Women Migrant Workers in China's Economic Reform

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform Feng Xu

International Political Economy Series General Editor: Timothy M. Shaw, Professor of Political Science and International Development Studies, and Director of the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia Titles include: Pradeep Agrawal, Subir V. Gokarn, Veena Mishra, Kirit S. Parikh and Kunal Sen POLICY REGIMES AND INDUSTRIAL COMPETITIVENESS A Comparative Study of East Asia and India Roderic Alley THE UNITED NATIONS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE SOUTH PACIFIC Dick Beason and Jason James THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF JAPANESE FINANCIAL MARKETS Myths versus Reality Mark Beeson COMPETING CAPITALISMS Australia, Japan and Economic Competition in Asia-Pacific Deborah Bräutigam CHINESE AID AND AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT Exporting Green Revolution Steve Chan, Cal Clark and Danny Lam (editors) BEYOND THE DEVELOPMENTAL STATE East Asia’s Political Economies Reconsidered Dong-Sook Shin Gills RURAL WOMEN AND TRIPLE EXPLOITATION IN KOREAN DEVELOPMENT Jeffrey Henderson (editor) INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION IN EASTERN EUROPE IN THE LIGHT OF THE EAST ASIAN EXPERIENCE Pierre P. Lizée PEACE, POWER AND RESISTANCE IN CAMBODIA Global Governance and the Failure of International Conflict Resolution Cecilia Ng POSITIONING WOMEN IN MALAYSIA Class and Gender in an Industrializing State

Ian Scott (editor) INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE AND THE POLITICAL TRANSITION IN HONG KONG Mark Turner (editor) CENTRAL–LOCAL RELATIONS IN ASIA–PACIFIC Convergence or Divergence? Fei-Ling Wang INSTITUTIONS AND INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE IN CHINA Premodernity and Modernization Feng Xu WOMEN MIGRANT WORKERS IN CHINA’S ECONOMIC REFORM

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform Feng Xu Assistant Professor Department of Political Science, Sociology and Anthropology Agnes Scott College Decatur Georgia

First published in Great Britain 2000 by

MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 0–333–91819–3 First published in the United States of America 2000 by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 0–312–23362–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Xu, Feng, 1963– Women migrant workers in China’s economic reform / Feng Xu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–312–23362–0 (cloth) 1. Migrant labor—China. 2. Women—Employment—China. 3. China– –Economic policy—1976– I. Title. HD5856.C5 X8 2000 331.4'0951—dc21 00–022306 © Feng Xu 2000 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 0LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 09

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Jamie

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Contents ix

List of Maps

x

List of Figures Acknowledgements

xi

Glossary

xii

Acronyms

xv

Introduction Statement of thesis Project specificities China’s economic reform A critical approach to nationalism Method and theory The intersection of gender, class and place of origin Personal interest and field research

1 3 4 13 16 19 25 28

1. The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ in Economic Reform Nationalism and economic reform Reform policies and gender Reconfiguring femininity and masculinity Conclusion

33 38 42 51 56

2. ‘Emergent Classes’ and Sicheng Society Theorizing class in a socialist context Mao’s class analysis and revolution strategies The ‘emergent class structure’ of economic reform in Sicheng Construction of jingshen wenmin Conclusion 3. Building Material and Spiritual Civilization in Sicheng Sicheng’s political economy in historical and spatial context The Jiangnan vs. Subei discourse: place of origin in the construction of identities The hukou system: marker of insiders and outsiders vii

58 63 72 80 97 100 102 110 117 122

viii

Contents

Flexible accumulation and construction of gender in migration: some comparisons Conclusion

125 127

4. New Factory Women in Time and Space The gender division of labour in silk production Gender, kinship and households Conclusion

129 130 138 152

5. A Close Watch in a Tight Space: Multiple Foci of Labour Control Job hierarchies based on gender and place of origin Labour discipline in time: piece-rate The disciplinary power of space: the factory compound Thought work as disciplinary power Workers’ resistance for daily survival Conclusion

154 160 165 169 171 176 179

6. Identities of Women Migrant Workers: The Intersection of Gender, Class and Place of Origin The construction of migrant workers as ‘Other’ The state regulatory mechanisms Managerial control after work hours: ‘free’ time regulated Workers’ mediation of mixed identities Women migrant workers: challenging boundaries Conclusion

180 181 183 186 189 193 198

7. Conclusion

199

Notes

205

Bibliography

223

Index

234

List of Maps Map 1: Map 2:

People’s Republic of China, showing area of detail Outline map of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces showing Subei and Jiangnan

ix

7 7

List of Figures Figure 1: Figure 2:

Yonghong factory compound Silk production work process

x

10 11

Acknowledgements In the research and writing of this book, I have accumulated many debts. I am greatly indebted to all the members of my supervisory committee. I owe a special debt of gratitude to B. Michael Frolic, Isabella Bakker and Mitchell Bernard for their generous support and intellectual nurturing from the inception of this project to its end. This work also benefitted tremendously from my external readers. I want to thank Janet Salaff, Judith Nagata and Bonnie Kettel who have provided constructive comments. I would also like to thank my friends and colleagues at York, especially Christine Saulnier, Katrin Froese, Mary Young, Yumiko Iida and Leslie Ann Jeffrey, for having engaged in many discussions with me or having read and commented on earlier versions of this work. Other colleagues I would like to thank are Joanne Wright, Nadine Jubb and Liz Philippose. I am also grateful for managers in Yonghong and Huaqiang for their cooperation. I would especially like to thank workers I interviewed, from whom I learned a great deal about life, Chinese society in transition, and humanity. I am deeply endebted to my parents who have always supported and believed in their daughter in whatever she is pursuing. I would also like to thank Suzanne and Arthur Lawson, for their generous support and encouragement. Finally, I would like to specially thank my husband and best friend, Jamie Lawson, for his love, devotion and unfailing support. Jamie has read, commented on, and edited this book at each stage more times than he can possibly remember. Each of them has provided me with emotional and intellectual support throughout the years. But none of them is responsible for what I have said – the burden for any errors is mine alone.

xi

Glossary parvenus ignorant, narrow-minded and stupid neither fish nor fowl office director of the factory headquarters marrying out eating from one big pot mass culture or popular culture gazette supporting job categories position–wage system catch up or even surpass personal competence private entrepreneurs a prosperity common to all people every job is important, and one can achieve personal development at any job position constructive advice River Elegy cooperativization Red Flag guilds organized by place of origin household registration system literally, when you marry a chicken live with a chicken, when you marry a dog live with a dog [i.e., in marriage: you made your bed, now lie in it] southern Jiangsu

baofahu bengtou bengnao bulun bulei changbu bangongshi zhuren chujia daguo fan dazhong wenhua difangzhi fuzhugong gangwei gonzhi zhi ganshang bing chaoguo geren nengli getishang gongtong fuyu hanghang chu zhuangyuan

helihua jianyi He Shang hezuohua Hongqi huiguan hukou jiaji sui ji, jiagou sui gou

Jiangnan xii

Glossary

jiating chengbaotian jiating chenbao zerenzhi jieji jiguan jingshen wenmin jitizhuyi jingshen jiurou pengyou ku lishi shimin liudong renkou luohou jiuyao aida

meiyou wenhua mishu modiao yibainian de quru

nangeng nüzhi nanren neng gan de, nüren ye neng gan nanxun neshuo huixie niangjia nongmin qiyejia nü qiangren Qiu Ji qujinglai rang yibufen ren xianfuqilai renkou suzhi Renmin Ribao renqing shehui shehui zhuyi jiushi jiefang shengchanli

xiii

the family contract land the household contract responsibility system class place of origin spiritual civilization collective spirit friends made only for instrumental purposes bitter historical mission floating population of migrants backward countries are naturally subject to invasion and exploitation uncultured executive assistant a permanent end to the one-hundred-year humiliations [i.e., an end to China’s semi-colonization by the west] men tilling, women weaving Anything a man can do, a woman can do also tour of the south capable of writing and speaking women’s natal families entrepreneur of peasant extraction strong woman global membership marrying someone into the family let some people get rich first population quality People’s Daily emotional feeling society socialism means liberating the forces of production

xiv

Glossary

shehuizhuyi shichang jingji shehuizhuyi youjihua shangpingjingji Shijie Jingjidaobao shou minyung de baibu sixianggongzuo Subei Subeiren tianguniang tianshi, dili, renhe

weiji gan wenhua wuhao huodong wuzhi he jingsheng wenmin xingzheng jibie xiuyang

youlixiang,you wenhua, you daode, youjilüe de xinren

yu guoji jiegui Zhe shi meiyou banfa de Zhongguo Funü Zhongguo Qingnian Zhongguo Renmin zhurenwong jingsheng zhuyao maodun zishifengzi zaijiaoyu ziyou lianai

socialist market economy the socialist planned commodity economy World Economic Herald accepting their fate thought work northern Jiangsu province Subei people iron girls good opportunities, favourable geographical position, and support of its people sense of crisis culture: a loose term, implying education and literacy Five Goods Campaign material and spiritual civilization administrative level cultivation, associated with education and literacy morality and discipline ‘New Person’, with ideals, education, morality and discipline literally, connecting rails with world there is nothing we can do about it Women of China Youth of China The Chinese People being the master of one’s own affairs principal contradiction ‘reeducating’ intellectuals love marriage

Acronyms MNCs NHE SAPs SEZs SOEs TVEs

Multinational Corporations New Household Economics Structural Adjustment Programmes Special Economic Zones State-Owned Enterprises Township- and Village-Owned Enterprises

xv

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Introduction

For more than a decade ‘globalization’ has attracted attention both from academics across disciplines and from media coverage. There is no single definition of the term. Some of the more popular ones include: the incorporation of people into a single global society; the shaping of the local by the global, hence the intensification of cross-border social relations; the world as a commercial unit – the ‘global shopping mall’; and the growing consciousness of the world as a single place. No one can deny that we are unprecedentedly interconnected, politically, economically and culturally. However, views differ on the relationship between the global and the local. Can we treat globalization as the meta-narrative of today’s world, to which the local merely reacts? Or are there ‘other modernities’,1 which are not necessarily contained within global capital logic? Some scholars stress the importance of transnational forces, reflecting a particular episteme oriented in fact to the West. Others, on the other hand, call for more historically and politically grounded analyses of globalization.2 This book tries to tease out what the local implies for the global, while retaining its local distinctiveness.3 As China participates in the global political, economic and cultural circuit, it is increasingly aware of ‘the world as a single place’. One catchphrase in China today is yu guoji jiegui (literally, connecting rails with the global). However, this should not be confused with willing homogenization by transnational forces. The emergence of neo-confucianist ideology in China, and indeed in Asia more generally, and the endurance of China’s distinctive socialist legacies both give us pause when we analyse its economic reform programme in strictly transnational terms.4 This desire to be modern while still remaining oneself is not unique to China, but China is perhaps unusually able to leverage a compromise. The quest for this balance is particularly evident in recent struggles over 1

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

trade and economic policy. Globalization means that developing countries increasingly adopt a flexible accumulation strategy to meet the austerity demands of the IMF and World Bank, imposed through Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs). 5 Feminist political economy has shown that this element of ‘globalization’ has drawn more and more women, especially rural women in developing countries, into global capitalist production on the so-called ‘global assembly line’. Feminist scholars have contributed greatly to our understanding of the gendered nature of ‘globalization’ and ‘structural adjustment’. They have also drawn our attention to feminist strategies of resistance in different locations.6 Economic restructuring in developing countries, primarily enforced from abroad, contrasts with China’s economic reform, implemented largely from within. China enters its period of economic reform with a distinctive array of social and economic structures, as well as with highly distinctive ideological formations. These distinctions are worth sketching out in some detail. China’s 40 years of socialist economy provide a different social, political and cultural context from that of most other developing countries, without a sharp rupture in political leadership. The historical continuities and discontinuities are reflected in the concept of shehuizhuyi shichang jingji (the socialist market economy), which is China’s current development model. As the Third Plenum of the 14th Session of the Central Committee made clear in 1992, economic reform in China is intended to build wuzhi he jingshen wenmin (both material and spiritual civilization). Both aspects of civilization were set out in Plenum resolutions as legitimate affairs of state. The Party envisioned an important future role in the era of economic reform as the promoter of spiritual civilization, despite its apparent retreat from the economic sphere. The Party’s continuing ideological role in a resolutely economic reform project under a still authoritarian political order can be related to Gramsci’s concept of the integral state, provided we account for the specificities of Chinese social and political structure, so different from Gramsci’s main preoccupation, the west. Specifically, the lengthy Western tradition of relatively autonomous institutions of civil society (again, in the gramscian sense) may be contrasted with the relative strength in China of state activity in morals, ethics, and the ‘organization of consent’, as well as with the relative public importance of kinship structures. The fact that China’s reform was largely internally driven and marked by a long socialist legacy contributed to different dynamics of economic reform. Having discussed the Chinese state’s unique qualities in relation to the wider, more abstract concept of the integral state, one can

Introduction

3

point to a tendency that China shares with many developing countries. For China’s economic reform was launched around the same time as SAPs in most other developed and developing countries. Further, China’s economic reform, like SAPs elsewhere, aims at attracting foreign investment through Special Economic Zones (SEZs) and at integrating into the global economy. The common denominator is a flexible accumulation strategy, involving labour market deregulation; cutbacks in social benefits; and multiple forms of exploitation.7 These features take on different forms and meanings in different parts of the world – indeed, this variety is the essence of flexible accumulation. Unlike the mere labour market deregulation prevalent elsewhere in the world, China’s flexible accumulation strategy involves building a labour market – commodifying labour – virtually from scratch. Labour was allocated by the state under Mao; rural Chinese were generally not allocated urban jobs: in short, the allocation was accomplished primarily by command rather than by market. One of the prominent features of China’s emergent labour market is the increase in migrant women working in urban manufacturing. Importantly, the formal primary sellers in the labour market are not these women, but local labour commissions in their townships of origin. The mobility of these women is made possible by the decollectivization of rural economic reform and the specific manner in which China’s hukou (household registration) system has been loosened. Hukou used to tie people with rural status to their lands, and people with urban status to their registered urban residence. The hukou system is not abolished under economic reform, though it has been loosened, and is still significant in the state regulation of migration and migrants. Under the modifications, rural people migrating to urban areas can do so only temporarily. Their hukou status does not alter with migration. Managers take advantage of this temporary status. Further, heterosexual ideology, in China as elsewhere, perceives women as wives and mothers before it perceives them as workers. Single women workers are assumed to be temporary workers, another advantage for managers. However, women workers also share strategies of resistance in their different locales against the flexible accumulation strategy. 8

Statement of thesis I situate my study of women migrant workers in Sicheng,9 Jiangnan, in the context of the differences and similarities between economic restructuring in other developing countries and China’s economic

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

reform. This book rests on the general feminist literature on gender and work, while also granting attention to feminist scholarship in China Studies from both China and North America. The central thesis developed in the present work is that we must analyse the intersection of gender, class and place of origin to understand the strategic situation of women migrant workers in Sicheng. Within this general proposition, I shall try to answer the following question sets: 1. What is the gender impact of China’s economic reform? How does it compare with that of the SAPs in many developing countries? Has economic reform led to changes in the construction of femininity and masculinity? If so, have the changes been a result of local and sectoral economic change or of something else? (Chapter 2) 2. Economic reform policies have shifted the state from class-based politics to productivity-based politics. What is the material impact of this shift in Sicheng class structure? What does the case contribute to our understanding of class in a non-European and non-democratic country? (Chapter 3) 3. Place of origin stands beside the gender and class issues discussed in questions 1 and 2. How does place of origin figure in the identities of Sicheng people vis-à-vis Subei migrants? (Chapter 4) 4. What motivations do women have in migrating to Sicheng? Do they migrate because their parents want them to as part of household strategies? How has the reform process affected the answers to these questions? (For instance, rural decollectivization has restored the position of male heads of household.) How does kinship, transformed by socialism, figure in migrant women’s lives in Sicheng? (Chapter 5) Beyond these four issues taken separately (gender, class, place of origin, migration), how do they interact strategically in the relationship with management and state ideology? This work explores the structures that migrant women workers in Sicheng face, and it explores their accommodation and resistance. Thus, 5. what are the prevailing forms of labour control? Do different forms of ownership make any difference in forms of labour control? (Chapter 6) 6. What are the resistance strategies, if any, that workers adopt? Do migrant workers in Sicheng have a peculiar sense of agency? Do women migrants assume a worker’s identity (and hence a worker’s strategy) once they move to industrial work? (Chapter 7) The book concludes with some reflections on the findings.

Project specificities Next I consider the broad specificities in which I pursue these issues, beginning with the industry under examination. A well-documented

Introduction

5

account exists of transformations in the gendered division of labour in silk production lasting over a thousand years. (Chapter 5 will elaborate the historical changes in the gender division of labour in silk production.) Through a historical study of the gender division of labour in China’s silk industry, I argue that women of different classes had different relations with patriarchal structures. Poor women tended to be less restricted by the system, at the cost of their social status. As silk production became subject to a more detailed division of labour in the twentieth century, it was also increasingly feminized. Weaving was the last silk production work procedure to be feminized under industrial conditions. But all this occurred well before Deng’s economic reform. Reforms have resulted only in urban women workers being replaced with unmarried women migrant workers as Sicheng production workers. What we see most recently is not the increased feminization of work, as in many developing countries, but rather the reduced status of production workers. Unmarried migrants, rather than women in general, are the stigmatized group recruited as a ready workforce. Silk production also highlights the radical separation of production and consumption, which is common in modern off-shore production. However, in silk production this separation also has had a long history. Today’s off-shore industry has roots in imperial monopoly and later neo-colonial relations. Therefore, I can focus on production relations with greater justification, because most consumption excludes the production zones and populations, and long has done so. Because the majority of women workers in the Sicheng silk factories are also away from home, I do not focus in a comprehensive fashion on the relationships between women workers and their families. This is a constraint imposed in part by practical problems in interviewing distant families. However, I will explore the forces impinging on migrant women workers when they consider (or reject) the wishes and constraints of their families. Through reference to comparative studies of Malaysia, Java and Hong Kong, 10 I conclude tentatively that in China, the autonomous functioning of kinship structures is not the central parameter constraining these actions, behaviours and decisions. The socialist legacy strongly mediates the effects of economic reform on women’s agency in this aspect of their lives. This point bears some elaboration. On a comparative basis, the varying structures of kinship are indeed critical in explaining women’s agency. But in China, the socialist state made a drastic break with feudal kinship structures when it came to power in 1949. The state has strongly inserted

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

itself into issues formerly organized by relatively autonomous kinship and gender norms. This has meant for instance that work outside the home, whether in the communes or in the factories, became not only politically and economically necessary, but inseparably part of the identity of Chinese women. Working outside the home is simply their way of life. Some opening remarks are also due on the study area. Sicheng is of interest for several reasons: 1. It is not a special economic zone (SEZ) unlike many of the studies of gender and work. 2. The silk industry is locally well-embedded and has a long history there, culturally and economically. 3. The majority of workers in Sicheng’s silk factories are migrant workers from northern Jiangsu province (Subei), whose status sharply declines and takes on quasi-ethnic meaning once they are in Sicheng. 11 4. Sicheng enjoyed a reputation for the most successful township and village enterprises (TVEs) in the country in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Yet it also has many state-owned enterprise (SOE) silk factories. Often capitalist- and household-owned originally, the SOEs were nationalized in the 1950s. These points bear further examination. In this section, I will deal with points 1, 2 and 3. Point 4 will be considered in the section on Yonghong (SOE) and Huaqiang (TVE). To begin with point 1, many areas studied in the literature on women workers and economic restructuring are SEZs. Feminists often choose SEZs to study the impact of globalization on women for straightforward reasons. Women work in overwhelming numbers for the multinational corporations which have concentrated in SEZs. 12 There are also practical considerations for foreign-based scholars gaining access to Chinese enterprises. However, women workers in China’s four SEZs are a tiny minority in China’s economy. Most women workers work in SOEs and TVEs outside these zones. How economic reform affects women workers in TVEs and SOEs outside SEZs merits more attention. Economic reform certainly affects these firms in ways that are both different from and similar to SEZs. Non-SEZs are more and more open to the global economy and yet multinational companies do not have as strong a presence. The impact of globalization on Yonghong (SOE) and Huaqiang (TVE), therefore, is most directly experienced through international markets and central institutional reforms designed to build

Introduction

Map 1

7

People’s Republic of China, showing area of detail.

Map 2 Outline map of Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces showing Subei and Jiangnan.

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

competitiveness. In SOE and TVE factories outside SEZs, therefore, important continuities and discontinuities with China’s socialist legacy, indigenous class-based politics and state ideology on gender can be investigated. Indeed, this book attempts to demonstrate that China as a nation-state is not a homogeneous community in this or most other respects; rather, it has many kinds of internal ‘boundaries’. One of these boundary types is that which separates Chinese by place of origin. Sicheng’s migrant workers from Subei experience somewhat similar treatment as, for example, Mexican workers in the United States.13 This case study attempts to shed new light on the issue of ‘ethnicity’, too often linked with genetic heritage. Partially because of an SEZ focus, the comparative literature on gender and work focuses on women workers working on a so-called global assembly line, largely for multinational corporations. In this literature, women workers are drawn into the global capitalist economy with the arrival of the latter. These export industries themselves tend to be ‘imports’ to the locality. Because the MNCs are usually located in SEZs, a ‘racial’ or ‘ethnic’ divide is normally understood to coincide with a class and/or a national one and the issues are not readily separated. For example, in the SEZs workers are usually indigenous and managers foreign.14 Sicheng lies south of the Yangzi River. The river divides northern Jiangsu (Subei) from southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang (Jiangnan). (See map, p. 7) The division between Subei and Jiangnan takes on almost ethnic meaning in Sicheng, where women migrant workers from Subei replace local rural and urban Sicheng women workers in Sicheng’s single industry. The division by place of origin in this case constructs women migrant workers as ‘uncivilized’, ‘inferior’ and ‘dumb’, while local Sicheng women workers were ‘civilized’, ‘superior’ and ‘nimblefingered’. Place of origin in this situation changes the ‘essential’ dexterity often attributed Asian women in light industry recruitment strategies. 15 Because Jiangnan women are said to have ‘nimble fingers’, migrant women workers, though equally Asian, have to be defined by clumsy ones (Chapter 4 will focus on this issue). Jiguan (place of origin), on the other hand, is central to Chinese conception of self and community within the dominant national ethnicity. Actual birthplace matters, but jiguan is a separate matter which reveals cultural identity and sometimes social status as well. Jiguan has to be understood as part of a process of social identity construction and as a site of power. It therefore assumes discursive meanings broadly similar to those of race and ethnicity, and thereby opens up the question of

Introduction

9

what race and ethnicity mean. As Emily Honig points out, describing one’s jiguan is far from straightforward, and its implications are determined contextually and relationally. For instance, being from Subei is meaningless in Subei itself, inoffensive in Beijing, but full of negative and distinctive connotations in southern Jiangsu.16 The discourse on Subei provides both a discursive and a political economic understanding of Jiangnan people’s stereotypes about migrant workers in Sicheng. And it is in discourses on Subei versus Jiangnan, in combination with discourses on modernity versus tradition, that migrant workers’ identities are partly constructed. Silk production has been crucial in Sicheng’s economic and cultural advantage over Subei. Sicheng people are proud of their long history as one of China’s great centres of silk production. However, migrant workers are now the main workforce in that production process, with local, supposedly silk-savvy talent clamouring to take over other functions in service, managerial or marketing activities. Subei workers are considered inferior by Sicheng people, but the actual work of producing the prized local product is consigned to them without question. Silk weaving is basically divided into the separate preparation of warp and weft threads, and weaving proper. Preparation of the two types of thread (hereafter, prep work) has a more detailed division of labour. Besides prep work and weaving, there are fuzhugong (supporting job categories) (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2). The local place of origin discourse is couched in unequal power relations, in that it is Subei and Subei people who are stereotyped, while Jiangnan people do the stereotyping. Stereotyping of this kind is what Foucault called a power/knowledge kind of game. It classifies people according to a norm (such as silk-wise Jiangnan people) and constructs the excluded as ‘other’ in opposition to this norm. Jiangnan identity therefore does not exist without Subei. This power/knowledge game has direct implications for work process issues. On one hand, the taylorist deskilling without which that industry would face even more dire conditions, links naturally with this denigration of the production workforce, even as it earns the blessing of being labelled ‘modern’ because it is inseparable from ‘scientific management’. On the other, Sicheng’s weaving occurs under conditions which militate against the full-blown surveillance proper to classical taylorism in the West. Unlike assembly line work, which provides a focal point for the line leader, silk production machines block shift leaders’ sight. Women silk production workers I interviewed take advantage of the height of the machines to avoid the gaze of shift leaders (Chapter 7 will deal with this issue).

10

1

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3

4

5

6 12

8

7

11 13

10

14

9

16

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23 18

19

22 20

21

Figure 1.1

Legend: 1. Raw Material Warehouse – Yuanliao cangku 2. Raw Material Inspection – Yuanliao jianyan (7) 3. Sizing – Jiang Si (3) 4. Heat Setting – Re Dingxing 5. Soaking – Pao Si (4 & 5 – 27) 6. Management Office (Shift leaders) – Guanli (10) 7. Management Office (Shift leaders) – Guanli (7) 8. Warping Workshop – Zheng Jin (41) 9. Warp Winding – Fan Si (63) 10. Measuring Room – Liangma (6) 11. Weaving – Zhizhao (377 people; 414 machines) 12. Warp Joining – Jiejing (12) 13. Weft Winding – Juanwei (45) 14. Guards – Mengwei (8) 15. Prestorage Quality Control – Chengpin Jianyan (55) 16. Power Control Room – Dian Qi Kong Zhi Shi (3) 17. Boiler Room – Guo Luo Fang (9) 18. Management Offices – Guanli (14) 19. Warehouse – Cangku (6) 20. Canteen – Shitang (22) 21. Weft Preparation Workshop (Twisting, Combining, Spooling, Winding) – Luo Si, Bing Si, Nian Si, Dao Tong – (237) 22. Shift Leaders’ Office 23. Main Compound Road 24. Public Road

Yonghong factory compound.

Introduction

11

Warp Process

3

1

4

12

2

13

14

15

Weaving and Finishing

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

Weft Process

Legend 1. Raw Material Inspection 2. Soaking 3. Winding

4.Warping 5. Winding 6. Combining 7. Twisting

Figure 1.2

8. Heat Setting 9. Winding 10. Natural Setting 11. Weft Winding

12. Weaving 13. Measuring 14. Inspection 15. Warehousing

Silk production work process.

Comparing a state-owned enterprise (SOE) and a township- or villageowned enterprise (TVE) allows for an investigation of the effect of different forms of ownership on hiring practices, labour stratification along gender and place of origin, and labour–management relations. I further my thesis through a careful study of economic reform’s unfolding in Sicheng, and in Yonghong (a state-owned enterprise, or SOE) and Huaqiang (a township-owned enterprise, or TVE) in particular. Yonghong and Huaqiang were set up in different historical periods for different purposes. Yonghong has a history of over 60 years as an SOE, and before that, was a local capitalist operation. It is among the largest silk-producing SOEs in Sicheng, and silk production is its primary source of profit.17 Huaqiang started operation in 1985. It was financed by Sicheng township. Like general managers in SOEs, Huaqiang’s general manager and party secretary (one person holds both positions) was appointed by the township government at that time to set up the factory. Before this appointment, he was the party secretary of a brigade in rural Sicheng. But unlike the SOEs, Huaqiang was set up exclusively to pursue profits; therefore, it more nearly excludes maoist production politics.

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

The purpose of comparing Yonghong and Huaqiang is to investigate the continuities and discontinuities between the socialist and reform economies, and whether Yonghong’s socialist legacy makes any difference in labour control, hierarchies among workers or managers’ interests. The present findings show that ownership does not make much difference in terms of hiring. In this respect, ownership matters only to workers with urban residency, most of whom were hired before 1985. At that time, a contract system was adopted in hiring in Yonghong. Managers in Huaqiang have more independent power than those in Yonghong, as well as less elaborate consultative obligations. The biggest difference I found between Yonghong and Huaqiang is the choice of labour control mechanisms. Yonghong has less coercive labour control, and still utilizes a productivist variant of Mao’s sixianggongzuo (thought work). Mao’s sixianggongzuo contributes to a distinctive form of labour control. MNCs or TNCs do not have a strong presence in Sicheng, but the preoccupation with export markets certainly does. Silk, like other Chinese industries, has undergone restructuring since China launched economic reform, opening more to the outside world and integrating into the global economy. The SEZs, subcontracting, the recruitment of contract and temporary workers, and the dismantling of the hallmarks of maoist egalitarian policies such as job security all characterize China’s economic reform on a national basis. Such flexible accumulation strategies are part of a global phenomenon, but exhibit local characteristics, here as elsewhere. Yonghong, as a SOE, is now undergoing structural change, which involves replacing maoist production politics with a market-economy ethos. The result is not necessarily a complete abandonment of the old. The ‘old’ and the ‘new’ still contest one another in Yonghong. Its deputy general-manager’s account of reforming Yonghong is revealing: From 1984, Yonghong started to change from state-ownership, to a system of multiple ownership with state-ownership dominant. We opened restaurants, an interior decoration company, an auto repair factory, etc. The purpose is to diversify our production and ownership forms in order to remain profitable. [But] a new problem arises in terms of benefits and redistribution of wealth. Because non-stateowned parts of Yonghong are responsible for their own losses and benefits, inequalities arise in terms of benefits. We can not equalize benefits among them. All we can do is to exercise some macro control at the enterprise level.

Introduction

13

Faced with TVE competition, the main silk-weaving component of Yonghong started to hire workers from rural Sicheng in the mid-1980s. These workers were hired as contract workers, unlike workers hired before the mid-1980s, who were usually from urban Sicheng. Yonghong started to hire migrant workers from Subei in the early 1990s, as the firm found it difficult to recruit workers from rural Sicheng. Job stratification is based on gender and place of origin, and Subei migrant women workers are at the bottom. Huaqiang’s workers are from rural Sicheng and outside Sicheng. Huaqiang is not obliged to provide workers with pensions or maternity leave. Unlike Yonghong, the core activity of which remains silk weaving, Huaqiang combines weaving and dyeing. Dyeing, unlike weaving, is done only on demand; therefore, it does not require significant overheads. Because silk weaving is more directly export-oriented, Yonghong is also more susceptible to the rise and fall of the international market. Within Huaqiang, the job categories are sharply divided according to the workers’ place of origin: outsiders, whether male (mostly hired as dyers) or female, are at the bottom of the job hierarchy. Workers from rural Sicheng get better jobs.

China’s economic reform China’s economic reform coincided with the globalization of production. As we will see, this has great impact on the former’s pace and direction. But the internal impetus for reform is important to emphasize. China started its economic reform process as a result of an internal power struggle and eventually a transition from maoist to dengist policies. The Third Plenum of the Communist Party of 1978, where Deng Xiaoping consolidated his power, adopted a number of changes in the Party’s political line and economic orientation. These included a shift in Party priorities from criticism of the Gang of Four to the pursuit of ‘socialist modernization’; a decision to decentralize, rationalize and reform economic administration and management through new responsibility systems, performance-based rewards and punishments, and the law of value; abandonment of mass movements as a preferred means of policy implementation; and a commitment to strengthen the institutions of collective leadership, socialist democracy and the legal system. 18 Reform began to be implemented first in rural areas in the early 1980s. The decollectivization process put an end to the communes in favour of jiating chenbao zerenzhi (the household contract responsibility system). Under the new system, individual households contract for the use of a

14

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

plot of land, a piece of machinery, or even a workshop or enterprise, and they assume full financial responsibility for operating it. The contracting households must fulfill a certain grain quota, but keep all net profits and absorb all losses. Although land theoretically remained collective or public property, in fact it became the private property of the contractees. 19 Each household now becomes the basic economic unit in rural China. Peasants are no longer tied to collectives for their basic needs. (As we will see in urban economic reform, this is significant in flexible accumulation policies.) Each household organizes its own economic activities. Peasants are encouraged to engage in commerce and industrial production – two areas that were restricted under Mao in favour of tilling the land. This individualizing tendency tends to benefit villagers with political influence, education, skills and labour power, an amorphous collection of tangible and intangible assets often evoked obliquely in the term bengshi, translated here as capabilities.20 The collective, which ensured substantive equality within a particular village, disappeared. The state policies encouraged some peasants to get rich first. Rural China witnessed an increasing gap between rich and poor households. However, the gap has less to do with access to land (or indeed with purely entrepreneurial activity) because of the ongoing importance of personal political influence. Key resources are available through guanxi, or personal connections, in the making of fortunes. 21 If success can be measured by the scope and degree of change, then rural reform is more successful than urban reform. Economic reform has fundamentally changed rural China. Urban reform started in the mid-1980s, stressing a few main areas: 1. the overall locational strategy for development shifted from inland to coastal; light and service industries, suppressed under Mao, now take priority over heavy industry; 2. flexible forms of ownership, hiring practices, and production emerge; 3. national self-reliance is replaced by export-oriented development, notably advanced in four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) at Shenzhen, Xiamen, Shantou and Zhuhai; and 4. markets are allowed to set an increasing range of product prices. The rationale behind these reform policies is that markets rather than central planning are the means by which China can catch up with advanced industrialized countries, but that the transition must be planned and orderly.

Introduction

15

However, for this transition to succeed, more than Party resolve is required. SOEs, for instance, still at the core of the economy of many cities, deeply embed the principles of socialist planning in their institutional form. The reform of SOEs has thus become the key to urban reform. State-owned enterprise before reform acted more as a social service provider and less as a profit-seeking enterprise: this was a period when ‘correct policy’ rather than profitability was ascendent. SOEs were also designed to provide urban employment. Because the redistributive economy and the market economy operate on different principles, reforming China’s economy means more systemic change is required, and more systematic resistance can be detected. The state reform policy is now to pursue the socialist market economy as decided at the 14th Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in 1994. The gist of the socialist market economy is to maintain state ownership as the dominant form of ownership and the Chinese Communist Party as the leading Party, while giving markets a more important role in the economic sphere. Deng Xiaoping officially deemed the socialist market economy to be the use of markets to build socialism. As I will argue in Chapter 2, the Party has called for jingshen wenmin (spiritual civilization), promoting a collective spirit and socialist ethics, in order to redress the problems of self-interest and ‘money worship’ which the market economy supposedly creates. The fundamental problem with the socialist market economy is the achievement of a balance between the forces of capitalist methods (in other words, markets) and socialist ends. Because state power is still the dominant force in structuring the means of production and disposal of labour, class status is still heavily based on political influence. The major difference is that Party and Party members now act more as ‘economic brokers’ than as the sole economic players, and while the predominance of formal state ownership allows for this informal influence, it can now do little more. In principle, SOEs are now producing for profit, rather than producing to meet state quotas. Under reform, SOEs retain any profits after tax. Labour is no longer allocated by state plan (under which each urban Chinese was assigned a job for life); wages are no longer set centrally; workers enjoy reduced or no job security. Managers can decide on hiring, firing and wage scales. In sum, these reform policies have amounted to the introduction of a relatively unadulterated labour market. Increasing labour mobility, especially from rural to urban areas, is part of this flexible accumulation strategy. Recent literature has drawn attention to the ongoing importance of the state in the most

16

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

recent phase of globalization. The Chinese state’s socialism is certainly changing from ‘redistribution’ to ‘regulation’. It needs to be emphasized that marketization does not mean less state interference, but rather interference at different levels, increasingly designed to ensure economic growth rather than to achieve any other social project. In contrast to both friendly and hostile analyses of the neo-conservative ‘revolution’, this book begins with the assumption that the state has not generally declined in global importance, but rather has been reconfigured.22 The same lesson holds true in the specific case of China’s experience of economic reform. But we can understand the continued yet changed importance of the Chinese state under economic reform from the specific vantage point of its state socialist legacies. To sum up, the strategic situation of women migrant workers in my research is situated in China’s process of economic reform, in the globalization process, and in political, economic, social and cultural change. Above all, this book investigates the intersection of class, gender and place of origin in explaining a local strategic situation. The relationships among nationalism, gender discourse and economic reform; the historical change in the local gender division of labour; the political economy of economic reform; the Subei versus Jiangnan discourse; and the ‘emergent class’ structure: all these concretize the central explanatory nexus in Sicheng’s silk factories, streets and homes. Comparative case studies of women workers will then be juxtaposed with the experiences of Sicheng’s migrant workforce, in order to determine their motivations for migration, their identities, their sense of their work’s meaning, their experiences of labour control and their forms of resistance.

A critical approach to nationalism This summary of intellectual influences ends with a brief discussion of nationalism in relation to gender discourse, class politics and reform. Nationalism also plays a larger role in China’s economic reform than it does in other countries’ restructuring. Modern nationalism, its origins tied up as they are with the Western enlightenment model, is strongly linked to a unilinear model of historical progress. In general as well as in China, this association tends to deny alternative narratives or experiences, as either irrelevant to the main flow of history, or backward. Thus, national identity continuously erases or subordinates other identities, whether religious, gender or ethnic. It is worth underscoring that such nationalism is indisputably the product of both state propaganda, and a popular sentiment widely shared by Chinese people. Given its

Introduction

17

genuine popular roots, what then could be said against it, to qualify its centrality in the writing of history? The post-structuralist insistence on a multicentred conception of power, so evident in Foucault, is foundational to such an argument. Prasenjit Duara23 makes the following argument against the ‘linearity’ of national discourses: Because our own historical conceptions have shared so much with the linear History of the nation, we have tended to regard History more as a transparent medium of understanding than as a discourse enabling historical players (including historians) to deploy its resources to occlude, repress, appropriate and, sometimes, negotiate with other modes of depicting the past and thus, the present and future. It is extremely important to question the nationalist premise that national interests and identities alone adequately represent all Chinese people in the political and economic spheres. Equally critical is what follows from such questioning: the exploration of the ‘strategic silences’ (Bakker) in the nationalist discourse of economic reform, namely silence about identities and interests based on class, gender and ethnicity; or the exploration of any deviation of these interests from national economic development. The nationalist issue is important to the present work for several reasons. Among these are three: 1. a redefinition of gender under nationalist influence affects how women workers perceive their work and construct their identities; 2. economic reform has deliberately muted class-based politics in the workplace and beyond; 3. local identities are similarly constructed, particularly in official or public statements, as derivatives of national identity. The discourse on renkou suzhi (population quality) has replaced class as the primary official framework organizing and classifying Chinese people, and has thus become a point of reference for people to understand not merely class, but also gender and place of origin. Ironically, economic reform policies permit the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, under the very standard established under this ‘measure’ of quality. A historical analysis of class in China must portray the leading theories not merely as debatable positions about a social fact, but as instruments and parameters of power in their own right, insofar as they

18

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

intersect with communist ideology (in the materialist, non-judgemental sense), with their own impact on history. This includes the contemporary appeal of class-muted politics in economic reform. This political approach to ideas helps us understand class in China: class politics and class formulations are not just a matter of theoretical musings, but in addition are a matter of a state ideology with concrete implications for state-building. Class politics and their official formulation have meant not only wealth and dearth, but life and death, for many people. In addition, the material character of official ideology, starkly obvious in China, flows directly back into the actual formation of class. Increasingly, for instance, the growing gap between the rich and poor is attributed to geren nengli (personal competence), rather than to structural problems, and hence, is further encouraged. An alternative analysis of emergent class structure is important in pointing out that current economic growth is not some levée en masse of possessive individuals but is a structural accomplishment achieved on the backs of many dispossessed people in China. To name these costs is not to close debate about economic reforms, for many benefits of real worth follow also from it. Although critiques of the growing inequality in China are not themselves couched in class terms for obvious political reasons, they are not absent. 24 The strong nationalist element in China’s economic reform has meant that gender roles are redefined by the state as derivatives of national economic growth. Economic reform has also provoked unprecedentedly heated debates on such matters as discriminatory employment practices against women, and the maoist gender ideology that in earlier years fell short of full women’s liberation. The women’s studies movement, and the portrayal of men and women in literature and films are some examples of this new debate. (Political reform has also made it possible to air some of these debates publicly without appearing to call the political leadership into question.) An investigation of such non-state discourses is important for this project because they show that state discourse on gender is not without either supplement or resistance in Chinese society. Against this rapidly evolving national context, the sexual division of labour in silk production has changed over time, with localized discursive effects. Such changes have an impact on the social meaning of gender and work, and therefore, shape how migrant workers see themselves as silk workers. The significance of studying the changes in the sexual division of labour in silk production is to challenge the notion that silk production is necessarily women’s work, and therefore by definition, unskilled.

Introduction

19

Method and theory This project operates in a poststructuralist mode which arises out of, or in dialogue with, a specifically dialectical, structuralist heritage. My first methodological intervention covers two interconnected areas. First, I use poststructuralism to interrogate ‘silences’ (in gender, class and place of origin) in reform policies and discourse; and second, I use it to expose the stakes in such silences. (By ‘silences’, I mean those gaps in a structured set of interrelated concepts, gaps whose existence denies quarter or even a name to aspects of social reality.) Reform discourse seeks to provide a unifying language for unified national actions. Those aspects of social reality which fall outside this unified discourse are simply ignored. Poststructuralism exposes such contradictions in reform discourse. Poststructuralism is also powerful in insisting that theoretical concepts such as gender or class do not conform to a predetermined logic beyond particularities of time and space. By acquiescing to this insistence, we are forced to contextualize the meaning of every theoretical concept. For the present research, this contextualization requires a careful study of the temporal and spatial limits of each theoretical concept: class, gender and place of origin all exhibit specificities in feudal, maoist and dengist times, but also in Sicheng, Jiangnan and Chinese spaces. I choose to do a close and careful case study in this research because I recognize the importance of looking at the construction of gender identity and work from its specific historical, cultural and social context. Although the present work focuses on two factories in a one-industry town, the issues under investigation have wide implications for the political, social and cultural transformation unfolding in China. It also has implications for the global level: the aforementioned role of the state, for example. At the national level, the Chinese state, still very much authoritarian, has been dominant in constructing gender identities and setting the boundaries for the form and scope of any opportunity for struggle in everyday social practices. This is not to say, however, that the specific findings of the present study point to patterns that hold throughout China – it is to say quite the opposite. Research abounds on ‘Chinese women’, as if 500 million women in China had a universal, single and fixed identity. These women are presented as collective victims of the Chinese patriarchal system. 25 I join other feminist China scholars in challenging this generalization, all too often a projection of white, middle-class feminist concerns.26 Instead, I focus on exactly how gender

20

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

identities have been constructed in relation to other identities such as class and place of origin, and also how struggles are carried out in the fine detail of everyday social practices. Some might therefore ask why I use Western feminist theories to study Chinese gender politics. Implicit in such a question is often the assumption that China is irreducibly unique and therefore needs a completely different theorization. Though the remarkable creativity and self-confidence of Chinese civilization lends force to the claim, such a concern is typical of area studies, which commonly rest on a presumed strong correspondence of culture and geography with the boundaries of a particular nation-state. Also, a diverse community of scholars, including post-colonial scholars, have challenged the assumption that theories produced in the West have universal validity. On the other hand, they have also challenged the tendency to exoticize differences, even when differences are recognized. Often the essence of China or the Chinese is presented as traditional because China has changed under strong, unidirectional influences from the West and Japan. Such premises are problematically essentialist. They ignore the Chinese contribution to the history of interaction between China and the West, and also ignore the transformation of the West by international migration and globalization. However, though arguing for the applicability of Western theories to China, I also believe that this requires a process of adaptation – it requires paying attention to the specific social, cultural and historical contexts of China, and to the Chinese people’s experience. That China is unique is not a unique phenomenon! The application of Western theories in non-Western societies is, in a sense, an issue of cross-cultural communication. As Lydia H. Liu argues, ‘comparative scholarship that aims to cross cultures can do nothing but translate.’27 But what does it mean to be a ‘translator’ in Liu’s sense? Talal Asad argues that cultural translation is couched in power relationships, in no small part because Western languages first housed a transition to modernity that now has much wider appeal, and expressed a power that insists on the tendential conformity of others. 28 These cautionary notes are all to the good and I adapt them here to the use of Western theories in a Chinese context. ‘Translation’ of Western theory is therefore no apolitical act. But Asad develops these cautionary notes about translation of theories based on a relatively simple power relation – West versus non-West. Edward Said, makes similarly polarized cautions about how ideas ‘travel’. Postcolonial feminist scholars Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan develop the notion of ‘scattered hegemonies’ in response to Said. This breaks the binary opposition between the West

Introduction

21

and non-West, and between core and periphery, based on a presumption of decentred power relations more in keeping with Foucault. Its theoretical implications are that 1. any theory must be contextualized, and that 2. people in the peripheries – the disempowered – also contribute to theory production. In other words, Grewal and Kaplan propose to ‘develop a multinational and multilocal approach to questions of gender’. 29 This study hopes to make a theoretical contribution to the transnational feminisms Grewal and Kaplan propose. Such transnational feminisms are ‘to compare multiple, overlapping, and discrete oppression rather than to construct a theory of hegemonic oppression under a unified category of gender’.30 My investigation of the intersection of gender, class, and place of origin in the lives of women migrant workers in Sicheng, Jiangnan, starts from the premise that gender and class have different meanings in different historical periods and geographical locations within China itself. It demonstrates that the particular social, political and cultural structures that women migrant workers in Sicheng face explain their unique experience of economic reform. However, I will also argue that because China’s economic reform introduces a flexible accumulation strategy similar to other countries such as Malaysia, there are overlaps in strategies, both of labour management and labour resistance. The first methodological approach is, therefore, to expose the silences and explore the stakes in an economic reform discourse that lacks key references to gender, class and place of origin. My second methodological commitment is to interdisciplinarity, as a necessary response to the complex, open-ended and fluid nature of the transformation Chinese people are experiencing. The adequacy of knowledge produced within any single discipline is limited by the ‘silences’ which become necessary to maintain that discipline’s safeguarded boundaries. Disciplinary boundaries or ‘canonization’ are questioned in the spirit of post-structuralist methodology.31 The third methodological approach is to view economic reform as more than state-imposed policy. Rather it treats economic reform as both a process and a structure which not only conditions women migrant workers’ lives, but also is conditioned by them. Methodologically, such a project requires a ‘bottom-up’ study of the lived experience of economic reform. This ‘bottom-up’ study is informed by the epistemological stand, which many informants repeatedly rejected that the experiences of the less powerful and less privileged constitute valid knowledge. By exploring women migrant workers’ lived experiences of economic reform, the constraints and possibilities they face, I attempt to contribute to the often difficult task of sorting out the relation between structure

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

and agency. A recent work by Dorothy Solinger on migrants in China is an important break-through in bridging this gap in China studies, although she understands the term ‘structure’ as institutional structures, a definition more nearly within the confines of mainstream political science than the definition in use here. 32 This issue affects how we understand power in the post-Mao era. As many sinologists have written, it is simplistic to see China as totalitarian. 33 An investigation of the state–civil society relation from a gramscian perspective can shed light on the forms of power in post-Mao China. For both Gramsci and Foucault, power resides not only in direct physical coercion or constraint, but also in ‘consent’ (Gramsci), ‘symbolic power’, or ‘representation’ (Foucault). This power is no less powerful. Moving the study of power beyond the institutions or structures, and beyond a false opposition between state and civil society, and seeing power instead as a ‘lived relationship between power strategies and resistance or subversion’,34 enables us better to understand tensions and contradictions in power relationships. Feminists are attracted to such a theorization of power because it enables them to investigate the power relations couched in the discursive construction of masculinity and femininity, as well as in the space for resistance. For the purpose of this book, I shall evoke Foucault for a working definition of power. Foucault’s notion of power differs from the traditional model in three basic ways. 1. Power is exercised rather than possessed. 2. Power is not primarily repressive, but productive. 3. Power is analysed as coming from the bottom up. By focusing on power in relational rather than absolute terms (that is, rather than as a thing powerful people possess), we can better analyse how subjects/identities are constituted by power relations. That is, they, too, are constituted relationally: ‘women’ act and are in relation to men; proletarians act and are in relation to peasants, etc. (Thus mental institutions not only suppress madness in Foucault’s work, but create a category – even the reality – of mad people, distinguishable from sane ones. The same logic which permits this to occur in mental health and educational institutions exists at a societal level.) By power being productive, Foucault means that power does not act merely to stop other things from occurring or being. Power is productive in a sense that it produces, disciplines and normalizes individuals through institutional and cultural practices.

