Beyond Tears and Laughter

Gender, Migration, and the Service Sector in China

Yang Shen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9789811358166
• eBook ISBN: 9789811358173
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Labour Economics
• Index: Economics

This book explores the experience of China's migrant labourers in Shanghai from anthropological, and gendered analyses, offering extraordinary insights into the life-world of the marginalized people. China has hundreds of millions of internal migrants coming from the countryside to the big cities in search of fame, fortune, or just a living. The author also examines the gender dynamics at work, in intimacy and leisure of this marginalized, yet huge population. With an in-depth and multidisciplinary examination of the experience of restaurant workers in Shanghai, this book sheds humanising new light on the experience of the megacity from the inside and will be of direct value to policymakers, demographers, feminist scholars, anthropologists, sociologists, and responsible citizens.

© The Author(s) 2019

Yang ShenBeyond Tears and LaughterNew Perspectives on Chinese Politics and Societyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5817-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector

Yang Shen¹

(1)

Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China

Yang Shen

End Abstract

A wave of suicides occurred in Foxconn factory plants across China in 2010, during which 14 workers aged 18–25 died (Lau, 2010). The Foxconn incidents drew my attention to rural migrant workers and motivated me to carry out research on migrant workers. On the theoretical level, I was interested in finding out everyday operation of gender and class. On the personal level, I intended to document experiences of the marginalised groups in Shanghai, the richest city in China.

In this book, rural migrant workers (sometimes abbreviated to migrant workers) refer to those who hold rural hukou and do non-agricultural entry-level work in places other than where their hukou is registered. Hukou refers to the household registration system in China that categorises citizens as either agricultural residents or non-agricultural residents.¹ It requires every Chinese citizen to be recorded with the registration authority at birth.

Prior scholarship has explored migrant women in manufacturing such as Lee’s (1998) and Pun’s (2005) pioneering work on factory girls in Guangdong province. In this book, I aim to develop a deeper understanding of rural migrant workers’ lives in the service sector. Despite the fact that 43.5 per cent of workers in China are now working in the service sector (NBS, 2017a), their life experiences are under-represented.

I began to work as a waitress of a chain restaurant in Shanghai. I met Yong and Fengyu as soon as I started my work. Yong was born in rural Anhui province in 1985. After dropping out of junior high school, he migrated to Shanghai, working as a pantry helper, delivering dishes from kitchens to dining areas in the Meteor restaurant (pseudonym of the restaurant where I did fieldwork). When I first met him in 2012, he was 27 years old and was extremely eager to find a wife. Twenty-seven might be an age still too young for a middle-class man in Shanghai to ever consider marriage, whereas it becomes a disadvantage for rural men like Yong to find a wife. For rural migrant men, age increase is not necessarily in tandem with the growth of professional experiences and wealth; their ‘marriageability’ probably decreases with age. Each time Yong’s parents met him, they nagged that he should get married as soon as possible, which made him very anxious. He worked at Meteor in the hope of finding a wife. Considering women are usually overrepresented in the service sectors, he believed that his chance to find a waitress to be his wife was relatively high. However, after more than five years of non-stop searching, he was still not able to find a wife. To make things worse, waitresses exhibited uncooperative attitudes towards him, which made his work difficult. He thought about quitting the job many times but had no idea where to go.

Fengyu was born in rural Anhui as well. She worked at Meteor for two years before giving birth to a son. Not long after giving birth, she resumed her job at Meteor in order to provide financial resources for her family. She did not think it was a desirable job—a lot of unpleasant incidents occurred when serving local customers. One day a male customer showed superiority to her: ‘If we hadn’t come to this restaurant, you would have been planting crops and pasturing cattle.’ She hit back, ‘If we hadn’t come, you would have been eating shit!’

Fengyu, like many other waitresses—and even pantry helpers themselves—considered being a pantry helper as hopeless and unpromising. According to Yong, Fengyu’s attitude towards male pantry helpers is indifferent and hostile. Waitresses are supposed to be taking dishes from pantry helpers and delivering them to customers as soon as they can. But Yong told me that, sometimes, waitresses like Fengyu just ignored the male pantry helpers. They had to stand holding dishes while the waitresses chatted. The negative perceptions of the pantry helpers led to waitresses’ uncooperative behaviour at work. Waitresses’ discrimination rendered it impossible for Yong to find a wife in the restaurant.

