Technomobility in China

Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones

Cara Wallis

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781479866083
• eBook ISBN: 9780814795279
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Winner of the 2014 Bonnie Ritter Book Award

Winner of the 2013 James W. Carey Media Research Award


As unprecedented waves of young, rural women journey to cities in China, not only to work, but also to “see the world” and gain some autonomy, they regularly face significant institutional obstacles as well as deep-seated anti-rural prejudices. Based on immersive fieldwork, Cara Wallis provides an intimate portrait of the social, cultural, and economic implications of mobile communication for a group of young women engaged in unskilled service work in Beijing, where they live and work for indefinite periods of time.





While simultaneously situating her work within the fields of feminist studies, technology studies, and communication theory, Wallis explores the way in which the cell phone has been integrated into the transforming social structures and practices of contemporary China, and the ways in which mobile technology enables rural young women—a population that has been traditionally marginalized and deemed as “backward” and “other”—to participate in and create culture, allowing them to perform a modern, rural-urban identity. In this theoretically rich and empirically grounded analysis, Wallis provides original insight into the co-construction of technology and subjectivity as well as the multiple forces that shape contemporary China.

1

Market Reforms, Global Linkages, and (Dis) continuity in Post-Socialist China

In October 2008, a graphic appeared in an online KDS forum populated mostly by Shanghai residents. Utilizing the international symbol for “prohibited,” it featured several words and abbreviations in both English and Chinese enclosed in a red circle with a red slash across it (see figure 2). In the center of the circle were the letters WDR. Above WDR a phoenix hovered over Chinese characters that read “Phoenix Man” (fenghuangnan), and inside the circle were also the phrases “New Shanghai Man” and “Western Digital Man.” For those familiar with China’s online realm, “no WDR” was easily understood as “no waidiren,” or “no outsiders,” and referred more specifically to rural-to-urban migrant workers in China’s cities. “Phoenix Man” and “New Shanghai Man” were variations on the same implied meaning.¹

This graphic—expressing the common prejudice against migrant workers not only in Shanghai, but also in urban areas across China—could have gone the way of much Internet content; that is, it might have generated a few comments and then quickly been forgotten. As is so often the case in Chinese cyberspace, however, it went viral after it was reposted on Tianya.cn, one of the most popular online forums in China, with a message criticizing the xenophobia of Shanghainese.² And again as is so often the case, once it caught the attention of the larger body of China’s “netizens,” it set off a firestorm of opinions and discussion. Some posters chastised the “arrogant” and prejudiced Shanghainese and ridiculed the perceived deficiencies in the city’s men and women. Several were critical more generally of anyone who viewed outsiders (i.e., migrant workers) as stealing urban jobs while draining city resources. Many others, however, agreed with the sentiments expressed in the graphic and blamed migrant workers for crowded cities and high crime rates.

Fig. 2. No waidiren (no outsiders).

In that this online debate directly and indirectly raised numerous contentious issues—the importance in China of place/locality for notions of belonging and exclusion; the gaps between urban and rural residents; the discriminatory nature of China’s hukou (household registration system); and related notions of culture/education (wenhua), class, gender, and wealth—it presents a microcosm of the larger socio-cultural context of contemporary China. With forum participants referring to issues of development and modernization along with social ills like prostitution and corruption, their comments also allude to the achievements and challenges of a society that is still in the midst of a profound transformation. The fact that this debate—and many others like it³—took place online is also significant, for it is representative of China’s remarkable growth in telecommunications in the last few decades: the nation’s numbers of Internet users and mobile phone subscribers are the largest in the world and continue to grow. Finally, just as this online discussion reveals ruptures along a local/outsider, or urban-rural demarcation, it is indicative of the way such divides have been exacerbated by China’s reform policies of the last three decades.