Introduction

23

Another key aspect of Foucault’s theory of power is the necessary place it gives to resistance. Foucault suggests that power relations are implicated in two different orders of events. At the level of discourse, ‘power utilizes strategies for the production of truth and the disqualification of non-truth’; and at the level of effects, ‘power establishes programs, forms of extraction of knowledge and information that help constitute, at particular moments in time, an overarching system’.35 For example, the Chinese communist state is always ready to produce, on the strength of its own authority, knowledge about what is ‘true’ and ‘untrue’. At the current period of economic reform, the discourse of modernity acts as disciplinary power: those who do not act, think or speak in this discourse are deemed backward and behind history. The key to Foucault’s notion of power/knowledge is discourse. For Foucault, discourse means a group of statements which provide a language for talking about a particular topic at a particular historical moment. But the concept of discourse refers to more than language as people normally understand it. As Stuart Hall 36 points out, [d]iscourse is about the production of knowledge through language. But . . . [s]ince all social practices entail meaning, and meaning[s] shape and influence what we do – our conduct – all practices have a discursive aspect. It is important to note that the concept of discourse in this usage is not purely a ‘linguistic’ concept. It is about language and practice. It attempts to overcome the traditional distinction between what one says (language) and what one does (practice). Foucault does not deny that things have a real, material existence in the world. What he does argue is that ‘nothing has any meaning outside of discourse’. 37 ‘The concept of discourse is not about whether things exist but about where meaning comes from.’ 38 Finally, Foucault expands the domain of the political beyond the state, to include a heterogeneous micropolitics of power. As Jane Sawicki39 points out, ‘[t]he practical implication of [Foucault’s] model is that resistance must be carried out in local struggles against many forms of power exercised at the everyday level of social relations.’ A foucauldian understanding of power enables us to investigate power as it operates through the practice of everyday life. By investigating effects of power, I will be able to analyse how power works in producing knowledge and ‘truth’ (discursive formation), such that the latter becomes common sense and prevents people from thinking otherwise. This is ‘the universe of discourse, that is to say, the universe of the

24

Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

thinkable, and hence to the delimitation of the universe of the unthinkable . . . ’40 Foucault calls the results of this action power/knowledge; Bourdieu calls it ‘doxa’. According to Bourdieu – and here Foucault agrees – doxa is produced in struggle, the stakes of which are not only the character of the truth that is constructed, but the concealment of the signs that it was constructed at all and hence that it is a limited and limiting truth.41 This role of doxa in the production of truth may be clarified with the following example. While in Sicheng, I was frequently told by shift leaders, workshop leaders and union officials that workers will not have much to say because they do not really know much. This did not appear to be a pretext as access was readily granted to the workers. This is itself an example of Foucault’s power/knowledge those who are in power claim to have exclusive authority to ‘speak’ the ‘Truth’. In this situation, managers seemed to believe that workers cannot speak with authority, even about their own life and work experiences. Workers certainly can speak in the most literal sense. But since workers cannot speak in a more authoritative sense, they have to be represented. But what exactly is meant by being capable of representative speaking in the Chinese context, where expertise has been directly entwined for millennia with the class system through the state examination system? This reflects, on the one hand, managers’ sense of status in factories – only those who are ‘educated’ and well informed are capable of speaking authoritatively. In fact, it is commonsensical in China that only those who are neshuo huixie (capable of writing and speaking) are competent to be leaders. Such ‘commonsense’ is in line with China’s mandarin tradition. Those considered ‘incapable of writing or speaking’ are above all the peasants. To identify the source and lineage of a claim, like this claim to authoritative speech, is not of course to refute it. Are the managers wrong to question the workers’ authoritative speech? Though the present work has benefited immeasurably from the wisdom of the managers themselves, it claims they are wrong on this point. The life stories of the latter, told through this study, have certainly demonstrated that workers are not dupes any more than they are mulishly stupid. Often, their life stories are also in tension with what managers told me about migrant workers. This work’s use of Foucault and his assertion that more than verbal communication is involved in discourse should also encourage us to broaden the investigation of what constitutes workers’ speech. Sometimes, in leaving a factory in a tight labour market, they speak with their feet. When peasant workers are silent in meetings, that is also a

Introduction

25

form of ‘speech’. Workers do speak incoherently at times and sometimes with contradictory voices, but through this supposed cacophony, ‘the subalterns’ 42 do speak. Interpretation of such speech requires more work and time, requires the establishment of trust with the informants, and is necessarily fraught with dangers of misrepresentation. But some valuable knowledge – such as knowledge of work from the bottom-up – is available in no other form. 43 Having written at length on the valuable contributions of Foucault in this present work, I wish to return to Gramsci’s concept of integral state. While Foucault provides a remarkable set of analytical tools for the study of micropolitics far beyond the confines of the institutional state, it is Gramsci who offers a better account of the political organization of these micropolitics within a comprehensive and strategically coordinated historical bloc. The exercise of hegemony is a centred and directed process, even though a complex one operating in diverse locales; and this is true, Gramsci asserts, even in the pluralist diversity of Western societies. Foucault can guard us in the Chinese context against the excesses of cold war models of totalitarian statism. But all the more reason, then, to retain an awareness of the centripetal forces of an integral state at work in an authoritarian context such as China’s.

The intersection of gender, class and place of origin This project’s poststructural approach informs the analytical concepts of gender, class and place of origin used here. I argue in brief that these concepts point to realities which are discursive formations, that is, meanings structured in but not limited to language. Theoretically and methodologically, I situate my work in the feminist literature on gender and work (in the tradition of Ong, Hossfeld and Mohanty)44 and in feminist studies of Chinese women. The latter, to be discussed in the section below, provide me with a framework for conducting a crosscultural analysis of gender in China. Western scholarship on women in China has taken a poststructuralist turn recently. As a partial consequence, I am better able to use a poststructuralist approach to multiple identities, the structure and agency issue, and the gender and labour process. This turn is certainly in keeping with tendencies in the Western women’s studies movement, but since economic reform, it also can enter into critical dialogue with the burgeoning of a significantly different women’s studies movement in China. In China, some feminists, such as Li Xiaojiang, insist on the essential difference between women and men, and indeed on the essential difference

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

between China and the West. The more essentialist Chinese feminists’ position should be understood and welcomed in relation to the state discourse on women. However, essential difference is exactly what is under attack in recent Western feminism. I follow Mohanty and Ong in questioning both the universal application of gender categories and the assumption that gender, as opposed to mere biological sex, has any essential meaning. By gender that is socially constructed, I mean the meanings of both masculinity and femininity. It is the power relation in constructing these meanings that I shall explore, in intersection with other socially constructed inequalities based on place of origin (a discussion which borrows much from the discussion of ‘race’) and ‘class’. Feminists working on gender and work are also interested in the question of class. I agree with Burawoy,45 and before him, Thompson,46 that class has to be understood as a cultural process, rather than what YuvalDavis has labelled an economic’ abstract term. Burawoy’s class analysis is also useful for studying production politics at the shop floor. Following poststructuralists such as Laclau and Mouffe, I argue that class, like gender, does not have an essential a priori quality.47 For Laclau and Mouffe, class rests on an artificially coherent abstract logic of capital which itself cannot be sustained without question. Ong’s view of class is similar to Laclau and Mouffe’s, but she addresses a much more concrete problem. She argues that the presence of the local Malaysian state bureaucracy, rather than local changes in the means of production, reconstituted Malaysian villagers as ‘a localized version of the Malay proletariat, or a fraction of the emergent Malay middle class’.48 On this concrete question of the relation of the state to class structure, I also take a cue from Konrád and Szelényi, although they do not adopt a poststructuralist approach. In a state socialist system, establishing state ownership of the means of production can obscure ongoing class antagonisms. First, this is because class can no longer be defined based on formal property relations; rather it is based on the disposal of labour. 49 Classic marxist analysis typically holds that class struggle under such circumstances should either be eliminated or transformed into an ideological and political contest over the Party’s policy. Konrád and Szelényi by contrast refocus attention on the new production relations. Second, class consciousness is blunted in statesocialist countries because the Party-State monopolizes the formal role of organic intellectuals. Besides gender and class, place of origin is a third division that constitutes migrant workers’ identities in Sicheng. Following Honig50 I argue

Introduction

27

that one’s place of origin is not straightforward in China; that in Jiangnan, place of origin is a site of power relations which constructs migrant workers in Sicheng as ‘other’. The diverse places from which migrant workers in fact come are grouped into one homogenous unit, which is called Subei by Jiangnan people. The derogatory meanings attached to Subei and Subei people have many similarities with the social construction of ‘ethnic’ identities. In Sicheng, place of origin divides people into ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ in combination with gender and class divisions. I insist that class, gender and place of origin intersect in constructing migrant workers’ identities. As Anthias and Yuval-Davis argue, ‘race, gender and class cannot be tagged on to each other mechanically for, as concrete social relations, they are enmeshed in each other and the particular intersections involved produce specific effects.’51 This book aims at an alternative understanding of social life, power politics and cultural changes in the many regions and locales of China by using gender as a central analytical tool. An interdisciplinary gender approach not only makes ‘women’ visible. The label of ‘interdisciplinary gender’ literature can be readily misunderstood. It should help us understand power relationships based on sexual difference, interwoven with other inequalities. Gender is not the only organizing principle of identity, or of oppression and domination. Rather, gender inequalities have to be understood in their intersection with ‘race’ (here, really place of origin) and class. Jessop 52 can be helpful for a first approximation of how these three social identities interact. 53 In his apparently paradoxical notion of ‘contingent necessity’, Jessop on one hand takes a realist stance towards causation. Real effects have real causes, hence their relationship is one of necessity. But on the other hand, he argues that any particular social reality emerges from the particular intersection of distinct ‘causal chains’, rather than being ultimately determined by any one of them, taken singly. In this sense, outcomes, though necessarily flowing from particular intersections of causal chains, are contingent in relation to any particular causal chains. Distinct causal chains, in turn, are accessible to thought only by means of distinct theories. Given that causation flows from the intersections of the causes they examine, one theory cannot subsume another, but both must participate in a relation of mutual articulation. 54 Therefore, the development of the main argument of the present work necessarily implies a thorough discussion of the social construction of these three analytical categories. But we must not treat gender, class and race as stable categories. If we do so, we are merely ‘adding

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new names in an ever-expanding pluralistic horizon’. 55 Instead, the very character of these categories is culturally constructed. The contingent interplay of causal chains is nothing other than the exoteric world of life experience, subjected to rigorous and multiple interrogations. Because this feminist approach studies people’s lived experiences, it offers an alternative to mainstream China studies’ which tend to focus on power politics at the state level. But to speak of the exoteric world with authority requires a different standard than to speak authoritatively of the esoteric world. The latter requires mastery of objective and secret laws, while the former also requires a clear understanding of one’s own relation to the everyday lives of others.

Personal interest and field research Feminists today have challenged the ‘objective’ and ‘value-free’ role hither to commonly assumed by Western academics. Mani 56 writes, with respect to the ‘traveling theory’ alluded to with reference to Grewal and Kaplan, contemporary theory in feminism and in the humanities has brought a critical self-consciousness to bear both on the place and mode of enunciation (who speaks and how) and that of its reception (how it is interpreted and why). As claims to universality and objectivity have shown to be the alibis of a largely masculinist, heterosexist, and white Western subject, both readers and writers have had to confront their particularity and history. Gender, race, class, sexuality, and historical experience specify hitherto unmarked bodies, deeply comprising the fictions of unified subjects and disinterested knowledges. The revolt of what Donna Haraway has called ‘situated’ knowledge as against ‘disembodied knowledges’57 ‘has brought to the fore theoretical and political questions regarding positionality and identity’.58 There are two main reasons for this project. First, since coming to Canada, I have often been asked the question: what is the situation of Chinese women? I have two problems with such a question: 1. I do not feel comfortable to speak as an ‘authentic voice’ of Chinese women; 2. such a question tends to assume that Chinese women are homogenous and have some fixed, even essential common qualities. Second, many excellent works have been produced on economic restructuring and women in both the developed and developing countries, but not much has been written on women’s situations in China’s economic reform.59 Media in the West,

Introduction

29

when they do report on China’s economic reform, tend to focus on its economic or political aspects. Most writings on China’s economic reform from the field of political science emphasize the state institutions, even when studies are carried out at the microlevel. This project is therefore an attempt to fill the lacunae of the human aspects of China’s economic reform. My identities, shifting as they do across geographical, linguistic and socio-cultural spaces, have given me a particular mode of speaking. My personal experience growing up in Jiangnan, China gained new meaning when I moved outside of that familiar milieu, and at the same time became critical of any totalizing discourse on Chinese women. I am also aware of my privileged position as an academic trained in the West as it affected my time in the ‘field’ talking to workers in Sicheng. The above thoughts on the positionality of researchers are, in a sense, also the basis for the work’s methodology. The human aspects of institutional changes tend to be ignored when writing within the political science discipline. To overcome this tendency, I used an ethnography approach and asked open-ended questions during interviews. I relied heavily on personal narratives of workers I interviewed in particular to shed some light on their aspirations, disappointments, struggles during economic reform in their particular locales. This is because feminist and other critical theories insist that theory and objects of study be held in tension, conditioning each other with equal force. In discussing similar research methodology, Wolf 60 states, a subject-focused approach must constantly move back and forth between the ‘raw data’ – the subjects – and theory, continuously modifying and confronting the latter in an attempt to understand and contexualize the former. Clearly, as social scientists we are interpreters, not ventriloquists; we have access to our subject’s mediated representations of themselves and can portray only our own mediated understanding and representation of them as best we can. Despite such problems with mediation, representation, and subjectivity, it is important and useful to engage with such narratives and weave them into our attempts to understand structural transformation. For this reason, this work may be considered political anthropology: it details Sicheng workers’ lived experiences of economic reform while situating their strategic situations in the larger structural terrain. I am interested in the transitions from a centrally planned redistributive economy, a class-based politics, and a proclaimed state commitment to

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

gender equality. How do these impact on political economy, the labour process, and the local role of the Party-State? How do structural continuities and discontinuities both condition Sicheng workers and open up space for resistance in ‘negotiating’ their identities? I made two field trips to Sicheng from May to June 1995, and from February to April 1996. The research is based on open-ended interviews with over 100 migrant workers, peasant workers, workers with urban residency, managers, union officials, urban planners and local government officials. The interviews are also supplemented by factory and municipal archival materials, Chinese newspapers and journals. The process of gathering the information was both made possible and constrained by some of the very processes under consideration in the study. For instance, I obtained access to workers and managers of Yonghong and Huaqiang through normal use of personal and familial contacts. Managers of these two factories were, given those circumstances, willing to talk to me, and let me talk under relatively free conditions to workers, technicians, workshop leaders and shift leaders. As many specialists have found who wrote about recent fieldwork experiences, China has become much more open and thus more accessible to Western-based researchers, albeit still under the watchful eyes of cadres. During my two field trips, I was able to talk to workers in their dormitories and in a factory-run canteen. I was also invited to several social functions held in Yonghong. I interviewed more than two workers at a time, because I wanted to create a relatively comfortable environment where workers could interact freely with me and among themselves. (Single interviews, like signed permission forms, have unpleasant connotations for historical reasons in the Chinese context.) I found women migrant workers interpret and construct their own identities as women, workers and migrants. In transforming themselves from rural unmarried women to women working in factories and away from parents, they cross gender, class and place of origin boundaries. While they do so in perfect legality, the Chinese discursive context means that the boundary crossings do evoke certain public, factory and governmental responses. Yet their identities can be deployed strategically: for instance, their origin allows them to ‘play dumb’ convincingly; their class allows them some residual place in SOE managerial paternalism; and their gender provides them with some freedom from familial obligations before they choose or are forced by circumstance to found their own families with marriage. To investigate the main themes I outlined at the beginning of this introduction, it is perhaps obvious that the work must go beyond

Introduction

31

production and factory. But what is needed beyond these? I have already suggested what this implies for the study of place of origin, and gender in relation to class. Gender, class and place of origin are culturally constructed. By this, I mean that meanings about gender, class and place of origin are produced and reproduced in discourse. Discourse, in turn, is far less constrained in the dorms, on the streets and in canteens than it is on the shopfloor. These then are local sites which must be drawn into the analysis. Yet another consideration is scale. For this work situates the dynamics between managers and workers, and dynamics among workers, in wider social, political and cultural structures which are both national (here, meaning Chinese) and global. Marketization in silk production has led to more and more integration in global markets. For example, patterns of silk fabric are designed for the tastes of global consumers, and final processing has often been moved offshore as a response to this cultural divide. This work is accordingly composed of seven chapters, organized from macro-, through meso-, to microlevels, in an attempt to investigate how migrant workers strategically engage with structural powers (gender, class, place of origin) as they accommodate, acquiesce and resist. Chapter 1 focuses on the gendered nature of economic reform policies and discourse. Chapter 2 analyses the emergent class structure of the post-Mao era. Chapter 3 teases out locational concepts, notably Subei and Jiangnan, and explores the conscious effort of the local Sicheng government and the largely unconscious tendency of local town people to remake the identity of the town. Chapter 4 focuses on the gendered nature of the emerging labour market by investigating the recruitment practices of managers in Sicheng. It also argues that the emerging labour market has mixed implications for China’s rural women by presenting their personal stories of their arrival in Sicheng. Chapter 5 compares similarities and differences in labour control style in Yonghong and Huaqiang. It argues that in the midst of the celebration of scientific management as a complement to market reform, among managers and government officials, sixianggongzuo is found to operate in Yonghong alongside material incentives, and simple material incentives or disincentives prevail in Huaqiang. It also argues that workers resist labour control primarily to survive, even under the more rigorous control on the shopfloor that is part of the managers’ efforts to maximize profits. Chapter 6 focuses on the social control and regulation of women migrant workers within the dormitories and beyond. Such control and regulation, besides operating through institutional forms, occurs as well in the discourse about Subeiren (Subei people), yet it also encounters a basic resistance.

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To conclude, this project is about the lived experiences of migrant workers in the era of economic reform. The transformation of their social and cultural identities is structured partially by national and global, political, economic and cultural forces. However, they actively participate in constructing their changing identities through accommodation and resistance to structures beyond their control.

1 The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ in Economic Reform

I entered Yonghong in 1958 because of the high demand for workers during the Great Leap Forward. Before then, I was a housewife. I’ve been exercising a lot since I retired. I’m healthy and have a stable income. I’m very happy. I’m healthier than I was when I was working in the factory. My life is guaranteed because of the advantages of socialism. It was not interesting to be housewife. It was more fun to work. I’m not used to women these days. I don’t like them. I’m not that old, but I save money and am thrifty. Nowadays, women don’t save money. They don’t want to work. They prefer to stay home. When we were working, we worked hard and did not even ask for leaves. I did shift work until I retired. Even when I was sick, I still had to go to work. We even worked without pay. Nowadays, everything is measured with money. People simply won’t work without pay. These people really need to be educated. When we were working in factories, we were very responsible. We were very disciplined.1 Yu, a Female Retired Worker I entered Yonghong in 1950 as a result of the joint private– state ownership. Before then, our family owned two looms. When I was working in Yonghong, my mother-in-law helped us with household work. In fact, she did most of the cooking and grocery shopping, because she did not have a paid job. When I was working shift work, I did not want to ask for leaves. Nowadays, no new worker wants to do shift work. They only want comfort. Everybody wants to marry laoban. They want money, but they don’t want to work. There is a world of 33

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difference between the old and new generations. Can you find anyone in Sicheng who wants to do shift work as a weaver? No one wants to be a production worker even when they are employed in silk factories. When we became model workers or awarded ‘progressive worker’ titles, we were so thrilled just to get a mug. In 1983, I was asked not to do shift work. I did not ask for it. I was asked to teach new workers. I earned more money in doing shift work. I agreed to teach new workers not for money, but to be responsible for the factory. Nowadays, people need the backdoor to avoid shift work. When we were workers, we had a sense of politics. We wanted to work, not only for money. Nowadays, model workers rely on writing and speaking, not working. These old model workers are not respected by managers. Managers don’t even pay visits to them. Our older generation is not used to the new generation. Of course, great progress has been taken place. For example, factories are getting bigger and bigger. Weaving is getting more and more mechanized. Some people have good quality, some don’t. One cannot generalize. 2 Bao, a Female Retired worker 1992 was a significant year for reform after the slowdown following Tiananmen in 1989. In early 1992, Deng made his much-publicized nanxun (tour of the south). This trip confirmed the direction towards a market economy, and hence marketization sped up. The direction towards marketization was crystallized in the decision made at the 14th Party Congress in 1992 to implement a socialist market economy. (‘Socialist market economy’ means that state ownership remains dominant and the Communist Party maintains its leading role (the socialist component), while markets play a more important role than planning.) The decision signalled a shift from shehuizhuyi youjihua shangpingjingji (the socialist planned commodity economy) adopted at the Third Plenum of the 12th Session of the Central Committee in September 1982. The socialist market economy officially established the new status of markets in China’s economy. China’s economic reform, as the Party claims, has twin pillars of equal importance: wuzhi and jingsheng wenmin (material and spiritual civilization). Material civilization is economic development. Spiritual civilization covers a wide area, but in essence calls for the Chinese people to cultivate socialist ethics and morality, as well as to educate themselves. It was crystallized in the recent Party decision to mould you lixiang, you

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 35

wenhua, you daode, you jilüe de xinren (a ‘New Person’ with ideals, education, morality and discipline).3 The civility/wenmin campaign is to improve renkou suzhi (population quality), which is considered both an essential marker of modernity and a strong force propelling China’s economic development. In this chapter, I argue that economic reform policies affect men and women differently, through a careful discussion of what is being reformed and what the gender consequences are. It is not my contention, however, that the state is inherently hostile to women. Rather, economic reform policies often have unintended gender implications. A feminist approach to economic policies makes it possible to point to the ‘strategic silence’ in such gender-biased policies. Current reaction against maoism has made a rigorous case for workplace equality more difficult to make, and has opened significant terrain for overt misogyny. I will compare Chinese reform policies with the gendered implications of SAPs in some developing countries, which have already been analysed from a gender perspective. Some gender implications can be found in China, because of the distinct forces pushing economic restructuring. But both China and other developing countries share a strategy of flexible accumulation. Second, I argue that China’s economic reform is simultaneously a cultural reform. The spiritual civilization campaign, whose focus is population quality, signifies the Party’s continued will to power under the new conditions reform brings. The ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse targets each individual as both the potential solution and a present problem for China’s modernization. The discourse therefore made it difficult for people to articulate some possible criticisms of the reform policies. Most often, people’s direct criticism targets their immediate superiors or those who say they have ‘low quality’. My argument, that economic reform in China has to be understood in terms of both economic and cultural change, is well illustrated by the twin pillars of China’s economic reform. Economic reform has been analysed by a class-focused theoretical framework by some China specialists in the West. 4 These analyses are extremely important for us to understand the increasing social polarization in today’s China, precisely when class politics has been officially abandoned at the Third Plenum of the Communist Party in 1978. Many China specialists also analyse China’s economic reform from various feminist perspectives. 5 Because the feminist approach I use deals with the intersection of gender, class and race or ethnicity most effectively, I use it to investigate China’s economic reform policies and discourse, adapting the race/ethnicity analyses to China’s relations of place of origin. Chapter 3 shifts the analytical lens to class analysis. Chapter 4

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moves the investigation to the case study locale, Sicheng, because place of origin is meaningful mostly in specific local contexts. This chapter is thus an attempt to situate women workers’ lived experience of work and identities in the larger structure of China’s economic reform. At the policy level, I attempt to show the peculiar impact of reform policies on migrant women in Sicheng. At the level of discourse, I argue that by playing on the historical memories of humiliations China has suffered as a nation, the state is once again calling on certain social groups such as these women to make sacrifices in the national interest, the latter being defined as economic development, the return of a strong China in the international community, and hence modiao yibainian de quru (a permanent end to the one-hundred-year humiliations). Mao’s gender ideology promoted equality between men and women in the public sphere, yet inequality between men and women remained in the neglected private sphere. Further, equality between men and women in the public sphere was measured against male norms. Now economic reform has seen a shift in gender ideology as part of rectifying the ‘leftist deviation’ of the Cultural Revolution. It involves redefining femininity and masculinity, again through constantly working on people’s consciousness. For instance, women are now increasingly defined through their distinct biological features. What is also clear is that the state is less politically committed to strict gender equality in the workplace. The workplace, especially medium and large state-owned enterprises, have seen managers fire female workers first and hire them last. Skill and work in heavy and light industries are undergoing a new ‘en-gendering’ in China as a result of economic reform. Consequently, many women who entered the labour force in the 1950s are disempowered, redistributed from heavy to light industry or retirement. However, reform policies had distinct consequences for different generations of women, and women responded to them according to distinct needs and interests. Younger women now have more freedom from state assignments in choosing their career. Unmarried rural women, for example, have benefited from the modified hukou system, which has allowed them to seek urban factory jobs. Even choosing to stay home is more feasible and relatively more enticing than during the Mao period. Many feminist writings on China’s economic reform have already pointed to the fundamental gender shift in the economic reform. 6 However, the shift in state gender ideology has encountered resistance, and is subject to different interpretations even by women who accept the

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 37

shift. For example, Rofel’s work on women workers in Hangzhou silk factory has demonstrated that women with different levels of education respond to ‘motherhood’ differently. Some women workers prolong their maternity leave, rejecting the productivity discourse of reform, even though this is in line with the state’s call to be a good mother. The state, through its dominance over the production of knowledge, produces a dominant discourse on economic reform and gender. However, economic reform has also opened up space for non-state dominant discourses, and resistance to either form of dominant discourse. I call this cacophonic nature of resistance tactical noise. With regard to resistance, China’s women studies movement has become important. Some Chinese feminist scholars such as Li Xiaojiang have started to challenge the implications of funü, an ‘older ideological subject’ used by the All China Women’s Federation, in favour of nüren. In fact, as Tani Barlow observes, ‘women’ can have three different modern Chinese translations. Funü, nüren and nüxing each signify women differently. Funü is an essentially national woman, who does not have an identity apart from the nation. The usage of funü has always served the national interests as an agent for Chinese modernization.7 Chinese feminists regard the recognition of women’s difference and the cultivation of women’s separate consciousness as ‘women’ as important elements of a genuine women’s liberation. By replacing funü with nüren, these Chinese feminist scholars hope to move woman/women out of the statist discourse into a realm of autonomy. However, the emphasis on women’s difference can be dangerously confused with the new dominant discourse in policy and cultural expression, which sees women as biologically different and tendentially inferior. It is perhaps a strategic move for Chinese feminists to insist on an essential difference, so that women’s interests are not subsumed under the nation’s. Such struggle is yet another aspect of the cultural and discursive shift represented by economic reform. This chapter now turns to a comparative perspective in order to make a theoretical and empirical contribution to the international feminist literature on gender and work. The remainder of the chapter is divided into three sections. First, I discuss the nationalist element in economic reform in order to put China’s economic reform into context. The reform was initiated by the post-Mao leadership to build a stronger and greater China, a long identified and yet incomplete task. Next, I analyse the gender implications of economic reform. Then, I focus on changes in gender discourse in order to investigate how economic reform as a dominant discourse changes the way people think, act and speak.

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Often, a modern/progressive versus tradition/reactionary dichotomy is used in categorizing, classifying and hence disciplining people. However, this dichotomy in the dominant discourse is not without resistance from below.

Nationalism and economic reform Coupled with material civilization, spiritual civilization is aimed at moulding the new subject – ‘the New Person’. ‘The New Person’ is required, a new culture is to be adopted, commensurate with the building of the socialist market economy. The new culture has always been couched in sharply dichotomous terms in relation to the old culture in twentieth century China. Cultural and social changes in the post-Mao period have to be understood in this historical continuity. Here, the old culture becomes the centrally planned culture. In this most recent dichotomy, SOEs are usually associated with the old culture; TVEs, with the new culture. Those who do not think, act and speak in the mode of the market economy are considered to be of low quality. However, the ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse is not just articulated in market terms. It also calls for ‘socialist’ ethics and morality. Such tensions tend to be met with cynicism, for many are prepared in the light of recent Chinese history to recognize only the importance of family and money in regulating non-state human relations. The ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse, as I will argue in the next chapter, translates structural problems into depoliticized individual ones. This clearly has potential implications for improved social control in the reform era. Yet the discourse, far from a pure imposition, has achieved a degree of cultural hegemony, in the sense that it permeates everyday talk among ordinary Chinese people. The ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse is closely tied to a strongly nationalist message. The Chinese people are told repeatedly that China as a nation will not survive if economic reform is not successful. Such a message draws on the powerful and equally well-established commonsense that Chinese people may be called upon to act as one and to make sacrifices for the nation. Since China’s traumatic encounter with the West in the mid-nineteenth century, modernization has been at the centre of its project of national salvation and state-strengthening. The relationship between ‘Westernization’ and ‘Chinese cultural tradition’ has been a thorny issue for Chinese intellectuals and government officials concerned with this modernization. As China opens to the outside world, the international media plays a new and critical role in transmitting images of modern women and

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 39

men to a Chinese audience. The construction of femininity and masculinity through the international media interacts with domestic constructions. The shift of gender ideology and economic discourse in China’s economic reform has thus to be understood in the context of the internationalization of cultural ideas, together with the western hegemonic project of modernity. Modernity, according to David Harvey, ‘not only entails a ruthless break with any or all preceding historical conditions, but is characterized by a never-ending process of internal ruptures and fragmentations within itself.’8 Modernization is then, as Dirlik9 defines it, the historical process (or processes) that have produced (and continue to produce) the condition of modernity: ‘scientific discoveries, industrial upheavals, demographic transformations, urban expansions, national states, mass movements – all propelled, in the last instance, by the “ever-expanding, drastically fluctuating” capitalist world market,’ to which we might add revolutions. Modern nation-building has been tightly connected with the linear writing of ‘History’. 10 According to Duara, nationalist discourse requires at least two modernist revisions in how history is approached. First, it becomes ‘History’, a single narrative given specific meanings and specifically periodized around progress. Second, this single narrative subordinates all the complexity of popular ‘histories’ in the plural – in other words, a diverse constellation of collective changes are rewritten as the History of a single People. Modernity in China as a state project is greatly influenced by the Enlightenment idea of evolutionary development of individuals, institutions and society governed by rational thinking and science. Modernization in China has been closely interwoven with nationalism in both state and popular discourse since the Japanese example became influential in the early twentieth century. Initially through the Japanese example, Chinese nationalism modelled itself on the already-existing Western state, held up as the state par excellence.11 Chinese marxists have accepted a teleological marxist conception of History which includes universal evolutionary stages and the assertion that economic factors are primary in historical causation. In the periodization of world history, marxism offered the hope that China could eventually ganshang bing chaoguo (catch up or even surpass) the advanced world. Modernity is to be achieved through economic development that can be measured concretely, for instance by the number of years by which

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Women Migrant Workers in China’s Economic Reform

China lags behind the United States; national economic performance can be measured by economists armed with the mathematical tools provided by Western economics. According to official Chinese Histories, China has suffered from Imperialist forces since the first Opium War in 1840, and has been reduced to a secondary collective citizen of the world. What the Imperialist forces taught the Chinese marxists and before them, May Fourth intellectuals, was that national economic power through modernization is the only way to gain international status and respect. One message the Chinese have been told repeatedly by the state is, ‘luohou jiuyao aida’ (backward countries are naturally subject to invasion and exploitation). Consequently, the national hegemonic discourse of modernity, with its social-darwinist overtones, became the predominant discourse within which people think, talk and act. It not only added an element of urgency, but also a voluntarism that made it possible and eminently desirable to rise up in the hierarchy. Thus did nationalist intellectuals, both revolutionary and reformist, seek to mobilize the nation through this discourse.12 On 1 October 1949, what was on Mao’s lips, and indeed on everyone’s, was this: Zhongguo Renmin (the Chinese people) had ‘finally stood up’. Note well what was not on everybody’s lips: the standing up of the foot-bound, the men of the field, the Xingjianese, or any specific Others. The liberation of women, of subordinate classes, of China’s various ethnicities, are all read as subthemes. As to the main themes, nationalism under Mao took the primary form of anti-imperialism. Imperialists were the enemies of the Chinese people as a whole. Under Mao, China’s backwardness was primarily attributed to imperialist and capitalist forces. For the 40 years since the founding of the socialist regime, China therefore developed its economy, separate as far as possible from the capitalist world economic order. Throughout, Chinese intellectuals and officials under nationalists and communists have been strongly focused on why China has not fully developed. In reform discourses, the factors contributing to China’s backwardness have shifted to internal ones: to China’s own tradition and culture. The sentiment that something intrinsic to Chinese culture and tradition has to be changed in order to progress was well received in society in the 1980s.13 This is demonstrated by the highly popular TV series He Shang (River Elegy),14 that critiqued the traditional Chinese culture as inward-looking and thus not conducive to modernization. Before He Shang, the now-defunct Shijie Jingjidaobao (World Economic Herald) started its 1988 New Year’s Day editorial with a nationwide

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 41

invitation to discuss the issue of Qiu Ji (global membership).15 By global membership, the editorial meant China’s membership as a nation, and the Chinese’s membership as a ‘race’, in the world system of nationstates. Global membership is conceived in social-darwinist terms: only the strongest nations and races belong to the international community, the weaker ones are doomed to be erased from the world map, figuratively speaking. There is a strong weiji gan (sense of crisis) and lishi shimin (historical mission) in the reform discourse. According to Qiu Ji’s editors, the greatest crisis China faces today is economic backwardness because of its undeveloped commodity economy. However, they also argued that traditional culture has to undergo fundamental changes to fit changes occurring in the economy. The key for transformation of traditional culture is improvement of population quality.16 China must take advantage of the historical opportunity provided by economic reform to fulfil the national dream fought for by generations of ordinary Chinese, intellectuals and leaders. The open advocacy of such ‘Westernization’ was pushed back somewhat after 1989. However, 1992 witnessed a return of critiques of traditional culture as causes of economic backwardness. Besides traditional Chinese culture, ‘left’ policies under Mao, and the social and cultural identities created because of these policies, have also been included among the obstacles to China’s modernization. The following quote is typical of the attack on left politics under Mao: China under the ultra-leftist rule was closed-off, over-weening and boasted of being ‘the centre of international revolution’ in the midst of poverty. ‘Transition (to communism) in poverty’ somehow became a fashionable national-strengthening policy. Wealth was attacked as capitalist, while poverty meant socialism. ‘Leftist’ rule has not only brought Chinese people disaster and humiliation but also destroyed socialism.17 The official Chinese national identity was firmly determined by socialism and non-integration with the capitalist system. This is now attacked as ‘old’ and ‘unsuitable’ for the present-day market economy. Moreover, once again, any alternative to the present ‘new’ reform policies is seen as a return to the ‘old’ (now ‘left’) politics.18 In opposition to the attacks on Chinese traditions and culture, the neo-confucianists take pride in the Chinese ‘race’ and Chinese culture. This school emerged both in China and in Southeast Asian countries, Singapore and Malaysia in particular. There is an uneasy relationship

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between the modernists’ need to reject the country’s own past and culture and the nationalist need to assert Chinese equality or even superiority during a programme of modernization. Although neo-confucianists differ from iconoclastic reformers with regard to the normative weight attached to Chinese culture, the former do not offer an alternative to modernization. Rather, neo-confucianists attempt to argue that the confucianist values China and other nations share, such as self-cultivation, entrepreneurship and hard work, have contributed greatly to industrialization in countries like Singapore. They can therefore contribute to the industrialization of China. As I will show in the next chapter, China looks more and more towards its East Asian neighbours, especially Singapore, for a model of economic development that maintains an active state role. However, one needs to bear in mind these tensions when theorizing China’s modernity project. China’s modernity project is not simply to copy the Western model, but to assume its own, evolving forms. Critiques of traditional cultures and leftist Mao policies have not led to total acceptance and enthusiastic reception of capitalism and Westernization. The intersection of nationalism and economic reform in China subsumes other non-national interests. The Party calls on Chinese people to act as one to build China as a strong nation-state. Having discussed the strong nationalist component in China’s economic reform discourse, I will now turn to analysing economic reform policies as they impact on gender relations.

Reform policies and gender Economic restructuring in many developing countries was carried out in response to pressure from international lending agencies in the wake of the debt crisis. The principal ideology behind the SAPs is neoliberal. The latter, as Bakker argues, rests on three main premises: –that institutions such as the state and the market should reflect the motivation of individual self-interest; –that states provide a minimum of public goods along the lines of the nineteenth-century ‘night-watchman’ state; –and that the most efficient allocation of resources and maximization of utility occurs through markets. 19 These lending principles informed structural adjustment policies, which ‘represented a switch of strategies on the part of the major official aid

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 43

agencies in the early 1980s away from incremental redistribution to monetarist and open economy strategies’. 20 These policies then were imposed on developing countries. There were, of course, variations in the manoeuvrability of each state towards the lending agencies. However, on the whole, the state’s sovereignty was eroded, and the result of the programmes was always meant to be the market taking primacy over political mediation. 21 Further, economic restructuring in developing countries is being carried out in a dominantly private and heavily foreign-owned capitalist economy. The SAPs forced massive privatization of the public sector in developing countries. They also pushed the implementation of austerity measures, which included cutting back on social spending and reducing popular consumption. The emphasis on structural adjustment and on deregulation of the labour market in countries undergoing structural readjustment has also resulted ‘not only in a notable rise in female labor force participation, but in a fall in men’s employment, as well as a transformation – or feminization – of many jobs traditionally held by men’.22 The SAPs eroded many rights and benefits people in developing countries enjoyed during the period of economic growth generated by borrowed money from foreign lending agencies. Therefore, economic restructuring is considered to have resulted in the general worsening of people’s living standards. 23 In essence, lending agencies considered structural readjustment to be inevitable for the solution of debt crisis, and considered markets to be the answer.24 The restructuring has further integrated these countries’ economies into the world capitalist system by forcing an export orientation on the economy.25 By contrast, economic reform in China was driven by internal political economic forces, much more than it was debt-driven. Second, the general attitude of the Chinese people towards economic reform has been positive, for most say that their lives have improved since reform. Reform policies are not squarely based on neoliberal ideology, despite the increased introduction of market principles in China’s economy. The reform of labour allocation is a useful example. Labour allocation is now undergoing a transition to the market: no urban Chinese are allocated jobs anymore; instead, they look for jobs themselves. Urban Chinese now have more freedom in choosing or changing jobs. The modified hukou system also allows rural women to migrate to urban areas to work. However, state control of labour movements remains, especially from the countryside to urban areas. Consequently, migrants can find jobs, but only marginal, temporary ones. Another peculiarity is that as the labour market is still emerging, and public sectors are given

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more power to hire and fire employees, the specifically Chinese form of connections and networking, guanxi, has started to play more important role in getting access to jobs. The importance of guanxi may be explained by the contingent interplay of emerging market forces and authority figures’ increasing power over allocation of resources. In any case, differential access to the labour market is widely seen to depend on differential access to guanxi.26 A further distinction between SAPs and China’s reform is that developing countries are expected to reorient to export-oriented industries principally in order to pay back debt to the foreign lending agencies. China, on the other hand, adopts an export-oriented development strategy to increase the national foreign currency reserve, but also to promote the development of the domestic market, and hence domestic consumption. One consequence of these differences in how Chinese people experience reform is that the post-Mao state can play on nationalism to push forward its reform policies, at least in the more prosperous parts of the country. It was the Chinese state rather than outside forces which initiated the reform, and the results have benefited a very wide range of Chinese materially. When the Chinese state talks about the inevitability of economic reform, it is articulated in social-darwinist nationalism: if China does not reform, it will not ‘survive’ in the international community of nation-states. Economic reform, insofar as it is intended to achieve modernization, is considered to be a historic mission.27 The state is still a dominant force and continues to carry a social vision of ‘a unified will, a single historic mission’ despite its internal complexity. 28 The Third Plenum of the 11th session of the Central Committee in December 1978 was considered, in virtually all Chinese discussions, the critical foundation for China’s economic reform policies. The Third Plenum officially declared that the era of class struggle was over, and the era of economic development had arrived. The general tenets of China’s reform policies can be summarized as follows: decollectivization in rural China in favour of households as the basic units; encouragement of non-state forms of ownership; establishment of export-oriented SEZs as development hubs on the coast; two-tier pricing for state-plan and market respectively; and proliferation of specific markets, for example in labour, consumer products and foodstuffs. The ongoing reform of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is seen as the key to reform’s success in the cities. At the enterprise level, SOEs face challenges in several areas: firm function; wages and employment; and management-labour relations. The SOE is transforming its primary

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 45

functions from employment and social services to profitability and competitiveness in the market. The initial expansion of non-state forms of ownership such as the township- and village-run enterprises (TVEs) has two aims: rural-based employment in order to prevent massive rural–urban migration; and a model of flexible accumulation, a benchmark against which the rest of the economy can be pressured to reform. Pressured to be competitive, SOEs also have to cut production costs, and managers have newly acquired decision-making powers to implement a flexible accumulation model. The state has also eased the hukou system, facilitating the managers’ need for cheap labour, and their general need for more choice in transforming the labour-force. To repeat, China’s economic reform is aimed at introducing market mechanisms into its centrally planned economy so as to achieve the ‘four modernizations’ (in agriculture, industry, science and technology and defence). Until after my fieldwork, however, it had not aimed at widespread privatization of state ownership. The state has emphasized other, intermediate forms of ownership. Even the fastest growing ‘progressive’ TVEs are not privately owned. They are financed by the governments of local townships and villages. Neither has letting the market play the leading role meant that the state’s role has declined in economic activities. Rather, an altered, more economically efficient state intervention in the economy has emerged. What is even more important to note in the Chinese case is that the state at local levels and its local agents assume more important accumulation roles during reform, and that this is in fact critical to understanding the logic behind the local promotion of TVEs. 29 Beyond this local accumulation role, the Party’s ideological role remains prominent. According to the Party, spiritual civilization is considered an absolutely essential complement to material civilization. Without spiritual civilization, it is said, the market economy might spin out of control. Spiritual civilization can have a countereffect on the anarchic market economy. But unlike debates on the relationship between base and superstructure under Mao, which overprivileged the superstructure, reform firmly established material civilization, albeit without reference to class, as the driving force of history. As Deng stated in a widely repeated slogan, ‘shehui zhuyi jiushi jiefang shengchanli’ (socialism means liberating the forces of production). Having outlined China’s reform policies in relation to the SAPs, the present study must examine the gender impact of this restructuring. Feminists have written extensively on the consequences of SAPs. 30 Here, I will outline these feminist concerns. Feminist economists point out

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that individualism, rationality and self-interest – the key tenets of neoliberalism, and mainstream economics more generally – are by no means gender- and class-neutral. By appearing to be so, they conceal the power relationships couched in the social relations they describe.31 Kabeer and Humphrey attack neoliberalism’s notions of individualism, rationality and self-interest on two fronts: within the family/household and in labour markets. As they argue, neoliberalism has several basic flaws: 1. It imposes the universal model of family/household as a heterosexual couple with their offspring, with husband as the breadwinner and wife as housewife. 2. It wrongly conceives of self-interest and rationality in terms of narrowly economic interests alone. 3. It does not consider reproduction in its economic rationale. 4. It sees the household as a unified entity which is self-interested and competitive in the market, while altruistic within itself. 5. Finally, it treats labour markets as open to men and women equally.32 These basic flaws, when translated into the SAPs of other countries, are seen to have had profound gender impacts. Kabeer and Humphrey outline several gender impacts that occur through the SAPs: 1. When women enter the labour market, they are seen to be working to supplement an already-given family wage. (Hence the capitalists’ ethical justification for providing women low wages.) 2. Women are disadvantaged in the labour market because they are disproportionately responsible for reproduction, which is unpaid. Thus, women either have to do a ‘double shift’ (one at the workplace, another at home), or remain invisible to the wage economy by simply doing housework. 3. In societies where sons are preferred, women are disadvantaged in family decisions in allocating education money. Hence they are at a subsequent disadvantage in the deregulated labour market. 4. Finally, traditional gender roles and stereotypes discriminate against women in the labour markets. In sum, Kabeer and Humphrey’s critique of neoliberalism rests on their insistence that individuals are not free agents, detached from society. They argue that individuals are socially constructed and differentiated based, among other things, on gender. Therefore, their agency is conditioned by social structures in which they are situated.33

The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ 47

Let us now turn to the empirical findings regarding the gender impact of the SAPs in many developing countries. The SAPs are said generally to have resulted in the ‘feminization of labour’. 34 As Standing argues, with the establishment of SEZs open to TNCs in many developing countries, women have been drawn into the labour force as cheap labour. Many industries simultaneously underwent ‘deskilling’ in order to cut the cost of production. Consequently, in many societies, women have taken up jobs traditionally occupied by men. 35 Further, as the labour market underwent deregulation, there was a global trend to rely more on casual and temporary labour, and on part-timers. Women have tended to take up these jobs, in part to balance work with home responsibilities.36 Because the predominant gender ideology in many developing countries sees women as mothers and wives first, and workers second, capitalists can justify paying women low wages. 37 In sum, some women workers were empowered by their newly acquired economic status. However, they are also subjected to exploitation and patriarchal control by international capitalists. Economic reform in urban China has very specific gender implications when it focuses on the competitiveness of SOEs and the expansion of TVEs. The ‘feminization of labour’ in many developing countries refers to the reduction in overall job quality to the level characteristic of jobs previously occupied overwhelmingly by women, and consequently, to the actual occupation of those jobs by proportionately more women. But in China, many urban women workers already employed in the state-owned enterprises were laid off during structural reform. Many were then pushed to informal sectors. Also, rural Chinese women were drawn into factory jobs as cheap and ‘passive’ labour because they are unmarried and therefore involve none of the ‘costs’ to the enterprises that married women with children have. China’s economic reform has also forced enterprises to be competitive in both the domestic and international markets. In order to be competitive, enterprises also adopt a flexible accumulation strategy: more informal sectors in the form of TVEs, subcontractors, cottage industries and domestic work; more reliance on contract and temporary workers and less on workers in SOEs, who are increasingly laid off; more and more confinement of women to some job categories, such as manufacturing and service jobs, which are temporary and low paid. However, the notion of feminization of labour is not sufficient to explain the gender impact of China’s economic reform. In many situations, there has been an ‘en-gendering’ of work in the sense that many jobs are once

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again considered to be men’s or women’s work. Consequently, there is increased segregation of the labour market in China. Rural decollectivization has restored the (normally male) head of the household as an important economic figure. However, given that China’s socialism has drastically disrupted the traditional kinship system, the male head does not have all the decision-making power in the household. This is an argument developed in Chapter 5, using personal narratives of women migrant workers. Decollectivization did mean that girls’ education has dropped dramatically. ‘From 1978 to 1994, the number of girls attending primary school dropped by 9 per cent, while the female population increased by 25 per cent. In 1993, 70 per cent of illiterates were women.’38 With inadequate access to education, rural women suffer additional disadvantages in the labour market. It is more so in the reform era when a post-secondary education grows in cost, but can get people out of rural hukou and into better quality, permanent jobs. Sectoral restructuring in urban China has meant a change in emphasis from heavy industries to light manufacturing industries, because the latter ‘have good economic results’. 39 Further, most of the new actors in the light manufacturing industries are TVEs, which offer workers lower wages and poorer benefits. Heavy industry, by contrast, is mostly stateowned because it is capital-intensive. The increase in light industry has also meant an increase in the Chinese informal sectors. Such sectoral restructuring has meant that heavy industries laid off workers, and state-owned light manufacturing industries, especially textile industries, also closed down or approached bankruptcy. Under Mao’s gender policies – ‘whatever men can do, women can do’ – women were recruited into heavy industries long considered male-dominated. Since urban reform started, managers in these sectors have used their newly acquired powers to discriminate against women. The first to be let go were women, because women are considered more costly: employers have to pay maternity leave.40 Women workers were even laid off in textile industries because of the competition the latter faced from TVEs. In Shanghai, a major cotton industrial centre, at least 250 000 textile workers actually lost their jobs in the early 1990s. About 90 per cent of Shanghai’s textile factories have recently gone bankrupt. 41 Further, the Labour Insurance Regulations, first implemented in the 1950s and reimplemented in 1979, ‘differentiate men and women by requiring women workers to retire at age fifty, as compared to age sixty for men.’42 In many situations, many women who retired at 50 have to seek temporary jobs to support families. A second income in these cases is often absolutely necessary for family survival.

