasty, including signing a number of unequal treaties with the Chinese authorities, they also introduced into this old empire the western notion of modernity with advanced technology and scientific thinking. Western modernity was perceived by some Chinese officials and intellectuals in positive terms as an important resource for the nation’s own modernization. Since the May 4th movement in 1919, Chinese people, particularly young elite intellectuals and politicians have discussed what China could learn from the western enlightenment. Critiques of Chinese tradition and established beliefs were overwhelming. Traditional values, such as Confucianism in particular, became a target for Chinese intellectual criticism to justify the appropriation of adapting the advanced western model of modernity in terms of liberty and democracy into China. Modernization is usually associated with development and progress, aiming to ‘meet the west’ or to ‘catch up with the west’. Chinese modernization history can also be seen as part of western colonization history. Within a global context, an uneven world order historically enabled western modernization, initially in Western Europe, to be seen as the default model for non-western countries to pursue. Paul Gilroy (1993) criticizes the universality of Eurocentric modernity, arguing for a notion of modernities in non-western societies. Similar notions include second modernity (Beck and Lao, 2005), multiple modernities (Eisenstadt, 1999), alternative modernity (Ong, 1997) or ‘other modernities’ (Rofel, 1999). For theorists such as Gilroy (1993), traditional societies including those within Africa had already experienced modernity and civilization before the introduction of the western model. This chapter does not set out to trace in detail the history of Chinese modernization since the twentieth century, which has already been well documented (see Rofel, 1999; Dirlik, 1989). As an introduction to the book, this chapter aims to provide a socio-economic and historical background within which this study is located, seeking to problematize the issue of Chinese neoliberal modernization and its related issue of class formation currently discussed within the academy. Importantly, it is argued that an exploration of peasant workers’ migration provides a lens through which to problematize the modernization project and to enable a more comprehensive and critical understanding of modernity and the formation of contemporary Chinese society in ‘new times’. Equally important, masculinity also provides a lens that serves to challenge the underconceptualized understanding of the gendering of the modernization project.

Modernization in ‘new times’

In more recent Chinese history, the socialist revolution in terms of the nation-building of the People’s Republic of China is seen as one of the major modernization projects in the twentieth century. It was also accompanied by establishing modernity with ‘Chinese characteristics’, while deploying a Marxist–Leninist communist ideology, commonly understood as ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ or ‘Mao’s Marxism’ (Schwartz, 1965; Knight, 1986). Founded in 1949 by Mao Zedong, a Marxist revolutionary leader, the new China aimed to build an independent country that would challenge western power (Dirlik, 1983) and most importantly, internally, to overthrow the ‘three mountains’⁴ on the Chinese people’s back and ‘class antagonism’ (Renwick and Cao, 1999:123). The main ideologies in this new-founded socialist state were anti-imperialism, anti-feudalism and anti-capitalism, which positioned new China as a more advanced nation state to her counterparts in Europe (Dirlik, 1989). Socialist new China was dedicated to building an ideal society with equal opportunity and distribution, while at the same time, bypassing the stage of primitive capital accumulation. Mao’s idea of communism was that the Chinese economy was centrally-planned and under the administration of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese people’s lives were regulated by the central communist government and materials were equally distributed to its people under the one-party administration. However, as a result of inefficient production, an uncompetitive economy, plus the great famine⁵ between the late 1950s and 1960s, followed by the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s–1970s, China’s economy remained depressed and a large proportion of the population continued to live in poverty. Meanwhile, the Chinese socialist revolution was also seen as an alternative modernity to western capitalist modernity (Liu, 1996:198), with the former emphasizing a spiritual cultural revolution, even though the ‘reality’ of poverty was evident across the country on a large scale.

Within the discourse of this new socialist modernization,⁶ the Chinese government prioritized its economic development by opening its socialist market to the outside world, attracting foreign direct investment, setting up special economic zones in the coastline cities with distinctive tax and economic policies, encouraging private businesses and stimulating competition in the market in order to boost economic growth. At the same time, Deng’s liberal economic policy prioritized certain regions, mainly in the south east, to take the lead in achieving economic development. He justified this uneven regional development in terms of allowing ‘some people to get rich first and ultimately there will be common prosperity’ (

) (see Fan, 2006), which has helped to change Chinese people’s understanding of modernization from revolution and class struggle in the Mao period to economic development and growth in the post-Mao period.