This chapter highlights key disjunctures and continuities that constitute the assemblage of post-socialist China in order to provide a backdrop for understanding young rural-to-urban migrant women’s engagement with mobile technologies. Over thirty years ago the Chinese government embarked on a course of development that unleashed processes of change, the consequences of which nobody, either inside China or “China watchers” outside the country, could have predicted. To jumpstart a stagnant economy and make a clear break with the Maoist past, in 1978 the Chinese leadership, under the direction of Deng Xiaoping, boldly embarked on a program of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang). Through advancing the “four modernizations” (in industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense), eliminating class labels and class struggle, and integrating China into the global economy, the government sought to bring stability and prosperity to a nation still recovering from the economic, political, and social upheaval wrought by the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).⁴

The last few decades have thus seen a shift from a planned economy emphasizing heavy industry to a market economy—or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—based on export processing (primarily centered in “Special Economic Zones” [SEZs] around China’s eastern coastal areas), the growth of the domestic service sector, and consumerism as a way of life. The marketization of China’s economy and its overall course of development have followed a teleology—where “some must get rich first and then others will follow”—that has emphasized “catching up” with other industrialized nations and reclaiming China’s rightful place on the world stage. It has also necessitated a profound ideological reconfiguration and repudiation of Maoist frugality and austerity, perhaps summed up most succinctly in the famous statement attributed to Deng Xiaoping, “To get rich is glorious” (zhi fu guang rong).⁵ Certainly many Chinese have benefited materially from the changes brought about by the reforms and China’s entry into the global market economy. The nation’s growing urban middle class now has access to new housing with modern amenities, automobiles, myriad forms of leisure and entertainment, and the latest technological devices. However, development has been extremely uneven, and not everyone has benefited equally from these economic, societal, and technological transformations.

To explore the differential manner in which China’s citizens have experienced the reforms, in the following discussion I begin with an overview of the origins and outcomes of China’s hukou. I show how current economic policies favoring the cities and coastal areas as China has sought to “link tracks with the rest of the world” (yu shijie jiegui) have worked in tandem with the hukou policy effectively to produce a society divided between the urban and rural areas. Next, I explore the phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration in China with an emphasis on the characteristics, material circumstances, and desires of young female migrants, or dagongmei, as well as the way China’s suzhi, or “quality,” discourse positions female migrants and rural areas as backward while upholding China’s urban centers as the source of modernity and progress. I then examine two “revolutions” in China: the urban consumer revolution, which has been strongly articulated to essentialist notions of gender and distinct social strata, and the explosive growth of telecommunications, in particular of mobile phones. Though I separate all of these phenomena for analytical purposes, they have emerged from interwoven processes, and as they intersect with notions of gender, class, and place, they are constitutive of the mobile phone assemblage of young rural-to-urban migrant women.

Hukou and the Urban-Rural Divide

China’s hukou has been likened to a “caste-like” system that has created severe social stratification in the People’s Republic of China.⁶ Though the hukou policy has roots in Imperial China’s baojia system—which was designed as a method of social control and taxation—its particular manifestation during the Mao era created an extremely modern and powerful mechanism of population management and organization.⁷ Today, despite economic liberalization and social transformations that have substantially weakened the hukou as a method for regulating people’s mobility, the household registration system still has profound effects in determining one’s life possibilities.

Hukou Policy under Mao

In the early years of the People’s Republic, as urban overcrowding, unemployment, and food shortages prompted fears of social instability, in 1955 the government issued a directive that categorized people as belonging to either “agricultural” (farmer/peasant) or “non-agricultural” (worker) households, according to whether they lived in a rural or urban area and regardless of whether some designated as “peasants” were not actually engaged in agricultural work. In the countryside the government also hastened collectivization in order to increase agricultural productivity, while Mao’s development strategy emphasized urban industrialization.⁸ In 1958, with the “Regulations on Hukou Registration in the People’s Republic of China,” migration policies were further restricted, and control was centralized in the urban Public Security Bureau (PSB). These regulations solidified the hukou policy and dictated that all citizens were for the most part destined to live their lives in their designated hukou location. Household registration was subsequently established at birth, and changes in residence were strictly controlled. Institutionalized separation between rural and urban areas was thus solidified and with few exceptions would remain intact for the next two decades.⁹