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The expansion of light manufacturing industries has meant that more and more migrant women from rural China are provided non-agricultural jobs, a long-cherished urban privilege under Mao. In some situations, rural women replaced urban women in light manufacturing. This is the case for women migrant workers in Sicheng. The present work will show that urban women left silk weaving because they consider silk production to be ku (bitter) work, and they now have the opportunity to avoid it. In the last four chapters, the present work will present many personal stories of women migrant workers, stories of gaining independence and power in migrating. To repeat from an earlier section, to reform SOEs is to make them profitable and more market-oriented, and therefore to cut costs. SOEs were not set up for profitability. They were set up to meet plan requirements, to ensure urban employment and to provide welfare benefits to their employees. Under diametrically opposed new rules, workers are laid off by managers to make the enterprises lean and efficient. Those considered unproductive tend to be women in their forties. Because reforming the SOEs has resulted in laying off women, as Honig and Hershatter observed, ‘women were particularly tracked into small, individually run enterprises, particularly those that engaged in work such as cooking, sewing, and childcare, traditionally considered the purview of women.’43 In 1988 Zhongguo Funü (Women of China) ran several issues devoted to the issue of middle-aged women re-entering the job market. Once such women are laid off, they also find it extremely difficult to find another job. Women workers who are laid off are often considered too old and unskilled for many light and service industries, industries otherwise considered suitable to women. These disadvantages are considered natural to that age group. For example, one writer in Zhongguo Funü advises that women must not be too ambitious in looking for new jobs. Because women in their forties are ‘naturally’ disadvantaged relative to younger women, they must look for jobs that they can ‘handle’. The writer advises that such women workers should look for temporary work, work in domestic service or take on other work that does not require ‘high quality’ people.44 When women do not take up jobs which need long-distance travel and long hours, they are called picky (tiao-ti) and spoiled by the maoist ‘iron rice bowl’. By contrast, women who are well adjusted to the labour market are publicized as models to follow. Often when middle-aged urban women are featured, they are said to have rationalized their ‘value’ in the labour market and then sought another job according to their ability. Such jobs included vendors, domestic workers, independent small business and child care. It should

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be noted that these jobs tend to be either poorly paid or without social security. 45 Reproduction costs and their gendered allocation simply do not appear in these analyses.46 These women supposedly cannot find jobs simply because they have low education and outdated work skills. Women are consequently entirely responsible for making themselves more competitive or for absorbing the consequences. Age is as important as gender for these workers: this age group of women have arguably suffered most from the Cultural Revolution. Urban people of their generation were normally ‘sent down’ to the countryside after junior or senior high school, few to return before the pattern of their lives were set. In general, intellectuals and government officials, whose careers were also interrupted and talents wasted at the time, were rehabilitated. By contrast, these women did not seem to benefit from rehabilitation. Some were once potential members of the elite, others not. Yet both were deprived of the cities’ educational and working opportunities. As urban workers, they are somehow personally responsible for both their ignorance and their unwillingness to welcome yet another upheaval in their lives. Clearly, there is class bias, with strong gender and generational inflection, in who counts as a victim of the Cultural Revolution. The reintroduction of a prominent role for the market also led to a redefinition of femininity and masculinity. Such a shift did not arise ex nihilo. Rather the redefinition of masculinity and femininity reactivated old controversies on men’s and women’s proper roles in society. Built upon existing patriarchal structures, they nonetheless manifest themselves in new forms. For example, the present biologically determined gender ideologies explain women’s disadvantages in the market as sexual (i.e., biological) inferiority. It is important to underscore that the state never passed laws and regulations explicitly authorizing discriminatory practices in the labour market. But some state reform policies were designed without consideration of distinct male and female interests, while others make unwarranted assumptions about those interests. It is largely because of these unintended and unexamined consequences of state action that economic reform has important gender-specific consequences. Sexism also comes from a reactionary resistance to the association of gender equality with maoism. One well-publicized example can shed some light on this point: Daqiu village women returning home. Daqiu village was reputedly successful in its economic development in the early 1980s, and the success was widely fêted in the media. But in the mid-1980s, Daqiu’s economic success was alleged to be related to its

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‘women returning home’ policies. Women staying home were considered beneficial to working men, to the women themselves and to village industries. The women were supposedly relieved of a ‘double shift’, men could work longer because their wives took care of all the household work and enterprises benefited because of increased male productivity. 47 Daqiu women returning home turns on women’s traditional role as housewives. By women becoming housewives, as Li Xiaojiang argues, men can realize their own greater social value as a symbol of manhood. However, such publicly sanctioned sexism is not without resistance. The fact that debates and controversies on women’s roles occurred at all shows resistance. Women simultaneously interpret, accept and resist the construction of femininity and masculinity in the dominant discourse. As my study shows, such constructions are complicated when class and place of origin intersect with gender. For now, I will delineate the shift in gender ideologies in the post-Mao period. Such a shift in gender ideology acts to conceal the gender bias in reform policies.

Reconfiguring femininity and masculinity Chinese communist gender policy can trace its origins to the May Fourth intellectuals, who were heavily influenced in these matters by Engel’s ‘Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State’. The appeal of Engel’s writings on gender relations came from his ‘materialist theory, which attributed the historic defeat of women’s independence and autonomy to the emergence of significant holdings of private property and the advent of class society.’48 Chinese communists found Engel’s analysis served to ‘denaturalize Chinese patriarchal power and open up the possibility of its demise at some time in the foreseeable future’.49 In China’s socialist gender ideology, women’s paid employment was generally considered the key marker of their liberation. But women’s interests were ultimately secondary to national ones. In the history of Chinese women’s employment in socialist society, women’s role as mother and wife tended to be emphasized when unemployment rose. During the initial period of collectivization into the 1950s, when unemployment was high, the government instituted the wuhao huodong (‘Five Goods Campaign’) which encouraged women to stay home as ‘socialist housewives’.50 During the Cultural Revolution, when class struggle was once again presented as the principal contradiction of Chinese socialism, the state policies heavily favoured eradicating class differences. Women were thus called back into workforce under the slogan, nanren neng gan de, nüren ye neng gan. (Anything a man can do, a woman can

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do also.) Women and men were seen during that time as ‘unisex, and women’s issues were seen as societal, not biological’. 51 Working outside home during that time became the symbol of modern women, while staying home was considered bourgeois. Gender policies during the Cultural Revolution could not simply be explained economically. These policies also served the class-based politics of the time. The All China Women’s Federation and editors of Zhongguo Funü were criticized by the Party because they sponsored many debates on family matters, which were seen by the Party as inconducive to the class-based socialist revolutionary cause.52 In October 1964, an important article was published in Hongqi (Red Flag, the Party magazine), which laid the foundation for analysing women’s interests first and foremost as class interests. As it stated, [t]he question of women is very often covered by a veil of sentiment, and people very often deviate from the class viewpoint over this question so that the spread of bourgeois thought is facilitated. For this reason, the implementation of the historical materialist viewpoint and of the method of class analysis in this realm to enable the question to be correctly understood and handled, has great significance for our socialist and communist work.53 Women’s participation in the workplace did not eliminate patriarchy. This gender policy was state-led and patriarchy merely took on different form. As Lu Tonglin argues, women did not need to obey the family patriarch, but certainly did have to obey the patriarch of the big family – the state. It was not so much that women achieved gender equality as men lost some of their privileges. 54However, many women who entered the workforce during that period did feel liberated. 55 Women’s work outside the home took on a significantly different meaning from ‘shame’ to ‘honour’. During the Mao period, tianguniang (‘iron girls’) were the models to be emulated. However, ‘iron girls’ were sexless model workers. They could do whatever men could as workers, teachers, doctors, etc, but could not do so as distinctively female subjects. In other words, women were working people first and foremost. To be defined this way has significant implications for the concept of gender in the Chinese context. The role of ideology should be understood as a system of representation, which ‘works on the conception of self and social order so as to call or solicit (in Althusser’s term, “hail”) an individual into a specific form of social “reality” as subject.’ 56 Unlike the commonsensical Western

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concept of ‘self’, identities, including gender identities, exist primarily in relationship in Chinese convention. This affects the character of ‘hailing’ that generates social identities in China. Insofar as women were treated as working people in the workplaces, they were seen in relation to the national project (as earlier passages have shown). In addition, their interests as women in the workplace were seen as secondary. By contrast, they remained wives, mothers or daughters-in-law, this time when set in relation to the family. However, as I argued, the latter were residual identities, themselves related to the national project and its class or development orientation. It was up to Chinese women to balance work and family, without, however, having a basis for placing limits on their sacrifices, or enjoying a legitimate space for interests they could claim in their own right. Against this legacy, the Chinese women’s studies movement offers an essentialist identity labelled nüren. Whatever the theoretical problems with an essentialist ontology, it does posit an important, if dangerous, pragmatic basis on which to hail a newly autonomous womanhood. Urban economic reform led to the closure of many factories and the loss of many workers’ jobs, in order to achieve efficiency and profits. However, urban women tend to be the first to be let go. This time, ‘going home’ is presented to women as their contribution to economic reform. Further, the state argues that women’s sacrifice embodies traditional Chinese women’s virtues such as ‘sacrifice, tolerance and generosity’. The general reason for significant redundancies is clear, given the aims of economic reform. But why is it that women are now again being called to ‘go home’? The key answer lies with the continued existence of the patriarchal structure and culture under socialist gender policies. It was easier to deal with gender inequality in the economic than in the cultural sphere. Socialist gender policies did not challenge the fundamentals of patriarchal structure, namely the oppression of women because of their gender in relation to the public/private divide. Rather, they simply advocated equality between women and men in the public sphere. Equality referred to the sameness between men and women. Yet managers tended in the end to lay off women workers first because of the consequences of the surviving patriarchal understanding of women workers’ positions in the private sphere. This understanding virtually mandates marriage, and ascribes women the primary role as mothers and wives within marriage. Reference was made earlier to potentially troubling aspects of the emerging women-studies problematic. The latest reconfiguration of gender relations changes from seeing women as the same as men, as part

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of a larger social emancipation; to seeing women as different from men along biological lines. This shift may be linked ideologically to the confucian understanding of women as the weaker sex, whose role is primarily at home and with the family. The shift is also reflected in recent state regulations: in particular, one could cite the 1986 health care regulations and 1988 labour protection regulation. Both regulations accord benefits to a woman worker with one child. A woman with a second child outside the mandate of state population policy is subject to fines or even dismissal according the state family planning regulations. In so doing, as Woo argues, the state thus constructed the ideal Chinese family as the one-child family. 57 As such, and regardless of the desirability of the policy aims identified, women’s bodies, not men’s, are sites of state disciplinary power. Further, both regulations were ‘to carve out special protections for women structured around their reproductive functions, thus defining the treatment of women along biological lines.’58 The regulations ‘represent advances in addressing the health needs of women.’ 59 However, to see women either as the weaker sex or as primarily responsible for reproduction makes it logically easier to ask women to ‘go home’ first during fundamental structural change. Parallel to this trend, managers, especially in light industries in the coastal areas and SEZs, seek specifically unmarried young women from rural areas as a cheap and manageable labour force. With no family to support or ‘distract’ them, and often with no better choice, these workers can be paid less than local mothers, and worked harder and longer, and yet they are counted on to be as ‘passive’ as other women. The ‘Woman Question’, from May Fourth through Mao to the Deng era, has been tied to nationalism and socialism. Ultimately, women are deprived of separate agency; they can only be saved by being subsumed in a different, national movement of salvation, whether by May Fourth intellectuals, communists or developmentalists today. Shifting women’s primary role to the family not only made it easier to reallocate women in the labour market, but has significance for maintaining a sphere of stability for (largely male) individuals in a chaotic and confusing society. Women are generally expected to seek jobs which suit their supposed biological characteristics. They are expected to maintain harmonious and stable families. As welfare benefits and social services for urban people are cut, families become more and more important in tempering the demand for these services. It is not surprising to see, for example, a shift in the 1980 Marriage Law, which reinforced the social custom that requires children to assume responsibility for their aged parents.

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Beyond these immediate policy goals, redefining femininity and masculinity during the economic reform era is also part of ‘refuting the past’60 and thereby claiming legitimacy for the present regime and policies. ‘The past’ in this case refers to the ‘left’ policies in the Cultural Revolution, including the ‘iron rice bowl’, its associated mentality and culture. In the reform discourse, a new culture compatible with the market economy has to replace the culture of a centrally planned economy. Because middle-aged women workers are laid off in large numbers, they have become both object and subject of such discursive struggles. The other relevant aspect of the ‘left’ politics now discredited refers directly to Mao’s gender policies, symbolized by the iron girls. Iron girls as models gave young women a clear message that it was possible to overcome an inferior biology and influence one’s destiny. What was challenged at the time was admittedly not so much the idea of biological inferiority but that women could overcome it. In other words, women’s worth was measured against the men’s standard. The model was mercilessly mocked in media and popular culture in the post-Mao period. Women’s ‘feminine beauty’ is now emphasized in the present gender ideology, with no small impact on consumerism. Women in the post-Mao period are thus not expected to do whatever men can. Rather, they are advised to choose traditional women’s work. However, today’s female model is similar to ‘iron girls’ in one sense: they were both ‘byproducts of political campaigns that had objectives other than raising the status of women’.61 Media representation of Chinese women and men also reflects this shift. While the images of women are centred on family, the images of men are centred on the business world. The shift to the idea the women should look like ‘women’, and men like ‘men’, ‘was part of the reassertion of gender as a natural and valued division in society’. 62 Such an idea was seen as a remedy to the ‘sexless’ world under Mao, when Chinese women’s femininity was concealed and women were required to do men’s work despite their supposed biological characteristics. The focus on women’s femininity not only situates women firmly within the family milieu – married women in particular – but also targets women as consumers of domestic housewares, cosmetics and fashionable clothes. Media representations showcase the interaction between domestic and international factors in constructing femininity and masculinity. As Lily Ling points out: To local and international media alike, the Asian woman embodies ‘service’. But where international ads tend to sexualize this message

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(e.g., tourism ads that feature beautiful, young Asian women in traditional dress enticing the (male) viewer/traveler to ‘visit’), local media frame it in traditional terms: e.g., married women are ‘virtuous wives and good mothers’ (xianqui [sic] liangmu) when they tend to their husbands and children at home, or single women or young ‘Misses’ (xiaojie) reveal their ‘true selves’ (benlai mianmu) when shopping as consumers in a market economy, and so on. . . . The ‘modern’ Chinese men, as depicted in these commercials, mirrors his Western counterpart.63 The present chapter has discussed the changes in femininity, but this has to be understood in relation to masculinity. While today’s female roles are good wives, mothers, daughter-in-laws and women who do traditional women’s work, today’s male roles are bread-winners. The husband is expected to earn money and support his family including aged parents, and in the current reform discourse, this means above all participation in the marketplace. He wears suits, busies himself in the business world, goes to business banquets and travels. In other words, he has to be busy outside the home to make money. The new masculinity also means that he has to be able to take leading roles at home as well. As post-Mao gender discourse shifted towards biological determinism, men’s supposed biological characteristics such as rationality, independence, vigour, dominance, tough-mindedness and daring make them natural leaders. Women’s supposed biological characteristics such as emotionalism, sentimentalism, quietness, fussiness about details and gossip make them unsuitable to lead. Those women who do not follow such models are either mocked or condemned. A nü qiangren (‘strong woman’) may have a successful career, but she is usually portrayed as single – either never married or divorced – and unhappy.

Conclusion I have pointed to the historical continuity of economic reform: it is to fulfil the national dream of a strong nation-state. This nationalist component of economic reform subsumes other interests. For example, women are once again called on to make sacrifices for the good of China as a whole. By comparing the gender impact of the SAPs in developing countries, I have argued that the gender impact of China’s economic reform is more complicated than the notion of the feminization of work that emerged from the feminist work on SAPs. In China, women who were assigned to SOEs or collectives before economic

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reform started, felt disempowered by labour reform policies because they were pushed out of the formal sectors to either informal sectors or home. Urban young women have more freedom in seeking jobs, but they often face discriminatory hiring and firing by managers. Rural women have also acquired greater freedom of movement thanks to the modified hukou system. But they are often found in low paid jobs as temporary workers. I have also analysed the cultural shift of economic reform embodied in ‘spiritual civilization’ in order to expose the discursive terrain within which Chinese people accept and at the same time resist the new gender roles. I have also argued that reform policies are designed based on so-called gender- and class-neutral assumptions, and because individual actors are social actors, reform policies have impact on gender and class relations.

2 ‘Emergent Classes’ and Sicheng Society

Everybody wants to have a better life, but it has to depend on circumstances. Laoban nowadays are the most popular, because they are capable of making money. Therefore, everybody wants to become laoban. In this society, guanxi is so important, without which one simply cannot accomplish anything. So, I think money and guanxi are the two most important assets one needs in this society. But I do think most people who call themselves friends in this society are wine-and-meat friends [ jiurou pengyou: i.e., friends made only for instrumental purposes]. The gap between the rich and the poor is increasing. Poor people are poor because they do not have guanxi. In villages, becoming a cadre is like making a small fortune. Some people become cadres because of guanxi, some become cadres because they have higher education level than the rest.1 Xiaodi, a male peasant worker Looking back, we are better-off; compared with some other people, we are not well-off; looking forward, we are not certain. The status of technicians is declining. Nowadays, a person’s ability depends on one’s financial situation. Technicians, university or non-university graduates are employees, while business people are laoban. There is a world of difference in whether you exploit others or you are exploited. Because besides selling one’s labour power and skill, one does not have ownership, therefore, you have to serve other people. Laoban have a lot of financial resources; they can dominate others. We think that laoban had good opportunities and 58

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have good guanxi. Without guanxi, you cannot become laoban. 2 Ming, a male technician People who have no money cannot compare with people with money. Both food and clothing are extremely expensive in Sicheng. I’d like to do something with my life. But I do not have ability to earn money. Without money, you simply cannot do anything. I want to have a rich husband, but not too rich. 3 Qing, a female migrant worker We sold our contract land last year. That means that I do not have to worry about the state grain quota. But I pay 200 yuan per year to the village and also pay tax to the silk market [i.e., user fees originally connected with the market’s construction]. Under the commune system, the gap between the rich and poor was narrow. With economic reform, the gap between the rich and poor is becoming larger and larger. For example, I and another peasant in my village earned more or less same work points [ gongfeng] under the commune system. But I am now earning far more than he does. He is still tilling the soil, while I’m in business. But he spends more physical labour than I. I just spend more mental labour than he does. I’ve been in the market for seven years. If the policies remain unchanged, I will be able to do business for a few more years. I’m quite happy with my life. No one in the family is tilling the soil. Tilling the soil is not very profitable. If it were profitable, everybody would go for it. Peasants simply cannot make a living by tilling the soil. They have to engage in other economic activities such as raising pigs, chickens or setting up looms at home. 4 Hao, a former brigade leader, now a ‘private’ (geti) silk retailer I came to work in Yonghong right after I graduated from high school in 1982. I make more money working in the factory. My husband is a carpenter. We have two daughters, one eight years old, the other two. Tilling the soil does not earn us much money; fertilizer is especially very expensive. We have three mu [1 mu = 0.06 hectare] of land. My husband and I do not till

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the soil. We hire people to do it. Last year, we paid 35 yuan per mu for the labour. We buy fertilizer and supply one meal each day. 5 Jing, a female peasant worker We have five mu of land. Mostly my husband tills the soil. I weave almost twelve hours a day at home. I also look after our son. My step-daughter is twenty years old. She is working in a silk factory in Sicheng. I do the cooking and cleaning. We bought a loom in 1994. Last year, we earned about 8,000 yuan from weaving. Last year, our township got a new party secretary. He immediately raised the electricity fee. We have to pay 0.3 yuan more per watt-hour. That means we have to pay an extra 800 yuan per year for electricity. We are also required to raise about one sheet of silkworms. It is a mandatory task. If we do not do it, we will be fined. We plant over one mu in mulberry trees. We also raise one pig.6 Jumin, a female peasant in rural Sicheng

These personal narratives tell a story of growing opportunities as well as the increasing gap between the ‘rich’ and the ‘poor’ since economic reform began in China in 1979. How do we understand this contradictory phenomenon and what it implies for the future? Part of the answer certainly may be found in the tradition of historical materialist political economy. But at the same time, it is fundamental to the premises of this book that the analytical concept ‘class’ (or even the underlying concepts of mode of production and capital) cannot grasp the totality of historical development, nor should we, as Lefort warns, ‘confuse social division with the empirical distribution of individuals in the process of production’. 7 Social inequalities in today’s China, as the above narratives suggest, result primarily from unequal access to political power, in the sense of state power. One of the more important manifestations of the current state basis for class power in China is the peculiarly Chinese phenomenon of guanxi. It is a different question to consider where this unequal access to political power may lead; this question can only be answered by the making of history, not by the making of scholarly works. The making of history may benefit, however, from a consideration in a scholarly work of the process by which what now exists becomes whatever will be. Beyond the more specific claims of marxist political economy, it is possible to affirm the latter’s more general methodological proposition that that process consists of, or at the very

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least may be analysed by, dialectical dynamics operating entirely within the ‘real world’. The study of class is not merely the study of the degree to which people are rich and poor, but the study of how human collectivities come to be marked by distinct, marked patterns of wealth or poverty. In the historical materialist tradition, such collective destinies – class destinies – are interlinked. These two claims – class analysis as the search for underlying causes of interlinked and opposed social phenomena (that is, a ‘unity of opposites’) – are fundamental distinctions which separate the political economy understanding of Marx from mainstream (liberal) or weberian understandings of class. Further, the marxist analysis refuses explanations which turn on the individual characteristics of persons, or on principally ideological characteristics of the society. (In the West, these alternative approaches are championed by neoclassical and weberian explanations respectively.) Instead, marxist analysis focuses initially on 1. collective relations to the means of production, and 2. contradictory relations among different collectivities, or classes, themselves conditioned fundamentally, but not exclusively, by the conflicting interests that flow from the relations set out in 1. These relations are all considered to be dialectical relations. A further useful relation is frequently posited between the structural reality of a class-in-itself, and the sociopolitical collective agency (a class-for-itself) which emerges from the resultant historical struggles. While class-in-itself commonly denotes a set of interests which essentially emerge prior to consciousness or politics (at least in the broad sense), class for itself is a necessarily contingent, historicized and localized reality, which may or may not emerge at all. Beyond these basics, marxist class analysis has historically been reduced by some to the rather mechanical characterization of the fundamental classes that emerged in European history. Marxist mode of production analysis has also been similarly reduced to the work of tracing out the abstract and self-contained logic of the capitalist mode of production, as explicated in Marx’s Capital. The first ambition of Capital is manifestly to ground a set of universal claims about the fundamental form capitalism takes. Where elements of the capitalist system are introduced, the remaining elements tend to emerge (unless otherwise impeded), and the same fundamental classes are always at the core of that structure wherever it appears. A second, more controversial ambition is to demonstrate that, while capitalism is ultimately universal in neither time nor space, the broader set of categories – modes of production and classes – is considered both universal and fundamental.

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While the applicability of capitalist categories (or socialist or even ‘asiatic’ ones) is necessarily in question in the present period of transition in China, so too is the explanatory sufficiency of the broader set of categories, oriented as they are to a single base in production. A better understanding of marxism’s fundamental insights is gained by interrogating its secondary tendencies. The centre of marxism, beyond its dialectical method of seeking unities-in-opposites, is its commitment to concepts which are grounded in an analysis of real conditions. In this sense, Deng’s dictum to ‘seek truth from facts’ marked a welcome return to the roots of the Party’s intellectual heritage. Dialectics and realism in this sense are immensely valuable in explaining why particular people become rich or poor. Doing this analysis in China is complicated, however, by the Party’s decision that economic development, rather than class struggle, has become the principal contradiction to resolve in China today. The language of class struggle, for largely understandable reasons, has become associated with ‘leftist excesses’ of the Cultural Revolution. It is beyond the scope of this study to judge whether, in the tradition of Chinese marxism, class struggle is still considered a real but subordinate contradiction, or whether the years of socialist rule are believed to have eliminated classes and class struggle. The increasing gap between the poor and rich is recognized officially without reference to class in the marxist sense. It is also known that income differentials are officially explained as necessary, in order to bring about gongtong fuyu (a prosperity common to all people). This chapter attempts to explore a putative emergent class structure in economic reform and to seek structural explanations for the increasing gap between the rich and the poor. But it also sees classes-forthemselves – the product of historical struggles in particular locations rather than of a mechanical set of economic structures – as fundamental to any adequate theory of class. For this reason, Chinese official theory on class must also be explored, in the present context less to pass judgement on the validity of its claims and more for the material impact of its proclamation. First, I focus on the theoretical discussion of class analysis in the socialist context. Second, I want to trace the genealogy of ‘class’ in China to demonstrate that class and class struggle have a historically contingent character and have to be articulated in a cultural context that renders class and class struggle meaningful. I argue that the Chinese revolution fundamentally changed China’s social structure and created a new language – a class language – to articulate social inequalities. The Chinese revolution brought about a totally new state of affairs,

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in the sense that new ideas about class emerged: Mao’s class analysis displaced natural and non-contradictory hierarchies with the necessarily contradictory nature of classes in society (shehui). Third, I shall analyse the emergent class structure in the economic reform. Finally, I will analyse the post-Deng discourses of civilization and population quality. This last section is intended to demonstrate that from a Western marxist perspective, dengist discourses made it impossible to see class inequalities as necessarily antagonistic and structural, rather than the result of individuals’ personal failures. However, because the discourse is open-ended, it also creates a space for clever and strategic utilization for resistance.

Theorizing class in a socialist context In this section, I examine analytical branches of the socialist tradition which engage with non-Western and state-socialist social structures. This is done fully aware that in many respects, the socialist tradition emerged in critical engagement with individualist explanations of economic success or failure, and developed sharply different understandings about the nature of ‘class struggle’ and ‘revolution’. It is not an easy task to attempt a class analysis in China given the nasty history of class struggles and struggles waged in the name of class. This task is made even more difficult because Western theoretical debates on ‘class’ are based on European characteristics of capitalism. How do they relate to the Chinese situation? My rather eclectic attempt here is influenced by Konrád and Szelényi, Laclau and Mouffe and Ong. In the marxian tradition, class is primarily based on the structure of property relations: in the capitalist mode of production for instance, those who own the means of production are of capitalist class; those who do not and therefore have to sell their labour power to those who do are working class. This core relation is one in which the collective participants ‘in themselves’ have interests which are mutually negating. This mute fact of capitalist structure puts a necessary element of struggle into play in real capitalist societies. Self-conscious classes, on the other hand, or classes ‘for themselves’, emerge only from the real historical struggles which necessarily result. This theorization is politically problematic when applied to state socialism, where the state owns the means of production and yet workers clearly remain a distinguishable element in society (and indeed in some sense must remain distinguishable for the purposes of regime legitimation). Early in the Soviet experience, Lenin adapted taylorist

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principles to the problem of capital development under socialism. This was to advance a goal of capital development hitherto attributed exclusively to the bourgeoisie in industrial societies, and one that clearly involved both the expansion of a working class and the imposition of sacrifices. The latter sacrifices were to be functionally if not politically equivalent to exploitation, insofar as both led to the alienated expansion of capital. This strategy gradually became ossified and dysfunctional in ways which are now well known, if also often exaggerated in dogmatically anti-socialist reflexes in the West. Could state socialism avoid the charge of being marked by fundamental contradictions that involved necessary class struggle? Official socialist discourse strove vigorously to find some basis to deny the charge; Western marxist analysts (and indeed Chinese analysts at the offset of the Cultural Revolution) sought to demonstrate that class antagonisms continued to exist under the new dispensation. The main contribution Konrád and Szelényi made in analysing class structure under state socialism, is the argument that three great divisions constitute classes-in-themselves under these conditions: workers, who do not individually own means of production; intellectuals, who dispose of workers’ labour and its fruits; and political elites of the party, who control the means of persuasion and coercion. Konrád and Szelényi also argue that the state blunts the emergence of classes for themselves (in other words, classes expressing and consciously advancing their own interests) by eliminating autonomous organic intellectuals (in Gramsci’s sense) that could represent these various class interests. The Party-State cannot sacrifice its own identity as the sole collective organic intellectual for workers and peasants, without sacrificing its basis of existence. Thus, on one hand, Konrád and Szelényi argue that the mere collectivization of the means of production does not put an end to class struggle. A ‘rational-redistributive’ system has its own contradictory class system, just as capitalism does, though class consciousness is blunted in the former case. These contradictions lead the system towards class power for the intellectuals. This analysis retains its critical edge because it claims extra-political class interests are masked by state-socialist politics, but are grounded like Western corporate managers in the disposal of labour power. On the other hand, China’s socialist market economy certainly is neither capitalist nor classically state-socialist. Can socialist analysis take this notion ‘socialist market economy’ seriously, or must the system be read as a transitional position on the road to either capitalism ‘proper’, or a relapse to socialism? In this regard, Laclau and Mouffe, and other

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‘post-marxists’ question any social determinants which are presented as pre-political, including those structures which vulgar marxism sees as objective laws. Laclau and Mouffe deny, therefore, that there is an inherent logic to capitalism that will necessarily tend to emerge wherever elements of capitalism are introduced. The coherence of economic structures emerges ‘politically’ and contingently as a process of articulation, and not in predetermined forms as a functional necessity. On the other hand, while it is a fundamental premise of dialectical materialism that contradictory realities are necessarily finite and dynamic in their development, some marxists such as Ellen Meiksins Wood assert vigorously that strong distinctions may be made between transitional moments, in which outcomes are indeed more open-ended and politically determined, and periods in which contradictory, but nonetheless structurally sophisticated and relatively sustainable realities such as capitalism establish themselves along lines that are broadly well known.8 They would agree with the assertion that the local emergence of such a contradictory reality as capitalism is necessarily caught up in dialectical relationships with the hitherto existing social structures of the locality, and that capitalisms do indeed emerge with strong and abiding local markings. Thus, while French and English capitalisms both qualify as nominally ‘Western’, even they emerged in substantially different contexts, and their class formations bear the marks. However, the central development of a market-regulated (that is, progressively commodified) economy ensured that core features of their economies assumed common traits; economies which subsequently assumed these features also took this direction, and others in the future may be presumed to take this direction as well. Laclau and Mouffe permit one to imagine the constitution of economic structures that are neither capitalist, nor socialist nor anything else imagined before. But if nothing, including viable economic structures, lies outside politics (understood here in a broad sense of the constitutive struggle of purposive, antagonistic collectivities), then how in the Chinese context could there be class interests if the Communist Party has ruled that they no longer exist? In fact, while Laclau and Mouffe do say that all social structures are constituted politically, they do not mean by this that one could imagine any political force that could fully realize its will without being constrained by structures already constituted. Moreover, any political practice occurs on contested terrain, adding strategic constraints to structural ones over against any one political will. It is likely that the conclusion would be that a distinction could still be made between products of already given structures,

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and products of contemporary politics. What Laclau and Mouffe challenge is the assumption that these structures will always remain in the background, never to be politicized and changed. They also question the assumption that this background constitutes only, or even primarily, class identities. Implicitly in line with Laclau and Mouffe, insofar as she asserts that there is no essential quality to the category ‘class’, no essential grounding of a class-for-itself in a class-in-itself, Ong argues in her study of Malaysian villages that the introduction of state agents introduced alternatives to the existing mode of production. 9 Ong’s insight about the role of the state in the actual formation of class relations is useful in helping us think about class relations in China, for she points to a state role in shaping class identity which is quite autonomous from production relations. In Malaysian villages, Ong states that ‘class differentiation into relations of capital and labor involves the active participation of the state. Through their particular access to different labor markets and the state bureaucracy, kampung folks are reconstituted into a localized version of the Malay proletariat, or a fraction of the emergent Malay middle class.’10 Class identities are altered, not by the introduction of a new production role for the state, but by the mere presence of state officials, state offices, and the associated consumption norms. Thus one can establish tentatively that there need be no necessary link between the state’s impact on existing production relations, and the class identities which its local presence can cause to emerge. Beyond its direct role in the mode of production and in the production of consumption norms affecting class identities, the third, indirect role of the state in China for the development of class identities is to constitute an ideological and political context. Maoist class analysis and the state assignment of class identities had little to do with the mode of production as such, which tendentially moved towards the collective/ redistributive model Konrád and Szelényi considered and then abruptly turned towards radical models of self-reliance. But official class analysis and identity-assignment have an insurmountable presence in any account of the constitution of class identities, that is, in the identification or nonidentification of classes-for-themselves. Following Konrád and Szelényi’s argument, we can treat the Party of China’s Party-State as the organic intellectual of all classes: it reconstitutes class as a mere dimension of state politics and assumes a monopoly over the definition of class positions. (By contrast, we can treat the State aspect of the Party-State as setting policies which impinge on material characters of

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class relations.) More recently, however, the Party has intervened to proscribe class analysis as a legitimate mode of understanding central social inequalities. As a result, the reform-era Party-State blunts the genuine emergence of class-for-itself more than the maoist Party-State. In China, the theoretical position taken and the action the state takes to implement that position have actual material impacts on class as objective realities. In China, perhaps more than in the West, political debates about class should not be read just as ideas about objective reality with persuasive power, but as material forces which impinge on what classes actually are. In sum, it is both theoretically and politically more accurate to understand class in concrete situations and see class politics as political process when we look at the class politics in Mao’s China and the emergent class structure in today’s China. However, it would be an equally erroneous position to overstate the scope of the state’s influence, or to make assumptions about what lies beyond, based on the Western experience. The first step towards overcoming the second category of potential errors is to make a distinction between criticism that can be directed against the state as a set of authoritative institutions rooted in legitimate coercion, and the wider ‘state of affairs’ or status quo, about which critical analysis also remains vital. In contradistinction with Western states, in which a much deeper norm of separation between church and state functions to keep the State’s role in ethics and civility to a minimum, the Chinese Communist Party works out its modernist projects against a backdrop of profound State implication in the moral and ethical dimension of society. And yet it is not true that the Chinese state exhausts the set of Chinese social institutions and structures, particularly in the reform era, or even that the remaining social structures are entirely divorced from the state. In this sense, we can nonetheless resort helpfully to Gramsci’s concept of the integral State, precisely because he was grappling through this concept with the fundamental unity of power which undergirds civic ethics and state coercion in the West. It is beyond the scope of this book to resolve this theoretical debate. Nevertheless, within the socialist tradition, a distinctive political economy produced out of political struggle in history must be understood to involve distinct, definable class interests, outside the question of whether or not these interests are currently understood consciously and acted upon. The former, latent class interests, if not currently being constituted, are the deliberate product of earlier times, and arguably at least in part an unintended consequence of the constitution of a

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class-divided set of economic structures. Although in the Chinese case these interests may be more difficult to identify, both because of the current political (and often societal) disapproval of class analysis and because of the puzzle posed by the adaptation of a universal model to local conditions (for example, ‘socialism [or capitalism] with Chinese characteristics’), it is possible to begin the process of identifying class interests quite concretely by reference to patterns in the strategies which actual individuals adopt in that context. If universal traits of capitalism are indeed unfolding and are indeed drawing each other out, this process should emerge from such a study of the undoubted realities of uneven commodification and a process similar to primitive accumulation by which private use and benefit emerge from publicly held resources. A number of class strategies, familiar to marxist class analysis of undoubtedly capitalist societies, emerge from the reform process and are consistent with this study’s interviews. A few class strategies unfamiliar to such analysis of capitalism are evident as well. A set of propositions seems possible about emergent classes in China, based on the presumption that actually existing political economies are necessarily class societies. Jiangnan peasants seek to diversify or leave the land; urban workers leave the factories for white collar jobs; laoban benefit from the nexus of pre-existing hierarchies and increasingly elaborate markets. All rely on their connections. However, these strategies are not exclusively economic interests of class. Those women with none of these options, and often facing adult life outside conventional family strategies oriented to first-born sons, can imagine enrichment by strategic marriage. A rural unmarried woman seeks factory employment as a strategy for improving her quality of life away from a patriarchal family structure, and for developing a fund for her wedding during a brief period of relative freedom. A few key developments in the reform experience appear to be crucial in the background of these strategies.11 In the countryside, decollectivization and planned industrialization were the first steps in the reform process as a whole. This permitted a rapid diversification in individual household strategies and activities. There were waged work, a greater variety of agricultural activities and the individual or collective subleasing of lands to subcontracting capitalists or worker collectives. These acts had the beneficial effects of building a certain consumer market in the rural areas, of guaranteeing superior food provision, of providing an incentive to provide urban centres with relatively cheap labour and of preventing catastrophic levels of permanent migration.

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In urban areas, SOEs undertook reform programmes to reorient themselves to market norms. This process, accelerated by the competitive pressures of the rural, and later urban TVEs, combined with the SOEs’ earlier commitment to economies of scale and high volume production, to encourage competition on the basis of cost containment and reduction. Relatively cheap labour was therefore in demand even in the SOE sector, and rural reform provided new sources of labour supply. Government services provided a second vector of change. The end of the maoist mass line in favour of a professionalized bureaucracy, and the increased need for government regulation to handle the burgeoning parts of the economy outside the plan both encouraged the opening of government posts to the educated public. Other service sectors such as banking and insurance also were decentralized and specialized, grew in the presence of a growing non-state sector and frequently reorganized from nonprofit to profit-making work units.12 A third source of growth in white collar work came from the growing retail sectors that a reorientation to consumer products encouraged. This reorientation, a fourth major vector of change, also increased the proportion of the economy oriented to light industry and relatively labour intensive activities. This in turn meant that private or smaller scale TVE activities were favoured in this growing branch of the economy. Even cottage industries and puttingout flowered as a result of the celebration of consumerism. (On the other hand, as private enterprises grew in scale, there was a pronounced tendency to have them link up with village government as managers of new collectives. These benefited from the greater capitalization and credit benefits associated with their status, and the extension of these by the force of guanxi relations with local officials.)13 While the results for the consumer were widely welcomed, there was also alienation among poorer classes and other sections of the population less able to consume at the new norms promulgated in the mass media, yet bearing a considerable worsening in their working conditions and status in the realm of production. The recent strike by Huaqiang workers in 1995 reflected a wider national resistance that was vigorous, if ill-organized. Fourth, even in state-controlled sectors, managers were given important new powers in profit-making work units, including the power to hire and fire employees. Full nominal responsibility for the profitability of the enterprises fell on these managers, as indeed did important shares in the profits. However, substantive accountability of the managers to the real shareholders has been impeded in many respects by the overlapping forms of ownership. The strong presence of state and township or village collective ownership, without meaningful input from below

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in ‘shareholder’ direction for the firm, has meant that firms may readily fail or flounder without proportionate consequences for the managerial team. These national developments were played out locally in the reorganization of the class structure of the Sicheng area. Gentry and large peasants in villages neighbouring Sicheng were once wealthy if they possessed much land. Now the inverse is more nearly the case for the wealthy peasants who remain; and where they can, peasant families will rent out or sell their land and offer their labour in the neighbouring factories, in putting-out systems or in various retail undertakings. Where land sale is not possible, peasant families and individuals within them will still nonetheless diversify their activities to include some or all of these activities. Urban people who can, avoid manual work in factories, jobs once considered among the most desirable within the socialist experiment. New opportunities in the service sector and core government services offer more than high status in a society regaining a traditional disdain for manual labour. They offer relatively secure incomes and benefits, and superior working conditions. From these very specific strategies and their relation to specific social positions, it is possible to derive a picture of emergent class interests, the early outline of an emergent mode of production. Perhaps more troubling for an unimaginative student of Marx are some of the prevailing peculiarities of these class strategies. For instance, access to these desirable positions for urban resident and peasant alike is said to rest on one’s connections or guanxi; and for the urban resident, already privileged in access to education, access to government and service sector jobs turns on increasingly expensive post-secondary (and even secondary) education. The purchase of education is also a key factor in the story of migrant workers. One worker interviewed for this study was still recovering from the shock of failing exams, and the alternative for her was work in Sicheng. (There is obviously a key role for strategic marriage which must be explained with reference to specifically Chinese kinship relations and internal migration restrictions. But here the focus is on guanxi and the class interests underlying it.) The centrality of guanxi it leads us to examine in greater detail the character of China’s elite classes, which so far have been underdeveloped. With whom does one cultivate connections in this new and amorphous society? Guanxi becomes important when kinship and state structures in combination are far stronger than civil society (in the sense of the free interaction of equal individuals).14 I also argue that the importance of guanxi in creating social hierarchies can be best explained by the contingent

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interaction of Chinese cultural meanings attached to social relations (the importance of personal relations and obligations) with the structural contradiction implied in the notion of socialist market economy. The latter, though beset with often confusing glosses, rests ultimately on retaining state-ownership as the dominant form of ownership, while encouraging the development of market economy (and hence, widespread processes of commodification, or subordination of use values and their production to market exchange). Those use values which aid in profitable activity and remain available through a variety of allocation mechanisms connected with the still-dominant form of ownership, rather than through the market, more often become the grounds for cultivating guanxi. More and more, guanxi is cultivated instrumentally in the pursuit of profits, rather than for individual use or for face-saving infusions of scarce resources in the meeting of state targets, according to a more nearly market-based rationale of calculated net benefits. The best class analysis is not merely the identification of useful statistical categories, but of the emergence of self-conscious collective interaction. Paradoxically, in post-Mao China, a state which in marxist eyes must be more divided by class interests than at any point since collectivization, it is both unfashionable and impolitic to identify antagonistic class interests, and hence difficult for class consciousness to develop. Well-developed class identities in an apparently class society are presumed to coexist in dialectical and exploitative relations in marxist theory: for that reason alone, classes-in-themselves are by definition not readily or predictably governed. Perhaps for this reason, apparent class positions are officially played out instead through the officially sanctioned cultural categories of ‘civilization’ (wenmin) and population quality (renkou suzhi). (Overtly class analysis of exploitation, such as that of the male technician quoted at the beginning of this chapter, is both rare and unofficial.) The official construction of a new humanity appropriate to the socialist market system relies on these conveniently non-quantifiable continua, along which persons in any job category may be placed. Because of its very flexibility, so helpful to a pragmatic government which still requires an ideological justification for its actions, this discourse of population quality provides some limited terrain for the expression of unofficial inter- and intra-class tensions. The overall effect, however, is that fully developed classes, like fully institutionalized public/private divides, are therefore blunted. If the above analysis is correct in seeing the potential for it, class struggle cannot come into the open, and remains the social relation that ‘dare not speak its name’.

