Chinaâs rapid ascent into the status of the âworldâs factoryâ in the past three decades is well known. It is also generally known that a majority of Chinaâs factory workforce is composed of workers who have migrated from the countryside and who number some 150 million or more.
It is easy to view both the Chinese migrant workforce and the ways employers dominate migrant workers as static and unchanging, and most of the papers and books that have been published about Chinaâs migrant workers do precisely that. Because the authors did their research at one point of time, they tend to assume that the domination over workers that they viewed at the time of their research is not evolving. This book instead examines major shifts in the modes of domination exercised over these factory workers in the past three decades during Chinaâs industrialization, urbanization, and integration into global capitalism, in comparison with other countriesâspecifically Hong Kong and Vietnamâduring their own periods of industrialization. I have done so through fieldwork research in China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam for the most recent periods and by examining materials and workersâ own remembered accounts for the earlier periods.
The bulk of the research was conducted in southern China, where I conducted extensive fieldwork research into workersâ living and work conditions. Indeed, I shared a tiny apartment in south China for half a year with young migrant factory workers while engaged in research. We lived together in a burgeoning type of urban setting in south China, commonly known as the migrant worker village (mingong cun), where factories are located, migrant workers live, and power is wielded over workersâ everyday lives. To update my findings, I have returned to my field sites in China and Vietnam to do renewed interviewing up into 2018. The evolving character of the domination of workers and the changing power configurations will form the essence of my discussion. I have used ethnographic, comparative, historical, and survey research methods to identify the features of this domination.
This book engages in a discussion of class and citizenship; of life/work cycles and everyday life practices; of power, domination, tactics, and strategies; and of global and local production politics. Domination over Chinese migrant workers has two faces. On the one side, a configuration of state, capital, and local power, alongside the contestations of traditional norms and modern urban values defines an individualâs class identity, status attainment, citizenship rights, and everyday life experiences. Multifaceted state domination has varying impacts on individuals who have different positions in terms of gender, the work/life cycle, the labor market, and relations in and of production on shop floors. Global capitalism and its interactions with local production processes condition this domination.
The second face of the domination of Chinese migrant workers has to do with how they exercise their daily life tactics and strategies in tacit indirect power struggles. It is a process within which a delimited space of resistance exists. In the short run, the structure of domination is reproduced, but in the long run the status quo in the power relations is reshaped. It is, last but not least, a process in which a new working class is emerging.
As noted, to provide a comparative context, I will focus not only on the Chinese migrant working class and the power configurations which dominate these workersâ lives but also the circumstances of Hong Kong and Vietnamese workers. I spent considerable time during this past decade talking with former Hong Kong garment workers about their livelihoods and working conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, and with Vietnamese workers about their own conditions and the direct and indirect controls they experienced.
Certainly, I am not the first to investigate Chinese migrant factory workers. Given Chinaâs role as the worldâs factory, the past three decades have seen an enormous proliferation of research on these workers from the perspectives of gender (Choi & Peng, 2016; Li, 2018),1 citizenship (Chan, 2012; JakimĂłw, 2017; Smart & Smart, 2001; Solinger, 1999),2 culture (Chan, 2002; Chu, Liu, & Shi, 2015; Pun & Lu, 2010), work conditions (Chan, 2001, 2013; Yang & Gallagher, 2017), living conditions (Chan, 2002), representation (Dooling, 2017; Pun, 1999), social networks (Zhao, 2003), agency (Chan, 2010; Friedman, 2014), technology (Qiu, 2016; Peng & Choi, 2013), labor organizations (Chan, 2013; Xu & Chan, 2018; Franceschini, 2014), migration (Chan, 1998; Zhang, 2001), the labor law system (Hui, 2018; Gallagher, Giles, Park, & Wang, 2015), cross-generation differences (Pun & Lu, 2010),3 class formation (Chan & Hui, 2017; Chan & Siu, 2012; Pringle, 2017; Sargeson, 1999), and comparative labor regimes (Siu, 2015). The conventional approach to study Chinese migrant workers is the âsubjugation model.â This perceives the migrant workersâ subjugation to various structural and institutional forces, manifested in Chinaâs household registration policy, work permit system, factory sweatshops, and gender and locality/kinship discrimination. These structural and institutional forces in turn provide conditions for incubation of exploitative and suppressive shop-floor cultures in workplaces. According to this approach, the plight of Chinese migrant workers is the direct consequence of Chinaâs reintegration into the global economy and the Chinese stateâs modernization strategies to attract foreign capital investment.4
To date, Ching Kwan Leeâs book Gender and the South China Miracle remains the most influential work on the subject (Lee, 1998), in which she adopts Michael Burawoyâs production politics (Burawoy, 1985), framework to study Chinese female migrant workers in the early 1990s. She shows that in Chinaâs post-socialist economy, where local state regulation of labor relations was minimal and the factory workforce in the export sector was organized to incorporate localistic networks into the shop floor, a predominantly female workforce was influenced to think of themselves as docile âmaiden workersâ (dagongmei) so that despotic management could subjugate them via this self-identity and coercive and punitive discipline. Equally important is Pun Ngaiâs groundbreaking ethnography on Chinese female migrant workers in a Hong Kong-owned electronics factory in Shenzhen, China (Pun, 2005). Using Foucaultâs notion of âdisciplinary powerâ (Foucault, 1979), Pun convincingly shows how female workers in the 1990s were disciplined into becoming docile and efficient working subjects not only by harsh working and dormitory rules and disciplining, but also by strategies of class, wage, and ethnic differentiation as well as by sexualizing the social bodies of dagongmei.
While Lee and Punâs works can be classified as variants of the subjugation model,5 both of them do not subscribe totally to the passive imagery of Chinese migrant workers. Lee and Pun similarly note the possibilities of workersâ agency and resistance from a feminist perspective. Since the 1990s, other feminist scholars have also unpacked the migrating and work experience of Chinese female workers from a gender perspective and shed new light on migrant womenâs subjectivity, identity, agency, and home/work dilemma in post-socialist China. Several of them have also argued that female workers are not the passive victims of exploitation that is a dominant conception in the public media and in the subjugation model. They suggest that female workersâ migrating experience provides important avenues of escape for rural women suffering gender oppression and violence from the patriarchal authority of parents or in-laws.6 Although the feminist studies focus on the life experiences, subjectivity, and agency of female workers, none of them poses similar questions about male workers and how the state, capital, and patriarchal power dominate male workers. Most feminist scholars accept masculine domination as given without critically examining the changes in the gendered hierarchy within and outside workplaces in a rapidly changing Chinese society.
Many studies of Chinese migrant workers from the past three decades continue to take institutions and the labor market for granted. For example, most of the studies assume a local, homogeneous, and female-dominated migrant labor market in urban areas without attending to the consequences of the changing compositions of these labor markets. Many studies take the Chinese stateâs clientelist relationship with foreign investors for granted without placing the post-socialist Chinese state in a competitive global production context to analyze the Chinese stateâs shifting strategies to appropriate the pool of migrant labor.
On another front of scholarly inquiry, researchers employ the subjugation model to explain the record-breaking economic performance in many coastal cities in south China. Some scholars argue that the economic growth generated over the past three decades in these cities has been founded on a peculiar local urbanization and development pattern which segregates migrants from local residents, excludes migrants from local welfare, imposes a strict surveillance system on migrants, and discriminates against migrants as second-class citizens who only have temporary household resident status.7 Without ârights in the cityâ (Harvey, 2012; Mitchell, 2003), Chinese migrant workersâ subjugati...