During the Mao era, enforcement of the hukou system was possible due to a centrally planned economy and what Dorothy Solinger has referred to as the “urban public goods regime” whereby urban residents—the vaunted “workers”—were entitled to a range of social welfare benefits such as education, healthcare, employment, and housing allocated through their state work unit (danwei).¹⁰ They also received food ration tickets based on their possession of an urban hukou. In contrast, rural residents—“peasant farmers”—were denied this “iron rice bowl” and were supposed to be self-sufficient through the rural agricultural cooperatives. In addition to providing grain for themselves, rural residents also had to produce food for people living in cities. Because an urban household registration guaranteed such a wide range of state-provided benefits, it was associated with a better material standard of living and an exclusive, privileged status. Thus, Zhang Li argues that the hukou should not be seen only “as a system of population management and material redistribution but rather a badge of citizenship with profound social, cultural, and political implications for the lives of Chinese people.”¹¹

Though Mao’s revolution was predicated on peasant support, and in official rhetoric Mao himself exalted “poor” and “middle” peasants as the vanguard of China’s Communist revolution, the profound irony of Mao’s hukou system was that it did not just divide China spatially; it also created a hierarchical distinction between the city and the countryside and between urban and rural residents.¹² It is important to point out, however, that stigmatization of China’s rural inhabitants has roots far preceding Mao. China’s reformist intellectuals of the early 20th century, in their attempts to explain the nation’s defeats at the hands of foreign powers and the decline of imperial society, targeted peasants and China’s countryside as symbolic of what they perceived as China’s “backwardness” and “weakness.” In their thinking, which was greatly influenced by western notions of modernity, building a modern nation entailed repudiating traditional Chinese culture with its “feudalism” and “superstition” that were most deeply rooted in the countryside.¹³ As Myron Cohen observes, China’s farmer peasants—the vast majority of the population—were thus configured by most reformers as passive, pitiful, and in need of education and guidance by an enlightened, urban elite.¹⁴ It was also during this time that the word “peasant” (nongmin) entered into the Chinese vocabulary, a result of Japanese influence. As an abstract “modern” word, it could take on a powerful discursive function as one of the “basic negative criteria designating a new status group, one held by definition to be incapable of creative and autonomous participation in China’s reconstruction.”¹⁵ Hence, the urban-centered hukou policy was one area where Mao’s revolution ideologically paralleled the past it was supposedly burying.

The hukou policy also demonstrated continuity with China’s patriarchal, institutionalized gender discrimination. Though lineage in China is traditionally derived through the male line, and Mao’s class labels were also inherited through the father, until 1998 a child’s household registration was passed on through the mother. This policy, which obviously contradicted Chinese custom, was meant to limit mobility as much as possible.¹⁶ The ways in which one’s hukou status could potentially be changed—joining the army and possibly being discharged to an urban area; gaining admission to an urban university; and becoming a Communist Party member and moving up the Party ranks—all also unfairly advantaged men. By designating that hukou pass through the mother, the state effectively limited its economic obligations should a male with urban hukou have dependents with rural hukou.¹⁷ On the other hand, the most common way for rural women to change their hukou was through marriage migration. However, this usually meant a change from one village to another—in other words a change in hukou location, not status—because marriages between urban and rural people were (and are) extremely rare. Even if such marriages took place, these unions would not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Mobile Bodies, Mobile Technologies, and Immobile Mobility
• 1. Market Reforms, Global Linkages, and (Dis)continuity in Post-Socialist China
• 2. “My First Big Urban Purchase”: Mobile Technologies and Modern Subjectivity
• 3. Navigating Mobile Networks of Sociality and Intimacy
• 4. Picturing the Self, Imagining the World
• 5. Mobile Communication and Labor Politics
• Conclusion: The Mobile Assemblage and Social Change in China
• Appendix: The Fieldwork
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author