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Mao’s class analysis and revolution strategies In pre-revolutionary China, the category ‘class’ was an alien concept. The basic social structures in agrarian China were those of kinship and lineage. A lineage was composed of both rich landlords/gentry and poor peasants, with gentry as the leaders. As Barrington Moore observes, [lineage] had rules of conduct that were repeated orally at the colorful ceremonies when all members gathered and visibly reasserted their membership in a collective unit. Through the clan a certain notion of Confucian notions, such as respect for elders and ancestors, filtered down to the peasantry . . . the clan and patrilineal emerge as the only important link between the upper and lower strata in Chinese society.15 One’s social reality was thus bound by familial and clan ties, and obligations which cut across class divisions, but not by civil–societal institutions that acknowledged the different classes they linked, as was the case in the West’s common citizenship or transcendent religion. Mao was faced with this cultural and conceptual reality, which hitherto existing marxism had considered impossible conditions for revolution. How to reconcile the universalistic premises of marxism with the particular circumstances and needs of Chinese culture? Mao was not alone in perceiving difficulties in a particular setting unexamined by Marx. Gramsci, pondering in prison how revolution could happen in Italy, reworked the concept of hegemony based on the intuition that revolution could happen only when civil society is first conquered. His concept of hegemony, as it bears on the present discussion, refers to cultural leadership. Gwyn Williams described Gramsci’s concept of hegemony as follows: By ‘hegemony’ Gramsci seems to mean a socio-political situation, in his terminology, a ‘moment’, in which the philosophy and practice of a society fuse or are in equilibrium; an order in which certain ways of life and thought are dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religions and political principles, and all social relations, particularly in their intellectual and moral connotation.16 Dirlik draws a link between this apparent tangent and the present study. Dirlik points to the similarities of Mao and Gramsci on the question of

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a revolutionary’s cultural leadership. It was within the marxist idea of class that Mao viewed the problem of consciousness, but also within the marxist idea of consciousness and the purpose of social analysis that Mao viewed the problem of class. As Dirlik argues, consciousness, to Mao, means ‘not simply a reflection of social reality, but a mode of comprehending and changing it’. 17 As mentioned earlier, the basic social structure in pre-revolution Chinese villages was kinship. As Moore has demonstrated, there was little in the way of Western-style civil society, or legal support for market contracts. This became a central problem for the Chinese revolution because revolution had to be made in the Chinese countryside after 1927. Communist power from within the state had already become impossible under the nationalists. Then the communists were driven to the countryside. Their fateful response was not capitulation to the break with their ‘natural’ constituency in the urban working class, but the famous Long March. For the revolution and the reasons for it to make any sense in a basically kinship-based rural setting, without any resources available from the state, a civil society had to be created and non-antagonistic familial and kinship bonds broken between peasants and gentry. The categories shehui (society) and jieji (class), in their interconnected way, made it possible for Chinese intellectuals to theorize social structure apart from an Imperial- and kinship-based conceptual universe. They defined a national community in which people would relate to each other as autonomous social forces. Even though this meant coming to terms with often grotesque exploitation, the move to see the society in which this exploitation occurred for what it was, was in some sense freeing.18 How would it be possible for the enlightened social critic and the oppressed peasant, living in separate social spheres with no common conceptual or even spoken language, to translate effectively across the barrier between them?19 The key to this revolutionary activity of translation was consciousness-raising. As Dirlik points out: [t]he predicament of Marxist revolutionary consciousness was not just political (reconciling Marxist and Chinese political goals), it was also cultural . . . Revolution would have to be made, and a revolution in consciousness and culture was the precondition to, rather than an expression of, a revolution in material existence.20 In a sense, the Communist Party led by Mao in pre-revolutionary China was just doing that – creating a civil society and moulding class

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consciousness in the peasantry. To Mao, building revolutionary consciousness through the encouragement of revolutionary speech was no mere static reflection of class or society; it was a dynamic material ‘moment’ of revolutionary activity. 21 As Anagnost points out, the speech of the subaltern subject is not the spontaneous flow of pent-up sorrow but the careful reworking of perception and experience onto the narrative frame of Marxist class struggle as the specific lens that renders this vision. This new frame was put into place via a complex dialogical exchange between political vanguard and the rural masses. 22 Mao’s first major analysis of class was in 1926 in his essay ‘Analysis of Class in Chinese Society’. Its opening remarks were not ‘Which classes may be shown to exist in China?’ They were instead, ‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends?’ He then went on to identify fifteen ‘classes’, predominantly with regards to their attitudes to revolution. Dirlik argues that in Mao’s 1926 essay, Mao revealed a conceptualization of class that was predominantly political: In his delineation of class in China, he was interested not in a structural determination of class in terms of relationship to the means of production, but in the identification of the status of social groups in terms of hierarchy of power, and especially in terms of exploitation. 23 This theorization of class in China would later guide the Communist land reform programme in liberated areas before 1949 and then throughout the country after 1949. Mao’s class analysis attempted to bring peasants to class consciousness, to believe that they were exploited by landlords. The Party had great difficulties in persuading poor peasants to use economic conditions to see their social reality and mould their non-class consciousness into class consciousness. 24 Revolutionaries had to guide the peasantry to help the latter see their role in history as proletarian. As Dirlik points out, Lenin’s vanguard party assumed a quite different elite strategy and merely disdained the ‘false consciousness’ even of the working class. Mao on the other hand, offered a model of constant interaction with workers and/or peasants, which modified and moderated the nakedly coercive implications of Lenin’s approach. 25 The work team’s constant dialogues with poor peasants were aimed at leading peasants to see the antagonistic interests between peasants and landlords. After gaining control of an area, they provided peasants a

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new language and rhetorical stance, in the form of a ‘speaking bitterness’ narrative that articulated the antagonistic interests between them and the landlords. ‘Speaking bitterness’ narratives are constructed around the contrast between the ‘past’ and ‘present’. By exposing the dark and immoral side of the ‘past’ (the old society), the bright and moral side of the present (the new society under Mao) could be brought out. 26 The ‘speaking bitterness’ narrative was latter employed by the Deng leadership to let intellectuals vent their anger and sorrow about the Cultural Revolution. Under Deng, Mao’s policies especially during the Cultural Revolution were delegitimized by maoist techniques, while Deng’s reform policies were legitimated with intellectuals as their firm supporters. The dualist approach to history, organized around a before-and-after contrast in both phases of consciousness raising, rendered class identity problematic after Liberation and collectivization. On the one hand, classes continued to be superficially evident, and continued to provide the government with a focused legitimacy; on the other hand, the socialist aim was explicitly to overcome class contradictions through national emancipation. With the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, every Chinese was given a formal class status based on the person’s position in the structure of ownership in the last three years before the victory of the revolution in the locality. In the countryside, assigning class status occurred in the context of land reform: At the time of land reform, the Communist Party adopted the term [jieji chengfen] to refer to the exact economic condition of each peasant family and hence to its relative position on a socio-economic scale which included, in ascending order, agricultural workers, poor peasants, middle peasants, rich peasants, and landlords. 27 The Party applied the methods with which it had experimented in the countryside to determine the condition of each city dweller. By 1952, practically the whole Chinese population had been given a class status. In all the papers and files concerning an individual, that person’s assigned class status was inevitably listed. The Party redistributed the confiscated goods and property from the rich classes and redistributed them to the poor ones. In so doing, the party reconstructed the social order to favour classes which it considered its allies, and to penalize others.28 By classifying and categorizing the whole Chinese population into an ‘enemy camp’ and a ‘friendly camp’, the Party was able to establish a new order of identities based on affiliation to the revolutionary

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cause. The new social order also replaced the old mode of familial and kinship affiliations, whose institutions were dissolved, and even the material reality of most class positions was replaced with new modes of affiliation identifying with or against the Party and its causes. Western marxism would gradually conclude that an analysis similar to the new order of class was not without its problems: from that perspective, any notion of class based on statistical categories rather than on historical struggle would be dubious. The Agrarian Law of 1947 and the supplementary regulations guided the classification of rural classes. However, it was not always easy to identify real individuals’ class belonging. As Hinton observed in Long Bow village: By far the most important dividing line was that between the middle peasants and the rich peasants. The Draft Agrarian Law of 1947 had made this great divide between friend and enemy, between the people and their oppressors, between revolution and counter-revolution. It was absolutely essential that this line be clear and unequivocal. Yet here the Juichin documents were most ambiguous. In describing middle peasants the document said, ‘Some of the middle peasants practice a small amount of exploitation, but such exploitation is not of a constant character and the income therefrom does not constitute their main means of livelihood.’ Anyone using these standards would have to know exactly what small, constant, and main meant in order to carry out the intent of the law. In regard to the differences between poor peasants and middle peasants the same kind of difficulty arose. 29 The complexity and multiplicity of social and political conflicts was well observed in Mao’s essay ‘On Contradiction’. To Mao, there was always a zhuyao maodun (‘principal’ contradiction) that conditioned all the other contradictions; it was the task of the revolutionary to identify the principal contradiction and use it to guide the revolution. This was an idea borne out of the exigencies of civil war and national liberation. ‘The idea of principal contradiction’, as Dirlik points out, ‘resolved the problem of chaos on a short-term basis, but it did not provide a guard against arbitrary activity (more crudely, opportunism) on a long-term basis . . . ’30 Class struggle is by definition a historical and fluid process. It is inherently a political process, though in Western marxism, it must flow out of ‘objective’ contradictions (that is, out of those contradictions emerging

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from the relatively autonomous, non-political realms of production exchange). As even Laclau and Mouffe argue, class struggle arises from social antagonisms embedded in historically specific, if ultimately political processes. Mao’s political conception of class, however, illustrates the historically contingent nature of class struggle. Class struggle was certainly carried out as historically inevitable during the Cultural Revolution. However, during the Cultural Revolution, people were given class labels based increasingly on attitudes and behaviours.31 Class enemies were everywhere, yet objectively nowhere. Enemies simply had to be invented for the sake of class struggle.32 There is no agreement on why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, nor is it the purpose of this study to resolve the question. Initially, Mao wanted to mobilize the masses against bureaucratic authority as he recognized that the bureaucratic elite were more and more detached from the masses. 33 Whatever the initial intent or the real combination of causes, the whole country was consumed by political conflict and slipped into chaos. We now turn to post-Liberation class structure and political economy in China. After land reform was completed by the spring of 1953, the landlord class was eliminated, the material conditions of the poorer strata of peasants were improved, but in the end, middle and rich peasants owned more land than before land reform. 34 But as Riskin points out, this result was deliberate. As he states: Land reform had the dual purpose . . . of ending ‘feudal exploitation’ and promoting growth of farm production. The second objective meant preserving the rich peasant economy, which best embodied the potential for private agricultural development. In urban China, the national-capitalist class (except bureaucratic capitalists, i.e., monopoly capital) was encouraged to participate in the building of a ‘new democratic revolution’. 35 The foregoing paragraph alludes to elements of the ‘New Democracy’ model. The model was characterized as a united front of people of many class backgrounds in China under Communist leadership. The rationale behind the model is that China was not ready for socialism. As Dirlik points out, the basic problem of this model was ‘how to balance the forces of capitalism against the forces of socialism’. 36 This model, however, was soon abandoned because it did not bring about economic development as expected under the model. This was blamed on exploitation in rural China, on commercial speculation and on usury by capitalists. 37 Consequently, the commune system formed in the mid-1950s:

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The ‘high tide’ (gaochao) of [rural] collectivization gave rise to a similar movement in industry and trade: for a few months in 1956, virtually all economic activity in China was undergoing rapid and clamorous reorganization. In industry, the target of this activity was the transformation not of collectivities, but rather of joint stateprivate enterprises, referred to as ‘state-capitalist’ in character. The former owner/managers in essence became state employees while receiving interest payments on the value – estimated by the state – of their shares in the enterprises.38 After collectivization was completed in the urban setting, planning and management were also centralized under the influence of the Soviet model of ‘one-man management’ system. 39 This system was a combination of taylorist scientific management and a hierarchical ‘responsibility system’ of leadership.40 Under the centralization of management and planning, bureaucratic power grew. Mao’s ‘mass line’ principle then led to decentralization of central bureaucratic power during the Great Leap Forward. ‘The Great Leap Forward substituted spontaneously initiated, mass economic activity for the blueprints worked out by professional planners . . . it gave great economic and political authority to local and regional units – the communes and provinces, respectively.’41 After the Great Leap Forward ended in economic crisis, central planning of major macroeconomic variables and of the large-scale modern industries was restored, while other activities would be decided by provinces and localities. The Cultural Revolution saw another of Mao’s efforts to attack both bureaucratic power and leninist elitism in Party organization. Mao’s overt vision in launching the Cultural Revolution appears to have been to achieve ‘egalitarianism’ – later attacked by the Deng leadership as the daguofan (‘the big pot’). As Riskin points out: [e]galitarianism as a goal of the Maoist leadership was most seriously applied to relationships that had – or potentially had – a class or status character. Although from the 1950s China has kept a complex and variegated system of wage ranking scales . . . visitors’ reports have usually indicated a markedly small difference between the wages of the top administrative and technical personnel and those of ordinary workers.42 I have outlined China’s political economy under Mao in order to demonstrate that Mao’s economic policies after 1949 had undergone twists

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and turns in terms of solving contradictions between central and regional levels of authority; between bureaucratic and party elites on one hand, and masses on the other; between ‘red’ and ‘expert’; between rural and urban; and between managers and workers. The principal problem facing China according to Mao and his philosophical supporters, ‘lay in the realm of relations of production’, and that ‘the proper function of political economy as a field was to investigate problems in this realm’. 43 In other words, for Mao, revolutionary superstructure determines base. The post-Mao leadership was to turn this approach of Mao’s upside down. To sum up, Mao’s genius lay with his political conceptualization of class, in which class analysis was intended to mobilize the peasantry in support of the revolution. Against Second Internationalist ‘objectivist’ theorizations of class, Mao understood that class consciousness had to be moulded in Chinese peasants. He recognized that not all consciousness was class consciousness. Against the leninist theorization of politics, Mao understood that the moulding of class consciousness required an intensive face-to-face engagement with the concrete needs and lives of the peasantry. ‘The task of the revolutionary was to present to the proletariat its image in history in order to help the proletariat fulfill its potential.’44 Mao’s mass line politics also explained several campaigns attacking bureaucratism, whose height was seen during the Cultural Revolution. It may be argued that this precarious position of the intellectuals and cadres throughout the Mao period made possible a reform period that was relatively stable and decentralized. The later development during the Cultural Revolution pointed to the danger of an abstract or overpoliticized theorization of class and class struggle. Not only did class struggle become historically inevitable – class was defined far more abstractly than in a traditional marxist notion, and the friend/enemy distinction was made far more absolute than the earlier nuance permitted under the principle of ‘principal contradiction’. And yet in a society whose social structures had been remade to fuse economic with state and ideological functions, how could an ‘objective’ notion of class be maintained? There was no longer (and indeed in China never fully had been) a relatively autonomous base for a class to emerge ‘objectively’ in relation to political and ideological activity. The Cultural Revolution was later called shinian dongluan (‘the tenyear chaos’) by the Deng leadership. The Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in December 1978 formally abolished the class label every Chinese was assigned and shelved class-based politics. According

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to the Deng leadership, the principal contradiction China faced was no longer class struggle at all. China’s poverty and backwardness has been identified as the principal contradiction instead. With this shift, we also see a discursive shift. The official hegemony of class discourse is replaced with a ‘civility’ discourse. As a consequence of these most recent developments, interviewees for the present study certainly recognized social inequalities that were the result of economic reform, but they did not necessarily see their social reality as one of social antagonisms. Given that Chinese people were well versed in class language under Mao, why did the respondents not see social hierarchies in class terms? There are two main reasons: first, the state is now telling its people that market economy offers everybody equal opportunity to compete; if one fails, then it is one’s personal failure. Second, the ‘civility’ discourse organizes Chinese people into backwardness/bad quality and progressiveness/good quality. Therefore, structural problems are translated into problems of individual behaviour or attitude. Next I will sketch and analyse what a Western analysis could call an ‘emergent class structure’ in China, and use the personal narratives of people in Sicheng as a lens to focus on a particular local situation.

The ‘emergent class structure’ of economic reform in Sicheng Before the central government decided to increase the salary of public servants, a public servant’s salary was a bit higher than a worker’s. However, their salary has increased several times more than that of workers. An ordinary employee in a local electrical utility earns a annual income of 30 000 yuan; while workers 6–7000 yuan. There is also a huge gap between managers’ salary and workers’.45 Ming, a technician After Liberation, I worked as a shift leader for a few years and was workshop leader until my retirement. To answer Mao’s call that leaders should be the first to bear hardships and the last to enjoy comforts, shift and workshop leaders were always the first to bear hardships. We worked eight hours a day in workshops, we did not have a bonus. Together with workers, we also ‘offered work without pay’ for four hours every day. At that time, we were primarily producing for export, shift and workshop leaders worked much harder than workers. At that time, workers followed the advice of heads of factories very much. People were thrilled to see their names appear on the honour roll.

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Nowadays, managers are the first to enjoy comfort and the last to bear hardships. Workers are fined if they are five minutes late for work; they would face more severe punishment if they take home something from the factory. But managers can take home things from the factory without being seen, because they come and leave in cars. It should be possible to demote cadres as well as promote them. In reality, they can only be promoted. For example, one dyeing factory in Sicheng was divided into three separate factories eleven years ago, so that there would be enough general managerial positions to be arranged for the former party secretary, the former general manager and the deputy general manager in the old factory. You can only have one general manager for one factory. General managers use factory cars as their own. They feel they own the factories. Workers do not earn much even if they work to death. All the shift and workshop leaders have ‘red bags’ [hongbao, or bonuses given by general managers]. The principle, ‘the working class is the leading class’ is reversed.46 Huang, a retired male worker At the beginning of economic reform, factory jobs were the most sought after in the town. At that time, everybody wanted to get a job in state-run enterprises, because they provided stable income and benefits. At that time, service sector was non-existent, so everybody was the same, working in factories. At that time, banks and local tax bureaus did hire a few employees, but people did not particularly want these jobs, because people who worked in banks and tax bureaus did not really earn more than factory workers, and factory workers enjoyed much better benefits. When factories started to give workers an end-of-year bonus in the early 1980s, Yonghong gave out 60 yuan, the highest bonus for workers in the town. This news caused a sensation in the town. The next year, every factory wanted to beat the rest in the amount of bonus they gave to workers, so some waited to the last minute in order to beat other factories. At that time, people preferred factory jobs. However, with the emergence and development of service industries, gradually people did not want to work in factories. Jobs at banks and tax bureaus are the most sought-after ones. The silk market [set up in 1985] led to the development of service sectors such as hotels, restaurants, even hair salons. On the one hand, people’s attitude has changed; on the other hand, with the expansion of silk

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industry, the town could no longer supply sufficient labour for factories. There has been a shortage of labour since 1982. The first group of peasants from nearby villages were employed in factories. Peasants at that time yearned to work in factories, because their social status in villages could be raised even though they still have rural hukou. Those who wanted to work in factories had to go through the back door because there were only a few job positions in each village. The village party secretary was the person who decided who got factory jobs in Sicheng. On the one hand, peasants are also affected by the development of service industry, so many of them set up their own business; on the other hand, villages also set up silk factories, so many peasants prefer working in local village-run silk factories. Because workers from the town have more or less guanxi, they get the most comfortable jobs in factories.47 A retired male technician There have been tremendous changes in the past ten years. The biggest change has been the opening of the silk market in the town. There have been big changes in downtown Sicheng: more new buildings and wider roads. [Older houses are predominantly downtown and usually in bad condition.] However, the downtown area is not as good or modern as the suburbs of the town: new mansions are everywhere in the suburbs. Nowadays, factories build apartments to sell in the market. Usually business people buy them. Workers cannot afford them. Most workers bought flats. These flats were allocated to them by their employers in the past. A worker’s monthly income is not sufficient to support a family. Old Wu, a retired male worker The market economy has created many problems. It is inevitable. But they do not seem to go away. There are many women in town, who do not have good jobs but who have married businessmen. But many of these women are quite bitter yet they cannot show their feelings to other people even though their material lives are very comfortable. Why? Because they are dependent on their husbands, who have power over them. The town has a reputation of having the most expensive brides and weddings. The cost of getting married is snowballing. When the couple register to get married, the groom has to give the bride 30 000 yuan. Some women even want men to buy new apartments; some

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who have lower standards are happy with old apartments. I have a son, so my task is very arduous. One cannot afford a wedding ceremony without money. So the only way out is to be thrifty. It is actually more cost effective to have daughters now. 48 A female shift leader Doing business nowadays is not based on fair competition. Doing business is closely connected to officialdom. 90 per cent of ex-convicts are laoban because they had no other options.49 A male workshop leader Many village cadres are very bad and corrupted. Some of them profited from family planning. They fined those villagers who violated family planning, but village cadres do not hand over the fines to their leaders.50 A male migrant worker All the business people in this silk market had guanxi when they started retail business here. No one without some guanxi can be in this kind of business. I, together with two others, contracted to sell silk products for our village-run silk factory. But then, the factory went bankrupt in 1993. After the factory went bankrupt, we were asked by the then-general manager to change our status from state-owned enterprise employees to private businessmen [ getihu]. The factory had a state-owned licence [guoying zhizhao] even though it is a village-run factory. But I did not want to become a private businessman; I still use the state-ownership licence to do my silk retail business here. To have a state-ownership licence means that you belong to a work unit [danwei]. The advantage of having a state-ownership licence is that when I go to wholesalers to buy products, they trust me because I have a danwei. What I am doing now is exactly the same as what we three did until 1993. The difference is that now my family is doing business, while before the three of us, as a collective, did business. My wife, son-in-law and I together are running the business. As far as rural living standard is concerned, we are not worried about food or clothing. We are healthy. My father is 92 and lives with us. I have two elder brothers and one younger sister. One elder brother is a village cadre. Because my village is along the major highway, our ricefields are considered important demonstration fields. For example, when leaders from municipal or township [formerly

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commune] governments come to visit the countryside, they come to villages like ours. Therefore, the village head in our village has to make sure that ricefields are in good shape. At the end of the year, village head has to make sure that each household meets the state grain quota. My retail business is mainly in raw synthetic materials. I have built up guanxi with several synthetic producing companies when I was working as a salesperson in village-run silk factory. Right now, I’m using these guanxi. As I told you at the beginning, one needs guanxi to do retail business here. It is unthinkable for a couple who do not have any guanxi, to invest 50 000 yuan in this retail business. I sell synthetic raw materials, instead of raw silk, because the silk business is much riskier than synthetic materials because silk products are more expensive and therefore need more money in reserve in case I cannot sell them. Of course, it is more profitable if you can sell silk products. Only big laoban in this market do silk business, big laoban such as one salesperson for a major state-owned silk company. Over 95 per cent of my customers are old guanxi. The rest come to us after contacting us by phone. Most of the time, I negotiate business deals with customers. When I am not around, my son-in-law will do it. My wife does not make business deals with customers. She looks after the store when we are not around and cooks one meal for us. Without economic reform, we would still be tilling the soil. Economic reform has brought about tremendous changes to the countryside. Before 1979, few villagers built houses of over one storey. From 1949 to 1979, over three decades, not many houses over one storey were built. In contrast, within one decade from 1979 to 1989, 90 per cent of villagers in villages along the major highway are now living in houses over one storey. We have demolished our old multilevel house and built a new one. Our new house has sanitary facilities and the interior is decorated. My family was the first to have a telephone installed in the village. Some people say that Deng’s economic reform has had bad effects. But I think anything will have good and bad effects. Bad effects include prostitution, gambling and so on. These are the bad sides of capitalism. But on the whole the economic policies are good policies. Deng did not tell people to gamble, prostitute themselves or blackmail. Most people say the policies are good. Those who have not made money are complaining about the policies. For example, peasants who are poor are themselves stupid:

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after decades of tilling the soil, they still do not know how to use fertilizer. Some people are not adventurous enough. They are content to till the soil, but they don’t realize that some people are making more money. Those peasants who are still poor prefer the communes, in which they could earn work points by simply participating in production. Under the household responsibility system, the head of each household has to be responsible for all economic activities. Market economy requires people to think in terms of market economy, no matter what you are doing. To be a good businessman, one needs to have some brains, many friends and a good reputation. There is also a big gap between inland and coastal regions. Some beggars from inland regions said that our ordinary meals here are far better than their meals during holidays. But Guangdong and Fujian are better than this area. For example, someone I know went to Haikou this Spring Festival and she told us that people there do not cook. They eat at the restaurant everyday. We are not like this yet. Some big laoban might eat at restaurants regularly, but not everyday. But houses would be so clean if one did not cook. In this sense, women are liberated. Cooking is hard work. But for people from Anhui, Hunan and Subei, earning 500 yuan a month here is like a dream coming true. Back there, they can only earn a couple of hundred yuan every year. Their situation is similar to us peasants in old days who envied urban people for having a monthly income. I’ve been to more than twenty provinces and cities, and I think Sicheng is a very good place to live. 51 [Hao was formerly a brigade cadre under the commune system. Since the household responsibility system was implemented in rural China in 1979, Hao and two other men contracted to sell the products produced by the village silk factory. After the factory went bankrupt in 1993, he set up a retail business in the Sicheng silk market.] Hao, the silk retailer Deng said that some people must be allowed to get rich first, so that common prosperity can be achieved. I do not agree with that. I think most of the poor will remain poor. The gap will increase. In Sicheng, only the general manager in the textile machine factory is scared of workers because most workers are male urban residents of Sicheng and the general manager is really corrupt. The silk retailers in today’s silk market are more or less the same as middlemen [sic] before the Liberation. As before the Liberation, private weavers nowadays get raw

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materials from middlemen. As a result, there are layers of exploitation now as before.52 Liang, a retired male mishu (executive assistant) Silk industries have developed rapidly in our village. We have one silk weaving factory, two dyeing factories and one machine factory. Eighty per cent of our villagers work in factories. Some do business in the silk market. Our village has 683 mu of land in total. We also have a state grain quota of over 25,500 kg. We do not want to till the soil any longer. We have contracted out over 70 mu so that contractors grow grain for us to meet the grain quota. We pay them over 200 yuan per mu. Contractors live in our grain storage. Each household keeps 0.5 mu to grow grain for their own consumption. One hundred and eighty of our 300 households – i.e., implicitly the male heads of the household] are doing business. In our village, business people can afford to build villas. We have at least 40 villas in the village.53 [Guan is a middle-aged man. He holds several positions in the village: party secretary, village head and head of the village office for the comprehensive management of security. It is difficult to know how much he actually earns, given that it is usually common knowledge in China that cadres and managers earn far more than their salary would indicate. His xingzheng jibie (administrative level) is similar to that of a township cadre.]54 Guan, village cadre in Hong village (near Sicheng) Clearly, there are new social hierarchies emerging in the eyes of people in and around Sicheng. The basic social division is between mental and manual labour: the former include managers, laoban, government officials and white collar workers; the latter are factory production workers and peasants who till the soil. The increasing polarization of society since the launching of economic reform is the result of a deliberate national policy decision: the Deng leadership is no longer committed to egalitarian principles, but instead is committed to capital accumulation and concentration as a primary means of growth. In fact, egalitarianism has been condemned as a major obstacle to high productivity, a cause of common poverty under Mao. The Party reasons that since it is not possible that everybody get rich at the same time, it ‘lets some people get rich first’ (rang yibufen ren xianfuqilai). In order to reassure people that they would not be punished for getting rich, the government has promoted the ‘ten thousand yuan households’ (wanyuan hu)

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in rural China and ‘excellent individual entrepreneurs’ (youxiu geti jingyingzhe). The encouragement of alternative forms of ownership to state ownership (collective, private and share-holding) and the encouragement of classes other than workers and peasants (the ‘good classes’ under Mao) to participate in China’s economic development should, as Dirlik states, remind us of the ‘New Democratic’ model the Mao leadership adopted in the 1940s and abandoned shortly after Liberation. The rationale behind the earlier model was that China was not yet ready for socialism. Dirlik argues that the ‘New Democratic’ model’s attempt to balance capitalism and socialism is also the current model’s structural contradiction, one now being smoothed out by the ‘civility’ discourse in the reform era. 55 Economic reform has created more social and occupational stratification than during the Mao period. Under Mao’s development models, only workers, peasants and cadres were considered reliable allies of the Party. Other classes (bourgeoisie, landlords, rich peasants), considered untrustworthy, were virtually eliminated. Economic reform restored many of the principles of the ‘New Democratic’ model. Although social stratification is fluid, and overlaps exist within both rural and urban areas, and between them, we can identify several categories of social stratification. In urban China today, we can identify the following emerging social hierarchies: 1. Professional managers in state-owned and collective-owned enterprises. Their power lies in the disposal of labour power in enterprises they do not own. 2. White-collar workers, engaged in mental labour. 3. Service-sector workers, who are considered to have higher status than production workers because their work environment is much better than the latter’s. 4. Private entrepreneurs, most of whom are seen as baofahu (parvenus) but whose conspicuous wealth is also desired. 5. Local government and party officials, who, like their counterparts in townships, are involved in economic activities. 6. Urban workers, peasant workers and migrant workers are back at the bottom of the subhierarchy of production workers.56 The above categorization of national social stratification has strong local parallels in Sicheng, a light industry town, and its relationship

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with rural areas near and far. Under Mao, a factory job in the SOEs was considered a decent and sought-after job. Under Mao’s development models, service industries and commerce were restricted because they were associated with the consumer culture of capitalism. But the establishment of the silk market in Sicheng in 1986 stimulated the development of service industries and commerce: banks, tax bureaus, trading firms and retail shops. Consequently, urban Sicheng residents have more job options than previously were available. The silk market was set up in principle to market commodity exchanges, activities that had been conducted through centralized channels of the state under Mao. However, what we see in Sicheng’s silk market is not simply an emergence of private sector operating in a market economy. Rather, what we see is a blurring of state and non-state sectors in the sphere of commodity exchanges. Retailers and wholesalers in the Sicheng silk market are composed of private entrepreneurs, and contractors for collective and state-owned trading firms and silk factories. As one silk retailer, quoted above, put it, private entrepreneurs are small laoban, while contractors and sales representatives of big state-owned or collectiveowned trading firms are big laoban. (The latter have more solid financial resources, and guanxi with the powerful in government circles ensures them of unusually beneficial terms of credit.) Some private entrepreneurs like the silk retailer have to rely on the state-ownership licence to win credibility with their suppliers. As Meisner points out, it was ‘rural inhabitants who prospered under a system that favoured the aggressive and the ambitious, the entrepreneurially inclined, the physically strong, skilled, the clever, the families with greatest labor-power, and especially individuals and families with political power or access to it’. 57 Because the household is now the basic economic unit, those peasant households with sufficient labour-power and strength are able to make money in a variety of nonagricultural activities: they become wage labourers and independent entrepreneurs. Those with access to official positions tend to get the best deal out of reform policies: officials are the ones who have power over allocation of resources, and over local responsibilities to allocate resources. One male migrant worker told me, ‘In my village back home, the cadre in charge of family planning took money into his own pocket from fines charged on those who violated family planning. These fines are supposed to be handed over to the local government.’58 Village cadres also benefit from the current policies because they have more guanxi with communities outside villages.

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From the above-quoted personal narratives, we get the following picture of social hierarchies in Sicheng: laoban, managers, white-collar jobs, wage labourers and peasants. As suggested above, laoban is probably the most intriguing and ambiguous category for political economy: here its discursive construction is particularly highlighted. Laoban (boss) is a term that was used in Shanghai under semi-colonial rule in the 1930s. It was an ambiguous term: it could refer to industrialists, shopkeepers and even to heads of gangs. The term laoban has been adopted again, and is quite notable in Sicheng. In today’s context, laoban can refer to managers, government officials with the power of disposal of social power, store owners and private entrepreneurs (getihu). What holds the category together is that a laoban occupies superior positions in some institutional hierarchy and is competent in both the market and the guanxi of civil society. The fact that managers in state-owned, collectively owned and township-owned factories as well as government officials are all included in the category ‘laoban’ demonstrates the importance of the straddling of state and private sectors in the ‘socialist market economy’. For the Sicheng people I interviewed, laoban primarily means business people in the silk market. They are considered able to make money and by their own consumption to set fashion trends. Laoban’s conspicuous wealth by local standards is both highly desired and despised, a qualified critique of increasing social divisions. The desire to become laoban reflects the ‘lack’ many Sicheng people feel. Some people’s criticisms of laoban stress the supposed loose sexual morality of the latter. There is also a strong suspicion their money is made improperly – old gangster associations are not incidental to the current usage. Moreover, there is a sense of a brash new presence which succeeds despite being ignorant of traditional knowledge regarding the sector, a feeling which is not confined to the snobbery of the old silk merchant elites. As one technician put it laoban make money precisely because they are ignorant of silk products: this ignorance supposedly makes it easier for them to cheat. On the surface, the emergence of laoban is a direct result of economic changes. But many of my respondents think guanxi contributes more than markets to the emergence of laoban. In today’s China, guanxi receives considerable attention: here, like laoban, guanxi is considered as a linguistic construction as well as a political-economic social practice. In some circles, it is analysed as an art, called ‘guanxixue’. The anthropologist Yang summarized ‘guanxixue’:

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[Guanxixue] must always present itself in terms of ‘old friends’, ‘old acquaintances’, ‘old relationships’, etc . . . .It must involve each side using other and also mutual exchange . . . ‘[G]uanxixue’ in actuality is informal organization’s method of opposing and resisting [fankang] formal organization. Of course, this kind of resistance is often unconsciously played out by the two sides involved in guanxi.59 Although renqing (emotional feeling) has its origin in confucian culture, we must not reduce guanxi to an epiphenomenon of Chinese tradition. Similar practices were widely evident in the former Soviet Union, for example. As Yang points out, guanxi in mainland China, is situated in ‘a political economy in which the state is a dominant actor and discursive subject’.60 Between the Communist Party’s seizure of power in 1949 and the Cultural Revolution (1966–69), guanxi took significantly different and more secretive forms because of both the varied kinds of institutional organization in vogue at various points in the maoist period, and the idealist and utopian vision the Chinese government and people held in building socialism. Guanxi in Yang’s analysis started to be practised during the Cultural Revolution as a form of social resistance to the state penetration of all aspects of social and personal lives. Guanxi, as practised in the limited realm of civil society, was very much ‘at odds with the dominant state system of universalistic ethics’.61 Guanxi was practised for ‘use-values’ (for example, for food unavailable in the markets or for help in finding a job) during the Cultural Revolution. What has changed in the form of guanxi since the introduction of economic reform is that guanxi has gained ‘exchange value’.62 For the purposes of identifying emerging class systems, we need to know for what one now seeks guanxi and with whom one cultivates guanxi. In exploring these two questions, I attempt to analyse the contingent interaction of guanxi and points of access in the ‘socialist market economy’. The short answer to the question of whom one seeks out in the guanxi relationship, is that one seeks out government cadres, local party officials, managers of enterprises and the minor capitalists in the emerging markets. But it is clear that most interviewees did not sharply distinguish amongst these positions. The men interviewed – for women are rarely considered effective players in the market – often aspire to any such position: all such persons can be considered laoban. Black or white cats both catch mice, and Chinese seem to have this wisdom from daily experience, not merely on the highest authority.63 But the reason for this indifference to precise hierarchical positions in the categories used

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in real life is initially puzzling. As with peasants leaving their land and urban workers entering banks and government offices, one can identify more readily the Mao-era origins of these elites, than what they currently are becoming.64 A dialectical approach to change ‘under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past’65 is not surprised by this fact, which reflects the general non-predictability of a future nonetheless conditioned by a knowable past and present. The full reality of these elites should not be confused with the betterknown element of that reality, namely their Mao-era origins. What these elites are becoming, regardless of their formal position, is laoban. Clearly the term laoban identifies a status category, but one which also points to a real, particular position which a significant portion of the population occupies. I propose that this term normally implies both a boss in a hierarchy and a deal-maker in the market or civil society. A tiresome debate seeks to distinguish state from non-state entities in China, between bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures, between state and market or civil society, between ‘public’ and ‘private’ institutions. Which of these hierarchies the laoban technically commands is ultimately less interesting than the positive assertion that their power currently lies in straddling a deliberately and hopelessly blurred boundary. On the other hand, the combination of boss and deal-maker is a critical element in the constitution of a capitalist class, and it is possible to see in this a potential future for laoban taken as a whole. What stands in the way of calling the present reality capitalist is precisely the blurring of boundaries. Claiming that this blurring of boundaries is deliberate is not to suggest that the laoban themselves have a hand in the blurring simply because it benefits them. It seems reasonable to assume that the blurring of boundaries occurs on a grand scale in order to reconcile nominally communist leadership and stateownership with market principles attractive to outside investment and internal accumulation. Furthermore, on the local level, it is quite clear that market-oriented enterprises in Sicheng have often emerged at the request of higher officials, and TVEs normally emerged with SOE support and financing. 66 Thus entrepreneurial careers have been launched by permission rather than daringly ‘undertaken’, as the original term ‘entrepreneur’ would imply. (On this point, see the comments of Hao the silk retailer, below.) Guanxi also exhibits qualities which point to this blurring of boundaries. On the one hand, we have just seen that guanxi long predates the current reform period, and involves a degree of mutual gift exchange on

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the basis of personal sentiment that is quite different from a commodified exchange. Moreover in the present reform period, laws intended to curb bribery of state officials entrusted with the allocation of desirable resources forbid above all the receipt of money by these officials. 67 Thus guanxi’s more public face, at least, involves the exchange of gifts towards the establishment of lasting personal relationships. Nonetheless in the current reform period, guanxi relationships are pursued more and more instrumentally; in the allocation of non-marketized resources, more and more with the intent of benefiting materially and personally; more and more influenced by an acquisitive calculus and an associated need to veil one’s intent in personal sentiment. Clarifying the boundaries the laoban straddle would require the ruling party to remake its origins as a fundamentally socialist undertaking or force the laoban to become more clearly either bureaucrat or capitalist. The recent planned reforms of the state-owned enterprises may yet shake this power base of laoban down into a more straightforwardly capitalist social structure. As suggested by the role of SOEs in founding TVEs and ensuring their profitability, class power in China today does flow in no small part from a process akin to primitive accumulation 68 from the state sector. The resolutions of the Communist Party on Zhu Rongji’s 1998 accession to the premiership promise to accelerate this process vastly. On the other hand, there is no clear guarantee that the present situation’s change into capitalism must occur, and since considerable social unrest must be anticipated as a result of the transition, alongside resistance from existing entrenched interests, the progression to a more purely capitalist system may yet prove slower than these resolutions might suggest. As matters currently stand, China lacks the disciplinary clarity of institutional boundaries between private ownership of the means of production and public services. SOEs aid in producing basic infrastructure and raw materials at rates compatible with private profitability, and aid in creating their own competitors. Since economic reform started, private sectors have emerged in both rural and urban China. People have more freedom to engage in all kinds of economic activities which were forbidden before under Mao. Free markets, especially food markets, emerged, making many products readily available. However, the state is by no means withdrawing from the economic sphere. Indeed, local state and agents are now more effective in promoting market economy, if less visible in regulating social life. 69 I agree with Judd that the state in China should be understood to be internal to social life, and the point is relevant to this discussion of guanxi and the state. The state is indeed ‘an aspect of social life that is

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simultaneously both diffusely present and productive within everyday social relations, and also present in overt, concentrated form in familiar “state” institutions’. 70 This analysis conforms with the claims made earlier of Gramsci’s notion of the integral State and Foucault’s notion of diffuse power. The particular manifestations and features of guanxi in today’s China illustrates the immanence of state power in social life, yet at the same time, guanxi can be seen as contesting and negotiating state power. Yang made a good point in stating that when guanxi is being conducted, participants are not really conscious of this state-resisting activity. But it is in the practice of guanxi that state power is being renegotiated and contested. 71 In today’s China, a non-market system of allocation of resources still predominates. Following Konrád and Szelényi’s study of pre-1989 Eastern Europe, the class power of Chinese managers, government and party officials could be said to derive not from property-ownership, but from the disposal of labour power and of the surplus product. 72 I disagree with Konrád and Szelényi in naming this ‘rational redistribution’, at least as it applies to contemporary China.73 In the context of introducing market mechanisms into a predominantly state owned system, disposal of social power took on ‘affective’ aspects or ‘emotional sentiment’ – a key element of guanxi – rather than displace guanxi. Because money still cannot buy important things – such as credit or the disposal of certain labour power – guanxi provides better access, but comes closer to barter in the context of a culture preoccupied with the market economy. For example, the silk retailer I quoted above uses his guanxi to get access to raw synthetic materials from synthetic producing companies at the most competitive available price. 74 He then sells products to his clients, who are also linked to him by old guanxi ties. One of the main reasons to sell to his guanxi ties is that the seller knows that his buyers are creditworthy and loyal clients; while his clients get a better price from him and see him as a steady supplier. In the business world, one can also use guanxi to get much-needed loans from SOEs with low interest or no interest at all. The silk retailer Hao noted above, for instance, that every synthetic textile company in China is state-owned because that branch of the industry is more capital-intensive. No private entrepreneur has enough capital to invest in such an enterprise: Because a businessman in this market knows someone important in one synthetic producing company, he was allowed to owe the

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company 2–3 million yuan without being pressured to pay back. In other words, he can pay back any time he prefers. That’s why his life is very good. He still owes the company money. 75 Here, we notice the intimate interaction between guanxi and state power through its local agents. It is also worth underlining that Hao mentions credit flowing from SOEs rather than from banks. (Interestingly, it is the synthetic side of the sector which predominates in this role.) Although most Chinese are engaged in some sort of guanxi, ranging from buying consumer goods at reduced prices, through getting good daycare for their children, to getting loans, there are hierarchies of access to guanxi.76 At this point, it is possible to return to a very early claim in this chapter, that class and mode of production categories, while indispensable, are ultimately also insufficient means in themselves of accounting for social reality. In part, because cultivating guanxi requires mobility and relationships built with people at frequent banquets, it also has gender implications. Even though Chinese women since Liberation have considered working outside the home part of their social identity, it is still socially otherwise less acceptable for women to interact freely with people in public and to be on the move. My female respondents in Sicheng factories told me that their daily routine is home–factory– home, which would be an unusual pattern for men. Because their mobility is restricted, they do not have opportunities to cultivate guanxi. The creditworthiness of women is also considered relatively suspect. As the silk retailer, Hao told me: There are more advantages for men than women in business. For example, it looks ridiculous for women to offer cigarettes. It is more convenient for men to do business. It is more difficult for women than men to earn money. For example, people wouldn’t believe that a businesswoman can have sufficient funds. The female silk retailer, Ling, agrees that it is more difficult for women than men in the business world. She said that Women have to endure more hardship than men to do business. For example, it is normal for men to drink, smoke and socialize with women, while it is not acceptable for women to do the same with men. I have one daughter in high school. I want her to go to university. It is too hard for women to be in business. 77

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So far, I have analysed the structural causes of growing class divisions, using personal narratives I recorded in Sicheng to give a more concrete picture. The market economy has resulted in occupational and social stratification and the development of multiple modes of production. However, changes in modes of production and social stratification did not come from forces inherent in the economy. The state initiated the economic reform and the state is still the dominant force in China’s political economy. What has changed in the role of the state is that it is now more effective in promoting economic development. Economic reform has released tremendous energies in Chinese people to pursue prosperity. However, as I have argued, increasing social hierarchies are primarily attributed to the differential access to social and material resources. Differential access in turn operates in a fashion specific to China: the state and its local agents still control the allocation of key resources, and the market system is not developed to its full potential scale and sophistication. Economic reform, in official discourse, ultimately will provide greater prosperity for everybody. The party told its people that economic reform must be deepened in order to reach xiaokang78 living standards by the end of twentieth century. Since economic reform, a great many people’s living standards have undeniably improved; stores are full of consumer goods; more high-rises have been built. These are important signs of modernity and wealth in both state and popular discourse. In both state and popular discourse, the achievement of personal success is measured in the concrete material terms of consumer durables: airconditioning, colour television, decorated condominium, computer, etc. Sicheng people are certainly aware of both the general growth and the social polarization, but in these respects, these signs of modernity can have an ambiguous effect. Those who are not rich were not optimistic about their future during my fieldwork. Their envy and desire for prosperity shows their sense of alienation. The signs of modernity, prosperity and success enter popular consciousness quite widely, and paradoxically create alienation in the many social groups who have not acquired them. There are numerous examples of this kind of alienation. One is a worker’s genuine question: ‘Why is it the deeper the economic reform goes, the worse off we workers are?’ 79 The Party tells urban workers that reform will bring prosperity, for example, and yet to encourage entrepreneurs, the Party must also celebrate and publicize disproportionately the exceptional prosperity of people in quite different class positions from urban workers.

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What urban workers do not understand is why economic reform, which does bring prosperity to some people, has not brought prosperity to them. Their declining relative material and social status makes them feel even more alienated now that it exists in the midst of a huge consumer boom. Again, the same worker says: ‘Our leaders always educate us to work hard. But what counts as working hard? Does hard work bring prosperity? I’ve worked so hard, yet I’m almost unable to feed myself and the family.’80 In this case, such workers feel doubly alienated by the fact that their lives are actually getting worse, regardless of how hard they have worked. That working hard does not necessarily bring the good life contradicts the official and popular discourse on ‘backward’ workers, for example those in SOEs, who are seen as lazy and dependent on the state for benefits. An alternative view is that one must work both hard and ‘smart’ to gain prosperity (see Hao’s words, above). This allows for the stigmatization on the basis of intelligence, of peasants who clearly are not lazy yet do not prosper. This kind of alienation is widely shared among workers I interviewed: I like watching Hong Kong movies, because I want to see how other people live their lives. But I also know I will never be able to live that kind of life. Reform and opening up enliven the market, however, many changes are happening so fast that I feel out of the place. For example, there are so many consumer goods I see on TV, but I cannot afford them. 81 Another example of alienation is well captured in the very popular T-shirt caption among young people: ‘Leave me alone, I’ve had it!’ (Bieliwo, Zhengfanzhene!) What these two examples demonstrate is well explained by Anagnost: Where the pressure to sustain the fiction of the efficacy of party policy overwhelms the material constraints on realizing them, the unfortunate individuals who get caught up in this fiction experience a curious form of alienation: a doubleness that denies their real material conditions of existence. 82 This kind of alienation many people feel against state reform policies has led to the counterrepresentation to the economic, social and symbolic order of reform. This kind of counterrepresentation, for example, is reflected in the ‘Mao cult’ that has enjoyed a certain resurgence since the early 1990s. As Geremie R. Barmé points out, ‘the image of Mao,

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long since freed from his stifling holy aura and the odium of his destructive policies, became a “floating sign”, a vehicle for nostalgic reinterpretation, unstated opposition to the status quo, and even satire . . . .’83 The Party is aware of a certain degree of alienation. The government still builds its legitimacy on the foundation of socialism, which at a minimum considers common prosperity its goal. Because the communist government cannot name the developed social polarization in class terms without undermining its own legitimacy as the ultimate expression of the will of workers and peasants, it seems logical that it would largely target individual behaviour and attitudes as official explanations for inequality, targeting which has the effect of diverting attention from these structural issues. Constructions of jingshen wenmin seem to be used by the Party to combat the ills associated with economic reform. Jingshen wenmin covers a wide range of issues, though the essence of the campaign is to improve population quality. However, the wenmin discourse also evokes cynicism and becomes a space for popular resistance to social inequalities. The next section addresses this discourse, which blunts the emergence of classes-for-themselves.

Construction of jingshen wenmin With the principal contradiction of China changing from ‘class struggle’ to ‘economic development’ since the Third Plenum in 1978, the state also ceased to classify every Chinese citizen by antagonistic class categories. Instead, it organized every Chinese citizen as either a ‘backward’ or a ‘progressive’ element. The backward and progressive elements take on new meanings in the reform era. Under Mao, the two opposing terms were implied by necessary class antagonisms. Under Deng, the opposition is no longer based on ‘antagonistic class positions between individuals but defined by contrasting states of being in a single individual – from a state of benightedness to enlightenment, from feudal superstition to socialist propriety.’84 In other words, the Party is trying to shift people’s consciousness from class consciousness to ‘quality’ consciousness, which points to individual character. Because communist morality emphasizes a collective spirit ( jitizhuyi jingshen), however, it tends to generate cynicism when presented too obviously in combination with the vaunted principles of market economy. The Party stipulates that ‘jingshen wenmin’ in the 1990s must include the following six aspects:

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

enhancing patriotism and nationalism; firmly believing in socialism; cultivating a collectivist attitude; encouraging a good work ethic and respect for science; enhancing the attitude and behaviour of serving the people; and strengthening consciousness of the law. 85

In the decision passed by the Third Session of the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee in 1994, the Party states that: the establishment and achievement of socialist market economy ultimately depends on the improvement of population quality [renkou suzhi] and cultivation of talented people [rencai].86 The most important task in constructing jingshen wenmin is to cultivate a ‘New Person’ with ideals, morality, education and discipline [youlixiang, youdaode, youwenhua, youjilu de xinren].87 Commonly used in every Party and government document at all levels, jingshen wenmin is an integral part of economic reform discourse. Without jingshen wenmin, the Party constantly told its people since the early 1980s, there would not be wuzhi wenmin: the two are inseparable in achieving China’s modernization. Often, the Cultural Revolution is evoked as the antithesis of wenmin: chaos, lawlessness and economic bankruptcy. As the backward/progressive distinction suggests, the Party has nonetheless presented itself as the promoter of ‘socialist market economy’ through such techniques as ritualized naming. In this respect, there is a considerable continuity of technique with the Cultural Revolution, and indeed with events far deeper in China’s past. Spiritual civilization is to counter the general sense of polarization and moral corruption in the society. China now finds in Singapore a model for this spiritual achievement of public unity and morality in a market society. When I was in Jiangsu, I also heard people saying that Lei Feng had gone abroad. Lei Feng was a soldier, who was hailed by the government in the 1960s as a model of altruism, after having sacrificed his life to save other people’s lives. The fact that even Lei Feng has gone abroad once again reinforces in discourse the ‘backwardness’ and ‘inadequacy’ of the Chinese population compared with other advanced countries such as Singapore. The sense of declining morality and ethics, of rising crime and social disorder and of indignation over a money culture and official corruption is all articulated in the wenmin/quality discourse.

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Although the state has appropriated particular qualities to serve its purposes in economic reform, it has chosen to organize these qualities under a blanket criterion, ‘quality’, that does little more than permit a speaker’s preferences to be expressed which are widely accepted. The quality discourse has achieved what Raymond Williams calls a ‘structure of feeling’,88 one ‘so pervasive that . . . its articulation in the most general terms by the party’s propaganda apparatus [is] elaborated to an exquisitely refined degree in the episodic fragmentation of everyday life and talk’. 89 The meaning of quality depends on who is speaking and for what purposes. When a manager says a certain worker has low quality, he usually means that worker does not follow factory discipline. When local Sicheng people say migrant workers have low quality, they mean that migrant workers are ignorant and cause local social disorder (see next chapter). When migrant workers say that managers have low quality, they refer to harsh discipline in terms that cost face for the managers themselves, and so exercise some degree of effective resistance. Because the discourse of quality is open-ended, it can also be subversive. One male peasant worker I interviewed demonstrates both the hegemony of wenmin/suzhi discourse and the possible space for subversion and the expression of petty resentments within wenmin discourse: A person’s quality is more important than beautiful clothes. It is no good to have a beautiful appearance but low quality inside. For example, people should not litter in dorms; bicycles should be put in an orderly way. At present, we are trying to achieve the title of ‘wenmin town’. On the whole, Chinese population quality is not good. People in the town are very fashion conscious. They wear more beautiful clothes that people from Shanghai. Cars have to be foreign makes. Laoban in this town lead the fashion and life style. People’s quality has to be improved even if they have money. Money is important, but money is not everything. Money is not necessarily always good thing. Generally speaking, population quality has to be improved. From the news, I saw Singapore has very clean cities. I think it has something to do with its population quality. Population quality is closely connected with the development of economy. You see, if a general manager does not have good quality, his corruption will definitely ruin an otherwise good factory. 90 When this male peasant worker talks about population quality to criticize money worship and the corruption of managers, he has turned

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quality discourse into a process of questioning the legitimacy of factory leadership, as well as the legitimacy of a state that is in practice no longer committed to egalitarianism. However, there is also anxiety on his part over the backwardness of China’s economy when he compares China with Singapore. But he put a subversive twist on the meaning of quality when he feels that manager’s quality, rather than workers’ quality, as managers would say, determines the well-being of the factory.

Conclusion The most important decision the Deng leadership made at the Third Plenum was the official shelving of class politics in China. ‘Class struggle’ was considered to have created the ‘ten years of chaos’ in China and was condemned as a ‘leftist deviation’ on China’s road to modernization. The post-Mao leadership officially highlighted the most hideous consequences of the Cultural Revolution: the mistreatment of intellectuals and officials, lawlessness and social disorder, the decline of work ethics and discipline and the neglect of the economy.91 Economic development has now become the national priority. This is to be achieved by the ‘socialist market economy’: market exchange and competition for self-advancement and profit under Party leadership. With economic reform, managers and government officials are given more power in running enterprises and local economies respectively. I have argued that the ‘socialist market economy’ conforms neither to the Western notion of capitalism nor to the conventional notion of centralized planning. It remains an open question whether this constitutes a transitional condition on the road to a distinctively Chinese form of capitalism, or whether it can be stabilized as a unique form of political economy with profitable relations with world capitalism. The introduction of market economy has created prosperity, but also a sharper class division in the enjoyment of that prosperity. The class polarization, as I have demonstrated, occurs through differential access to state power, still the dominant power, in disposing of labour and means of production. At the same time, personal enrichment becomes the prevailing human motivation. Up to 1995, the Party had to mould quality consciousness because it had to back both state power in production and the pursuit of individual wealth through the market. It could not admit that class polarization is a structural issue embedded in the present political economy. Throughout this chapter, personal narratives guided discussion of otherwise dry theories. Their use reflected a critical, Western theoretical

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stand on class: abstract conceptions of class should be articulated in a specific cultural context if class categories are to be meaningful. Class antagonism cannot be read directly from the internal logic of a mode of production; rather it has to be theorized as a political process of struggle. But neither can the existence of class be subject to deliberate, contemporary policy alone. Politics is constrained by the contestation of interests today and by once-politically constructed realities now cast in currently unshakable form. These personal narratives depict a complicated and contradictory picture of the post-Mao political, economic and social landscape. I will now change my focus to Sicheng to further investigate how the ‘socialist market economy’ is played out in one locale. In the following chapter, we will hear again some people living in Sicheng about their hometown, its culture and political economy. We will see how urban Sicheng workers’ construction of their identities changed from that of ‘lack’ to that of ‘presence’. Women migrant workers from Subei are constructed by urban Sicheng people as ‘backward’ and ‘uncivilized’. Place of origin interacts with class and gender in constituting the strategic situation of these women migrant workers.