Meanwhile, such an economic policy has also shifted the ideology of this socialist country from an emphasis on a spiritual position that was highly advocated by Mao to a more material-based approach, although the government always encompasses both in its policy making. The modernization process in the past 30 years witnessed unprecedented social and economic changes with the emergence of the western capitalist market economy in China enabling its integration into the world order. China started to ‘progress’ from a traditional agrarian nation to a modern industrial nation with its market-oriented economy. Featherstone (1995:87) maintains that ‘the move from traditional to modern societies was seen as accountable in terms of a range of specific processes: industrialization, urbanization, commodification, rationalization, differentiation, bureaucratization, the expansion of the division of labour, the growth of individualism and state formation processes’. All these characteristics of modernization have been taking place over the last 30 years in China. At the same time, they have also gradually changed the image of China from an isolated obscure country to an open and internationally recognized society in the global capitalist community (Dirlik, 2003, 2004), aiming for progress and development.

Globalization and the market economy have enabled China to gain access to the global market, to erase its ‘luohou’ (backward) history, and to build up an advanced nation state similar to western developed countries. Indeed, China’s rapid transformation has narrowed the gap with the western world through impressive economic development and other social and cultural spectacles, such as the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and Expo Shanghai in 2010. Communication in terms of social, cultural and economic encounters have been opened up within the global community that generates many similarities between China and the west in terms of a model of development. Modernity⁷ and globalization cannot be separated since a consequence of western colonial history is that it has enabled the western version of modernity to be universally recognized. Within the discourse of globalization, which is defined by Giddens (1990:64), ‘as the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa’, it is rather easy to draw contradictory conclusions, such as the threat of Chinese nationalism with the emergence of Chineseness, China’s westernization⁸ or China as a hybrid nation embracing global information and exchange with its own culture. One’s conclusion depends on whether one either emphasizes the internal power of Chinese culture as the hegemonic force of Chinese nationalism or the external force of western culture and its impact on Chinese society in the process of globalization. For Robertson (1995:26–7), Giddens’ account of globalization in terms of an ‘action–reaction’ relationship between the local and the global does not fully capture the complex interrelationship between the two.

For example, as is finely illustrated in the empirical data in the following chapters, the material reality in contemporary China is more complex and cannot simply be read off by such western/Chinese or global/Chinese dichotomies within the discourse of globalization, as the division is conditional and blurred. And more importantly, the relations between the local and the global are dialectically interconnected and integrated. Such a complex reality also raises discussions about China’s entry into postmodernity (Dirlik and Zhang, 2000; Liu, 2004) with the emerging conditions of social economic change, an increasing western style consumerism and diverse popular cultures, alongside the local Chinese culture. Dirlik and Zhang (2000) highlight the complex changes and intercommunication between China and the global economy:

On the one hand, it exposes the Chinese market and the realm of daily life to global capital and to international fashions and ideologies…. On the other hand, the world market’s spread into China, and China’s willing entry into it, enables Chinese consumers to encounter a world of difference, unevenness, inequality, and hierarchy, often delineated in terms of nation-state borders.

(Dirlik and Zhang, 2000:6)

A focus on globalization has lead to increasing discussion about the progress of the neoliberal modernization project currently operating within China.

Exploring and contesting modernization in post-Mao China

China’s current market economy, or neoliberal modernization project, is recognized by some modernist scholars as a westernization or capitalization process (Guthrie, 2008), as its market economy corresponds with the development of western capitalist societies in contributing to the global capitalist economy. However, within the ‘socialist market economy’ launched by Deng Xiaoping, there are various internal tensions and conflicts, since the capitalist market economy operates alongside another element of the modernization project, that of socialism with Chinese characteristics. Within this context, China’s path to modernization and the issue of modernity have been highly contested, experiencing controversies from the introduction of economic reform in the late 1970s, especially around the emerging neoliberal⁹ model of development and its coexistence with a socialist national identity of anti-capitalism. Ong (1997) maintains that China encounters a crisis of cultural identity with its integration into the global market and the influence of capitalism in this socialist state. While western societies are conscious of the emergence of China’s rising power in the international arena as a threat to their hegemonic position, there appears to be little awareness or a deliberate attempt to ignore that China’s current modernization project is never as smooth as it seems to be through simply concentrating on its highly visible rapid economic growth. Internal explorations of and debates about a suitable modernization model for China are ongoing within the new socialist market economy, in terms of evaluating and justifying its adoption of western liberalism of the free market in relation to an understanding of Chinese modernity.

The emergence of Chinese neoliberal modernization

Chinese neoliberal modernization (Harvey, 2005) has been theoretically supported from the beginning of the transition period from a planned economy to a market-oriented economy. Intellectual discussions exploring and explaining the transformations that have taken place in Chinese society have attempted to provide theoretical frameworks for the building of a modernized society by embracing western modernization theory and promoting the importance of primitive capital accumulation before achieving the ultimate socialist aim of common prosperity. Thinking about the relation between western modernity and Chinese culture dominated that period. There were nationalists who supported the idea of localism as a rejection of western capitalist moderniz...