* * *

Fengyu and Yong dropped out of middle school and migrated from rural Anhui Province to Shanghai, following their families. For the past 40 years, numerous young migrant workers follow this trajectory. By the end of 2017, China had 171.85 million migrant workers holding rural hukou but doing non-farm work outside their registered hometowns or home villages, accounting for 12.4 per cent of the whole population (NBS, 2018).

Migration results from various intertwined factors, including household registration system reform (Huang & Zhan, 2005; The State Council, 2014), income disparity between urban and rural areas, increased demand for an expanded labour force in cities, rural land reclassification (Song, 2009; Su, 2007; Yang, 2006; Yang & Shi, 2006), and the changing aspirations of peasants (Gaetano, 2004; Li, 2004; Yan, 2008). Among these reasons, the income gap is a direct reason that stimulates their migration. Take Shanghai and Anhui for example, the annual disposable income of urban households in Shanghai (57,691.7 yuan) was the highest among all the regions in 2016 (NBS, 2017b), 4.9 times the net income of rural households (11,720.5 yuan) in Anhui province (NBS, 2017c). More than 50 per cent of the workers in the Meteor Restaurant came from Anhui Province, particularly from rural Bengbu, Liu’an and Ma’anshan, as demonstrated in Fig. 1.1. Shanghai is an attractive destination for Anhui rural workers partly because of the availability of job opportunities and better earning potentials and partly because of geographical proximity.

Fig. 1.1

Map of Shanghai and Anhui. Source: Mr Wei Yuan made the map for the book

China’s strong economic growth over the last four decades has followed a pro-urban developmental model in favour of metropolitans and urban residents. The rapid growth would not have been possible without high levels of internal migration from the relatively low-income rural regions to the booming cities and industrial regions. Migrant workers from rural areas make a vital contribution to China’s economic growth. This growth has led to rising prosperity and declining poverty, but also to rising social and spatial inequality. Rural migrants’ experiences in Shanghai reflect the social and spatial inequality. The formation of a new urban underclass is a consequence of the massive scale of migration. In this book, I aim to illuminate how the shift in location has affected migrants’ lives in the transformation of post-reform China. I address a part of the service sector and highlight both women and men’s experiences in order to analyse the significance of gender alongside social class and hukou status as markers of social division in China. By studying restaurant workers in Shanghai, the book aims to show how a group of people who have played a major role in the transformation of China have experienced this transformation in their own ways.

Intersectionality of Gender, Class and Hukou

The book adopts an intersectional approach to examine social inequality. Intersectionality emerged in the late 1980s in an attempt to address the complexity of multiple forms of discrimination and social inequality (Cho, Crenshaw, & McCall, 2013). Since then it has been adopted across disciplines and has also inspired social movements outside academia. Intersectionality can refer to ‘the interaction between gender, race, and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements, and cultural ideologies and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power’ (Davis, 2008, p. 68). The question of whether intersectionality is an epistemology, a theory or a methodology is still controversial (ibid., p. 69). It may be more fruitful to address ‘what intersectionality does rather than what intersectionality is’ (Cho et al., 2013, p. 795). It provides a unique way to think about ‘the problem of sameness and difference and its relation to power’ (ibid., p. 795).

According to McCall (2005), the categorisation of identities such as gender, race and class is an inadequate but necessary approach to address social inequality. It is inadequate in that categorisations simplify social phenomena, and social inequality may be reinforced through the iteration of identities/symbols in categories; but it is necessary because categories are useful to identify social inequality and can be strategically used for political purposes.

In this book, the intersectional approach assists me in three ways, which serves as an epistemology and a methodology as well as a theory. First, it serves to justify the shift from a focus on women to research on disadvantaged people, including disadvantaged men. Davis (2008) considered that intersectionality is about the ‘the acknowledgement of differences among women’ (p. 71). While Young (2011) argues that intersectionality needs to include additional group representation—not only for women, but also for members of other disadvantaged groups. Although it is important to address the diversity of women, it would be remiss not to extend this analysis to men.

Second, intersectionality helps me understand how multiple characteristics such as gender, class, hukou, age and so on affect the production of knowledge, which es...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introducing Migration, Gender and the Service Sector
• 2. Gendered Subjectivities in a Patriarchal China
• 3. Working in a Gendered, Feminised and Hierarchical Workplace
• 4. The Short-Lived Jobs: From Beginning to End
• 5. Negotiating Intimacy: Obedience, Compromise and Resistance
• 6. Crafting a Modern Person via Consumption? Women and Men in Leisure Activities
• 7. Unpacking the Complexity of Gender, Class and Hukou
• Back Matter