3 Building Material and Spiritual Civilization in Sicheng

I came to work as an apprentice in what was then called Yamei Silk Weaving Factory [now Yonghong] when I was sixteen. My hometown is a village near Tai Lake, in Jiangnan. After three years as an apprentice, I started to work as a weaver. Most weavers at that time were men. There were only a few women prep workers. Most women stayed home as housewives. We men earned higher wages than women. Weavers were skilled workers at that time. Our wage was based on the piece-rate. Because weavers also repaired and maintained machines at that time, we lost money if we had to stop to repair machines. Before Liberation, employers could lay you off as they wished. After Liberation, employers could not lay off workers so long as the workers did not make yuanzexing cuowu [any mistake of principles]. Before Liberation, we workers would always start to worry about whether we would be able to keep our jobs after Chinese New Year. We were not allowed to wear glasses at workshops. As a result, workers were laid off once they started to wear glasses, around their forties. Once workers were laid off, they would die one or two years later because they had to beg for a living. Nowadays, we count on Mao for a living. Nowadays, we always get some subsidies as food price goes up. Before Liberation, we did not get a pay raise as food price went up. No wonder people had to go on strike at that time. I joined Canye Gonghui [employees’ union], fighting against Tongye Gonghui [trade association]. The Trade Association represented capitalists. When we demanded pay raises, capitalists would always tell us that they could not even sell their products: how could 102

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they afford to give us a raise? I would reply, ‘Yes, Mr Zhang, you might be right in saying this. Our workers could not afford silk because we did not even have enough to eat. While you, Mr Zhang, could afford it, you did not want to wear it. You only wanted to wear imported fabrics.’ I was mocking him. He could not say anything in return because, you see, he was wearing valitin and palace [two imported fabrics]. They thought it was enough that we could feed ourselves. But they did not understand our wives and children needed to be fed too. They did not take this into account. It did not matter to them if our wives and children died. Some small laoban did not want to see workers on strike. They tended to agree to raise workers’ pay to the same standard as those in other factories. Capitalists and workers were of same family, if one looked at the bright side of things. Small laoban and households who owned one or two handlooms each sold their silk to local chouzhuang [silk brokerages], while big factories sold their silk in Shanghai through their own wholesale stores there. I retired in 1973. Thanks to Mao, I am still alive. Before Liberation, if one was fired, one would not have survived for more than two years. My pension is small. I always buy the cheapest food. My pension is barely enough to get by. But people like me who have gone through the old society are happy to be alive. We have to thank Mao for that.1 Old Wu, a ninety-year-old retired weaver Three generations in my family were involved in the silk business. My grandfather was a lingtou [trade association head] with very great power. We had a huge house in the east of the town, the house is in Chinese–Western style; my father and uncle were both lingtou, but with less power than their father. My father died when I was six. My uncle went to Shanghai to do business during the Anti-Japanese War. Before Liberation, the silk business consisted of various trade associations which monopolized silk prices. Leaving aside Chairman Mao’s class analysis, workers in silk factories before Liberation were of poor quality. Some workers were all right if they were thrifty, but some went to visit prostitutes or gambled after working a few days in the factories. This group of people would belong to the sluggards even in today’s

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society. Those who worked hard and were thrifty could live a better life. My interest in ‘silk culture’ has been influenced by what I constantly saw and heard during my childhood. When I was a child, I always followed my uncle to his store. Stores bustled with noise and excitement. Silk culture means poetry, bridge duilian [antithetical couplets: a classical poetic form, written on scrolls or engraved on stones and bridges, etc.], silk customs and literary criticism of silk poetry. Relatively authentic silk merchants had quite high culture: the highest culture was calligraphy and paintings; the next would be drama, with Kunju [an opera style which originated in Kunshan, southern Jiangsu, in the Ming dynasty] occupying the highest status, and Jingju [Beijing opera style] second highest. In the past, the town’s famous silk merchants organized the Red Pear Painting and Calligraphy Association. The Association collected calligraphy and paintings, and organized themselves to do calligraphy and to paint. Silk merchants also sponsored famous Kunju troupes to tour in town. Merchants also played Kunju. Silk brokers, who were lower in wealth and status than silk merchants, organized Jingju and also played Jingju themselves. The reason why opera troupes considered Sicheng their first choice for performances was its economic strength. The town could afford to pay famous opera singers. On the other hand, people in the town had high taste and were very critical. Consequently, only good opera singers had the courage to perform in the town. In the old days, silk merchants lived in extensive family compounds, and they had strict family rules and regulations. You simply cannot compare them with laoban [’bosses’: here, silk wholesalers] at the present silk market. Unlike silk merchants, these laoban are not sophisticated; they have wenhua shuiping di [a low level of culture]. Why are these laoban not sophisticated? Well, most of them are peasants or unsophisticated workers who do not have skill in the factories or do not want to work there. In the past few years when the silk industry was very healthy, they made money, and subsequently opened wholesale businesses. But people who are not sophisticated cannot hope to become sophisticated. For example, laoban go to beauty salons to get contacts for pros-

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titutes; they buy services from masseuses; they visit saunas and they gamble. These people are society’s zuliu [muddy stream]. People of my generation know that laoban nowadays cannot compare with the silk merchants of the old days. In the past, merchants finished work around 2 o’clock in the afternoon. People did gamble, but not too excessively at that time. Merchants in the old days were gentry merchants because they were sophisticated and were separate from the work process. For them, business was the means: the end was to become a civilized gentleman. In the old days, business people could buy officialdom. There is not much silk culture left. People still keep some customs in raising silkworms. Bridges were demolished, but I recorded all the couplets on the bridges. Few people write classic poetry anymore. There is not much development in silk culture. Nowadays the cultural characteristics of people who are engaged in silk industry are assimilated by the whole society’s cultural trends. There is no distinct silk culture anymore. Young people do not know silk culture. Silk culture is inherited from the past. Present local culture has been influenced by cultures which are bulun bulei [neither fish nor fowl]: they come from western culture, karaoke, martial arts movies, Hong Kong and Taiwan cultures. Young people do not like national folk music or authentic music such as Beethoven. They only listened to Hong Kong and Taiwan music. When I was growing up, I and some of my peers played bamboo flutes, xiao [vertical bamboo flute] and dulcimer at summer nights. Besides having interests in calligraphy and painting, merchants were also interested in national musical instruments. My grandmother told me that when my father was growing up, he could play pipa [a stringed instrument], xianzi [a three-stringed plucked instrument], and huqing [a class of two-stringed bowed instrument]. I remember that many people came to our house in summers to play national musical instruments. People were happy when they were playing music and drinking tea. Nowadays, people stay home, watching TV programmes which are heavily influenced by Hong Kong and Taiwan culture, karaoke culture and western cultures. From Liberation to the eve of economic reform, I have to say the whole society was very suppressed because people were

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very easily labeled feudal, capitalist and revisionist, and because people did not dare to celebrate festivals. All the temples were demolished. All heritage sites in the town but one were demolished. The remaining temple was built in 1182 in order to honour the silkworm god Leisheng. I called on the town officials many times to restore the temple, but the local government officials are not interested. In fact, the temple once restored would have much potential cultural value, and it can also attract tourists. Both Chinese and foreign scholars who visited the temple are disappointed that it has not been restored. I have talked to local government officials many times, but they always told me that they do not have money. Nowadays, officials are not interested in cultural heritage. They are only interested in canliang fanfan [doubling the value of production output] and economic development. Many scholars who study small towns [xiao chengzheng yianjiu] ignore the cultural aspect of economic development.2 Old Wang, a technician at Yonghong in his fifties Before I came to Sicheng, my grandpa told me that Jiangnan is a beautiful place. He said that I can visit scenic places on weekends. He also told me that there are a lot of silk factories in Sicheng. Since I arrived, I have not had the chance to visit any scenic places yet. Sicheng has wider roads than my hometown. Peasants in this area live much better lives than us back home. They live in loufang [two-storey houses]. Many peasants here built new houses. Back home, we live in pingfang [one-storey houses], some peasants are still living in huts. There are many people in Sicheng. Back home, there are not many people around.3 Tao, a female prep worker from Subei My school teacher told me about Sicheng. He had his university education in this area. He told me that Sicheng is a very good place. It is very industrialized. I have read about Jiangnan in the school textbooks. Jiangnan is always described as beautiful and rich. 4 Zheng, a female prep worker from Subei Jiangnan is always described in TV and school textbooks as having beautiful scenery and a pleasant environment. After I

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arrived, I am not particularly impressed by the place. Well, I have not been to those beautiful scenic places either. 5 Juan, a female weaver from Subei

These narratives do not merely represent how the past is remembered differently and how the present is lived differently. They have to be read in a larger historical, cultural, political and social context. As I have argued earlier, economic reform has led to a fundamental shift in both economic and cultural spheres. Stories such as Old Wu’s are marginalized in the present discourse. Theirs was the dominant discourse written into local histories of class struggle under Mao. The Four Histories Movement [Sishi Yundong] launched in 1956 was an example. The purpose of this movement was to develop the class consciousness of people reading these histories, but also the class consciousness of those who were writing them (for example, the ‘speaking bitterness’ narrative). There was a single model to be followed in such history-writing activity: the historical rupture was always 1949; the narrative was couched in a ‘before and after’ contrast in order to accentuate the darkness of the old society and the brightness of the new.6 Such historical writing activity was state-directed as a ‘sporadic and recurrent mobilization of Chinese historical consciousness and historical resources’.7 For women workers who entered the labour markets in the 1950s, the historical rupture was 1949, when the communists came to power. That age cohort, as well as those who had already been working before 1949, always situate their narratives in this before–after dichotomy around Liberation (jiefangqian versus jiefanghou). Such a sharply ruptured understanding of history was moulded through the state hegemonic project of ‘speaking bitterness’ right after 1949. By negating the old society, the legitimacy of the new government was established. But such local histories which focused on class struggle are now considered ‘leftist’ legacies.8 The priority is now shifting to economic development. But as I have argued in the last two chapters, economic reform does not mean the withdrawal of the Party. The Party in Sicheng also assumes the leading paedagogical role in spiritual civilization. One of the many spiritual civilization projects was the rewriting of local Sicheng history in the mid-1980s. Local identities are reflected in more recent history-writing not as a history of class struggle, but as a history of the economic strength, prosperity and high population quality represented by the local, pre-Revolutionary gentry class. As any identity is made meaningful in relational,

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and almost always hierarchical order, Sicheng’s present identity exists over against its pre-reform identity as well as Subei identity. As Honig points out, ‘[l]ocal history is also critical to the construction of ethnic categories, for contemporary labor migration does not take place in a historical vacuum.’9 The identity of Sicheng is now, as before, constructed around the ‘silk tradition’. Under Mao, silk tradition became the basis of stories of how workers in silk factories were exploited by capitalists, and how workers assumed leading class positions in the new society. The histories of class struggle became the History of Sicheng under Mao. However, silk tradition under economic reform serves as a basis for constructing a ‘history of a developed economy and entrepreneurship’. In the post-Mao period, histories of a pre-revolutionary developed economy, entrepreneurial traditions and literati class leadership become the History of Sicheng. The famous entrepreneurs of Sicheng’s past are now considered promoters of the local silk industry, with a leading role in such technological advances as mechanized weaving. Such reinterpretations of local history are made because these entrepreneurs are now useful evidence that Sicheng’s economic strength and modernity has historical roots. This particular technological advance was interpreted very differently in the 1950s when the exploitative nature of these entrepreneurs was emphasized; the mechanization of weaving in Sicheng in the early 1920s was explained in terms of capitalists’ profit-seeking strategies. Those earlier histories note that owners moved their factories from Shanghai to Sicheng in order to avoid the more militant Shanghai workers,10 just as today, factories without the luxury of mobility themselves, recruit cheap labour from Subei in the face of local labour opting for better conditions in the service sectors. The Party’s task in local history writing in the post-Mao era was to project to the Sicheng people its image in history in order to help fulfil its potential. The theme of the spiritual civilization campaign in 1997 was to ‘mould the image of Sicheng people at the end of the century’. The Party in Sicheng calls on townspeople to see themselves as one, striving for ‘high quality’ in the national hierarchies organized around the notions of quality (that is, spiritual civilization) and of economic development (material civilization).11 The class discourse of the 1960s histories has been labelled a leftist excess. Old Wang’s discourse is also marginalized. He represents an old elite-class worldview. While identifying with the present non-class-based discourse, Wang has problems identifying with dazhong wenhua (mass culture or popular culture) which he considers low culture by definition, or with the breaking down of social divisions as demonstrated in

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the status of peasant entrepreneurs. For Old Wang, peasants are always peasants though silk merchants could once properly aspire to officialdom. They simply do not have culture even when they have moved up the social ladder. The emergence of popular culture (soap opera, MTV, popular literature, pop music, etc) clashes with elite culture, and has changed social dynamics both within each community and among regions. As Sheldon Hsiao-ping Lu 12 points out: [t]his expansion of popular culture has entailed the marginalization of intellectuals, who stood, a short while ago, at the very center of culture. More decisively, their social status and financial well-being have been significantly lowered by a rampantly capitalist market economy. As to what migrant workers have to say about Sicheng, there is a strong pattern in what they describe: a place at once beautiful, developed, modern and more industrialized. These attributes do not inherently belong together. Their appearance together is the product of successive attempts to relate Sicheng to a series of sharply distinct national projects. These attributes – the beauty of the Sicheng of pre-Liberation craftsmen and intellectual gentry, the industrial power of maoist Sicheng, the modernity of contemporary Sicheng – all appear simultaneously, as if in exposed layers of sedimentation, in the speech of those living in the town today. Also, these speakers reflect the successive hegemonic discourses on Sicheng, rather than their own personal histories. At the same time, these culminated discourses act as a foil to their own hometowns. Sicheng is a place of the migrant imagination which by implication defines their hometown in terms of ‘lack’. Sicheng’s identity is closely related as always to silk culture. Its identity has its material basis in silk industries, its predominant economic base. Sicheng has the reputation of being an important silk-producing town, and has also acquired a reputation for its successful TVEs since economic reform began. One paradox about Sicheng’s reputation and identity is that the majority of silk production workers are actually coming from Subei. Local Sicheng people now consider silk production ‘bitter’ work, and it enjoys a low social status. Subei people are major economic contributors to Sicheng’s silk-based economy, but they are considered ‘outsiders’ because of their non-local hukou. They are also considered by local people to have low quality in comparison with local Sicheng people. The comparison between Subei and Jiangnan is

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now articulated in the ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse, but Jiangnan people have been stereotyping Subei people since at least the 1920s. This chapter moves to this local setting in order to investigate the building of the material and spiritual civilization. On one hand, I argue that Sicheng’s recent economic growth depends on a flexible accumulation strategy and the town’s advantaged geographical location. On the other, I argue that Subei place of origin is socially constructed, and in Sicheng, conditions the meanings of gender and class. The local Party is at the centre of both the accumulation strategy and the social construction of the town, having key responsibilities for both material and spiritual civilization campaigns. I will look at Sicheng’s political economy, situating it in the historical context of the political economy of Jiangnan and Subei in order to shed some light on the political economic context of today’s Sicheng. Second, I will analyse the Subei/Jiangnan discourse to expose the power relationship based on place of origin manifested in Sicheng. Finally, I will investigate the hukou system to argue that migrant women are treated as outsiders, not only because they are from a socially stigmatized place (a pattern common to many internal migrants the world over), but because of the state-administered hukou. The state enforcement of rural–urban divisions, while having other important policy motivations and functions, have an important effect on women migrant workers.

Sicheng’s political economy in historical and spatial context Sicheng is situated in the Changjiang (Yangzi) Delta, south of the river. Besides the nearby Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal, there are many rivers and marshes in the surrounding area. By car on the highway built in 1996, Shanghai is by North American standards within ‘commuting’ distance. Located at the midway point of modern China, Sicheng is part of the same traditional southern region, though earlier infrastructure put it much further away. The certainties of Old Wang’s pre-Revolutionary silk culture in Sicheng should be seen themselves as historical creations. In pre-Song times, silk production was concentrated in the north of China where the principal courtly markets of the capital were located. Consequently, silk was more expensive in the south. Because peasant households needed to have land to grow mulberry trees and the other equipment needed to raise silkworms, to reel the raw silk and then to weave silk, women in many of the poorest families of the south would not work at

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producing silk themselves. Principally rich households in the south could afford to set up looms to make silk, and so became even richer from great profits. A household would hire several women to weave silk in its compound. Those peasant households too poor to engage in silk production might send their daughters there to weave, under the supervision of the wives of the household: ‘weaving was thus a task that reinforced the social ranking of the inner quarter’.13 Silk production on a larger scale started to move from the north to the south as the silk-consumption centres relocated. After the northern Song dynasty lost the north to the Khitans and then to the Mongols, the Song state re-established its capital in Hangzhou. (The Song dynasty was thereafter called Southern Song.) A massive migration of northern artisans and peasants followed to the south, which brought benefits to the development of silk production in the lower Yangzi region.14 Specifically, Sicheng-based silkworm cultivation and silk weaving started in the mid-fifteenth century, the mid-Ming. The Grand Canal passes through all of northern Jiangsu. The Yellow River once flowed to the sea by passing through Xuzhou, a mining city in northern Jiangsu. The Grand Canal and Yellow River were the major waterway transportation lines connecting north to south. Successive central governments made sure that dikes prevented floods from impeding north–south shipping. The warm, wet delta area became the rice bowl of the nation, its grain flooding the arid north. The nearby cities of Subei prospered.15 As Kenneth Pomeranz argues, the post-1850 Qing state shifted its priorities from this pattern of internally oriented redistribution between south and north to growth-oriented policies that emphasized a coastal development strategy. (One sees a parallel with the present reform’s coastal development strategy.) The government’s aim was to build a strong nation to fight against the imperialist powers, and to compete with foreign producers in its own domestic market under the imposed treaty port system. But this system forced China to open its markets to foreign business and exports along its coastal cities.16 Shanghai rose as China’s principal import/export-oriented commercial centre. Initially, Shanghai was therefore a commercial centre and entrepôt because of this system. It also rapidly became the core of China’s comprador capitalist industry. On the other hand, as the coastal strategy unfolded, the central governments saw no point in making sure that interior waterway transportation was open for the traditional shipping of grain from the south to the north, a decision that, despite subsequent changes in grand strategy, has survived to the present. 17 ‘[G]overnment

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paid less attention to maintaining and repairing dikes on waterways connecting with the Grand Canal, thereby leaving parts of northern Jiangsu vulnerable to unprecedented numbers of floods and natural disasters.’18 Centres throughout northern Jiangsu (modern Subei) started to decline.19 Subeiren migration to Jiangnan dates from the nineteenthcentury floods and other resultant disasters in the Canal area and around the Yellow River. Every year before rainy seasons, many Subeiren sealed their houses with mud, and fled south. Sometimes, the whole village fled, some to find jobs and never to return.20 But jobs in Shanghai and Jiangnan on the whole were confined to the lowest end of the labour market. Subeiren could be found in Jiangnan, especially in cities such as Shanghai, doing the dirtiest, hardest work. They entered urban consciousness as beggars, with tired faces and ragged clothes. Anti-Subei discursive developments evident in Jiangnan first occurred at exactly the same time as Jiangnan people in Shanghai, in common with other Chinese, were themselves subject to prejudice, denigrated as inferior and uncivilized by the European, and later also Japanese, imperialist forces.21 A quasi-ethnic hierarchy seems to have resulted within the Chinese population, with Subeiren at the bottom, followed by Jiangnan people, themselves still second-class citizens in their own land. Given most of the bankers and industrialists in Shanghai came from Jiangnan, and given they were then considered the driving force of China’s modernization and the symbol of its future, Subei, as Finnane suggests, ‘came to represent what the imagined community was not: poor, dirty, illiterate, superstitious, unenterprising, sexually promiscuous, and inclined towards criminal activities’.22 Easy access to water transportation and proximity to Shanghai since the early 1920s has made Sicheng a major international silk-trading centre. While northern Jiangsu was experiencing decline, southern Jiangsu and especially Shanghai were experiencing fast economic growth. The Chinese economy entered the international division of labour as the producer of raw materials and luxury goods. Starting in the 1920s, southern Jiangsu modernized its silkworm raising and later its silk reeling under foreign influence. Weaving and other secondary processing were deliberately de-emphasized. The raw silk that southern Jiangsu produced was exported and Sicheng became a major international raw silk trading centre. Area peasants were encouraged by government to invest in cash crops such as silk, other non-rice agricultural produce and industrial production, instead of subsistence farming. Even under Mao, the silk industry remained dominant in urban Sicheng, though it converted briefly to cotton; and silk raising was

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allowed in rural communes. In the Mao period, commerce was thought to stimulate bourgeois consumerism and therefore had to be suppressed. The town became a single-industry town oriented to production rather than trade. By the time when hezuohua (cooperatization) finished in Sicheng in 1955, the original 142 privately owned silk production factories and individual loom-owners, with 1753 workers and 680 weaving machines, were converted into six joint state-private factories, operating at high volumes on a capital-intensive basis. (This change was based on the ‘New Democratic Model’.) By 1965, the six factories had again been transformed into three large state-owned factories. Throughout, silk production, while radically transformed in its own right, remained at the margins of a national strategy based on heavy industry and infrastructural growth.23 As Chinese industries were undergoing socialist transformation from the mid-1950s, women’s access to paid employment was also considered a component of socialist transformation. Women’s participation in the public workplace, in the communist gender ideology, was considered the key to women’s liberation from feudal patriarchy. It was during the Great Leap Forward that a large number of women were drawn into the labour force throughout the country. However, on a national basis, they tended to be at the bottom of the job hierarchies within SOEs or more likely in small-scale neighbourhood factories, which were in fact subcontractors for the big factories. The latter labour-intensive, smallscale and technologically backward factories were to develop simultaneously with relatively capital-intensive, large-scale, modern production units, which were mostly in heavy industry. The technological dualism was deliberately promoted during the Great Leap Forward, ‘thus enabling China to make productive use of available resources, however crude, scattered, or unskilled’.24 The development of industry in rural Sicheng started under Mao’s self-reliance economic policies. In 1960, when the Great Leap Forward ended, the commune factory was dismantled. During the Cultural Revolution, four brigade-run silk-weaving factories were set up. 25 Selfreliance at the local and regional level, as Riskin 26 points out: was seen as a complement to the strict rural–urban migration, reducing the incentives to migrate by providing new forms of employment and higher incomes in the countryside. It was seen as a way of lowering the considerable income gap between workers and peasants by developing industry locally, distributing its products widely, and keeping entree-level wages close to average peasant incomes.

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Rural industries developed in the 1960s were the forerunners of today’s TVEs, and the institutional habits they permitted made it possible for today’s TVEs to develop rapidly in places like Sicheng. From the 1980s, economic reform once again gave priority to coastal development, beginning with Guangdong and Fujian provinces in 1980. Four Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were created in the same year. In 1984, fourteen coastal cities were designated. The state’s coastal strategy included a considerable range of reforms for these centres: ‘a package of tax incentives, reduced tariffs, diminished bureaucracy, licensing priorities, preferential credit policies, price-setting powers, freedom from export duties for finished products, export earnings retention rights, and raw material and capital goods import duty privileges’.27 The goal of the coastal strategy is to attract foreign investors. This investment was to assist these areas to become prosperous ahead of the rest of the country, at the short-term expense of the remaining regions. These changes show how the central state is gradually shifting from maoist redistribution policies to ‘growth-oriented’ policies. A commentary in the Renmin Ribao (People’s Daily) provided an economic rationale for the relative neglect of poorer interior areas: Most investment and consumption are required in the development of new and outlying backward regions and economic results are poorer, whereas because of the better technical and economic foundation in the old [ie, coastal]28 regions, economic results are better. Therefore, the development of new and outlying backward regions on too large a scale will also, for a certain period, retard the increase of the national income . . . Within this century, the focus of our economic regions is in the East, but at the same time, we must make proper preparation for the large-scale development of regions in the West. 29 In real and imagined space, coastal and urban areas are modern, progressive and civilized spaces within China.30 Sicheng is not in the immediate coastal area, nor is it in a formal Special Economic Zone, but its proximity to Shanghai and its long history of silk industry and trading, as well as of village-level industries, has allowed its economy to grow relatively quickly during the reform period. Officials in Sicheng and other towns and cities in southern Jiangsu are proud of their membership in the less formal Inter-Provincial Shanghai Economic Development Zone. They feel less attached to their fellow provincials in the north. In fact, Sicheng takes some pride in its nickname ‘little Shanghai’. Subei continues to be contrasted with Shanghai among Jiangnan

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residents I spoke with. Close association with Shanghai is of course to join an elite club in the reform era. This subprovincial boosterism is reinforced by the spatial implications of China’s policies to stimulate market competition. Sicheng’s Party Committee is responsible for local economic development and advancing the policy of spiritual civilization. The importance of this to official discourse may be seen in the fact that the Party Secretary of Sicheng was dubbed as Sicheng’s ‘wulongren’.31 The Party Secretary does appear to have had a special and critical influence early in the reform era: the Party Committee under his leadership decided to speed up the development of TVEs in 1985. With the support of the Party, the government reorganized the existing factories to make them more efficient and competitive. On the other front of economic reform, the Party led the spiritual civilization campaign. It named local ‘civilized villagers’ , ‘families of the Five Goods’ and ‘civilized neighbourhood’. Often in Party propaganda materials, Party members were singled out as ‘servants of the people’, selflessly working towards the material and spiritual civilization of Sicheng. In so doing, Party members epitomize the new status of ‘wenmin’, just as they formerly epitomized class struggle. The leadership of Sicheng’s Party Committee in both economic development and spiritual civilization has strongly demonstrated that the Party remains a significant force. What has changed is that the Party is less committed to politics or its ‘red’ responsibilities, than to economic development or its ‘expert’ responsibilities. The Party’s role in spiritual civilization, as I argued in the last two chapters, is aimed at channelling popular energy away from class and other antagonisms and towards economic development. The state’s economic policy favouring township enterprises boosted that sector in the town. But this is not merely a statesmanlike or theoretically informed preference for more competitive, market-oriented firms. Sicheng’s economic policy gives priority to its own Township and Village Enterprises because revenues from taxing them go exclusively to local government, instead of being shared with the central government. 32 In the surrounding rural towns and villages, this centrally planned incentive has interacted with an existing infrastructure and a workforce specialized in silk to drive industrial output above agricultural output. By 1987, 34 villages in rural Sicheng have set up at least one silk-weaving factory. There has also been a great expansion of the industry both in the existing state-run and collective silk factories, and the growth in township silk and private silk workshops.33 A tour of the contemporary town of Sicheng confirms its striking dependence on silk.

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Silk factories are found throughout the town, even in residential alleys. That factories are found in residential alleys is not merely the product of reform, however: this presence is also the product of neighbourhood production under Mao period. The growth of TVEs in Sicheng did create job opportunities for many rural Sicheng peasants, much more attractive than tilling the soil. As I mentioned in the last chapter, one village in rural Sicheng contracted out over 70 mu of land to produce grain to meet the state quota. Its villagers can then be excused from fulfilling this duty personally to engage in more lucrative commerce or wage labour. However, the growth of TVEs also signaled an increasing informalization of silk production. Since mid-1980s, Sicheng’s SOEs have also started to reduce the percentage of permanent jobs and started to hire contract and temporary workers. The informalization tendency has contributed to the relative decline in the status of workers in SOEs as well. Urban Sicheng people no longer want to work as silk production workers. Alternative white collar career paths quickly became available in business and service industries, and have been eagerly taken up. From at least 1985, managers thus had to turn to rural Sicheng for production workers. Since the early 1990s, managers have had to recruit workers from Subei, as a separate silk-weaving factory by then could be found in every village of rural Sicheng, providing effective job competition with SOEs. The presence of unmarried migrant workers, as I will argue, altered the meanings of gender and class in Sicheng. So far, I have discussed silk production. I will now look at the exchange of silk which has reassumed importance locally. In 1986, Sicheng built the country’s biggest silk market in the west end, attracting silk retailers and wholesalers from the whole country. The silk market was hailed as the restoration of the town’s old glories, and became one of the area’s major silk-trading centres. As my respondents’ personal narratives have shown in the previous chapter, laoban in the silk market have emerged as a potentially distinct class. Relatively rich, they serve as the symbol for modern men: entrepreneurial, endowed with good guanxi, tough and strong, complete with suits, cellular phones and motorcycles or cars. The silk market also created demand for services: an industry and commerce bank, an agricultural bank and a credit union have set up a total of five branches in the market. Post offices, transportation facilities, restaurants and numerous quality hotels have sprung up around the market as well. 34 The silk industry boom and the market have accelerated urbanization. All the farmland in three nearby villages has been purchased either by

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the local government or by firms to build more factories and apartment buildings. Many rich business people have built mansions at the outskirts. Nearly all the spaces along the major streets are being used as silk retail stores. When one walks on the main street, the town does indeed look modern (in its style of buildings, and the presence of advertisement boards) and highly commercialized. The roads in the town have been widened, and a ring road is being constructed to relieve inner-city congestion. One urban planner at the Sicheng Urban Planning Bureau told me that since land on both sides of the ring road will appreciate in value, there are plans to build new ‘modern’ buildings along it. The local economy’s reliance on silk exports, has meant that its economic situation depends, to a large extent, on the demands of international markets. The town won its reputation for successful TVEs in 1993, in no small part because the international silk market enjoyed higher demand between 1992 and 1993. However, when the demand of international market began to fall in 1994, the whole industry suffered. Further, in order to compete for exports, factories had to keep production costs low. SOEs found it more difficult to deal with the volatile market situation than TVEs because the former have larger overhead than the latter. Both SOEs and TVEs nonetheless share a flexible accumulation strategy: a major part of this strategy is recruiting temporary workers from Subei. The presence of Subei people in the town as temporary workers has reactivated the 150-year-old Jiangnan/Subei discourse and caused it to acquire new meanings. The contemporary meanings emerge in part because the government has named and labelled its models in distinctive ways in various historical projects of spiritual civilization. This naming today categorizes its people and regions into modern/traditional, progressive/backward and civilized/uncivilized. Moreover, in the post-Mao period, in which class-based discourse is muted, spatial hierarchies take on more importance in the national discourse of modernity. Such hegemonic discourse sees the countryside, the interior and their populations as backward and feudal, while the town/city, the coastal areas and their populations are presented as progressive and modern. It is to this hegemonic discourse that I now turn.

The Jiangnan vs. Subei discourse: place of origin in the construction of identities Spiritual civilization discursive constructions also include the writing of local histories, questions of hygiene, improvement of population ‘quality’

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and implementation of scientific management. They are intended to mould a new national subject – the reformed ‘New Person’. To understand the shift from class to wenmin discourses, the peculiar underlying pragmatics of such discourses should be outlined. Besides actively participating in the national naming practices along the lines outlined above, Sicheng has also participated in local history rewriting since the early 1980s. Local history or gazette writing (difangzhi) also has a long history in China. Gazette writing in China is not aimed at discovering local contrasts with the grand History of China, but at showcasing the local efficacy of national state policies. (In the twentieth century, the latter was precisely to find the local means to advance the national History).35 Unlike the local gazette writing in imperial China, whose purpose was to maintain a lettered, ‘cultured’ civilization, local history writing since the early 1920s has been written to showcase the local efficacy of modernization. In these gazettes, the local officialdom shows its locale’s loyalty to a wider territorially bounded community that competes in the world system of nation-states. State-sponsored local history writing since the early 1980s is the latest example of such practices. The ultimate goal in this history-writing is to achieve locally what the West has achieved in modernization. The making and remaking of local identities as ‘modern’ ones in this sense thus have to be understood as concrete local practices (not emerging strictly from below, but rather from lower levels of state at the instigation of the national level of state), acting out the national and global processes of marketization and modernization. Understood this way, the interplay between the global and local, not just the national, is now crucial to the making and remaking of local identities and relating them to the flow of history. Before I turn to discuss this in the case of Sicheng government and local residents, I will provide a brief description of Sicheng in the course of China’s encounter in this century with modernity. Since China launched its modern nation-building project, Chinese intellectuals have considered the countryside both the symbol of ‘purity, simplicity and essence of the Chinese culture’ and the symbol of ‘backwardness and feudalism’. Similarly, the city has been considered as both the symbol of ‘decadence, corruption and western influence’ and the symbol of ‘progress and modernity’. The rural–urban divisions exist not only at the level of language but at the level of state policies, which I will discuss later. Such modernist discourses on the rural and the urban were largely inverted under Mao but were not erased, when urban people were exhorted to learn from the peasants. The modernist discourse on

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the rural–urban division is once again articulated in economic reform discourse. The above remarks come as no surprise to students of Chinese affairs. This study merely seeks to demonstrate how these nationwide divisions interact with regional distinctions in Sicheng. Sicheng, although a quintessential single-industry town, needs to have its identity explained culturally, and not merely by reading off the characteristics of its dominant industry. Instead, identity is constructed – whether consciously or unconsciously – by local people, and government uses its tradition of silk culture and entrepreneurship. This local identity is acted out in everyday life. For instance, in local social discourse, Sicheng is rich, prosperous and civilized, and has a long history of silk culture. As we have seen, it is one of the Jiangnan towns famous for its pre-Revolutionary gentry and literati. 36 Government and Party officials are now publicizing Sicheng’s long history of famous entrepreneurs and trade. The historical development of the local silk economy and the strong entrepreneurial presence were reflected in the huiguan (guilds organized by place of origin) and elaborate service industries such as traditional banks, restaurants and tea houses. 37 Huiguan were built by silk merchants from other parts of the country to meet and socialize locally with people from their particular native places. The numbers of huiguan in Sicheng reflected its attractiveness to silk merchants from different parts of China. They emphasize that Sicheng was a major silk trading centre. Some of the qualities traditionally associated with Sicheng can be summarized as follows: an export-oriented economy, an entrepreneurial spirit, high civility and cultivation. These qualities from history are selected for emphasis today because they are identified as precocious signs of modernity and an outward orientation, of competitiveness and competence in a market economy: in sum, of a high-quality population. These are, not coincidentally, the goals for which the country as a whole is now striving. There are two purposes the local government seeks to achieve in presenting Sicheng as a modern and forward-looking unit: 1) the negotiation of local identity within the national project of modernity and; 2) the assumption of social control, so as to reduce the potential for social unrest through internal social divisions. But this presentation has other important effects that belie this homogeneity. The language of Sicheng is a form of social control in which class and gender divisions inherent to the town itself are deflected into spatial divisions.38 In particular, the residents’ discourses on Subei create an ‘Other’. Subeiren although Han

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Chinese, are considered ‘inferior’, ‘uncivilized’ and ‘different’ by fellow Han in Jiangnan. From this fact alone, place of origin becomes a site of power relations. Discourse on Subei has its historical roots in Sicheng and in Jiangnan in general. It is now played out once again in the discourse of modernity. Subei becomes a convenient contrast model for Sicheng’s modernity and the quality of its people. Sicheng is considered to have tianshi, dili, renhe (good opportunities, favourable geographical position and support of its people). ‘Good opportunities’ refer specifically to opportunities provided by economic reform; it has a ‘favourable geographical position’ in that it is closer to the action of Shanghai; ‘support of its people’ means Sicheng has people with an entrepreneurial, outward-looking and forward-looking spirit. These are the signs of a modern national subject. Sicheng is where people from poor regions such as Subei migrate so as to achieve social mobility. The identity of Subei is constructed by contrast as a ‘backward and undeveloped region’. The general prejudice against migrants and migrant workers is of course not unique to Sicheng. 39 But the situation of migrant workers in Sicheng reactivates specific historical memories and imaginations Jiangnan people have about Subeiren. We have seen that northern Jiangsu, or Subei to southern residents, is on the whole more impoverished than southern Jiangsu. Honig points out that, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, when the area north of Yangzi river was prosperous, ‘it had no generic name “Subei”’.40 The socialist government since 1949 has changed Subei’s economy and infrastructure considerably, but despite the most extreme maoist inversions of traditional hierarchies, the contrast between Subei and Jiangnan remained unchanged by the time economic reforms were launched.41 Prejudice against Subei and Subeiren continued, and is still evident in casual conversations with Jiangnan people. In literary portrayals since Liberation, Subeiren appear in an unflattering light. Honig notes that tendency in Zhou Erfu’s fictional portrayal of workers and capitalists in Shanghai during the early 1950s, Morning in Shanghai. Mr Zhang, a cadre from Subei, was described as wearing a ‘gray cotton cadre’s suit with the bottom of his white shirt showing beneath the bottom of the jacket’. ‘Everything around him and all that was going on seemed to him strange and new.’ ‘Little wonder, then, that he was duped and cheated in a business deal with a pharmaceutical company.’42 In southern discourse, Subei and Subeiren do not correspond exactly with objective realities north of the river, but are lumped together as virtual synonyms for migrants. Subeiren thus takes on quasi-ethnic

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meaning even though they are objectively united ethnically only by being Han Chinese like most other Chinese.43 But people from Subei do not identify themselves as Subeiren; rather they see themselves as coming from a particular local district with a specific dialect, which happens to lie somewhere north of the Yangzi. 44 Subei has no official political status or ‘obvious, clearly delineated boundaries’.45 Nonetheless, Subei dialects, which over against southern dialects are more closely related, are considered ugly throughout the south. Their manners are considered coarse, their aesthetics devalued. Subei and Subeiren are judged (and organized conceptually) against standards and norms set by Jiangnan, in the context of its people’s and official’s desire to be seen as a leading modern centre of China. By constructing Subei as poor, uncivilized and inferior, Jiangnan is constructed by implication as wealthy, civilized and superior. Like national conceptions of Chinese qualities, these local distinctions are played out in the supposed qualities of local women. The typical stereotype of Asian women as ‘nimble fingered’ (and hence also beautiful and delicate) does not have a bad connotation. Nimble fingers are traditionally positively associated with womanhood. Sicheng women are certainly as nimble-fingered as any, but Subei women are seen as clumsy by comparison. The following advertisement, which evokes the image of Jiangnan women’s beautiful hands to sell a line of skin lotion, reproduces the existing notion that Jiangnan women have particularly beautiful hands. Why do women from Jiangnan have such fine skin? Why are weavers’ hands so silky smooth? Why are silk dresses so smooth? Why does silk cream nurture skin? Why is ‘Silk Mademoiselle’ praised as a ‘prized cosmetic’? ... Silk Mademoiselle cleansing lotion Cleans your skin, nurtures your skin – full quote from the advertisement This advertisement is one of a series featuring Jiangnan, and published in the magazine Zhongguo Funü. This particular advertisement, though a part of modernity’s consumer culture, exploits very old popular stereotypes concerning 1) sex differences: women naturally have delicate and tender hands; 2) regional differences: by dress and physical appearance, a woman from Jiangnan has particularly fine skin; by implication, women from other locales supposedly have rougher skin; 3) class differences:

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the whole conceit lies in the difference between what you see and what you expect about silk workers’ appearances; 4) youth and virginity (inescapable in Misi – Mademoiselle or Miss): the unmarried young woman is at once the model of beauty and desirability, and yet is concretely the largest, worst-paid category in the silk industry work force. The reader is encouraged to assume, either that silk and the beauty of Jiangnan women are related, or that beautiful hands for silk workers would be an enormous paradox for which the skin cream (the only image in the ad apart from a young, attractive woman) provides the only possible solution. If the reader, too, finds her hands unlovely, perhaps the advertisement says the skin cream can help her, since it provides a solution to that much greater problem. Whether such help can save Subei women is unclear. Today’s Subei migrant workers are at the margin of Sicheng society, and the women among them are considered less feminine. Peasants, managers and Sicheng workers are now constructed within the wenmin discourse; inequalities based on class and gender cannot be articulated in antagonistic terms because this would be a ‘leftist excess’. But Subei people, once in Sicheng, are lumped together as a homogenous grouping. Sicheng people are by contrast more modern and have higher population quality; Sicheng women are more womanly than Subei women. But these are more than silly prejudices, for they are reinforced by concrete institutions. Migrant workers’ situation cannot be fully understood without a discussion of the impact of hukou on them. Hukou is a state enforcement for social division between rural and urban China, and hukou status makes Subei stereotypes significant realities.

The hukou system: marker of insiders and outsiders The hukou system was created in the 1960s out of the socialist government’s concern about urban underemployment and rural grain production: among other provisions, it was illegal for peasants to move to cities without authorization. The state was also better able to control and discipline the population because hukou dossiers ‘evaluate the moral–political nature of each individual’46 and tie people to a specific place, occupation and class status. Third, it was also a technical requirement of a centrally planned economy, both for allocation of labour and for production organization. It was designed to control the population, to ensure agricultural labour remained on the land, and to prevent urban slums. For similar reasons, the former Soviet Union had such measures,47 but hukou has its own long pre-Communist roots in China’s

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baojia system. These forms originated in different phases of China’s past, but currently interact simultaneously.48 Hukou itself operated principally by limiting internal movement. 49 ‘The state required every city, town and village to keep records, called hukou bu, of their populations and required localities to use these records to restrict migration.’50 ‘In cities and towns with a police station, household registration was the responsibility of the Public Security Bureau (PBS) which kept a household registration book.’51 The bureau involvement meant any violation was categorized as a criminal matter. These measures acquired other implications when examined over time and space, implications limiting class and gender mobility. Like all other class adherents, those born in peasant households inherited peasant status. In cases of mixed-status marriages, the children take the mother’s status. There are only a few occasions when a person who has peasant hukou status can acquire non-peasant hukou status, and thus the right to significant social benefits (described below), to freer resettlement and to urban residency. These occasions include the acquisition of post-secondary education, demobilization as an army officer, or entry into high-priority jobs such as mining. On the other hand, nonpeasant hukou used to be ‘tied to rations for grain and other foodstuffs and daily necessities, and coupled with a system of household residency checks by local neighborhood committees’. 52 The hukou system was, therefore, not just about the rural–urban divide: each person, urban or rural, was restricted to her/his own community by hukou status and the social benefits tied to each locale. Originally, without a local urban residency permit, there was no way to find a job. Any rural residents seeking employment in cities were deprived not only of job opportunities but food and other necessities. The penalties the hukou system imposed were so great that people saw little attraction to migration. Of course, people still moved into the cities to meet the temporary demands of industries. However, as a result of hukou, they did not normally show up in the national statistics: Roughly 13 million work[ed] in state industrial enterprises on a temporary basis. Some 9 million of these [were] rural residents whose families also [had] agricultural income and who [were] forbidden by law from establishing residence and taking permanent urban employment in all but the smallest towns.53 These early migrant workers were helping overcome important difficulties in centralized plans. Employment in state-owned enterprises was

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limited during the maoist period, when agriculture and heavy industry predominated and light industry and commerce were suppressed. Staterun enterprises themselves did not have the right to hire permanent workers. Instead, the state ministries controlled the quota of nonmigrant labour. For enterprise managers, the hiring of temporary workers was a way of expanding its labour force without reference to the quota. Temporary workers were called in to do jobs which urban workers did not want; they were also needed for seasonal fluctuations in demand for labour in certain industries. They were paid, if anything at all, less than permanent workers and enjoyed fewer welfare benefits. In addition to these aspects of hukou, different coupons for grains, other foodstuffs and daily necessities were issued for use at national, provincial, municipal and local levels. Local residents could seldom get provincial or national coupons, further limiting the movement of urban residents. People with peasant hukou received their grain rations from their production teams.54 That children’s hukou followed (and still follows) the mother’s was a deliberate element in the effort to restrict outmigration from rural areas. The great majority of workers in state-run enterprises, especially mining and construction industries, were rural males. These male workers typically had non-peasant status, but some had married women with peasant status. Under this policy, the mother and her children, because of their peasant status, were not eligible for state rations and urban housing in the urban areas, nor were they eligible to attend urban schools. This policy worked because of the underlying social assumption that the mother is the sole primary care-giver: according to the Chinese expression, ‘man is responsible for the public sphere, while the woman, for the private sphere’. By playing on this patriarchal assumption, it subtly reinforced it. Because the hukou system governed rations for grains and other foodstuffs, medical care and children’s education, it especially limited the movement of women, given the underlying assumptions. It was the men who had to go to the cities to search for temporary work, while it was women who had to remain behind to take care of household, children and in some cases, the husband’s parents. Women in this situation also participated in agricultural production teams. Under liberal assumptions, the ones with fewer restraints to their movement are happier, and clearly the men had fewer restrictions on their movement. This has specific implications for men’s ability to conduct affairs, for example, away from the scrutiny of fellow villagers. But these movements are differentiated by class as well as gender: some

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men move of their own choice and with power, but others are forced to move or are left with no better option. Such men may or may not feel freer than women forced to remain in one place, and under this system, families needing urban incomes virtually had to send their men. Whether this system engendered more suffering overall than an ‘open’ system that depopulates the food-supply areas and that crams cities with slums populated equally by both genders is also doubtful. The hukou system was created primarily to limit people’s movement, especially peasant movements to urban areas, but it was also a policy that tied rights and privileges of citizenship to a relatively fixed hukou location.55 Further, there are hierarchies in these rights and privileges, depending on rural or urban status and on the status of the employers. One of the reasons for limiting the population of non-peasant status was to limit the welfare burden of the state, since the state was responsible for providing welfare only to its urban population. Although Chinese peasants are Chinese citizens, they are excluded from the subcommunity of welfare recipients. Their status as ‘outsiders’ in the city is thus little different from the status international migrants experience. Since economic reform, urban hukou (like immigration rights in Western countries) is even up for sale. As the Peasant Daily noted in mid-1989, ‘People go on a “black road” to get an urban hukou. Those with power use power, those with money buy it; those with neither, write [and] run back and forth.’56 Migrant workers have neither guanxi nor money to buy an urban hukou. Their hukou status in combination with the strong social norm of marriage and child rearing, justifies hiring them as temporary workers. Migrants’ newly acquired freedom of movement did not mean a drastic improvement in their status. This fact forces us to think about the meanings of mobility. D. Massey’s notion of the ‘power-geometry’ of time-space compression points to the unequal power relations involved in one’s relation to mobility: Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway differentiated mobility: some people are more in charge of it than others; some initiate flows and movement, others don’t; some are more on the receiving-end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.57

Flexible accumulation and construction of gender in migration: some comparisons It is banal to say that job segregation exists along gender lines. But it is critical further to ‘theorize the relationship between this job typing and

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the social identity of the workers concentrated in these low-paying, segregated, often unsafe sectors of the labour market’.58 It is also crucial to ask whether there is a connection ‘between how these jobs are defined and who is sought after for the job’.59 International capital is able today to target unmarried, childless or married women with children as cheap labour, only by taking advantage of locally dominant gender ideologies, which ‘view paid employment as conflicting with women’s domestic and child-rearing roles’.60 In Tiano’s case study of maquila women workers, ‘young, single, childless’ women have better employment options than married women who have children, or single mothers. The former are employed in what Tiano calls ‘electronic maquila’, which have better working conditions than ‘apparel maquila’, where the latter two categories of women tend to work. Unmarried women are seen as the desirable workers, while married women are the undesirable. On the other hand, Indian lacemakers in Mies’ case study 61 are defined as homeworkers, therefore their work is seen as a ‘leisure time activity’ and hence they are lower-paid. The code of seclusion of the caste system in India makes lacemakers’ work necessarily homework, and thus necessarily cheaper and more desirable for the employers. In Hossfeld’s case study of workers in Silicon Valley, married immigrant women make up the main workforce on the assembly lines.62 These married immigrant women are seen by managers as housewives and mothers first, and workers second. In the local context, their factory work can be defined as supplementary to their husbands and temporary. Their low pay reflects the low status of their work. The local ideologies of gender and race, as Mohanty argues, make women’s work either invisible in the case of lacemakers, or temporary in the case of the Silicon Valley immigrant workers. In Mexico’s maquiladora, unmarried women are seen as desirable and thus are hired for ‘better’ jobs, but married women with children as undesirable and thus segregated to ‘bad’ jobs. 63 The hukou system, place of origin and unmarried women’s inevitable future as wives and mothers are the primary bases upon which managers pay migrant workers low wages in Sicheng. Migrant workers do not have local hukou status. Treating migrant workers as temporary workers allows enterprises to reduce maternity-leave and child-care costs drastically. While permanent workers, usually urban workers, enjoy three months of paid maternity leave, migrant workers receive no paid leave. The ‘heterosexualization of women’s work – women are always defined in relation to men and conjugal marriage’ also makes it possible to treat female migrant workers as temporary workers.64

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This is because marriage is a virtually universal expectation, and these women are not married. Migrant workers and managers in Sicheng know that women migrant workers are temporary because they will have to go home once they are married. As one woman migrant worker said: ‘Those women who married early all stay home.’ If a woman does not return, the chances are poor that she will meet men and find a husband, and if she does not remain at her home village thereafter, the child which society places primarily in her care will be deprived of educational opportunities. The fact that these unmarried women, rather than married women, can and do take up low-paid factory work in Sicheng further suggests a process of heterosexualization – married women are always judged to be wives and mothers first. An unmarried woman from a rural peasant background will go back home to get married and then stay home as a mother and wife, while her husband seeks nonagricultural work away from home. However, unmarried women also take up this opportunity for temporary employment to gain some independence and freedom before taking up these conjugal obligations. The gender ideology which sees women’s primary role as wife and mother works to the advantage of managers, but also to some extent, of unmarried women, relatively and exceptionally independent. The functional motivation for targetting unmarried women is not just marriage as such, but its child-bearing and household responsibilities. The factories want sexually inactive women, and for that matter, women with no other traditional responsibilities for social and household reproduction. This also explains the value of their being away from their home village. These conditions allow the firms to engage a workforce willing to work longer hours, otherwise incompatible with either short- or long-term familial reproduction (for example, neither family cooking and cleaning, nor child-rearing).

Conclusion In this chapter, I have analysed the political economy of Sicheng in order to understand the local social dynamics in the era of building the ‘socialist market economy’. I have also examined both the material and cultural basis of Subei vis-à-vis Jiangnan discourse. I have tried to interrogate the power relations couched in the construction of the SichengSubei dichotomy by making the following three arguments: 1) To present Sicheng as a homogeneous community vis-à-vis Subei is to gloss over important internal divisions along class and gender lines. 2) By

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translating power differences based on class and gender into regional ones, and constructed differences into natural ones, the power differences in the intersection of gender, class and place of origins are also concealed. 3) By categorizing people into modern and traditional, progressive and backward elements, the divisions by class, gender and place of origin are also concealed. Subei migrant workers’ strategic situation in Sicheng has thus to be understood in the intersection of gender, class and place of origin. They are recruited by Sicheng’s managers to work in silk factories as cheap labour, just as many temporary migrant workers elsewhere in the developing countries. However, their coming to Sicheng, often their own decision rather than part of household strategy, sheds some light on the relationship among gender, kinship and households.

4 New Factory Women in Time and Space

In order to reduce workers and staff in erxian gongren [subsidiary jobs] last year [1995], 600 workers and staff were asked to change their jobs within the enterprise. One-third of them took an early retirement [they are usually around mid-30s]; one-third left the enterprise because they have connections to do business elsewhere, yet they want to get a pension from the enterprise. In order to do this, they have to invest 2000 yuan each year until their retirement age; another one-third are reassigned to production jobs, with yiji gongzi [one single-level wage increase], but only 2 per cent of them took the offer. For those who refuse to work as production workers, they are paid three months, at minimum wage [210 yuan], and then they are unemployed.1 Deputy general-manager, Yonghong factory When I was in high school, I was one of the best students in my class. Both my teachers and I had high hopes of getting into a university. But I failed miserably. I think I was too nervous. I like studying. But I don’t want to try again, because it is very expensive to be in school for another year. I don’t want be a burden to my parents.2 Zong, a female migrant worker One day, my grandpa came home with a job advertisement for factory work in Yonghong the local labour service bureau put out. My grandpa said that Jiangnan is beautiful, that I can go visit Suzhou on weekend once I’m there. That’s how I came here. 3 Tao, a female migrant worker 129

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My interviewees revealed multiple reasons for migration. Their stories also showed that most of them made their own decision to migrate. Women migrant workers in Sicheng were specifically sought after by managers because they are unmarried women from rural Subei. This chapter tries to sort out the following puzzles: 1. What does Sicheng managers’ recruitment of Subei unmarried women workers tell us about the gender division of labour in silk production? What does it tell us about the meaning of silk production? 2. What does these unmarried women’s entry into industrial work tell us about the interplay of gender, kinship and family relations? First, I will give a historical account of the changes in the gender division of labour in silk production to argue that it has not always involved associating ‘unskilled work’ with ‘women’s work’. Second, I will analyse the relationship between gender and family relations through my interviewees’ stories. I will compare this case with two other cases studies (Ong, 1987 and Wolf, 1992) in order to argue that China’s socialism has disrupted the elaborate pre-Revolutionary kinship ties, with important implications for the extent to which rural women can act autonomously.

The gender division of labour in silk production Unmarried women migrant workers have largely replaced local Sicheng women workers as the major workforce during the reform period. The status of silk production also declined. Silk production is now associated not only with women’s work but with migrants’ work. If local workers still reminisce about the old days when they were proud to be silk workers, certainly there is not much to challenge the notion that silk production now is considered migrant women’s work, and unskilled work. In order to question the extent to which this association is and ought to be taken for granted, I will give a historical account of the changes in the sector’s sexual division of labour. The Chinese saying nangeng nüzhi (men tilling, women weaving) says much about the ideal sexual division of labour in Imperial agrarian society. This division of labour based on ‘biological attributes’ in itself might only mean a sexual division of labour. However, it gradually took on a specifically gendered meaning since the Song dynasty (a period which includes the distinct Northern Song (960–1127) and Southern Song (1127–1279)). At this time, confucian revivalist or ‘moralist’ ideologies firmly established men’s power over women’s in tracing ancestral lineage, and affirmed women’s reproductive role as their primary one. Consequently, women were seen as properly dependent on men. Family was

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the only structure in the patriarchal society which integrated nangeng nüzhi with a system of male lineage. Family thus came to define a woman’s status through her life: she follows her father and brothers before marriage; her husband after marriage; and her son in the event of her husband’s death (Records of Rites). 4 Women were restricted as a matter of moral propriety to the realm of the private/familial, while the public/official was properly an exclusively male domain. The Song dynasty was considered a time of change that reached ‘the most basic social, cultural, political and economic structures of Chinese civilization, features that normally change very slowly over the long term’. 5 Here, I found Bray’s terms ‘womanly work’ and ‘women’s work’ useful in signaling changes in the value attached to what women did. 6 According to her, ‘womanly work’ is used: principally to denote moralists’ and officials’ use of nügong. What these officials see in female work is a moral activity linked to a gendered identity and embodied in weaving . . . It implies that the woman is an active subject of the state, and that her role is an essential complement to that of her husband. The work performed is the production of symbolically charged cloth, an essential good like food grain; the straightforward monetary value of the commodity produced by this work is of no real interest.7 ‘Women’s work’ is seen as: operating at the level of the private household economy . . . In this context, nügong could mean any kind of work women performed that produced recognizable commodities. This includes . . . weaving mats, making umbrellas or hats, processing foods, all kinds of work that fit nicely into our Western concept of handicrafts and all of which date back several centuries as commercial activities in various regions of China . . . but which as far as Confucian orthodoxy was concerned did not qualify as ‘womanly work’.8 The Song dynasty marks a watershed of sorts, in womanly work as in other matters. It is of some importance to identify what the moralists were attempting to revive, for it flows from the distinction Bray attempted to make. The concept of ‘womanly work’ can be used to describe the more ancient moral universe of ‘men tilling, women weaving’ until at least the Song dynasty and even more certainly the subsequent Ming. Weaving in this earlier time was not just a kind of work

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women did. In weaving, women displayed their virtues as ‘woman’. Spinning and weaving until the Ming were not considered demeaning activities. They were the enactment of family and civic virtue. Moreover, what women did was not inferior to what men did. Women and men simply did different work. 9 We have seen that during this period, southern sericulture was marked by strong elite dominance, a dominance driven by the immense costs. Nonetheless, the ancient division of labour continued to be invoked as a morally compelling form of social organization to the very end of the Imperial system.10 Before the Ming, women’s economic contributions both to their families and to the state was visible because silk was also connected to the state fiscal system.11 Because the timing of raising silkworms, and of reeling and weaving silk, conflicted with the high season for farming activities, women were mainly responsible for silk production. This sexual division of labour fitted the patriarchal ideologies that saw women’s place as inside the house and men’s outside. However, silk, like grain, was part of the tax-in-kind each household had to pay to the Imperial state. Within a household, the husband farmed to pay the grain tax, while the wife wove to pay the silk tax. They were directly subjects of the Imperial state in their own right because they paid the silk tax. The woman’s economic role in the household and the state was thus visible in the public sphere. Even though neo-confucian elites in the Song dynasty still tried to maintain silk production as ‘womanly work’, ordinary peasant household produced silk as a household affair for survival.12 The introduction of cotton in the Song and its expansion by the Yuan (1279–1368) contributed to the deskilling of women’s labour and their work in silk production was marginalized and devalued. The source of cheap cloth for officials, the urban middle-class and the ordinary people had been inexpensive rough weaves of silk, and cotton soon replaced it. Because peasant households mostly produced such a grade of silk, called silk ‘tabbies’, the popularity of cotton meant that very few households would continue to engage in silk weaving. Luxury silk products were still in high demand, but they could be manufactured only in the Imperial Factories and increasingly in private workshops. Ordinary peasant households could not afford the expensive looms required to weave high-quality silk. Further, the Yuan Imperial state switched from taxing in silk cloth to taxing only in raw silk and yarn. This tax policy ‘must have encouraged many rural households to abandon weaving and concentrate on sericulture and reeling’. 13 Husbands in the households took part in silk production.

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Song was also a time when the society experienced growing commercialization. Until the Song dynasty (1127–1279) and more so the Ming (1368–1644), weavers specializing in high-quality fabric outside the household worked exclusively in the Imperial textile factories, administered by the ministries of finance and public works. For centuries, most expensive silk was woven there. Several categories of artisans worked there: prisoners, demobilized soldiers and corvée artisans. They included both men and women. Based on historical documents, it seems that those who worked in the Imperial textile factories had very low social status. The prisoners’ status was closest to slaves. Artisans passed their skill down to their children, and were not free labourers. 14 As Bray points out, ‘[w]e cannot be certain if the work of each section [in the Imperial textile factories] was always run by a male foreman (hutou), but this was standard by the Song, and the living and working conditions of all workers, male and female, were hard’. 15 These were the populations of silk workers driven into the South with the founding of the Southern Song, and present when Sicheng was founded as a major silk centre at the mid-Ming. The introduction of silver in the sixteenth century ‘put a new face on the economic life of the empire. Commerce meant cash crops were cultivated on increasing areas of cultivation. It also fostered webs of trade routes and marketing networks, prompted general retreat in government control over the economy, and cast China as a formidable exporter in the world trade system’. 16 One example of this commercialization of the society is that direct payment replaced corvée for the artisans. This was possible primarily because the expanding private sector provided an alternative source of income for these artisans. However, this expansion of the ‘private sector’ did not imply a complete withdrawal of the Imperial state power. Instead, [t]he Superintendents of Imperial factories effectively controlled all activities relating to weaving, either by supervising guilds and regulating ‘private’ business, or by issuing certificates granting manufacturing and trade licenses. Although rarely entering into direct contact with producers and craftsmen, the Superintendents kept up contacts with all sectors of economic life in the prefecture and throughout the province through professional guilds, wholesalers, and financial groups. All workers, from spinners to dyers . . . were hired through their respective guilds or intermediaries (hanghui, yahang).17 With the expansion of private silk workshops, more men were drawn to weaving. But as neo-confucian ideologies were intensified, women were

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simply not socially and culturally accepted for work outside their own houses. Moreover, the Ming state abolished the tax-in-kind altogether. Women’s work was thus rendered invisible, because each woman in sericulture was by this time merely helping her husband produce silk as a raw material. Because most peasant households did not have the capital to buy elaborate looms, they simply sold thread as soon as they reeled it. Even for those households which still wove silk, wives tended to prepare threads while husbands wove the silk and then took it to market. Further, brokers played a more and more important role in the silk business. Consequently, peasant households were subject to more and more exploitation by middlemen. By the late Imperial period, silk production was specialized and subdivided into various processes of sericulture: the reeling and quilling of yarn, and the actual weaving. Sericulture remained a household activity, but reeling and weaving became factory activities by the early twentieth century. Having outlined a history of women’s status and sericulture in sketch form, I now return to the turning point identified in the Song dynasty. The Song was a period of more general change, a turning point of Chinese history. Many scholars see the Song as a time when women’s situations apparently took a turn for the worse. Parallel to these changes which ultimately led to women’s loss of status as active contributors to household tax payments, marriage patterns also changed after the Song. Some scholars argued that economic expansion during the Song meant that widows could support their families by seeking paid work in the market. 18 But the negative trends included, among others, the ‘escalation in the size of dowries’ and ‘more emphasis on patrilineality’. Examples were the spread of foot binding and the chastity cult. Silk played an important part in that downturn. Because many women no longer wove silk, they not only lost the recognition that came with direct taxation in kind. They could also no longer pay their own dowry. Consequently, they became their families’ burdens.19 As women’s role in weaving was marginalized, the representations of gender in textile production changed. Already in the Yuan, women were not named in anecdotes recounting how families grew wealthy by weaving silk at home. ‘The shift from giving to withholding (or ignoring) women’s names is also significant, for names were closely bound up with personal identity and worth in China.’20 Simultaneously, silk production in peasant households became more a mundane economic activity than an enactment of a moralist world view. The Qing state encouraged the ancient norm of tilling by men

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and weaving by women as an ideal sexual division of labour in order to make sure that peasant households were self-sufficient. Given that weaving in private workshops was more lucrative than farming, the encouragement of men to till and of women to weave in this later context was a way to prevent the farm economy from collapsing. 21 But its policies were couched in a moralist discourse rather than in economic terms. To summarize, the Imperial legacy before nineteenth-century European influence, the changing tax policies by the Yuan state and ‘[t]he demand for raw silk and silk yarn was growing, prompting an incipient division of labour along the lines . . . whereby rural sericulturalists specialized in producing raw silk for urban workshops and gave up silk weaving’.22 Starting from the Song and more so by the Ming dynasty, women’s role in weaving was marginalized: a woman no longer paid tax to the Imperial state, and more and more weaving was done in maledominated private workshops. However, moralists still tried to persuade people to go back to the old sexual division of labour when men tilled and women wove. The Qing state and its moralists were a good example of patriarchy’s distinctive local forms and a problem for an argument linking patriarchal forms directly to the logic of capitalism. Another turning point came the course of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury industrialization in the sexual division of labour and the changing boundary between the public and the private. The rise in Western demand was directed at Chinese raw silk for processing in Western weaving mills, rather than at Chinese-manufactured silk cloth. This was particularly significant in the United States, which taxed imported silk fabrics heavily while having no tax on imported raw silk. These measures were intended to protect the American weaving industry early in the century. What the United States wanted was China’s raw silk, and more particularly, the finer grade of machine-reeled raw silk.23 Several important changes occurred in the countryside where peasants engaged in silkworm raising and reeling: 1) the demand for and superior efficiency of machine reeling silk forced peasants to withdraw from this activity as well as weaving, and to produce cocoons only; 2) co-operatives were organized in villages to produce machine-reeled silk to meet the demands of American markets; 3) machines replaced labour in reeling silk, so factory jobs became an alternative lifeline for poor peasant families. The silk weavers of Shanghai were known in the 1930s as China’s ‘labour aristocrats’. 24 However, handicraft weavers were also increasingly facing competition from the newly developed modern silk-weaving industry. The modern jacquard frame, whose output doubled that of

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even high-quality traditional looms, was first introduced at Hankou in 1908. The year 1915 also saw the start of electrically powered weaving at Shanghai.25 Mechanized silk weaving in factories became a largely male occupation, in which weavers were responsible for the operation, maintenance and repair of their looms. Women, it was widely believed, should not be engaged in the unseemly behaviour of climbing about fixing complicated machines. Here is an ironic twist: in ordinary people’s minds during my field research, traditional weaving had become associated with men’s work. The post-war years led not only to a general decline in silk-weaving, but also a fundamental restructuring. A few larger companies started to dominate the industry. Meiya Company was one of them. Its new manager Cai Shenbai had received an American education, returning to China in 1920. Armed with his American experience, he imported the latest US-made looms and recruited ‘educated’ workers to operate them. ‘Cai’s two personnel managers, natives of eastern Zhejiang province, made frequent trips home to Shengxian and Dongyang counties to enlist bright young men and women as apprentice weavers. Only those who passed a difficult technical test were admitted as apprentices.’ 26 Note well here the emphasis both on ‘education’ and ‘technical requirements’ for these weavers to be qualified, and on the resort to outside labour. Mechanized weaving changed the definition and sourcing of skilled workers. ‘About half of those employed in the Shanghai silk-weaving industry were women. In the smaller factories, women tended to be confined to the Preparation Department, whereas men worked in the Weaving Department, performing skilled work of operating the looms.’ 27 As Perry points out, Cai’s new management procedures led to a break with this newly ‘traditional’ gender division of labour under mechanized conditions. Meiya hired large numbers of female weavers at only 80 to 90 per cent of the rate paid to males, yet found women were often as productive, sometimes even more productive than men.28 The intention behind hiring women weavers was to reduce costs as well as to create a more ‘passive’ labour force. Some Shanghai weaving factories, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, moved to Jiangnan small towns such as Sicheng to avoid militant Shanghai weavers.29 As more women became weavers, ‘weavers at Meiya – whether male or female – were relieved of the burden of machine repair by specialized mechanics trained at the Hangzhou Technical Institute.’30 Generally speaking, women working in the factories were stigmatized in the society at large. Consequently only desperate families would send

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their daughters or wives to factories. But women’s work in factories as independent wage labour started to disrupt the patriarchal family order, creating at once more negotiating power within the family and a power base outside the home. In Mao Dun’s Spring Silkworm, for instance, one woman has an affair while working in the factory, an act which would have traditionally meant death or expulsion from her husband’s family and permanent humiliation. However, because her income was indispensable to the family, she was pardoned.31 Clearly, the circumstances of the character’s empowerment is inseparable from national humiliation in the face of modernity, and we return to the issue of the May Fourth Movement’s subordination of women’s salvation to national salvation, mentioned in earlier chapters. But it was also possible that Mao Dun, a leading writer of the May Fourth period, wished to portray a woman breaking the yoke of patriarchal oppression within the traditional family. Still, the desperation of women workers was one of the windows which capitalists of the time exploited – they could pay women workers low wages. They were even paid less when they did the same jobs formerly done by men. The convenient assumption, only possible because of centuries of patriarchal and commercial alienation, was that men were the main income-generators while women were only supporting sources of income. The Song dynasty and the introduction of taylorist techniques at Meiya are presented here as turning points in silk production. Another turning point in the sexual division of labour in silk production came when the Communist government came to power in 1949. Mao’s gender policies stipulated that women’s liberation was in their winning economic independence. Women belonged to the public sphere as much as men. Indeed, it was feudal for women to stay at home. (Until then, most women were housewives.) Modern women in the Mao regime were the women who worked as wage-earners. Nonetheless, until 1958, weavers were predominantly male in the silk industry specifically. The Great Leap Forward in 1958 saw the large increase of women’s employment in Sicheng silk factories as production expanded. However, there were tensions between ‘equality between men and women’ as outlined in official policies, and the actual status of women in employment. Women’s work was still considered less valuable than men’s. They were paid less and did less skilled work. In keeping with the legacy of Meiya, weavers no longer did machine repair and maintenance. But women under Mao were still employed mostly in neighbourhood-run factories, which had few welfare benefits and paid much less than state-owned enterprises and large-scale collective enterprises. However, these neighbourhood-run

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factories generated large revenues for local governments and also reduced the pressure on local governments to reduce unemployment. Thus far, I have outlined the changes in the sexual division of labour in weaving and what they meant for women’s status and the meanings of weaving. From the Song dynasty on, weaving emerged outside the home and became generally considered men’s work. More and more women raised silkworms and reeled silk at home. The international division of labour in the early twentieth century drew Chinese women into the international capitalist system. The finished silk fabrics were considered luxury goods, while raw silk was not; hence cheap, unskilled labour became associated with the latter. Mao’s gender ideologies led to more and more women working as weavers. For these women, paid work gained them independence and honour. Economic reform, however, has greatly increased the gap between mental and manual work, in no small part because of the revindication of the intellectual and managerial class in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Therefore, silk production is now considered not only a woman’s job, but a job held by people with otherwise low social status. Furthermore, production has been informalized. Unmarried women were brought to Sicheng to produce silk. Migrant workers now make up about 40 per cent of the total population of Sicheng. Most of them are women engaged in silk production. I have discussed why managers in Sicheng specifically benefit from unmarried women from Subei to work in silk factories. I also have analysed the meanings of silk production in today’s Sicheng. How do unmarried women migrant workers perceive their coming to work in Sicheng and what does their migration inform us about gender, kinship and family relations in China?

Gender, kinship and households In 1993, I went to Subei nine times to recruit workers. 32 Personnel manager, Yonghong My parents did not want me to come here. But I gradually persuaded them. I said to them that I could not stay at home forever.33 Female migrant worker In visiting the dorms of silk factories in Sicheng, the overall age cohort is overwhelmingly youthful. Why do young people migrate here?34 One survey of the reasons why youth migrate, conducted for Zhongguo

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Qingnian (Youth of China) in 1997, discounts the argument of family necessity or family enrichment as a fully satisfactory one. This survey shows that about 52 per cent of those surveyed migrate for economic reasons. These include: escaping from home where poverty deprives them of things to do; heavy family debt; or post secondary education cost. However, nearly 42 per cent migrate for non-economic factors: they do not want to be peasants all their lives; they want to see the world; they want to learn some skill; and they want to learn how to live independently. Finally, 23 per cent migrate because they failed entrance exams. 35 Although we do not know how the survey questions were phrased and asked, the data suggest that family economic factors are far from the only reason people migrate. Although the present study does not intend to investigate statistical proportions, virtually all of the motivations mentioned in the above Zhongguo Qingnian study are evident from the research collected for this study. Unlike the Zhongguo Qingnian study, the present work looks systematically at how these motivations are gendered. Many case studies have shown that the kinship system in many countries greatly mediates both women’s entry onto the labour market, and women’s power vis-à-vis their households after they gained some economic independence. 36 These studies also introduce the element of gender. D. L. Wolf’s argument delineates two basic kinship systems – East and South Asia tend to exhibit a patrilineal kinship system; and bilateral kinship systems prevail in Southeast Asia. The present study has suggested how the Chinese model evolved historically in this respect. Many case studies on the relationship between factory daughters and family relations in Hong Kong and Taiwan 37 have demonstrated that the patrilineal kinship system subordinated factory daughters more to the family patriarchy. ‘The subordinate family position of Taiwanese daughters and the ways in which they submit their needs to the betterment of the family economy reflect certain stereotypes of how daughters’ lives remain unchanged by emergent industrial capitalism.’38 In contrast, as Wolf points out in her study, women in Java enjoy more independence from households primarily because their kinship system is matrilineal. However, even matrilineal or patrilineal kinship systems acquire specific meanings as a result of political, economic and sociocultural change. Some anthropologists thus call for ‘constructing categories of kinship that are sensitive to historical change and cultural variability’39 further, we need to overcome the rigid understanding in which there are only women/dominated and men/dominant. The relationship between men and women within the kinship system has to be

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understood in relationship to other hierarchies such as class and race. 40 Further, as Judd notes when writing on niangjia (women’s natal families) in rural China, there is a gap between the model and everyday practice of kinship – what she calls ‘practical kinship’. Practical kinship ‘enables the researcher to see and conceptualize women not purely as victims of patriarchy but as agents in the everyday practice of kinship’. 41 The comparative discussion may be enriched by interviewees’ personal stories. These women, between 17 and 21, were born and raised in postMao rural households. As Rofel argues, the timing of the coming of age has great impact on women’s identities. 42 China’s rural decollectivization has restored the position of male head in the household. But from my interviewees’ stories, family patriarchy does not seem to have determined the decision of these women to migrate. This apparent anomaly might be explained not by a distinctive kinship system, but by the intervening factor of China’s socialism, which deliberately disrupted an entrenched kinship system. The Chinese revolutionaries tried to mould peasants’ class consciousness through ‘speaking bitterness’ so that peasants no longer felt an obligation to the kinship system. This was in no small part because this kinship system extended beyond merely private attachments into associations or houses organized by family name. Because these associations cut across class divisions, they tempered peasant receptivity to arguments about class exploitation. The commune system, imposed after the post-Revolutionary settlement gave way to collectivization, meant that kinsmen’s power has greatly reduced, but not eliminated. As Chan, Masden and Unger 43 point out in their study of the impact of collectivization on the kinship system in Chen village, Qingfa [the party secretary of Chen production brigade] initially had played favorites toward his home production team in part because, against official Communist doctrine, he held onto traditional kinship loyalties. But it was also useful to him, both as an individual and as a brigade official. He could expect gratitude and loyal cooperation in return for his patronage. As brigade party secretary, Qingfa ultimately was responsible to his party superiors at the commune seat . . . In keeping with China’s patrilineal kinship system, marriage for sons is called qujinglai (‘marrying someone into the family’) while for daughters it is chujia (‘marrying out’). Gender difference in marriage is emphasized in numerous similar sayings. Overall, it is clear that a woman was

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not considered kin of her husband’s family. Rural collectivization meant that women were now also considered members of the commune. The commune movement mobilized rural women to engage in agricultural production outside of household. As Johnson44 points out, the mobilization of women into collective labor has resulted in a redistribution of some domestic labor from younger women to older women. This probably represents a gain in the status and independence of daughters-in-law vis-à-vis mothers-in-law in recognition of the value to the family of younger women’s remunerated labor outside the home. Women’s agricultural labour outside household has entrenched itself in rural areas since the 1960s. This has meant women working outside home has become everyday life, even for many rural Chinese women, though they are still primarily responsible for household work. The restoration of the male head of household with reform’s household responsibility system did not seem to restore the old kinship system exactly, at least not in Sicheng’s source regions for migrant workers: unmarried women migrant workers I spoke to reported that migrating to Sicheng was their own decision, not their father’s, though their fathers or male relatives were often consulted about the practicalities. The Zhongguo Qingnian study already has opened doubts about the centrality of family economic needs in explaining migration. My interviewees’ stories did not confirm the argument either, which is made most rigorously in what may be called the New Household Economics (NHE) approach. ‘Household Strategies’ are key to the NHE argument: each household supposedly acts as an economic unit, competing rationally in the market economy. But family strategy, as outlined in the NHE, cannot deal with the power relations within each household, because it treats the household as a self-evidently homogeneous unit headed by the patriarch in the family; these ‘bear little resemblance to recognizable human individual; rather they are abstract ciphers, undifferentiated by cultural context or individual’. 45 This NHE explanation also misses cultural and social factors. While economic needs are clearly a primary consideration for women seeking factory employment, the decision to join the labour market is not based, as liberal economists suggest, on narrow economic cost and benefit calculations. Many case studies also disproved the concept of household strategies. 46 As Wolf’s case study of Javanese factory daughters47 has shown:

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[t]he migrant did not migrate or work in a factory because it was a household-level decision or because they were trying to help their poor families. Some even left home without parental permission. Some had run away from unhappy home situations – either parents or husband – or attempts by their parents to arrange their marriage. While these particularities are not replicated in this study, the latter does confirm the sense that migration is a release from family obligation rather than a fulfillment of it. Many migrant workers were leaving disappointment or shame. For instance, most of the women I interviewed migrated after graduating from junior high school. Some felt a sense of loss because the direction of their life forbade a postsecondary education. As I mentioned in a previous chapter in the discussion of the hukou system, a postsecondary education would have guaranteed them ‘non-peasant’ status. A postsecondary education leads to upward social mobility, especially for peasant children. Therefore, coming to work in the factory can be consoling: at least they can feed themselves and leave home. Failure to enter a postsecondary institution can be devastating for some young women. In Huaqiang, I met Zong, who was nineteen years old. At the time of our meeting, she had just arrived in Huaqiang after failing the national postsecondary school entrance exam in July. Unlike the other four women who were present at the time of our interview in the dormitory, Zong looked very distressed. Throughout the joint interview, she was lying in bed. Initially, I thought she might be homesick, having just arrived at a place far away from home. (The other four women had come the year before and therefore were more accustomed to being away from home and working in the factory.) Then she told me that she failed her entrance exam. She showed me pictures of her two best friends, who had made it to university. Both pictures have their universities in the background. However, not every migrant worker shared such a sense of loss. Some did not want to continue school after junior high. Instead they wanted to come to work in the factory right after three years of high-school education. Of all the migrant workers I interviewed, none reported being forced to come to work in the factories. Many had to persuade their parents to let them come. One such migrant worker told me, ‘Initially my parents did not want me to come here. But then I said to them if I stayed home, they had to support me financially. If I came here, I can at least support myself.’48

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Like migrant female workers, migrant male workers are typically not married. But unlike unmarried young women I interviewed, who unanimously described a sense of freedom from their migration, male workers usually express a desire to go back home and start a family business after they made some money. Therefore, the motivation for male and female workers is different, even though both male and female workers want to make some money. Female workers put more emphasis on being able to enjoy some independence and freedom away from home, while male migrant workers are more concerned with being able to make more money so as to support their extended family. In villages, married sons and their families typically live with the sons’ parents. When there are several sons, it is also possible that only the eldest or some other son lives with the parents. But sons are primarily responsible for the well-being of their parents when they get old. Bao is 24 years old. He comes from Subei, the youngest son in the family. He told me: Married sons who stay at home are preoccupied with how to keep the family from starving; sons who migrate to other places to work are preoccupied with how to make their family rich. I’m the youngest son in the family. I’m lucky that I’m not the oldest son, because he has more responsibilities than younger brothers in supporting the family. I want to learn a skill in the future so as to make money.49 Some aspects of the patrilineal, patrilocal kinship system have clearly survived or revived. Married daughters feel less attached to family villages because they now belong to ‘somebody else’s’ family; they do not have long-term plans. Sons’ lives by contrast are permanently attached to their families and villages of origin. Women’s well-being is much more heavily dependent on whether they have a good marriage. The saying, ‘jiaji sui ji, jiagou sui gou’ (literally, ‘when you marry a chicken live with a chicken, when you marry a dog live with a dog’), reminded women not only of this limit on their fortunes, but of their coming separation (if not complete rupture) from their niangjia. From some of the migrant workers’ words, we can see that familial economic strategies to maximize incomes cannot always explain women workers’ migration to Sicheng, if only because daughters are assumed not to be part of family strategy. Most migrant workers did send ‘extra’ money back for one to two years for their parents. But after this initial period, female migrants start to save some money for a future marriage. On average, female production workers earn between 6000 to 7000 yuan

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a year in 1996, which approximately equals the national average of 6210 yuan in 1996 among urban workers.50 Women production workers in Yonghong in 1995 reported an average 6000 yuan although managers reported high-paid weavers, better paid than prep workers. Male migrant workers typically continue to send money home to support the extended family. A male workers’ money is considered enrichment for their family, while a female workers’ money is for their parents’ extras or for their own marriage. While kinship-driven differences do appear to explain part of the different reactions to migration men and women experience, they do not explain why those different experiences are to be had by migrating for work. Here we can note that rural industrialization marked the early period of reform, but occurred before the policy of emphasizing light industry was firmly established. The consequent relative lack of light industries in Subei and in other poorer or interior provinces also explains why unmarried young women are especially willing to work in Sicheng, where the prevalent sector is light industry. Light industry is considered less dirty and hence now more appropriate for young women. Hailian, for instance, noted that her hometown had predominantly heavy industries. These industries hire primarily male workers for the heavy physical work. 51 Migration from Subei is also explained by the unique ownership structure typical in new Chinese businesses. Where work in light industries exists, access is restricted both economically and politically through the collective ownership provisions of the local TVEs. Thus, for example, ‘We have to invest over 10 000 yuan in the factory to get a factory job. My parents cannot afford it. In Sicheng, we got a job without having to invest any money in the factory’.52 Another worker commented, ‘My sister works in silk reeling factory back home. It is not easy to get into the factory.’53 (This worker’s sister was probably helped in getting this job: their father is in charge of village family planning, an important village cadre position that would certainly have helped the placement, if help were needed.) Ying, who works in Huaqiang as a fabric measurer, is from Sichuan province, but the accessibility problems exist there as well. ‘State-owned enterprises predominate in Sichuan. There are very few privately owned factories. We need to invest if we want to get a factory job. My father works as a dyer in Huaqiang too. That work is hard work. But it is still easier work than tilling the land.’ 54 The competitiveness of Sicheng products, and hence its relative abundance of jobs, also rests in part on its long, famed association with silk production. Hence, one worker said, ‘The silk factories in my home

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town cannot find a market, even though the quality of the products is the same or better than those here, because silk factories in Sicheng have a long history. As a result, workers back home won’t get paid for months. Wages here are much higher’. 55 Beyond wages, locality recognition in the product markets may also help explain the ease with which jobs may be had in Sicheng. Migrant women workers I interviewed did not report being forced to come to Sicheng by their parents, nor did they mention strong obligations to support their family as reasons for coming. Zheng said, ‘one day, I was visiting my former classmate. She told me that managers from Yonghong were here recruiting workers. So, we decided to come together.’56 Some explicitly mentioned household obligations that they avoided by coming to Sicheng. Others did express negative obligations to their family as motivations to migrate, such as the ongoing tuition fees that their families would have had to pay, had they remained at home. Women more than men expressed a sense of independence and freedom from their parents upon their migration. As mentioned earlier, some had to persuade their parents in order to come. When I asked them why their parents did not want them to come, they told me their parents were worried about them being away from home at such a young age. This consideration of genuine family concern and affection does not appear to be considered in the household strategy literature I have examined, as a possible constraint on purely economic considerations. Parents do tend to trust their daughters’ ability to be on their own after one year away. Xia told me, ‘When managers from Sicheng came to our village to recruit workers, I applied. But my parents did not want me to come here. They thought I was too young to take care of myself. I was only seventeen the year I came to Sicheng. But then I received the acceptance letter from Yonghong. So they had to let me come.’57 After a few years, women migrants also appear to feel less obliged to remit payments to their parents, payments which in any case appeared to be relatively small. Thus, these young women are either unconstrained by any household strategy (households having only recently been revived as economic units in rural areas), or are able to exercise freedom precisely because their gender and their probable future, married ‘out’ into their husband’s extended family, lead their families to count them out of any household strategy which does exist. Households, however, are not merely economic units or even units of solidarity and affection. They are in most societies positively valued units of moral order. To leave one’s family, therefore, is frequently

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identified with moral problems. It is also true that migrant women workers are received as moral problems in Sicheng. It is important, however, to be clear about the moral issue at stake in such ‘problems’. In Sicheng, local class, gender and place-of-origin ideologies affect how new women factory workers experience factory work and how it is perceived by the society as a whole. How these forces interact may be seen in the light of comparative literature on similar situations. Ong has shown in her case study that in Malaysia similar women workers are viewed negatively. They are seen as ‘pleasure-seekers’, bad women, or prostitutes, ‘having fun with money’, as ‘street-walkers’, etc. One article, written by a manager in Yonghong in 1993, suggested a negative image of migrant workers who are away from their parents: ‘Migrant workers are away from their families. They are more easily lured by wrong people to do bad things because their parents are not around to supervise and control them’.58 While a number of these themes are similar to characterizations of migrant workers in Sicheng, one would ask why the Malaysian public and media hold such bad images of factory women. For the most part, these are not women migrating into distant localities. Ong’s answer instead points to an alarm raised ‘over the perceived threat of Malay factory women asserting social independence, thus casting doubts on official Islamic culture’ and that this alarm ‘has prompted state officials to call for greater control of women in the growing Malay working class’. 59 It is apparent that religious groups contributed greatly to Malay factory women being associated with ‘moral corruption’ because of the work they do outside the home, which resulted in the tightening up of ‘religious surveillance of sexual conduct’ of these factory women. In its own right, this Islamic activity should not be understood as purely repressive. One way of ‘exercising surveillance’, for instance, is to provide the social welfare needs (dormitories, transportation and mosques) of Malay factory women in the cities.60 Also, one reports that these factory women are not further ‘guided’ after work. But if the motivations for such characterizations of women workers are primarily religious and Islamic, the wider difficulty is that Ong provides little insight into the Sicheng case. The cultural experience of migrant women workers in Sicheng, as well as society’s perception, are both different and similar from the case of Malay factory women. Unlike the latter, migrant women workers in Sicheng are not labelled as ‘pleasure-seekers’, or bad women/prostitute, simply by virtue of working outside the home. Under 40 years of socialism, it became bourgeois and therefore reactionary for women to stay

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home. Women going to work became a symbol of their liberation from confinement to the home. Under Mao, the icon for modern women was the ‘iron woman’ who could do whatever men could. Women working outside the home held the key to their own emancipation. This new working norm was not a purely voluntary transformation. It was also made a necessity for household survival; it was simply not enough for a family to live on one person’s income. Forty years of socialist carrots and sticks have made women wage-earners a ‘given’ in China. Women who were born after 1949 now consider working in the ‘public sphere’ an important part of their identities. For women born before 1949, being able to work has meant newly acquired economic independence and thus ‘liberation’ from the patriarchal rule within families. However, factory jobs were long the privilege of urban residents; moreover, employment in SOEs and large collective enterprises were male privileges. Most urban women worked in small-scale collective factories and neighbourhood factories, which paid low wages and provided few benefits. Despite these disadvantages, women were found in the labour market, and a factory job was a rare prize, much better than being sent to the countryside. With rural industrialization, factory work became a common aspiration for peasants as well. For Malay factory women, entering the factories was a morally dubious assertion of independence from parents and village elders. This move, in Ong’s case study a mere matter of commuting, is seen as ‘morally inadequate’. This moral restriction is functionally equivalent to the legal hukou restriction, with the important difference that the moral authorities were institutionally autonomous from the state. According to religious groups, some Malaysian academics, as well as the state, the cause of this problem is a Westernized urban culture. Unmarried women migrant workers in Sicheng, as in other parts of China, are indeed warned about the moral ‘danger’ of their significantly more distant move, well away from parental protection and guidance. 61 The discourse in China is slightly different, however, in the sense that the move to work is not generally considered ‘morally inadequate’, but rather failure to find a ‘decent job’. Other jobs in Sicheng carry the highly gendered moral stigma any factory job would hold for Ong’s case study. For instance, both migrant and peasant workers consider a factory job better than waiting on tables or working in beauty salons. Working in service sectors such as restaurants and beauty salons is associated with prostitution. In a restaurant in Sicheng, I asked one waitress from Henan province, whether her parents approve of her working in restaurant. She replied in a way that underscores not only the moral

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stigma of her job, but the bargaining power jobs have given some women: I worked in Guangzhou for two years as an assembly line worker in an electronic factory. After that, I came to Sicheng. Unlike most of the migrant workers, who are working in silk factories, I prefer working as a waitress here. I don’t want to work as a weaver because of the terrible noise in the weaving workshop. However, my parents don’t want me to work as waitress because restaurant waitresses have a bad reputation back home. Instead they want me to be a weaver. But I said to my parents that if they don’t let me be a waitress, then I would be forced to return home. And if so, I want my parents to give me 200 RMB per month. 62 Most of my interviewees associate hairdressing and waitressing with ‘immoral behaviour’: they are ‘not decent jobs’. One interviewee was adamant about beauty salons: ‘Beauty salons act as meeting place between prostitutes and customers. They used to post job advertisements around the town. Certainly, you do not want to work there. There are a lot of bad things happened there.’ Moreover, the interviewee notes, ‘local people see prostitution solely done by outsiders’ (that is, internal migrants).63 Shortly before my visit, the local police raided some beauty salons and the raid was shown on local news. Lee’s work on migrant workers in Shenzhen corroborated these findings. 64 One of her interviewees told her: I worked as a barber in my home village. Theoretically, I could continue doing that here. It earns more and it is skilled work. But all my friends warn me not to get into salons. There are lots of terrible rumors about single women working in salons. In the future when we return home, no one would want to marry us. For married women, it would be different. 65 The association of prostitution with such public places as ‘beauty salons’ and ‘restaurants’ in the region of my case study may originate in the discourse and practices of prostitution in Shanghai, known as ‘the sin city’ in the early 1920s. The warning provided by one writer of the time clarifies the deeper historical associations with beauty salons and restaurants: [Traffickers’] favorite recruiting grounds are the theaters, tea houses, amusement parks, and other public places . . . Many of the hotel

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boys, the theater ushers, the waiters in the restaurants, the flower girls, newspaper sellers, Mafoos (carriage men), maid servants, and even rickshaw coolies are aiding and abetting in this traffic. The most dangerous of all perhaps are the women hair dressers and the sellers of jewelry, because they have easy access to the household and can exercise their influence freely.66 One important reason why factory jobs are considered ‘decent jobs’ by parents and migrant workers themselves is because factory managers offer some protection to migrant workers. In other words, managers assume quasi-parental roles for workers. According to Sicheng government regulations in 1993, employers have to provide dormitories to workers. Parents of migrant workers are thus reassured that their daughters are in ‘good hands’. Such regulatory and administrative mechanisms were not difficult to implement, since in the absence of general housing markets, they already existed in many factories. Employers in China, especially in state-owned and large-scale collective enterprises, take on functions often executed elsewhere by the state or the market, such as the provision of social welfare. (In better workplaces in China, this routinely includes housing, medicare, pensions and subsidized food.) By providing welfare needs to their employees, the state exercises social control through what Foucault called ‘bio-power’. Whether this, and the extension of parental control it implies, can be offered as a variation of the household strategy argument, cannot be decided by the evidence gathered for this study. Given the evidence, such a variation on the argument would have to build into household strategies standards of behaviour for family members, the violation of which could have concrete material implications for the family as a whole. For instance, a ‘fallen woman’ returning home might cause her family to lose face, and compromise her own marriageability. Already this would involve a significant compromise of the highly economistic and monetized analysis of existing household strategy literature. But the firm’s assumption of housing responsibilities on behalf of parents is also consistent with simple familial concern, which would be common to parents in China and the West for similarly aged young women attending university. What differs in this case is the absence of a religious factor in disciplining factory women, and the presence of strong localist prejudices in its stead. In Malaysia, ‘religious authority became one of the more critical agencies in disciplining the social conduct of working Malays, subjecting women to greater sanctions than men’.67 The new identity of

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being factory workers is seen as a religious problem of ‘immorality’. However, the identity of being outsiders is sufficient grounds, in the eyes of local Sicheng government and society, for treating migrant workers as ‘morally inadequate’. The following words, by a Malay factory worker and migrant worker in Sicheng respectively, support my point: I feel society views us with contempt because we are factory workers. Factory women sometimes associate in an unrestrained (bebas) manner, as when men and women talk among themselves, hmm, outside (the home) and released from the custody of the parents (kongkongan ibubapa) . . . Society only knows how to criticize (caci) but does not know the significance of our work in the factory . . .68 I can feel the prejudice of local people against us outsiders. Local people look down upon us. They treat us as outsiders. 69 In Malaysia and China, similar mechanisms of surveillance regulate the sexual conduct of factory women. In the Chinese case such mechanisms are particularly well-developed, mandated by state and executed by the firms. In both Yonghong and Huaqiang, dormitories and recreation are provided to migrant workers on site in order to prevent them from ‘making trouble’ outside the factory. According to Ong’s study, the vice-chancellor of Universiti Malaya argued that problems of urban living ‘could be alleviated by providing counseling, recreational, and educational facilities’. For both Malay factory women and migrant women workers in Sicheng, controlling their ‘leisure time’ means their sexual conduct should be supervised. The interesting aspect of this comparison is not to suggest that there is any inherent similarity between the forces leading to religious and locational stigmatization. The point is more that either stigmatized population can wind up working in broadly similar industries. An industry committed to a flexible accumulation strategy which competes by driving down input costs, will find conveniently priced labour among stigmatized populations. In these cases, both stigmatized groups are primarily women, examples of how the present period of global restructuring not only has specific gender implications, but also operates through highly specific local discursive practices. If a negative image of migrant workers in Sicheng is present in the public discourse, it is not because they are women who are workers. At the same time, there has been a change during the reform period in the specific social identity of women workers from the unabashed heroization of the maoist period. Hence on the one hand, even though China’s

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gender policy was state-led and women were still doing the household work while working as wage-earners, many women did feel liberated under Mao. For example, when I asked one of the retired female workers from Yonghong whether she felt liberated by working in the factory, she said without hesitation: Of course. Women have rights and power. Jiefangqian [before 1949], women did not have rights or power. Once women are economically independent, we have space to manoeuvre at home. Before women had economic independence, we had to listen to men’s orders. Now we women have money, men cannot mistreat us.70 This sense of liberation was shared by older women workers in Rofel’s study of workers in Hangzhou silk factories. Rofel asked a very important question about this pattern: how can we make sense of their sense of liberation when their experience of feminism was closely intertwined with the limitations of maoist gender policy? As with any other discourse, to insist on distinguishing ‘the way Maoist feminism “spoke” through these women from the way they spoke about themselves’ would be impossible.71 Before the Revolution, women working outside the home had come to be considered shameful – a sign of family destitution. Then with Liberation women working outside the home took on a significantly different meaning. The social and cultural construction of the meaning of work has shifted from that of ‘shame’ to ‘honour’ for women. Much of that ‘honour’ had to do with the honour attached to the particular work they were doing. These stories told by my interviewee and by Rofel’s were told in the early 1990s and the early 1980s respectively, when economic reform had created new ruptures in the class consciousness of society: between the two studies, workers’ status has greatly declined. The majority of production workers in Sicheng are now from Subei precisely because urban people of Sicheng associate a more traditional disdain for manual work with their own ‘Liberation’ of reform, and have been given the opportunities to avoid it. Because the retired women worker’s identity (quoted above) is closely associated with her years of work in factories, to deny her experience and social identity as a worker is to deny her basic identity. Earlier passages of the present study noted how the abrupt changes of Liberation have led to sharply defined transformations in discourse, distinctions which in fact appear somewhat more blurred when one examines the historical record. It became clear that a new temporal

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dichotomy is once again used in the reform discourse. By negating Mao policies, especially those of the Cultural Revolution, the legitimacy of Deng policies are established. For retired workers interviewed in the present study, to criticize and even look down upon new factory workers is also to draw a social status distinction between urban people and Subei people, currently the majority of production workers. Situating their stories in the present, we can read these stories as ‘a set of memories, a reconstruction of the past framed, as memories always are, in relation to the present’.72 The local control of management, reinforced by the reformed hukou system, as well as the historically rooted local discrimination against Subei people, explain the different cultural meanings and social identities of women workers in Sicheng. Religious aspersions do not, and class ones do only indirectly. In the local discourse, Subei people are considered ‘uncivilized’, ‘inferior’ and ‘poor’. In Malaysia, the bad association with women and work can be primarily explained by religious restraints. It is the religious groups in Malaysia which associate women with the private sphere, and which therefore argue that women working in the public sphere constitute a moral issue. Because religious establishments have autonomy from the state, their concern with women and work are significantly different from the state’s. The state’s main concern is accumulation, but its official religious ties to Islam deter a direct confrontation.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have called into question the contemporary commonsensical association between women and silk production through a historical investigation of the sexual division of labour and its meanings at different times. The historical changes in the meanings of silk production sheds some light on Sicheng managers’ recent recruitment of unmarried migrant workers as components of a flexible accumulation strategy. I have also argued that the concept of household strategies is not adequate in explaining the motivations my interviewees had for migrating: the approach implied by that concept does not analyse the internal dynamics of the household or consider sufficiently household functions other than economic ones. Further, China’s socialism disrupted the kinship system, replacing it in some of the mediating factors which determine the extent to which unmarried women migrant workers can act in freedom. A nuanced comparison between Malay factory women and those in my study argues further that gender and family

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relations in China have been mediated by the state. The best example of this mediating function of the state is the intervention in the sphere of procreation. This apparently most intimate matter is no longer a strictly family matter, but rather an important state affair. I will now continue to investigate how the strategic situation of unmarried women migrant workers in Sicheng is mediated by the intersection of gender, class and place of origin, by looking at their factory work and dormitory life in Sicheng.

5 A Close Watch in a Tight Space: Multiple Foci of Labour Control

We use the simple traditional management techniques: punishing and rewarding workers according to the quantity and quality of their work. State-owned enterprises are more democratic than township enterprises in that managers in SOEs are supervised by the Party, trade union and workers through workers’ congresses [ gongren daibiao dahui]. We use simple management techniques, but we have high profits. We are more efficient than SOEs.1 Deputy general-manager of Huaqiang It is more difficult to manage male workers than female workers, because male workers have more ideas. A silk weaving factory like this one has more female workers, so it is easier for managers to manage workers. While the textile machinery factory in the town has more male workers, they are more difficult to manage. Male workers in that factory recently had a wide-scale strike in the factory. The whole factory is on the verge of bankruptcy. Male workers are more aggressive and know more things than female workers. Female weavers have hard targets to meet, both quantity and quality. Male workers do supportive jobs in the workshops or factory, so they are more flexible on the shopfloor and therefore need their own conscience to work hard. When I was just appointed shift leader, I was excited and wanted to do the job well, so I kept a receipt book [for fining workers] at hand all the time. Whenever I found workers who had broken factory rules and regulations, I would fine them. But I found out later that it worked in just the opposite way. Why is this the case? I realized that too much control would 154

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actually lead to workers’ resistance. As the Chinese saying goes: a thread breaks if it is stretched too tight. Punishment through fines has to be combined with sixianggongzuo in order to discipline workers. After so many years at this job, I have realized that it is important to speak to workers in a calm way, that we must not use rude or dirty words to workers, because one cannot curse workers if one is educating them. We cannot curse workers especially because most workers are migrant workers; if we curse them, they will leave. 2 Female shift leader in Yonghong Last year [1995], some male workers in Huaqiang went on strike. Fifty or so factory guards went to beat them. 3 A male migrant worker in Huaqiang We workers are the majority on the shopfloor. We are more than one hundred on one shift, while there is only one shift leader. Furthermore, machines block us from the shift leader’s sight. We can always see her moving around the shopfloor, while she cannot see all of us at the same time. Workers always help each other out, so there are always ways to find time to rest, chat with co-workers. Because we know the shift leader usually goes to her own room 40 minutes before the end of a shift, we also start to stop working. We just let the machines spin, twist or combine threads. Otherwise, how do you think we two could sit here having our dinner for almost one hour?4 A female prep worker

According to the twin pillars of China’s economic reform, enterprises have to rely both on science and technology, as well as the improved quality of labourers, to be competitive in the market economy. A disciplined productive body (one of the four ‘haves’ in the ‘New Person’ discussed above) is associated with high quality in labourers. In this association, the potentially antagonistic interests between the labourers and managers are translated as shared interests in the process of both material and spiritual civilization. This chapter compares and contrasts managers’ labour-control mechanisms in Huaqiang and Yonghong. On one level, it is a commonplace that TVEs outpace SOEs in the category of ‘material civilization’, or economic growth. This truism is widely accepted as true for the firms studied here. On another level, considered

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here, spiritual civilization is found to be an active issue in Yonghong but hardly at all in Huaqiang. In Gramsci’s sense, the former’s labour control has a more ‘hegemonic’ quality than the latter, even though both factories are adopting a flexible accumulation strategy. The above quotations reveal that a significant space of negotiation and resistance to managers’ control exist on the shopfloor in Yonghong. By contrast, although a strike of male workers was also reported elsewhere in the town, ‘simple traditional management techniques’ in Huaqiang appear to be associated with ‘simple traditional labour techniques’ such as strike activity, at least for the men. Yonghong, by contrast, appears to have experienced less of either traditional class behaviour. Thus far, the association among firm ownership, managerial style and labour response is fairly straightforward, except that it depends on a key qualifier for a highly feminized workplace: ‘at least for the men’. In accounting for this variation by gender, however, it is important to analyse the specific conditions under which such a distinction holds, for global labour history shows that women workers can and do strike. Why do some women in some contexts show a marked difference in their response from their male coworkers? Moving beyond Burawoy’s theorization of production politics, which considers labour process mainly a process of class formation, I join many feminists such as Ong5 in arguing that the labour process is both a class formation process and a gendering process. Because gender is culturally constructed, a production-centred political economy approach becomes partial and problematic when we study the transformation of women workers’ identities. One way of approaching the issue of gender identity, which is culturally constructed, yet at the same time grounded in the material, is to adopt an interactive approach to political economy and culture. The ‘political economy and culture’ approach enables us to investigate cultural struggles (for example, struggles over the meanings of femininity and masculinity) which are located outside production, with their own historical continuities and ruptures. Feminists found the cultural– historical frame congenial, because ‘it allowed the inclusion of differing and sometimes contesting women’s perceptions of events and institutions’.6 Gender is understood simultaneously as a material fact, as a social institution and as a set of cultural meanings. The ‘political economy and culture’ approach also examines the intersection of class, culture and gender, in the ways women perceive and respond to their constructed identities. For example, through a ‘bottom-up’ study from the perspective of Sicheng’s women migrant workers, we can understand how they accommodate, negotiate and resist labour control.

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The structuralist marxist tradition could not accommodate the contestation over meaning so evident in the history – particularly labour history – of Western capitalist states and their colonies. As E. P. Thompson and others argue, althusserian structuralism allowed for neither the vagaries of historical change nor the role of human agency in effecting that. While Burawoy’s theorization of the politics of production is useful, his class-based analysis is also problematic. First, while he and Thompson greatly enrich the analysis of the cultual emergence of class, they do so by juxtaposing this emergence with the received marxist analysis of primordial class origins. It is, after all, always a class in the specifically marxist sense that emerges from the wider cultural process or on the shop floor proper, rather than a gender or an ethnicity. (That is not of course to assert that both are closet althusserians, with relatively autonomous cultural and material spheres.) I find Hall’s different definition of ‘culture’ more useful in breaking down the idealism–materialism duality as well as the opposition between practice and abstraction. Cultural meanings do not just exist ‘in the head’, but neither are we dumb puppets living out a material structure. It is the participants in a culture which give meaning to people, objects and events.7 The Hall conceptualization of culture emphasizes meaning. How does meaning arise for Hall? It arises holistically throughout the social structure ‘in the construction of identity and the making of difference, in production and consumption, as well as in the regulation of social conduct’.8 Such an understanding of culture sees cultural production not only in language and discourse but also in everyday lived experiences. Like Rofel’s, my own study points to the different perceptions and responses to work held by different generations of workers. The older generation of workers realized their identities in work. They talked about their eagerness to learn skills and their happiness working in state-owned factories. Their stories were told in 1996, when workers’ status had declined tremendously and enthusiasm for class struggle had been deeply compromised and officially set aside. It is possible that their perception is partly a nostalgic reinvention, though the Rofel experience of ‘informants’ memories forces us to greet even such caution with caution! Young workers by contrast see work in silk to be the best choice they have for now. Through migrant workers’ own stories, I also find that women are neither completely exploited nor totally liberated through work. This finding leads me to the following theoretical discussion about a dialectical relationship between structure and agency.

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Feminists have been concerned with the relationship between structure and agency. Some like Ong are attracted to the foucauldian notion of power because it helps to break a sharp opposition. To recap the summary of the foucauldian notion of power, power produces discourse, in other words, a group of statements which provide a language for talking about and acting out a particular topic at a particular historical moment. Such a group of statements thus structure what can be said and done. However, as Foucault insists, power is never complete. Therefore there is always room, indeed a necessary space, for resistance. Treating women workers as subjects has several implications for researchers’ relations with the subject/object of their research. When some Western feminists write about ‘third world women’, Western values and cultures are typically valued as modern and progressive, while non-Western values and cultures are devalued as traditional and backward. The key to such treatment of Third World women is the issue of representation. When we as researchers speak for and of others, we cannot avoid a certain objectification. But then, how can the gap be closed between representation and letting the subaltern’s voice be heard directly? To understand agency and structure dialectically, individuals are seen neither as simply ‘free’, nor as passive victims of structures. Rather, individuals’ agency is conditioned by outside forces. But as Wolf points out, agency is not synonymous with activity; agency can involve passivity, accommodation and withdrawal as much as defiance and resistance. 9 The foucauldian concept of power is helpful in breaking down the dichotomy between accommodation and resistance. This is critical because in situations where the signs of resistance are not overt, the workers involved are often assumed to be passive and hence in need of representation by others. According to Foucault, power is not possessed by dominant classes only, flowing from the top down: rather power is dispersed and never complete. Power does not merely flow, as it were, from the barrel of a gun or from any other single source. It is also located in the discursive production of such complex social phenomena as the complex production of rituals, objects and ‘truth’. Power, and like it, resistance, take multiple forms and have multiple foci. ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ is an important question famously raised internationally in this regard by Gayatri Spivak. 10 China’s traditions of state-sponsored ‘subaltern speech,’ such as ‘speaking bitterness’ campaigns, has made the aim of ‘writing the subaltern back into history’ problematic. The purpose of ‘speaking bitterness’ was to provide ‘the subaltern’ a form and language to speak as ‘the subaltern’. However, ‘the subaltern’ spoke ultimately to legitimize Communist policies as well, because the

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content of ‘speaking bitterness’ was intended to compare the brightness of the ‘new society’ with the darkness of earlier sufferings. As Hershatter points out, this legacy of official subaltern-speak should not foreclose the debate. 11 My concern here is this: as feminist scholars working in the first world, are we able and willing to hear the voices of women in China, notwithstanding the necessary implication of official discourse in their discourse? This challenges us to understand women in China on their own terms and as interpreters to communicate carefully the specific cultural milieu to a wider audience. Here, I will consider the theoretical objections to seeing workers as the puppets of discourses constructed by others. In critiquing Althusser, James Scott takes particular exception to this false opposition by reference to an economic ‘determination in the last instance’. 12 Beyond denying obvious untruths (for example, that workers do all identify themselves in the same social position vis-à-vis bureaucratic class in China),13 Scott denies that workers ought to identify themselves in some common way, which in the last instance is supposedly more true to reality than all other identities. Scott also raises important questions about interpreting various forms of action as expressions of consciousness. For instance, should we interpret the absence of workers’ strikes as a lack of resistance or as a choice of other strategies? We must therefore be cautious in our interpretations: 1) we cannot assume that migrant women either do self-identify as workers, or that they are in error if they do not; 2) we cannot confuse submissiveness with victimization; 3) we cannot assume that failure to complete a work task is resistance: the task itself may be impossible. Through numerous case studies, we can begin to draw together commonalities in workers’ experiences in capitalist production. Mohanty’s latest work comparing capitalist strategies in different locales is extremely important in putting together how international capital exploits racial, gender and class hierarchies to advance its profits.14 Although China’s relation to international capital is more clearly mediated than that of most countries, I consider my work a contribution to the detailed historical and cultural understanding of women workers and to the comparative study of women and work. In this chapter, I therefore analyse the multiple foci of labour control on the shopfloor and also the workers’ resistance to managerial control. The comparison of Yonghong’s consent-oriented and Huaqiang’s coercion-based labour control systems seems to raise questions about Burawoy’s assertion that despotic labour control exists in the world-system periphery while hegemonic control exists in the core countries. I argue

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that the ‘hegemonic’ labour regime exists in Yonghong because of the role of the Party, which continues its ideological leadership. The human-centred management style has its historical socialist forerunners in sixianggongzuo (thought work). According to Mao, only correct thought can lead to correct work. Sixianggongzuo, which is now considered an important part of spiritual civilization in the factory, is to make workers more disciplined and more productive in a non-coercive way. 15 The chapter is divided into five sections. The first four sections are aimed at investigating the multiple foci of labour control mechanisms in order to prove my argument that labour control, more likely in SOEs than TVEs, operates through webs of power in workplaces and the political domain. In the first four sections on the multiple foci of labour control, I will first focus on the reproduction of gender and place-of-origin hierarchies on the shopfloor. This is to show that labour process is not just about class production, but also a process of producing and reproducing other hierarchies. The second section will discuss individualization through piece rate as a labour control mechanism. The third section analyses the control of space as labour disciplining. The fourth section analyses the continued ideological role of the Party in Yonghong. Yonghong managers face a seemingly difficult task, to attempt to make workers productive and disciplined with less coercion than that practised in Huaqiang. The fourth section is on workers’ resistance.

Job hierarchies based on gender and place of origin Since managers were granted power to hire workers, managers have sspecifically sought female unmarried young women to do weaving and preparatory work. Managers prefer women workers to male workers because they want to have a ‘passive’ labour force. In both Yonghong and Huaqiang, weavers and prep workers are the main categories of workers on the shopfloor and a majority of them are women. Because Huaqiang also has two dyeing workshops, male migrant workers are found working as dyers, and female migrant workers work in the dyeing workshops to measure fabrics. In Huaqiang, migrant workers are at the bottom of the job hierarchy. Before economic reform was implemented, female workers typically occupied the lower end of the income scale principally because they were more junior than the majority of male workers. Managers were motivated to hire more and more female labour because women are considered cheap labour, and also because women are said to be more timid and less militant than male workers and therefore easier to manage.

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The women interviewed are not machinists or maintenance workers: climbing up and down from the machines seems to them to be ‘ungraceful’. The categorization of what constitutes skilled (machine-repair) and non-skilled jobs (weaving and prep work) is not self-evident, but rather is socially constructed. For example, domestic skills and the resultant dexterity girls learned at home are ‘socially invisible and privatized, and hence do not count as skills for rewarding jobs in a patriarchal dominated public world’. 16 In this case, these home-learned skills originally oriented to household reproduction seem to correspond closely to the needs constant-flow work processes such as weaving. In Sicheng, women migrant workers are further devalued by their lack of ‘nimble fingers’, which is traditionally an especially prized natural tribute of Jiangnan women, and indeed of Chinese women in general. It is widely accepted by female weavers, prep workers and managers as well as other male workers that weaving and prep work in fact require patience and nimble fingers. They also agree that these are exclusively women’s attributes. Men are supposedly less capable of being tied to machines, and they are less patient with restrictions imposed on them. But in fact the societal perceptions about weaving and prep work in factories have changed from seeing the work as male and skilled to seeing it as female and unskilled. Men are looked down upon or laughed at if they take weaving or prep work. The culturally produced meanings of men’s and women’s jobs are reproduced on the shopfloor. Male workers do not want to be weavers or prep workers because of this perception. Managers do not believe men would do a good job at weaving. The two sides feed each other and reproduce the sexual division of labour. In fact, some urban young men became weavers or prep workers in the early 1980s when employment in state-owned enterprises was valued. However, most of them did not want to these positions. Some male weavers in Yonghong were reassigned because they were not performing well and failed to meet the production quota. This of course surprised no one, because this is not a young man’s work! Managers concluded that once these young men were transferred to men’s jobs – guard work, transport of raw materials and finishing factory products, it was assumed that they would do much better.17 Therefore, these ‘handicaps’ (socially constructed gender assumptions) ‘confine’ men to better paying, and often less exhausting work. An odd discursive reversal is working here: on the one hand, men were rewarded with more freedom, better jobs and superior pay because of their ‘nature’ as ‘incompetent’ weavers. Women migrant workers, however, are not rewarded with such jobs because of their ‘lack of nimble

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fingers’ or ‘clumsiness’. The issue here is not so much that migrant women are not in fact dexterous. It is rather that presumably innate gifts are being rewarded in sharply distinct fashion because of the intersection of gender and place-of-origin. ‘Clumsiness’ is a code, concealing poor communication between migrant and local workers as well as local prejudice. The noise in the workshops makes it even more difficult for local trainers and migrant trainees who are not predisposed to respect one another to communicate work skills successfully. Even some shift leaders agreed, however, that the combination of the dialects and noise represents a problem. Hierarchies on the shopfloor are based on gender and place of origin. The gender hierarchy is most prominent in weaving departments: men who maintain and repair machines assume shift leadership over ‘unskilled’ women workers. In contrast, all shift leaders in the prep department are women. Interviewees explained this with direct reference to the fact that prep machines do not need daily maintenance and repair: it was unthinkable that women could have the latter role. In Huaqiang, peasants from nearby villages enjoy better work conditions, while both female and male migrant workers have much worse conditions and pay than their local counterparts. But in Yonghong, rural people (local peasant and migrant workers) are overwhelmingly the production workers, while urban people are predominant among non-production workers. Rural people, in short, do the ‘bitter’ (ku) and dirty jobs, while urban people do the ‘light’ jobs, from auxiliary to managerial work. (‘Bitter work’ in a weaving factory means doing shifts, working in noisy workshops and having little freedom of movement on the shopfloor.) Good welfare and wages until the mid- to late-1980s compensated for the hardship of weaving and prep work. Production workers are now paid by piece-rate, while non-production workers are in job classifications that receive specific base wages, adjusted according to their years of work and their workshop’s average bonus. Shift leaders in both weaving and prep workshops do not work on the machines. Their main responsibility is to supervise and hand out rewards, but more often punishment, to workers. They move around the shopfloor freely and can retreat to their own offices whenever they wish. Shift leaders are in turn supervised by deputy workshop leaders, who are in charge of the shopfloor during the day shift, and who make sure that shift leaders walk around the shopfloor frequently to catch whoever is not following the rules and regulations. Bonuses are a crucial component of labour control. Because shift leaders’ monthly bonus is based in part on average output value of

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the workshop, they have an incentive to do the job promptly. But the implications of bonuses are complex and do not end here. The mostly male machine repair and maintenance workers have bonuses decided in part by the women weavers’ evaluations. The first implication flows from the fact that if there is any quarrel between male mechanics and female weavers, managers have nothing to do with it. Managers in both Yonghong and Huaqiang thus confine pay conflicts among workers, which takes attention away from the fact that managers control the overall pay package from which piece rates and ultimately the bonus system are allocated. The hierarchies on the shopfloor have their temporal expressions. The factory schedule structures the rhythm of migrant and peasant workers’ lives. Their daily time is broken down into eight-hour segments of ‘work time’ and ‘leisure time’. Of course, shift work disrupts their patterns of rest time, and hence their daily and weekly time cycle and ultimately their psychological and physical health. In addition to this regular schedule, they have to do overtime work as needed. However, ‘factory time’ does not take into consideration that ‘leisure’ for local peasant workers means helping with the harvest season. For managers, once peasants start in factories, they have to follow ‘factory time’, rather than ‘agriculture time’. Migrant workers are not able to go home to help harvesting because they live too far away – presumably a strong reason for young women to see factory work as liberation, and for their families to resist their departure. In any case, during harvest time, many local peasant workers have to make a 40-minute bicycle trip to help harvesting after a eight-hour shift in the factory. Factory time is in part a process to which one can subjectively adjust. Workers told me that time went by terribly slowly when they first came, but now goes by much faster. When I asked workers whether they find it difficult to adjust to the factory time schedule, most of them do not see this as being oppressive (except that they do not like to work the night shift). Some peasant workers who are older and who tilled the land before they came to work in the factory have found it harder to adjust. But the primary reason for the general level of acceptance does not lie with the compatibility with ‘agricultural time’ so much as with academic time. The majority of peasant and migrant workers were recruited shortly after they left school. Schooling instilled time discipline and regimentation, and there is no homework for weaving or prep work! Not all workers have the same factory time to adjust to. Most of the urban women workers in Yonghong do not do shift work. Most of their

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weekly schedules involve an eight-hour day shift, running from 8 to 12 in the morning and 1 to 5 in the afternoon, with a one-hour lunch break. They have a one-and-a-half-day weekend, a benefit they share with factory office workers, government employees and other nonmanual workers. Once migrant workers enter the factories as manual labourers, machines set the pace for them. Variations in the machine accordingly imply variations in pace. Consequently, male workers in Yonghong’s sizing and soaking workshops necessarily have more rest time than the migrant women workers. These ‘unskilled jobs’ involve lifting tons of raw silk wrapped around a metal roll, putting them in either sizing or soaking machines to process, and later taking them out after the silk has been processed. While the raw materials are being processed, the sizing and soaking workers do not have to work. I saw male workers sleeping on the floor in a very obvious place in the workshop. As earlier paragraphs in this section have shown, women weavers and prep workers are controlled by quite different machine pacing. These workers are not without their own personal strategies to get through the day. For instance, the prep workers learn to let machines do more work for them. Factory hierarchies based on gender, class and place of origin work to generate and reinforce labour control. Because weaving and spinning are ‘naturalized’ as women’s work, this gender division of labour is seldom challenged. Because peasants are thought to see working in the factory as upward social mobility, it also seems natural that they be assigned to do the ‘bitter’ jobs. Because managers are seen by both managers and workers as authority figures, authority on the shopfloor is not overtly challenged. Workers expect ‘fairness’ or ‘charity’ at most from managers, but do not expect major changes as a matter of justice. These hierarchies based on gender, class and place of origin are a daily experience; consequently, these hierarchies become a given of social existence, a habitual way of being. During my interviews with migrant workers, they always told me ‘there is nothing we can do about such things’ (Zhe shi meiyou banfa de), by which they meant both factory and societal constraints. By the mere fact that they stay, they are agreeing in some minimal way to what that life entails. But reading this as passive acceptance is perhaps unfounded. Importantly, agreement or not, comprehension or not, the life and status of a worker shapes these people. This kind of participation in routine practice is what Pierre Bourdieu means by ‘habitus’.18

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Labour discipline in time: piece-rate The piece-rate system is once again hailed by the post-Mao state as a way to tap labour potential. It has become a means to overcome the lack of work effort that supposedly exists in socialist economies. Because the total wage package in both Yonghong and Huaqiang is a fixed one, workers face a ‘prisoner’s dilemma’: it is in the interest of workers to cooperate to drive down the average productivity. However, workers do not know that the total wage package is fixed, and because the piece-rate system makes workers work in an isolated environment, workers are led to believe that the more they work individually, the more they get paid. Since most of them do this, production is driven up with minimal variations in total pay over time. If they did know the full operation of the system, of course, there is still no channel for workers to challenge the rate-setter formally, except by seeking work elsewhere. Trade unions in China do not negotiate or bargain pay packages with the managers. Therefore, workers see speeding up or working longer hours as the only alternatives to increase their wages. The consequences are typically exhaustion, but not politicization. Youthful energy and enthusiasm shore up their stamina, and the general direction of economic reform commands respect in that it inspires a dogged retention of personal hope. For instance, one male worker had to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week: I’m always very tired. There is no life for me. I go to work 6 o’clock in the morning and back from work 6 o’clock in the evening. Everyday, it is the same. Workers have to work hard to improve their lives. There is simply no other way. I’m still young, so I can afford to work longer hours. Hopefully, I will make enough money to buy an apartment. 19 There are variations between the TVE and the SOE in terms of the implementation of the piece-rate principle. Instead of the traditional fixed monthly pay, workers in state-owned and collective enterprises are now paid according to a base wage, plus a component based on piece-rate. The base wage, or minimum wage, in Yonghong is 210 yuan. However, the minimum is not a living wage, and ensures only the worker’s basic survival. In Huaqiang, as in many township enterprises, there is no minimum wage. For example, a weaver gets paid on a rate of one yuan per metre. Managers conceal from their workers how much

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workers will earn annually. The deputy general-manager told me that annual wages are capped at an average of 10 000 yuan; most fall for short of this. Instead of being paid every month in full, workers sometimes get paid several months later and then only enough money to buy food. Several male migrant workers said they had not been paid for several months. At the end of each year, management redistributes excess money beyond the cap among the other workers according to their attendance, their production quantity and their production quality. As in Yonghong, the annual bonus is in part determined by workers themselves. Variations in the application of the piece-rate system also exist within the factory. Prep workers’ wages are not completely piece-rate. Because some spindles may not be full at the end of each shift and the worker from the next shift needs to start from where the previous worker ends, their wage is a combination of piece-rate and hourly wage. As the earlier sections of this chapter have already shown, the bonuses in addition to the piece-rate minimum are structured quite differently depending on the degree to which workers are held responsible for productivity gains. In their study of three textile factories in Henan Province, Zhao and Nichols found that: [t]he nature of the [piece-rate] system evidently strengthens management control over labor. Through monopolizing and manipulating both the evaluation of the workers’ performance and the distribution of rewards or punishments, management gains increased control. This is part of a more general shift toward greater atomization of the workforce and greater uncertainty.20 The uncertainty regarding pay is one mechanism ensuring that workers will actively participate in their own exploitation. Workers are told that the piece-rate system is to get rid of the daguofan (eating from one big pot), the socialist ethic of equality. The latter, it was said, did not give workers incentives to work harder since everybody was paid the same, no matter how hard they worked. In fact, the piece-rate system had been practised haphazardly before Liberation, after Liberation and even during the Cultural Revolution. In a brief history of the Sicheng silkweaving factory, it is noted that the piece-rate system had been abolished under Mao because the system created jealousy and internal conflict, hardly well suited to the cooperative socialist spirit. The authors of the time claimed that productivity had risen since the piecerate system was abolished.21 B. Michael Frolic’s Mao’s People also

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recounts a debate in a Wuhan factory, over the socialist implications of the piece-rate system. Piece-rate and other material incentives were finally condemned as ‘bourgeois rights’.22 The key difference between piece-rate in the Mao period and the practice in the post-Mao period is not so much the policy as the direction of production politics. Under the piece-rate system, workers are now in principle rewarded for their hard work – the more efficient and more productive they are, the more money they receive. Therefore, workers work harder, thinking this is the only way to earn more money. And they think it is the pace of work that determines each individual’s pay. Burawoy provides a very useful analysis that helps us understand workers’ complicity in their own exploitation and piece-rate: Uncertainty is the great magician of piece-work . . . Once workers thought it was possible to survive under a piece-rate system, they took up the challenge to their ingenuity, will and endurance, and blamed themselves for failure. In this way they were sucked into participating in their own brutalization. 23 Under this system, workers are preoccupied with internal conflicts, jealousy and suspicions of fellow workers. Many migrant workers in Sicheng complain that workers who come from local rural villages tend to get good machines, leaving them with bad machines. As one migrant worker said, ‘How can I make money with bad machines?’ One shift leader said, ‘Workers always complain when they get less pay than other workers. They tend to say, “How come they get this much, while we get this much?” Why don’t they ask why they did not work harder! These peasants think they are eating from one big pot. With the piecerate system, one piece means one-piece pay.’24 Piece-rate is one way to improve labour productivity. In addition, managers have to cut down on the cost of raw materials to gain more profit. One way of cutting down this cost is thrift in production, a matter largely in the control of the line workers. For example, workers are told that they must take the time to untie tangles in silk thread rather than cut them out; joining knots are to be as short as possible. It is obvious that this creates a tension within the work process because the piece-rate system rewards workers for speed in producing final product alone. For workers, time is money, and both management and general state propaganda stress this aspect of the job. Therefore, it is in workers’ interests to simply cut raw silk rather than untangle it. For managers, however, raw silk is also money, and raw silk is very expensive. Here,

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labour control mechanisms such as piece-rate can have ambiguous implications for managers. Labour practices in the maoist period are seen by the post-Mao government as too oriented on sixianggongzuo and not enough on production and efficiency. Although workers were by no means masters of their factories, they enjoyed a high social status. (Women textile workers in the 1960s were highly sought-after mates by men; state-owned enterprises provided good benefits.) Workers had more freedom on the shopfloor and were subjected to less discipline. One retired worker told me that it was very hard to discipline workers before economic reform when she was a shift leader. For example, each weaver would be assigned four machines. If one’s weaving machine broke down, leaving the worker with three machines, the shift leader would attempt to have the worker use machines assigned to workers who were absent that day. However, that worker would not obey the shift leader, remaining at the less challenging workload, and would not be penalized for this refusal. The same informant said that workers are more easily disciplined today. If a machine breaks down, the worker will be desperate to get other machines so as to maintain her wages. 25 It seems possible to summarize how power relationship between managers and workers have changed and how much importance has since been attached to the director’s responsibility and hence managers’ contributions to productivity. But the results are paradoxical. Managers, rather than workers, are seen as responsible for and major contributors to productivity. Yet shift leaders are the only managers who supervise on the shopfloor. Other managers share in responsibility for production, yet are absent from the shopfloor. On one hand, workers are responsible for their own wages and productivity, yet directors are supposedly responsible for productivity. Since economic reform was implemented, managers are seen by government officials as the main contributors to enterprise productivity. Workers tend to be seen by both managers and government officials as the ‘problem’ rather than the solution; hence, the need for labour control. Factories consequently have detailed points systems that allow managers to penalize workers financially for violating specific rules. These factory rules and regulations are based on taylorist scientific management. Taylor envisioned management as a science, which, ‘on the one hand, involves the establishment of many rules, laws, and formulae which replace the judgment of the individual workman [sic] and which can be effectively used only after having been systematically recorded, indexed, etc.’26 While such rules are very much part of factory life in the

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present study, however, taylorism proper remains an aspiration rather than a realization.

The disciplinary power of space 27: the factory compound Foucault’s theorization of space and power laid out a theory of how modern power operates, through what he calls ‘panopticon’. A panopticon effects its control over bodies, in part through the efficient organization of space. This is not so much an architectural model which represents or embodies power, as it is a means for allowing the operation of power in space. It is the technique for the use of the architectural structure, more than the architecture, that allows for an efficient expansion of power.28 Foucault’s main contribution here is to point to the location of power, rather than its nature. Unlike the functioning of power manifested in a panopticon, the concrete structuring of power relations in the architecture and layout of Sicheng’s factories and cities continues to delineate distinctive boundaries and hierarchies. For instance, in the factories, head offices are divorced from the production compound. Generally speaking, shift leaders are the only managers on the shopfloor. Even workshop leaders are seldom seen there. The separation of the management facilities from the shopfloor appears to be intended to demonstrate power by constructing both physical and social boundaries. For example, the boundaries permit secrets to be kept from workers. To understand the unwillingness of managers to supervise workers from the workshop, we have to look not at Foucault, but at how power is couched in boundaries in Chinese society. Traditionally, there has always been a strong social division between manual and mental labour, and this was often expressed in space. But during the Cultural Revolution, managers were encouraged to go to the shopfloor in order to eliminate this division between manual and mental labour. Since economic reform and especially since the adoption of the directors’ responsibility system, profits are their first preoccupation. As a result, their main responsibilities are marketing and making business deals. Managers have more reasons to not be around the workshop or even head office. Shift leaders often are the only managers who have daily contact with workers. However, working from Western theory alone, we would have to ask how this division can be sustained over time under modern conditions. Managers under taylorism originally needed to go to the shopfloor to extract the knowledge of the work process from workers.

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However, in silk factories in Sicheng, most of the managers were born to the silk culture of production: their knowledge is home-based (for example, from their grandmother or mother). Most of the managers told me that almost every local Sicheng resident had some knowledge of the silk work process, and that it was almost in their blood. While this might appear to be localist rhetoric, most of the managers started their career as production workers, and therefore have indeed acquired a first-hand knowledge of the process. There is therefore no pressing need from the standpoint of reorganizing production for managers to go to the shopfloor to extract this knowledge. In the view of managers, migrant workers are ignorant and have no knowledge of silk production: they come to the job already deskilled, so to speak. The shopfloor/office distinction is not the only spatial location of power. The factory compound is guarded, making sure that workers do not leave the compound before each shift is over. Workers are only allowed to leave after the siren is sounded. Workers are not even allowed to be around the main gate before quitting time. I visited a preparatory workshop in Yonghong and arranged to interview some of the workers. It was about ten minutes before the shift ended, and every worker including the shift leader were ready to leave the compound. Four workers and I approached the gate, but were stopped by the guard because the siren had not sounded. We were asked to return to the workshop to wait. Spatial arrangements on the shopfloor have also been changed to tie each worker to a fixed job position in order to achieve efficiency, and to keep supervisors mobile to enforce it. As Rofel also observed in her study of one silk factory in Hangzhou, China, ‘[s]ilk factory managers sought to spatially root each worker in one work space through an appropriately named gangwei gonzhi zhi (position-wage system)’.29 Weavers and prep workers are the two main categories of production workers in silk factories. Weavers work on an average of four weaving machines simultaneously. They cannot move away from the machines during their shift. This is to ensure high-quality cloth with no flaws. Weavers are preoccupied with their own machines and work on the shopfloor, so there is not much ground for collective action on the shopfloor. Experienced weavers are able to pace their work, while newcomers feel the severe time pressure most. One peasant worker mentioned that when she first came to weave, she felt dumb and under stress from work. After one year of work, she felt better. Machine maintenance and repair workers have more freedom on the shopfloor. They are only needed when weavers report problems with

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their machines. They do not even have to walk around the shopfloor frequently: as earlier sections have pointed out, weavers will immediately report any machine problems to them, because their wages are based on piece rates, and a broken machine means a sharp wage cut. This means a sharp difference in apparent discipline on the shopfloor. When I visited a weaving workshop, I saw weavers busy, with none taking obvious time off, while machine-repair and maintenance workers either were nowhere to be found, or chatted somewhere outside the shopfloor. When machine repair and maintenance workers are working, they control their own pace of work. Elsewhere I also mentioned even less rigid discipline in sizing and sorting. Prep workers are not as tied to their machines as weavers, because spinning machines can mostly operate by themselves. As we have seen, this means a problem exists in implementing the piece-rate system. While spinning silk, prep workers simply have to make sure that the broken threads are quickly and neatly knotted. But even if one or two spindles stop because the thread broke, the remaining machines keep spinning. Therefore being away or inattentive to the machines do not affect their work to the same extent as it would affect weavers’ performances. The nature of prep work means that shift leaders in prep workshop have more difficulty disciplining workers for chatting with co-workers, or for sitting down away from their machines. The gender segregation of jobs has its spatial expression in the physical segregation of unmarried female and male migrant workers. Through it, any illicit chatting between unmarried men and women can be avoided. This spatial segregation is paralleled in the dormitories. Together, unmarried and married migrant workers’ sexuality is tightly controlled.

Thought work as disciplinary power The Party holds that China is using the market economy to build socialism; therefore the Party believes that some buzheng zhi feng (literally, ‘deviant winds’), the byproduct of the market economy, need to be redressed through spiritual civilization. In order to rectify ‘deviant winds’, various xin feng (literally, ‘new wind’) titles were conferred on households and individuals by the Party to set good examples for others and to demonstrate the efficacy of its policies. Xin feng is otherwise as vague in Chinese as it is in English, and can cover good family relations, public service (that is, in the sense of ‘serve the people’) and even street cleaning.

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Reflected in the factories, ‘money culture’ is seen by the Party as the ‘deviant winds’ of market economy. In the official 1983 programme on the thought work of SOE workers, Party officials wrote, [a]t the present moment, working class love of country, socialism and of the Communist Party must be demonstrated through the construction of two wenmin [civilization processes] . . . In building material civilization, workers must work hard, achieve higher quotas, reduce energy and raw material waste, improve product quality and increase productivity . . . In building spiritual civilization, workers must cultivate socialist and communist ideals, resist the attitude of ‘money is everything’, improve attitudes towards work . . . abide by the law, help maintain social order and promote the betterment of the social environment. [emphasis added] 30 The potential tension in building the two wenmin is most clearly revealed in the fact that most of Yonghong’s production workers are hired as temporary workers as flexible accumulation strategy. The purpose of the new category of spiritual civilization is to turn workers into ‘disciplined productive bodies’, to improve their quality as workers. The quality/wenmin discourse thus turns labour discipline into a question of individual improvement. The well-established category of thought work is now oriented towards the new purpose of building spiritual civilization in factories. Sixianggongzuo is the practice of what resembles Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Sixianggongzuo aims at convincing workers that their personal interests are the same as the factory’s and the whole country’s; that their personal worth is not connected to how much they make alone, but also to their contributions to the whole country. Sixianggongzuo also targets self-interest as a feudal idea, which must be eliminated if workers are to improve their quality. Unlike former sixianggongzuo campaigns, however, which called on workers to be totally selfless, the Party recognizes the legitimacy of pursuing selfinterest, provided it is controlled by spiritual civilization. Yonghong and Huaqiang have adopted different management styles to achieve higher productivity levels. The former emphasizes the importance of obtaining the workers’ consent, while the latter relies on a simple material ‘punishment and reward’ management style. The primary reason for the distinction seems to be that Yonghong is stateowned whereas Huaqiang is a township enterprise. Most of Yonghong’s managers have been working in the factory for ten to twenty years and have been workers themselves, while Huaqiang’s management style is

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more impersonal and involves greater outright coercion. The differences in management style are explained by looking at the historical legacies left by socialism. Indeed, managers in Yonghong are familiar with sixianggongzuo and many of them believe that it still has a central place in today’s management. The dynamics among the managerial stratum, the Party and trade union officials play an important role in determining managerial styles. In Yonghong, the Party and union officials are now focusing on workers’ thoughts about achieving profits and efficiency. In other words, sixianggongzuo remains the means, but profits are now the ends. The Party’s leading role in spiritual civilization means repositioning itself in the factories so as to continue to claim to represent workers’ interests, and hence to justify its presence in the workplace. As I have argued in the previous chapters, the Party by no means takes a back seat in economic reform. As for trade unions, besides advocating non-coercive managerial strategies centred on sixianggongzuo, they are taking up new welfare functions such as visiting sick workers, organizing social functions and issuing one-child certificates, etc. Trade unions are seen as an arm of the Party that assists managers in achieving profits. The central state provides some guidance for labour/management relations in SOEs, but not for TVEs. 31 SOEs are more likely to look to the central state for further guidance. In Huaqiang, sixianggongzuo does not play a central role. One example of the punishment part of this management style was one migrant worker who forgot to wear his badge as required entering the guarded dorm. The guards did not listen to his explanation, but simply beat him and broke his ribs.32 Besides this ‘simplistic’ management style, managers in Huaqiang have concentrated the top positions in the name of streamlining bureaucratic structure. For instance, the deputy general-manager just quoted is also the chief union official. It is obvious from this and other evidence that the union office in Huaqiang has a much more ephemeral separate existence than the one at Yonghong. For instance, one town union official told me that it is very difficult to collect union dues from TVEs because of this union of management and trade union functionaries in the factory. Like many general-managers in TVEs, Huaqiang’s generalmanager was also appointed by the township government, creating another very intimate relation with management. In the era of ‘economic efficiency’ and ‘profits’, these intimate linkages are clearly organized around very particular priorities. Enterprise performance is measured solely by profitability.

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This having been said, management for these very clear objectives, with such clear powers to achieve them, should not be seen as unproblematic. In the early 1980s, managers in state-owned and collective enterprises were given the power to punish workers in material terms. One deputy general-manager in Huaqiang told me that managers raise the piece rate at times when the morale of workers is low. 33 Also the managers in Huaqiang retain most of a worker’s first two or three months’ wages to prevent her/him from leaving the factory. Most of them thought material punishment would solve all their management problems. Rather, as the recent strike appears to show, material punishments have led to loss of goodwill on the part of workers. Shift leaders, workshop leaders and union leaders in Yonghong have written a series of articles on how to do sixianggongzuo in the period of economic reform. They examined how to make workers more productive without using coercion. The initial innovation was to link material incentives with sixianggongzuo. Workers must be told that everybody benefits from a more profitable and productive factory; that those production workers who are paid the most make the greatest contribution to the national economy; and that managers should emphasize satisfying those workers who want personal development such as seeking Party membership. Sixianggongzuo officially includes the need to respect, care and love [sic] workers as human beings and to understand workers’ desire for personal development. Workers are encouraged to remain in their respective jobs, so party and union officials try to convince them that hanghang chu zhuangyuan (every job is important, and one can achieve personal development at any job position). There is an economic rationale behind the latter strategy: fixing workers into their respective job positions, prevents them questioning or challenging job hierarchies. Model workers are used as examples that one can achieve personal development at any job position. In regard to respect for workers, it is thought that efforts should be made to help peasant workers learn a skill, rather than complain about them being ‘slow-witted’, because this prejudice against peasant workers will hurt workers’ ‘self-esteem’.34 Another function of sixianggongzuo on the shopfloor, especially in SOEs, is to demonstrate China is a socialist country. This should imply that China does not treat workers as machines, as in capitalist societies. By constructing workers as both objects of sixianggongzuo (that is, as people whose attitudes are to be reshaped along prescribed lines) and simultaneously masters of factories, sixianggongzuo is used as an exercise of hegemony on the shopfloor. Operating the factory by largely non-

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coercive and consensual means, shores up a larger relationship of domination and subordination. It is labour control under the guise of respecting workers’ material and spiritual well-being. Yet, the discourse in which the ‘working class is master of its own factory’ is couched in strongly paternalistic tones. The sense of ‘masters of their own factory’ is achieved through a familiar technique in the international literature, cultivating workers’ love of factory as their own family. One union/Party worker wrote: The Youth League must often provide migrant workers with information about factory history and factory regulations, and educate them to love the factory like one’s family; and keep in close contact with them.35 [emphasis added] That managers want workers to love the factory as a family, is entirely compatible with the paternalist role managers play. The paternalist role played by managers is also well reflected in the words of one shift leader: ‘I teach them [migrant workers] as if I were teaching a child. Gradually, they work hard, because I take care of them.’36 But this is not merely about acting benevolently in loco parentis: factory managers have to make sure that no unmarried women workers in the factory get pregnant, both to adhere to the contract the factory signed with the migrant-producing locality, and to maintain the cost advantages of paying for the subsistence of sexually inactive women (that is, unmarried women) under conditions of labour scarcity. Only certain aspects of growing into adult awareness are encouraged under factory care: one can lose one’s innocence to the factory, learning its ways, but one cannot lose one’s innocence to a man. In Yonghong, sixianggongzuo and a people-centred management style are advocated. However, workers or their elected representatives are certainly not invited to participate in enterprise decision-making. They are encouraged to provide helihua jianyi (constructive advice) to managers, so that workers have a sense of participation in running the factory. The 1986 State Council regulations states that the workers’ congress must convocate once every two years. However, Yonghong convened their workers’ congress last year for the first time in four years. It seems the decision of when to hold a congress meeting is really up to the managers, as seems evident by the kind of procedural control deemed sufficient to ensure worker ascendance: ‘the workers’ domination of the congresses is guaranteed by a maximum staff representation of 20 per cent’.37 Clearly, workers’ participation does not give

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workers more power, for the overarching hierarchy in the factory is not challenged. Burawoy’s argument about resistance is that ‘[t]he more independent the reproduction of labour power is from enterprise control, the greater is the ability to resist managerial offensives’.38 This cannot explain the different management styles in Yonghong and Huaqiang. Even though migrant workers, who are the majority of the labour force, do not rely on the factory or the state for reproduction of labour in either factory, Yonghong’s management is human-centred and Huaqiang’s more authoritarian. Consequently, I would argue that the presence or lack of sixianggongzuo is the main reason to explain the different labour control mechanisms. Having analysed distinct forms of labour control mechanisms, I will now turn to look at how workers in Yonghong are resisting labour discipline even as the latter constrains them. Resistance in Huaqiang has recently taken fairly straightforward forms. More subtle would appear to be resistance to factory discipline influenced by sixianggongzuo.

Workers’ resistance for daily survival Part of the state’s effort to modernize is to ensure renkou suzhi (population quality). This is to be achieved through jingshen wenmin jianshe (the spiritual civilization campaign) together with wuzhi wenmin jianshe (the material civilization campaign). One criteria for a modern enterprise is its ‘spiritual civilization’ level. But this should not be seen as a major addition to the increasingly emphatic stress on profits. As earlier sections have mentioned, ‘spiritual civilization’ is a very loose term. It can include hygiene, scientific management, polite speech and respect for the elderly. The ‘wenmin/quality’ discourse is mirrored in the managers’ efforts to discipline workers as part of wuzhi wenmin jianshe. At the same time, managers, especially shift leaders, are encouraged to improve their own suzhi. The discourse on wenmin is not simply imposed from above. These two factors in combination ensure that the ‘wenmin’ discourse is a relatively open-ended and multiple discourse. It has become what Raymond Williams calls ‘structure of feeling’, a kind of ‘practical consciousness’, from actively lived and felt relationships.39 As Susan Brownell rightly points out, ‘the official discourse on “civilization” is paralleled by an unofficial discourse on “culture”’. 40 In the dominant social discourse, people who have wenhua (culture: a loose term, implying education and literacy) look down upon people who meiyou wenhua (have no culture). People with culture are usually considered civil even if all job positions can potentially be occupied by

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civil people. Workers and peasants, for instance, are generally considered bengtou bengnao (ignorant, narrow-minded and stupid). In the general rural–urban social divide, peasants are also generally considered meiyou wenhua de by urban people. As Brownell points out that ‘these linguistic formulae such as “having culture” and “lacking culture” reflect the class structure’. 41 It is then not surprising that the discourse on ‘smart’ and ‘stupid’ has disciplinary power on the shopfloor. It is not, however, a disciplinary power that runs only in one direction, especially on a shopfloor whose workers are being told that personal development is possible in any position. Women migrant workers are to a large degree bengtou bengnao in the eyes of managers, often precisely because they meiyou wenhua (lack culture – they have a low level of education and literacy). For example, one shift leader told me: these migrant workers are so stubborn and stupid. They won’t want to be reassigned to work on other machines even if they are told that they will get more pay. You simply cannot reason with them because their education level is too low. But that workers refuse to change their machines is not simply a issue of whether they are ‘smart’: they do so to defend their perceived selfinterest. Workers are well aware that machines vary in quality, and develop personal familiarity with particular machines in ways which boost their productivity and reduce stress. To be reassigned to another machine is to compromise one’s own performance for days or weeks, hardly ‘smart’ under the piece-rate system. But besides this consideration, the way in which the supervisor expressed his frustration is interesting, given that he himself only has two years’ high school education. The worker’s ‘education level’ is a code having more to do with class status than the exact literal equivalent in North American English. Even though this particular shift leader himself had a low level of education, he has changed his class, and his new class status places him among the ‘smart’. Xiao sheds some light on another, rather clever resistance strategy by migrant workers, ‘Sometimes, some migrant workers could put some machine oil on the specks hoping to hide them. But of course, shift leaders have sharp eyes’.42 The discourse on wenhua (culture), however, is also taken up by workers against their managers. Workers can openly resist shift leaders with this discourse if the latter shout at workers, or use dirty or rude language. Workers will simply say these shift leaders do not have wenhua (culture)

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because they do not know how to talk to workers in a calm and civilized manner. On the other hand, because of such discourse managers also seem to regulate themselves because they do not want to be seen by their subordinates as cuyan, buwenmin (rude and uncivilized). To be rude and uncivilized is to be put in the same class as workers and peasants. Because shift leaders work directly with workers, they are urged by union and Party officials, and higher-level managers to improve their xiuyang (cultivation, associated with education and literacy). It is true there is no open collective confrontation and workers do not file grievances. As some migrant workers say, there is no use in this, because managers will not pay attention to them. Workers are hired as ‘passive’ labour. However, workers are by no means easily disciplined by managers. Numerous articles written by union and Party officials in Yonghong have illustrated the difficulties managers have trying to control labour even with the introduction of the piece-rate wage system. Resistance on the shopfloor is usually individual rather than collective and takes the form of either open defiance or passive resistance. To take another example, migrant workers in weaving workshops are not willing to work on more machines when supervisors want them to, even though they are told that the more machines one works, the more money one gets paid. The ‘inability’ of migrant workers to work on more machines actually makes them less exploited with the piece-rate wage system, because the total wage amount is a fixed one. However, this kind of open defiance is made possible partly because of the labour shortage in this sector in Sicheng. Factory management cannot adopt a stance of ‘take it or leave it’ – the choice of the worker would be too uncertain. As one shift leader told me, ‘if we discipline migrant workers too hard, they simply leave. We shift leaders then have to work on the machines if there is a labour shortage’. Managers need the workers to work, and workers know this very well. They use this to their advantage to negotiate a space for their daily survival. Both workshop leaders and shift leaders were bitter about the high turn-over in factories. They said it should be the norm that managers fire workers, but in their case, workers fire them by leaving the factory! There is a contradiction in the stigmatization of people with little to lose from quitting or little likelihood of being fired. This contradiction, however, coexists with the motives some workers have to maintain their freedom from traditional gender roles by staying in factory work outside the hometown. This last point will be taken up later in the discussion of migrant workers’ interpretation of women’s roles in society and in the family.

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Another important form of everyday resistance takes advantage of spatial arrangements on the shopfloor as the female worker told me in the canteen. Women migrant and peasant workers are subject to spatial discipline the most because they are predominantly weavers and prep workers. However, these same workers also take advantage of spatial arrangements on the shopfloor to avoid the shift leaders’ gaze. This kind of everyday resistance is especially effective in prep workshops. Unlike weaving workshops which only involve weaving, prep workshops involve many different kinds of job and machines. Two prep workers I interviewed and developed a rapport with in Yonghong’s factory canteen, gradually started to tell me how they use the twisting, combining and winding machines to avoid the shift leader’s supervision. As Rofel in her Hangzhou study also points out, ‘the dense and massive space’ of such machines43 prevents shift leaders from exercising what Foucault calls panopticon by depriving them of a central vantage point from which to gaze upon workers.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have looked at how economic reform has led to a greater emphasis on labour control on the shopfloor. I have compared the different labour control mechanisms in Yonghong and Huaqiang in order argue that sixianggongzuo may explain the human-centred management style in Yonghong, and lack of it in Huaqiang has led it to a more authoritarian management style. Throughout the chapter, I have shown that labour control is not only a class issue, it is also a gender issue, in that the worker–manager power relationship couches sexual difference as a site of labour control. This is reflected in the sexual division of labour on the shopfloor, the subjection of women’s bodies to the state disciplinary power, and the assignment of less freedom of movement to women workers than to men. These social controls, as I have argued, also take on temporal and spatial expressions. I detailed some of the everyday forms of resistance tactics workers use for their daily survival, including open defiance, mockery, chatting and counter-surveillance. Although we must not romanticize these forms of resistance, they do make the managers’ job more difficult. By careful consideration of the workers’ voice, the tensions between the ‘labels’ ascribed to migrant workers and the latter’s construction of their own identities are brought to light. I will now shift focus from labour control on the shopfloor to social control of unmarried women migrant workers outside the production sphere.

6 Identities of Women Migrant Workers: The Intersection of Gender, Class and Place of Origin

When I’m in the factory, I’m a worker. But when I’m home, I’m a peasant.1 A female peasant worker When I first came to work in the factory in 1982, peasants like me did not even dare to sit with urban people when we were dining. I myself always feel that I am a peasant, a xiangxiaren [country bumpkin] even though I am working in the factory, and they are urban people. Urban people naturally have higher status than us bumpkins. Now, I feel comfortable chatting with them. In the past, unless they asked me something, I would not initiate conversations. In the past, one could always hear urban people say ‘this bumpkin, that bumpkin’, showing contempt to us. Now bumpkins and urban people are no different. I think wailaimei are like us when we first started working here. Peasant workers do not live in the same building as migrant workers. They feel they are different from us, just like we felt we were different from urban people in the past.2 Jing, a female peasant worker

When new women migrant workers are drawn into the global capitalist economy, they experience a transition from their ‘old’ identities (as peasants, rural residents, housewives and immigrants) to ‘new’ identities (as workers). In this process, their identities as unwed young women are also constructed by state and societal discourses about their origins. The 180

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discourse on migrant workers is powerful in that it constructs migrant workers as inadequate, inferior to local residents, lazy and slow-witted. This discourse also legitimates the state’s disciplinary power as it is exercised over migrant workers. However, women migrant workers are also constructing their own identities, even when they are constructed as the ‘Other’. They not only resist on the shopfloor, but also challenge gender boundaries. Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge can help elucidate this point. According to Foucault, cultural concepts constitute power/knowledge systems producing the ‘truth’ by which we live our lives. In other words, cultural concepts do not merely reflect material relationships but constitute our very experience of reality. While the local social discourse on unmarried women migrant workers structure the latter’s experience of reality, unmarried women migrant workers are also constructing their own identities in migration. My study has shown that women workers in Yonghong do not assume homogeneous identities. I argue that their identities have to be understood in the intersection of gender, place of origin and class. The heterogeneous nature of women workers also challenges managers’ desires to frame them as ‘working class’. In an officially socialist context, workers’ interests, managers argue, should be the same as the interests of the factory itself. In societies where independent political organizing is possible, the politics of difference in the feminist movement came to act primarily as a reminder of the need for open-endedness in any political programme. 3 In China, where autonomous grassroots movements are forbidden, peasant workers and migrant workers can insist on their own heterogeneity, and by this act alone, provide resistance to managerial control over them in their profit-driven strategy. In this case, the insistence on difference is also an expression of the local people’s sense of superiority over migrant workers.

The construction of migrant workers as ‘Other’ In both the state and public discourses, ‘people on the move’ are seen as necessarily less moral. This is a fear shared by both the host local government and the society of people on the move. The logic is that people, once on the move, are no longer part of a local network, and the social and political surveillance mechanisms that go along with it.4 The reform’s flexible accumulation strategy has created tensions between the state’s desire to control social order and the markets’ need for freer movement. The state presents social disorder separately from the consequences of the market economy. Social disorder is considered to have

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been created by ‘criminals’, who can then be policed. Therefore, the state has to be tough on crime to maintain social order: the overall logic is much like the discourse in North America. By seeing social disorder as purely a crime issue, it conceals deep-rooted social problems such as trafficking in women, which are difficult to combat when so many other valued activities are reorganized under the market economy. Regulating migrants and migrant workers is considered part of building spiritual civilization. New regulations have to be imposed. However, they are not created anew. The ‘new’ regulations have diverse origins in various historical periods, but now interact with each other in a new configuration. The state’s specific concern about young women ‘making trouble’ is not unrelated to the freedom that many young women feel in dorms that to an outsider seems very constrictive. But the local authorities and residents favour the dorms because they reason that these people will be more inclined to commit crimes. Once people are away from their ‘roots’, they are outside the state’s surveillance and the sanctions of village and family life, they can no longer be trusted to abide by laws. The alternative constraints of a national or regional civil society are assumed to be absent. This fear rests on a very common ‘sedentarist’ understanding that any culture or identity must be ‘rooted’, or fixed to specific locations. As Liisa Malkki points out, uprooted or displaced people in many parts of the world are often seen in terms of a ‘a loss of moral bearing’, and thus are thought to be ‘no longer trustworthy as “honest citizen[s]”’. 5 As she continues, ‘our sedentarist assumptions about attachment to place lead us to define displacement not as a fact about sociopolitical context, but rather as an inner, pathological condition of the displaced.’6 In his study of the migration situation along the Mexico–US border, Nevzat Soguk also remarks on this: Increasingly, refugees and migrants become a series of strategic reference points to which the statist practices refer in order to construct subjectivities and affirm the semblance of continuities. Referentiality of the refugees and migrants is achieved through a variety of representational practices by which refugees and migrants become objects of a multitude of narratives of inadequacy. For instance, at times refugees and migrants are re/presented as figures of lack as opposed to the adequacy and fullness of the figure of citizen. They simultaneously signify their own void and the completeness of the citizen vis-à-vis a refugee or a migrant. In other instances, they are written as representing the anarchy of the outside of the domestic sphere. Here, the domain of refugees and

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migrants becomes a security threat and the signifier of disorderliness, whereas the domestic (inside) sphere is perceived to be the embodiment of peace and security. Refugees and migrants are seen to be the transmitters of/from anarchy of the outside. Large influxes are therefore presented to be a security threat to the peacefulness and the civilization of the inside.7 A wider sense of this perception is helpful for understanding the form of social control used on migrants. Migrants have come to symbolize threatening changes in a time of pervasive change and moral challenge. Outsiders are blamed for much of the town’s social evils and disorder. The influence of the Hong Kong, Taiwanese and Japanese cultures through movies, television and magazines have led to new sites of entertainment (for example, karaoke, disco, beauty salons) and to a new lifestyle for some people in town. These places are rumoured to be frequented by rich business people and young people seeking fun – and prostitutes. Those who prostitute themselves, in the minds of local people, are exclusively ‘outsiders’. The nearby silk-trade market has attracted business people from all over the country and an influx of ‘outsiders’ and subsequent rapid changes to the street scene in Sicheng, has disrupted the usual tempo of the local people’s lives. However, as we have seen, the claim that the area used to be quiet and stable is a nostalgic myth in the long term. Sicheng was historically a major silk trading centre and the town has seen migrants from other parts of China since at least the end of Ming dynasty (1368–1644). The recruitment of unmarried young, able-bodied women from Subei to work in the silk factories in Sicheng has affected the local rural–urban boundary, creating a new ‘Other’ in the local public and private discourse, quite different from the late-maoist ‘Other’, that is, peasants from nearby villages. The migrant workers are now considered the main outsiders. As I have shown in Chapter 2, the discourse on Subei and Subei people has historical roots. Subei people have been considered ‘uncivilized, inferior and lazy’ by Jiangnan people. People from Subei are once again pulled into a region that is growing rapidly, and thus have become once again a symbol in that region of alarming change.

The state regulatory mechanisms Managers of local silk industries need migrant workers to commit to the factory. This is a constant preoccupation for management, evidenced in their renewed efforts in sixianggongzuo. From this perspective, it would

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seem to be in management’s best interest to break down the boundary between insiders and outsiders. Much is lost from a boundary which places a high price on remaining in Sicheng, and which virtually reserves the better job categories for workers who are local urban residents. With such irrationalities in a system which nonetheless persists, it is important to be clear about exactly what is gained. First, the latest massive migration movements seen at the national and local levels has intensified the state’s efforts to exert disciplinary control so as to prevent the catastrophic urbanization typical of other industrializing countries. In Sicheng, like other towns and cities who have received many more migrants since economic reform, the local government controls migrant workers by having them register with their employers. The employers are then required to provide dorms for the workers, and to report regularly on their efforts to manage and control them. Local urban residents who rent out their apartments to migrants and migrant workers are required to report to the local police, who then register those migrants and migrant workers. The state also regularly inspects each workplace’s system of migrant management and control. By tying migrant workers and migrants to a fixed place within the city, the state is able to control and manage them, despite the workers being separated from their ‘roots’ in native towns or villages. Clearly, long after the hukou system was at its most confining, the state is still creating and maintaining boundaries, while altering some in order to meet the needs of the efficient operation of the market economy. Those needs include a freer labour force, but not one so free as to drive up the price of labour by its actions. The local statist policies that are aimed at managing and controlling migrant workers help to draw the boundary between local and nonlocal people. A local government official said, when he introduced the town to me, that migrants do contribute to the local economy, but they also caused the town’s rise in crime. According to the statistics, 70 per cent of crime in the town was committed by migrants. In response, the local government increased its police force from 36 to 52 members in 1991. In the same year, the local government spent 450 000 RMB to increase and upgrade police equipment and other comprehensive techniques of governance. 8 In Sicheng township (including the urban centre and rural outskirts), commercial and financial sectors have an economic police force, factories have guards, villages have joint-defence forces and highways are patrolled. The total surveillance force comes to some 500 people. In addition, urban residents have neighbourhood committees, and villages

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have defence coordinating groups. These additions bring the total to 3000 people. In other words, as one journalist wrote, one out of 24 local people is involved in policing. Local people are being ‘defended’ from migrants, especially those unemployed migrants who are homeless, beggars and vagrants. According to the localist discourse, they are capable of committing crimes at any time, and have disturbed a place which used to be quiet and stable. The local government has sent 650 ‘moving people’ (excluding those recruited to work in factories) back where they came from in 1991–92.9 The local government did not want to see ‘unwanted migrants’ enter the town, but local factories do need migrants to work in them. In order to maintain social order, factories either lock away their workers or provide entertainment in the dorms to entice them off the streets. Sending ‘unwanted migrants’ back home ‘is one of the ways in which the participants of the statist discourse are able to invoke/call the name of the state and refer to it as yet the functionally indispensable and necessary element of living’.10 The government’s desire to maintain local social order and the need of the local economy for cheap labour have created a situation in which liudong renkou (floating population of migrants) are nonetheless a constant scene in the town.11 This paradox of an omnipresent population which is nonetheless in a legal and moral grey area has some parallels with the otherwise much more anarchic situation on the US–Mexico border. In both areas, the participants in what might be called sovereignty practices ‘keep silent as millions move across the border back and forth’, ‘in the face of their clamor to stem the flow’.12 In 1993, the local government systematized the control of migrants. The mechanism is called ‘one management, two sets of hardware’, the latter element of which refers to safety deposit boxes and anti-theft doors. The management of migrants on the other hand includes a number of important measures. First, if migrants rent houses or apartments from private owners, both migrants and owners must register with the local police and apply for an identity card. Second, employers must register all their migrant workers and apply for identity cards permitting the latter to work in factories. The local government regularly inspects the implementation of this mechanism by other involved parties and hands out rewards and penalties as required. An office in charge of migrant management is set up to coordinate activities among the local government, the police and all other involved parties. Management mechanisms are implemented by all factories employing migrant labour, whether state-, collective-, township-, village- or individually-run factories, in both urban and rural areas. Moreover, these

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measures are represented in a very positive light to the local population. The local police force and guards in the factories are portrayed as heroes defending the interests of local residents and maintaining local social order. Without their contribution, says the local government, there would be no economic growth.

Managerial control after work hours: ‘free’ time regulated Social control of migrant workers is therefore not limited to production sites, but neither is the regulation confined to the shopfloor and the streets beyond the enterprise grounds. Local discourse on migrant workers considers migrant workers ‘troublemakers’ and an exceptional source of chaos, once ‘let loose’ in the public space. Migrant workers are free from any family obligation in Sicheng and thus apparently have too much free time after work. By keeping them in controlled space, that is, in factories and factory-run dorms, managers can prevent migrant workers from making trouble in the local public space. This logic speaks to the limited relative strength of civil society in relation to kinship ties. Some of the rules and regulations imposed on these workers include closing the gates to the dorm in Yonghong at 11 o’clock each night. But the rules do not stop at controlling the migrant identities of workers. Dormitory regulations now state that male workers are not allowed in the women’s quarters at any time. Managers in Yonghong’s dorm recently reorganized the women’s living quarters. Previously, these quarters were mixed with male workers’. Now, all the women workers are grouped together in three, three-storey apartment buildings at the south end of the dormitory compound. By grouping women together, managers are able to make sure that no male worker is allowed in, by installing a separate gate to the women’s quarter and by having female supervisors guard the doors. Male workers and married couples live at the north end of the dormitory compound. The reason for this reorganization, as the managers I interviewed told me, is to manage the workers’ dorm life more easily. This management is more than routine maintenance and security. Workers who live in dorms have to follow rules and regulations in addition to those which prevail on the shopfloor. Managers take up parental roles and regulate workers’ private lives principally in order to make sure that no female migrant worker gets pregnant. Because of the general concern about migrant workers and rootlessness, they also enforce rules designed to ensure that non-workers of either sex are not sheltered

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in the dorm without the knowledge of authorities. As a daily routine, dorm supervisors go to each room to ensure that no one is sharing beds and that no outsider of any description is staying overnight. For this purpose, supervisors open the door to every room without knocking. A worker’s privacy is sharply limited. All these regulations are also said to protect women workers. Unmarried women are considered to be always in danger of moral corruption if they are not protected and guarded. Women are said to be more in danger than men when in a public space. Without parents and village elders around, factory managers’s parental role centres on women’s sexuality, and more importantly, chastity. In conversation with factory managers and trade union officials in Yonghong, they seem to be more concerned with possible pregnancies out of wedlock than with their sexuality. In other words, it is not simply a moral issue when managers control women’s sexuality, but a political and economic issue, given the national family planning policies and the costs to the factory associated with a pregnant worker. By keeping workers in a controlled space – factories and factory-run dorms – managers think they can prevent ‘trouble’. Protective confinement of this kind involves, to use Malkki’s words, ‘a technology of “care and control” – a technology of power entailing the management of space and movement – for “peoples out of place”’. 13 Factory managers try to prevent pregnancies by overt regulation, but encounters are also minimized as a side-effect of other working conditions. Sexual segregation in the dorms is reproduced on the shopfloor by the (male) mechanics’ freedom of movement, and hence, general absence. In this case, the mechanics are simply evading shopfloor control as workers, and therefore act out of their own choice for reasons unrelated to sexual policing. But this shopfloor practice also limits chatting between the sexes – which in any case would be illicit. When I asked some women migrant workers about dating, they told me emphatically that there was no opportunity to meet men at all. This is not to suggest that segregation is necessarily total and systematic, though in Huaqiang, workers are basically locked away, either in workshops or in their dorm without any entertainment. Managers in Yonghong’s dorm provide some entertainment such as ballroom dancing and videos every weekend to keep workers from going out on the street to ‘cause trouble’. Throughout my exploration of the rules limiting movement outside the compound, Yonghong managers never explained to me exactly what ‘trouble’ was being prevented, other than the apparent one,

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given the rules within the dorms, of relations with the other sex. But the very vagueness about ‘trouble’ on the streets suggests that whether workers actually make trouble or a particular kind of trouble is not the point; the point is rather that for managers, migrant workers are ‘trouble’. Managers assume the migrant workers ‘make trouble’ once they are outside management’s supervisory gaze. But managers respond to this perception in very different ways. Managers in Yonghong are able to keep workers off the street by regulating ‘free time’, by showing movies, by sponsoring parties and by providing reading rooms within the dorm compound. Provision of recreation facilities is said to enrich the lives of workers ‘afterwork time’. All this costs money that Huaqiang is not prepared to spend, and the solution for this TVE is to restrict free time even further. Shaoguang Wang points out in his work on the politics of private time in China: ‘[F]ree time’ is ‘free’ only in the sense that time at one’s command is free of duties. Like everything else, the ‘free’ time is more or less regulated . . . Because leisure plays an increasingly important part in people’s everyday life today, the state must take notice of leisure activities. In order to maintain the status quo, the state needs to shape a ‘disciplined’ and (physically and psychologically) ‘healthy’ population. To do so, it has to suppress ‘immoral’, ‘irrational’ and ‘dangerous’ activities, on the one hand, and to inculcate ‘elevated’ modes of social and moral behavior, on the other. 14 Certainly such an analysis applies to Huaqiang. The dorm there was recently completed and consists of four, three-storey apartment buildings. Male and female workers occupy separate buildings. The rules and regulations in these dorms are undoubtedly tougher than in Yonghong. The dormitory compound has a big iron gate at the entrance. Only a small door in the gate is open every day for workers to enter. Unlike the Yonghong dorm guards, who are retired workers and do not wear uniforms, guards in the Huaqiang dorms are young males in uniform. These male guards are former peasant workers at the factory, who work in shifts around the clock, every day. These gates are closed at 9 o’clock every night. Those who do not return by 9 are locked out. Managers not only regulate workers during working hours, but also after work. In Huaqiang, interviewees mentioned that they are not allowed to play cards or chess in their rooms, because managers are concerned that these games will take away from workers’ time for rest. Just

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as Henry Ford argued, albeit in a very different context and with very different conclusions, if workers do not rest well, they will not be productive during work hours. In the dorms in Huaqiang, there are no electric outlets in the rooms, making even tape recorders an impossibility. Workers referred to the dorm as a prison in my presence. But new factory women workers’ ‘free time’ has to be regulated in order to prevent moral failings impinging on their productivity: while the motivations are similar to Ford’s restrictive experiments, they are played out in radically different ways. The redrawing of boundaries and the construction of unmarried women migrant workers as a new ‘Other’ has brought changes in the dynamics among workers and between workers and their factory managers. Examining some of the workers’ experiences as factory workers in Sicheng help us understand the construction of migrant workers as the new ‘Other’ more clearly. Their personal stories also point to the heterogeneity of workers and the hierarchical nature of work in the silk industry in Sicheng. Thus far, the discussion has considered managers’ profit-seeking strategies in recruitment, the gender ideologies defining women’s work and the cultural meanings and social identities of women workers. What follows is some consideration of how unmarried women migrant workers make sense of the cultural meanings and social identities of being factory workers.

Workers’ mediation of mixed identities The redrawing of boundaries and the construction of unmarried women migrant workers as a new ‘Other’ has brought changes in the dynamics among workers and between workers, and helps us understand the construction of migrant workers as the new ‘Other’ more clearly. Their personal stories also point to the heterogeneity of workers and the hierarchical nature of work in the silk industry in Sicheng. For example, although Jing is considered a local when compared with migrant workers, her position in the hierarchical structure is still not the same as those of local urban residency. She is constantly reminded that she is a peasant, even though she has been working in the factory for more than ten years and even though she is not an ‘outsider’: Several times I requested a day shift job, partly because of my daughter’s leg problems. But I was told that it was impossible. Instead, I was shifted from weaving to the prep workshop. Prep work

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is considered lighter work than weaving. Day shift jobs are reserved for jieshangren [urban people]. 15 Tao is nineteen years old. When I asked her experiences as a migrant workers in Sicheng, she told me: I sometimes socialize with migrant workers from different towns. But I have never socialized with local people. Local people look down on us. They feel we are outsiders. Some local people are good, but most of them are selfish. Xiao is an urban resident. She entered Yonghong in 1981 and started as a weaver. When I asked her whether she is happy working in the factory, she replied: A day shift job does give me more spare time during the weekdays and I have a day-and-a-half off during weekends. I usually do laundry on Saturday afternoon. On Sundays, I take my son to the park. I feel relaxed on the weekend. The standard of living has improved, so we naturally want to make more money. But a factory job won’t make one rich. Consequently, few people want to work in factories. In the past, people had to rely on guanxi (connections) to get factory jobs. I, like everybody else, want to leave the factory. But one needs guanxi to do this. Nowadays, people want to get paid for whatever they do. Migrant workers are more difficult to manage because we don’t understand their dialects. Many peasant workers left factories to work at handlooms at home. In the past workers had a high standard of skill, but now workers are not serious about learning silk skills. In the past, workers were very serious about their work; now people want to be in business. Migrant workers do not have loyalties to the factory, unlike us, they go wherever the higher wage is. Migrant workers are lazy; they come here with the sole purpose of making money. They have a very poor sense of product quality. They complain if they earn less. Local people who are decent enough will not marry a migrant worker. Places where migrant workers come from are very poor. 16 Being an urban resident, Xiao’s job in the factory is better than those of peasant and migrant workers. However, the status of being a factory worker has declined tremendously since the expansion of service

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industries in the town. Urban workers like Xiao see a necessary binary division between migrant workers and workers from urban areas. For her, workers in the past (permanent workers of large SOEs) are hardworking, disciplined and willing to make sacrifices: they are committed to the factory. On the other hand, migrant workers are lazy, selfish, undisciplined and not committed to the factory. This is a representation of a general feeling among workers of urban residency towards migrant workers; in an earlier time, similar feelings were expressed about local peasant workers. Honig, in her study of mill workers in preLiberation Shanghai, also points to the mixed identities of workers.17 The mixed identities of workers and their heterogeneity means they cannot simply be categorized and classified in terms of either class, gender or place of origin only. These workers, whether peasant, migrant or urban, have to be defined in terms of the interaction of these cleavages: they live out their lives in the daily tensions between these identities. That there exist mixed identities and status categories among workers poses challenges to the managers. The latter want peasant workers to focus on factory work, rather than maintain other jobs like farming, even when they are not working in the factory. A survey of journals published by the trade union office and youth league office in Yonghong factory shows that between the early- and late-1980s, managers were preoccupied with indoctrinating peasants with an industrial work ethic and factory discipline. Some writers urged managers to be aware of the mixed identities of these workers and to act accordingly. Since 1992, however, managers have been less preoccupied with local peasant workers and more with migrant workers. Peasant workers who remain in the factory have had at least 4 years of work experience, and therefore they are more stable. The early 1980s placed the rural outskirts and urban centre in the same municipal bounds, and boom times with their greater migration levels have solidified some resultant associations. Consequently, migrant workers have replaced peasant workers now doing the hardest jobs in the factory. Therefore, management of migrant workers have become more important for the factory’s productivity and profit. On the other hand, the shift in managers’ preoccupation in regard to labour control confirms that a new boundary has been created among workers. Workers are now divided among themselves as locals versus non-locals. Managers also categorize workers as good workers versus bad. The categories usually overlap: good workers are local people; the bad workers, non-local. During interviews for the present study, shift leaders and workshop leaders, as well as managers, in three different

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factories all told the same story: how difficult it is to manage migrant workers. However, articles written in the 1980s in the local party and trade union organ, Menya (Budding), show that peasant workers were just as much the main concern during that period. The shift does not necessarily mean that peasant workers are now committed to the factory, it only implies that the boundaries have shifted. One anonymous writer writes of peasant workers of that time, ‘peasants have good qualities of handwork, perseverance and honesty. But they also have kept ways of thinking and behaviour from a thousand years of feudalism – conservative, narrow-minded . . .’ 18 In this article, peasants are considered conservative and narrow-minded because they are only concerned with their personal interests. ‘They do not have a strong sense of zhurenwong jingsheng (being the master of one’s own affairs). They treat their labour as a commodity. Wherever there is higher wage, they go there. They are not prepared to be rooted in the enterprise to serve the interests of the enterprise.’ Peasants were said to be unused to the serious discipline required by a large-scale factory system.19 The above article shows that managers have been struggling for some time to handle particular issues arising from the mixed identities of peasant workers and migrant workers. The abiding challenge facing managers since the beginning of economic reform is how to make workers productive and ‘rooted in’ factory discipline, while at the same time taking into consideration their mixed identities. Now, however, this enduring purpose faces a new challenge. Unlike workers who have urban residence and even unlike local peasant workers, migrant workers tend to be less committed to the factory because their hukou is still back home. The distance allows for misrepresentations and alienating misunderstanding. Managers expected peasant and migrant workers to be as committed to the factory as workers from urban areas, but did not treat them the same. The political and cultural construction of Subei is reproduced in the factory and shopfloors. Managers take no responsibility for communication problems. Rather, they lay the blame on migrant workers. Local people, however, are not expected to learn the migrants’ dialect. Managers consider migrants ‘lazy’. They assume because migrant workers are not able to meet their production expectations, ‘they have been home doing nothing for a long time’. Urban residents also consider Subei people ‘lazy’. Xiao said as a matter of fact, even though she has never been to Subei and she has never socialized with migrant workers in the factory: ‘Back home, Subei people do not do anything in winter. All they do is sunbathe under the roofs of their houses.’20

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Women migrant workers: challenging boundaries Unmarried women migrant workers crossed the rural–urban boundary and challenged a gender boundary by coming to Sicheng. Female migrant and peasant workers told me that they feel more free when they are away from home because they are not obliged to help tilling jiating chengbaotian (the family contract land) or other household work. They are free from any day-to-day parental discipline and free from the constraints they feel living in the village where everybody knows everybody else. Most unmarried female peasant workers prefer factory work in Sicheng to factory work in their respective villages, where factory work opportunities are often abundant. Besides the higher wage paid in the factories in Sicheng, they feel a strong desire to be independent and away from household chores. Most migrants told me that dorm life is much more fun than being at home. Although women workers are subject to factory and dorm discipline and regulations, migrant and peasant workers do not have family responsibilities after work. Migrating to work in Sicheng factories, for migrants, is a temporary step up from tilling the land. Schooling and non-farming wage work have changed peasant children’s aspirations in life. None of my interviewees, male or female, wants to farm. When I asked them whether they like working in factories, most people told me that they do not like the noise and the summer heat in the workshops, but they admit that factory work is lighter than farming. Farming to them is the last thing they want to do in life. Factory work provides them an opportunity to change their life, even though most of them realize their dreams may not always come true. Even though factory work is hard and dorm life is highly regulated, there are several bases for these women’s consent to this way of life: factory work is much better than farm work, factory work in Sicheng means getting away from family obligations, dorm life includes entertainment and making friends with their peers and town life is more fun than village life. In China, manual labour has been culturally and socially constructed so that tilling land is at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In a similar way, the process of zishifengzi zaijiaoyu (‘re-educating’ intellectuals) and urban people in general reinforced the division between manual and mental labour,21 by merely inverting the normative attributes of each. Thus one’s official class background was noted formally in personal identification regardless of one’s current relation to the means of production. This notation attaches a label or name to Chinese citizens with unique consequences. The distinctive Chinese understanding of ‘naming’

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has been explained by Rey Chow: ‘naming’ is to categorize and classify by assigning essences. 22 Once people are classified and categorized authoritatively, their identities are fixed. For example, at funerals, the official characterization (a rightist, a revisionist, a true marxist) in the official eulogy influences the family of the deceased. The non-radical Western convention is that a name is a mere label for an essence that resides inherently in the thing so named. A more radical Western politics of ‘naming’, echoed in the intent (if not the practice) behind ‘re-education’ in the Chinese countryside, is ultimately aimed at identifying and transcending the named aspect of a thing (such as the proletarian character of the proletariat or the capitalist character of capitalist society). Accordingly, identifying a category is to orient action towards changing the essence of the thing. The Cultural Revolution may be read as a culmination of a radical Western project – the transcendence of social divisions by their eradication. Thus, to eradicate the division between mental and manual labour, cadres, intellectuals and city students were sent to countryside to ‘learn from peasants’, that is, to acquire manual as well as mental skills, and ‘proletarian attitudes’. However, this radical Western project was being introduced into a profoundly different social setting, and was transformed into an essentializing naming process, one which involves assigned names that cost lives and careers. Above all, the original categories were not transformed: for their members were merely tamed by re-education, not transformed. To cross boundaries is not readily accepted as a completed process: new identities are not readily assigned. Instead, to cross boundaries is either to be out of place or without a place – neither fish nor fowl (bulun bulei). For migrant workers, Jiangnan symbolizes prosperity, hope for a better future, and modernity. These features contrast sharply with what they see as a ‘lack’ in Subei. One of the biggest desires for most of the migrant workers is to make some money to build a better future for them. However, once they are in Jiangnan, a place they cannot call their own, home becomes a symbol from which they draw their emotional support. Migrant workers are not home in either place as they experience displacement in both places. As one migrant worker told me, when she is in Sicheng, she misses home. But when she is back home, she wants to come back to Sicheng. The displacement these migrant workers have experienced is significant. They come to a place where they are not only considered outsiders, but where they have also to adjust to a different life tempo, to the discipline of factory work and for the first time in their lives, to independence from their parents.

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By coming to Sicheng, many women migrants I met are also challenging traditional gender ideologies in several ways: they made their own decision to come here, even though most of them have never been to Jiangnan; they delayed their marriage;23 and they exercise independence from their parents and village elders. Their ideal marriage is a love marriage: Zheng told me: ‘I do not want my parents to arrange a marriage for me. Two of my elder sisters had arranged marriages. I, of course, will have to have a love marriage’ [emphasis added]. 24 Hong told me: Peasant women’s life is simple and unchanging: once she reaches marriageable age, she gets married, then has kids, and then brings them up. I’ve seen so much of this since my childhood. I do not want to lead this kind of life. But I might in the end live the same kind of life so many peasant women have lived and are living before me. 25 Tao and Zheng both said that their model women are ‘strong women’. This has a special connotation in Chinese culture, not always a complementary one. Zheng said that women should be good wives and mothers, but she thinks strong women are more admirable because they suffer more in Chinese society. Tao told me how she felt after she watched a television soap opera about a man abandoning a woman after he discovered she was pregnant, and how she then became a strong woman. Both of them see strong women as ones who are on their own and who must have suffered greatly to achieve success. Because of these qualities, they admire strong women and identify with them. They themselves have demonstrated their independence by coming to Sicheng, and they have had to overcome real difficulties as migrants, as unmarried women. They are discriminated against because of their gender, class and place of origin. It also shows that some migrant workers like Tao, Hong and Zheng want to choose their life path, rather than shou minyung de baibu (accepting their fate). It is not surprising that ‘strong women’ are stigmatized in this patriarchal society. As Lu Tonglin points out, ‘[w]omen’s competence threatens the traditional image of masculine superiority even more, since it risks destabilizing institutional power, which is still essentially gendered as masculine’.26 ‘Strong women’ are those who achieve some success in life in career or business who have challenged the gender biases reflected in nostrums such as ‘women should stay home, taking care of husband and children’ or ‘the husband’s career comes before the wife’s’. Such discrimination against ‘strong women’ has its parallels in the West, where the label ‘feminist’ has a bad meaning. Some women do

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not want to associate themselves with such labels, even though what they do and say challenges gender ideologies in their own societies. What is more interesting is that some people nonetheless come to admire this stigmatized model. Some male migrant workers I interviewed see as ideal women those who fulfil their traditional role as mother and wife; for them, it is a welcome bonus if they are beautiful. ‘Strong women cannot be tender at the same time. Strong women do not have time for household work. I won’t feel comfortable, as a husband, doing household work, while letting my wife busy herself with her career. It is normal that a wife does household work, but if a husband does household work, people will gossip about them.’27 Some other male migrant workers, however, have mixed feelings about ‘strong women’. ‘I do not have much talent. Given my limited capability in having a successful career, I don’t think strong women would want to marry male migrant workers like me, even if I didn’t mind it’.28 The incompatibility between strong women and male migrant workers, according to this particular worker, is thus primarily a class issue, rather than a gender issue. Both male and female workers’ views on proper women’s and proper men’s roles reflect a general atmosphere of open discussions on women’s roles in both families and societies. As Honig and Hershatter point out: [t]he political liberalization of the post-Cultural Revolution decade made it possible for women to publicly discuss these dissatisfactions . . . The increased freedom to debate the issues of sexuality, courtship, marriage, family life, divorce, and violence also fueled the public discussion of gender discrimination. 29 A large number of women in the workplace have made qualitative changes ‘not so much in the collective area of power distribution as in the individual abilities of women to face challenges’.30 Even though unmarried women migrant workers did not leave home primarily to search for new identity, they do feel more independent. In contrast to women migrant workers, workers from the local rural areas feel more restricted. ‘In this small town, it is difficult to be a strong woman. It is possible in big cities.’31 Peasant workers from nearby villages feel more restricted than migrant workers too. One peasant worker told me, ‘I have to watch how I behave here, because home is just nearby. Any gossip about me will fly back home quickly’. These three quotations from one migrant, one urban and one local peasant worker shed some light on the relation of gender to space. As Massey points out:

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Many women have to leave home precisely in order to forge their own version of their own identities, from Victorian Lady Travellers to Minnie Pratt . . . Moreover, in certain cultural quarters, the mobility of women does indeed seem to pose a threat to a settled patriarchal order.32 Farming is considered by migrant workers to be taiku (‘too bitter’). Factory work is bitter, but better than farming. The dream of attaining nonpeasant status through education is dashed for these migrant workers, but factory work is also better than their one remaining long-term hope, namely to find a good husband. Before getting married, they want to enjoy some independence and freedom as migrant workers. For most unmarried young women, working in Sicheng might be the only and last opportunity they have to live relatively independent lives before marriage. Once they are married, they have to assume responsibilities as wives and mothers, and are restricted to one place. Unless they marry a local man, whether peasant or non-peasant, migrant workers usually have to go back home, which means fewer job opportunities. But the chances of marrying local men are very dim primarily because of regulated segregation and migrant workers’ low status in Sicheng. Women migrant workers see urban life as offering the possibility for freedom to choose a life partner. But the other hand, some migrants hesitate before the speed of modernity, which to them clearly implies other, Western kinds of sexual freedom. When I asked them what a ‘modern’ woman should be like, they told me, ‘Women of today’s age should be open-minded. They should dress up a bit. But they should not be too open. I cannot explain why I think this way’. ‘I do not think women should be too open. The beauty salons here are not part of Chinese culture, too westernized. Sometimes, beauty salons came to recruit us, I did not want to go there’. ‘I saw it on TV – “A Beijinger in New York” – that an unmarried woman slept with a man. I cannot catch up with this kind of modern idea’. 33 Migrant workers challenge traditional gender roles ascribed to women and men by questioning them and taking actions, but at the same time, they are also assuming traditional gender roles. For example, everybody seems to take it for granted that they will eventually marry, and then have children and raise them. However, they do have a desire to work for their freedom to choose a mate, and to make decisions in financial matters, so that they do not have to depend completely on their future husbands. That they continue to face this array of subtle restrictions as the setting for their aspirations is proof that their lives will be a product

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of quiet resistance, but not likely, as in the West, of politicized celebration of multiple identities.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have considered the institutions and regulations to regulate the ‘free time’ of women migrant workers with the goal of controlling their sexuality. I have also exposed the centrality of discursively constructed social and cultural boundaries alongside state-enforced local boundaries in internal Chinese migration. I have also discussed how unmarried women migrant workers flesh out these constructed subjectivities in the light of their life experiences and how they participate in tempering if not totally reshaping them. It is important both theoretically and practically to assert that these workers do so without being dupes but also without having a heroic project of social transformation. Workers use hegemonic discourses to resist, complicit with dominant norms even as they question them. The migrants are treated as objects to be controlled and regulated. Their portrayal as ‘outsiders’ from the ‘inferior Subei’ symbolizes what this ‘imagined community’ (Anderson) of Sicheng is not. The statist practices of regulation and control of migrant workers also legitimize the state’s claim to rule and represent local people. Unlike the positive connotation of community-building in the West, community-building in Sicheng, and indeed in many Chinese cities and towns where migrants come to work, takes on a ‘xenophobic’ meaning. Migrant workers in Sicheng are welcome as important labour for its silk industry, yet they are also considered to be ‘outsiders’, who therefore, need to be controlled. Though the period of reform has made state-enforced boundaries more permeable, the social discursive boundaries have remained manifestly readable by the residents and migrant women workers of Sicheng. Indeed, the aggravation of increased migration may even have strengthened these boundaries. Migrant workers in Sicheng still face a perplexing and restrictive combination of open gates and guarded communities, setting in motion the intersecting and changing dynamics of gender, class and place of origin.

7 Conclusion

This work started as an attempt to investigate Sicheng’s unmarried women migrant workers’ lived experiences of economic reform. I wanted to understand how these women workers experienced the transition from peasant daughters to factory workers in a time of great political, economic and social changes in China. A ‘bottom-up’ study of China’s economic reform along these lines derives from two main concerns: one is that economic reform seemed to be understood predominantly as changes in the economic sphere; the second concern is that workers’ voices seemed to have been buried in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Mental labour is once again privileged over manual labour, and those who do the latter again cannot speak with authority. In essence, my project is to put human interests at the centre of the study of economic reform. Through a ‘bottom-up’ study, I attempted to contextualize gender and social dynamics in Chinese society, which is increasingly integrated into the world economy. It was by no means an easy task to conduct such a ‘bottom-up’ study. Reform has opened up Chinese society to scholars doing fieldwork in China. Many government officials and factory managers are more willing to talk to foreign researchers about the success of economic reform policies than to allow the latter to talk to ‘the masses’.1 During my first trip to Sicheng in 1995, for example, I was accompanied by a friend’s friend to the Zhengxin silk factory (a pseudonym). We met the office director of the factory headquarters in a reception room. I submitted to her a written statement of my study, which stated that I wished to study the changes reform has brought to the silk industry and women workers, and how women workers are dealing with these changes. After she heard that I wanted to interview women workers, she immediately turned down my request. She told me that the factory was in deep 199

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trouble at the moment because of the bad general situation in the international silk market. She said that factory leaders these days could not even raise their heads, therefore they were scared to let me interview workers because workers might express complaints to me. She also added that they did not even permit Chinese reporters to interview workers. I went to another silk factory, Qingsheng (a pseudonym) to investigate the possibility of getting access to workers. I was allowed to a talk to a group of five female and two male workers, with the trade union officer present. The presence of the union officer was an important factor explaining the general discomfort of the workers. Their general silence was their only ‘speech’! I then went to two more factories (Yonghong and Huaqiang) and was able to talk to the deputy general manager of both factories. I was careful, this time, not to push the issue of interviewing workers. Instead, I only inquired about the future possibility of interviewing workers. When I returned to Sicheng in 1996, managers from Yonghong and Huaqiang granted me permission to talk to workers in the dormitory. I also found out this time that Zhengxin factory is in debt because it borrowed heavily to import machines during the good years of silk production (1992–94). When the market fell in 1995, it suffered tremendously. It is also revealing to read articles written by reporters from all over the country who travelled to Sicheng between 1992 and 1994. These articles were full of praise of the ‘miracle’ Sicheng has produced. The glaring gap between what appeared in Chinese newspapers and the lived experiences of economic reform further proves the importance of a ‘bottom-up’ study! My experiences in the field, first of all, confirmed the general knowledge that guanxi is unusually important in China; second, these experiences made me realize the continued role of the Party and State in regulating the daily life of Chinese people. State power is not so much always brute force as it is often the ‘organization of consent’ (Gramsci). Researchers coming from abroad always face the issue of power relations when they are in the ‘field’, because they can leave while the ‘researched’ stay. My experiences have told me that the power relationship between the researcher and the researched is usually more complicated than mere ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. For one thing, managers set the limits for what I could do in the ‘field’. I was, however, fully aware of my privileged position when I was talking to migrant and peasant workers. But my gender, age and familiarity with their dialects made it easier for me to get to know them at a more personal level. Trust was gradually built up as I made daily trips to their dormitory and ate with

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some of them at canteens. One peasant worker even invited me to her home on the weekend. It has been a rich and rewarding experience for me both intellectually and personally. With respect to recent debates on the subject of method and ethics, I strongly believe that there is still room for ‘fieldwork’ if such work is done with great care and consciousness. These young women workers’ aspiration for a ziyou lianai (love marriage) and independence by migrating to Sicheng, and their disappointment and sometimes their hopelessness about their situation once they arrive, together point to the importance not only of investigating the structural constraints constituting and constructing their identities, but also of investigating women’s agency in constructing their own identities. Urban workers, migrant workers and peasant workers are not homogenous categories in either Yonghong or Huaqiang. Rather, gender, class and place of origin intersected in today’s Sicheng, in the construction of multiple identities: there are multiple and overlapping forms of domination and resistance. I have argued that the state in China has to be understood in something like the gramscian sense of an ‘integral State’ because the state and its agents continue to play an active role in economic activities, and the Party continues to play its leading ideological role. But elements of kinship structures and civil society are also articulated with these State functions. Material civilization and spiritual civilization, the twin pillars of the economic reform platform, speak strongly to this point. The continued ideological role of the Party in China perhaps can cause us to pause before rushing to embrace the notion of a Chinese ‘end of ideology’! The continued leading role of the Party and the State’s willingness to turn to Singapore rather than the West for model of modernity perhaps can also make us think more carefully before predicting that China’s economic reform will necessarily take the route of Western modernization. China’s socialist legacies, the Party’s continued will to power and the global trend towards flexible accumulation, as I have argued throughout the work, are critical structural forces conditioning gender and other social dynamics in China. However, I have also used the insight provided by Foucault’s notion of power to shed light on the necessary space for resistance so evident in the personal narratives of the Sicheng people I interviewed. This book is not simply a case study of Chinese women in the era of economic reform. Rather, it understands gender as fluid and complicated, intersecting with diverse forms of hierarchies. My careful study of lived experiences in relation to multiple forms of power suggests that

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‘the dynamics of gender and social life must be contextualized in the ever shifting and ever widening fields of knowledge and power’2 associated with Chinese modernity. This work thus makes a contribution to the general feminist literature of gender and work. It enriches our understanding of how to approach the multiple and overlapping webs of power, dominance and resistance in specific locales in the era of globalization. More specifically, this work provides an insight into how the official and nationalist discourse in China’s economic reform determines the relational contours of gender, class and place of origin, and how the strategic situation of women migrant workers in Sicheng has to be understood in the intersection of these three. This book therefore engages with both the structural forces at national and global level, and the lived experiences of multiple forms of domination and subordination. By bringing the two levels of analysis in tension, I have demonstrated that Chinese state power is immanent in every aspect of the social life of Chinese people. Yet the lived experiences of Sicheng people I interviewed also demonstrate the resistance and transgression of norms carried out on the shop floor and in their ‘leisure time’. Unlike economic restructuring occurring in some places elsewhere in the world, China’s economic reform legitimizes the post-Mao state in the eyes of Chinese people. In general, Jiangnan people do feel their lives are better off than in the pre-reform era, and they now have more freedom and choices in their lives. This general sense of feeling ‘betteroff’ made the nationalist message about economic reform – the linear progression of history – very powerful in China. Despite the differences between economic restructuring elsewhere in the world and economic reform in China, both share a flexible accumulation strategy. As I have argued in Chapter 2, women workers who were hired under Mao were laid off by managers in their pursuit of this strategy. However, the state socialist legacies in China did contribute to the different gender impact of economic reform in China. Unlike the ‘feminization’ of labour in many countries under restructuring, there is actually an ‘en-gendering’ of labour in China: many jobs are now once again considered ‘men’s’ jobs, and women are now called on to seek ‘women’s’ jobs or traditional household activities. The gender implications are entangled with the changes in state gender ideology. Now, women’s issues are no longer considered as a social issues, but biological ones. The emphasis on the essential, biological difference between men and women has made it easier for the employers to lay off women workers first, because women are not only considered mothers and wives first, but because this is assumed to pose

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insurmountable difficulties in the physical performance of their work. The state can also ask women to make sacrifices to contribute to China’s modernization. Such sacrifices include not having waged work, a desirable direction for some, depending on their class position. Further, the women’s studies movement emerged out of economic reform era. The movement also emphasizes the essential difference between men and women so that women can cultivate their identity independent of any national project. The Party has officially declared the era of class struggle over, and the principal contradiction of China is now officially economic development. As I have argued in Chapter 3, there is a general sense among the people I interviewed of an increasing gap between rich and poor in a potentially unique political economy. However, the increasing social stratification is increasingly articulated in the state-directed discourse of ‘population quality’. The ‘quality’ discourse has permeated people’s daily lives. Because of the open-endedness and the ambiguity of this discourse, it can be subversive when the less powerful use it against the powerful. In Chapter 4, I moved from the national to the local level to study how place of origin changes the dynamics of class and gender in Sicheng. The presence of migrant workers from Subei redraws class and gender boundaries in Sicheng: the major social division in both material reality and the discourse in relation to the silk town is between Subei people and Jiangnan people. Subei women migrant workers are not only less feminine but also less ‘civilized’. They now do the kind of jobs that are associated with low social status. The state socialist legacies in China also meant that the state replaced kinship in mediating rural women’s identities. In Chapter 5, migrant workers’ personal narratives revealed the relative lack of kinship role in their decision to migrate to Sicheng. Every worker I interviewed said that they went to Sicheng on their own will. Further, they migrate for both economic and non-economic reasons. Chapters 6 and 7 focus on how gender, class and place of origin were played out within and outside the factory. The two chapters detailed multiple forms of labour control and social control, as well as the multiple forms of resistance carried out by workers. Since economic reform started, rural–urban migration has become a major political and social issue for the Chinese state. Migrants are seen in China both as an asset for China’s economic development, but just as often, as troublemakers contributing to social disorder. Studies on rural–urban migration in China and its gender implications are still scant at this moment. Future studies would benefit tremendously by continuing to detail women migrant workers’ lived experiences of

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migration, and looking at the changing relations of gender and household. In this work on the work and life experiences of women workers in Sicheng (including Subei migrants, peasants from neighbouring villages and town residents), it was already clear that the negative stereotype of Subei women was not the only aspect of Subei identity. But one element of a broader picture had to be set aside for practical reasons: fieldwork at this growing source of women’s migration. I thus propose the following issues for future investigation: 1) How are Subei women whose husbands migrate affected by migration? 2) How do men who do not migrate, especially husbands of migrants, see migration? 3) How are female migrant workers viewed and judged in their home villages, especially as wives and daughters-in-law? 4) How do these experiences of migration change the way migrants, especially returning migrants, feel that others see them? By investigating gender and social dynamics in Subei and other places marginal in China’s economic reform policies, future projects should be designed to shed light on men’s and women’s responses to their marginal status in a national and provincial development strategy that concentrates growth in the wealthy coastal area. Gender-differentiated responses to their peripheral political and economic status are central to understanding the tension between the dominant discourse about Subei and similarly stigmatized poor areas, and the interpretation of their own marginality.

Notes

Introduction 1. L. Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (Berkeley: University of California, 1999). 2. See, for example, A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routledge, 1997); A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); S. Hall, ‘The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity’, in King A. D. (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the WorldSystem: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pp. 19–40. 3. See, for example, R. M. LeBlanc, Bicycle Citizens: The Political World of the Japanese Housewives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 4. K. Liu, ‘Is There an Alternative to Capitalist Globalization? The Debate about Modernity in China’, boundary 2, 23:3 (1996) 193–218. 5. I. Bakker, ‘Introduction: Engendering Macro-economic Policy Reform in the Era of Global Restructuring and Adjustment’, in Bakker I. (ed.), The Strategic Silence: Gender and Economic Policy (London: Zed, North-South Institute, 1994) p. 2. 6. M. P. Fernández-Kelly, For We are Sold, I and My People: Women and Industry in Mexico’s Frontier (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); A. Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987); K. J. Hossfeld, ‘Their Logic against Them: Contradictions in Sex, Race, and Class in Silicon Valley’, in Ward K. (ed.), Women Workers and Global Restructuring (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, Cornell University, 1990) pp. 149–78; D. L. Wolf, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); C. Mohanty ‘Women Workers and Capitalist Scripts: Ideologies of Domination, Common Interests, and the Politics of Solidarity’, in Jacqui, A. M. and Mohanty, C. (eds), Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures (New York: Routledge, 1997) pp. 3–29; C. Ng, Positioning Women in Malaysia: Class and Gender in an Industrializing State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); D. S. S. Gills, Rural Women and Triple Exploitation in Korean Development (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999). 7. See, for example, D. Elson and R. Pearson, ‘Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’: An Analysis of Women’s Employment in Third World Export Manufacturing’, Feminist Review, 7 (Spring 1981) 87–107; A. Ong, ‘The Gender and Labor Politics of Postmodernity’, Annual Review of Anthropology, 20 (1991) 279–309. 8. Hossfeld, 1990; S. Tiano, Patriarchy on the Line: Labor, Gender and Ideology in the Mexican Macquila Industry (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994). 205

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9. Sicheng is a pseudonym for the town in which I conducted my research. Jiangnan refers to the part of Jiangsu province south of the Yangzi River and northern Zhejiang province. See map, p. 7. 10. Ong, 1987; Wolf, 1992; J. Salaff, Working Daughter of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in Family? Morningside edition with new preface (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). 11. My work on Subei is influenced by E. Honig’s work, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 12. Ong, 1987; Wolf, 1992; Fernández-Kelly, 1983. 13. See, for example, N. Soguk, ‘Transnational/Transborder Bodies: Resistance, Accommodation, and Exile in Refugee and Migration Movements on the U.S.–Mexican Border’, in Shapiro, M. J. and Alker, H. R. (eds), Challenging Boundaries: Global Flows, Territorial Identities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) pp. 285–325. 14. See, for example P. Andors, ‘Women and Work’, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 20 (1988) 22–41; Ong, 1987. 15. Elson and Pearson, 1981. 16. E. Honig, ‘Native Place and the Making of Chinese Ethnicity’, in Hershatter, G., Honig, E., Lipman, J. N. and Stross, R. (eds), Remapping China: Fissures in Historical Terrain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) p. 145. 17. Much like the rival household responsibility system, both production units and a wide range of service agencies have become self-supporting under economic reform. Many units have responded with a startling degree of vertical integration and diversification. Just as the Red Army has always supported itself with farms and other ventures, schools and municipalities have acquired or founded profit-making side concerns which function as ‘cash cows’. Similar ‘private sector’ ventures have developed as off-shoots of state-owned enterprises. Yonghong has cautiously attempted such diversification with mixed results. It is more difficult for larger ventures such as Yonghong than smaller ones such as Huaqiang to diversify production. 18. R. Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 63–4. 19. M. Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) pp. 230–1. 20. Some peasants, without guanxi, did make a fortune. But it was primarily possible at the beginning of the reform when cadres were still not interested in business. 21. J. Unger, ‘Rich Man, Poor Man: The Making of New Classes in the Countryside’, in Goodman, S. G. and Hooper, B. (eds), China’s Quiet Revolution: New Interactions Between State and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994) pp. 43–63. 22. S. Sassen, Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 23. P. Duara, Rescuing History From the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) p. 5. 24. See, for example, Zhang X. J. (ed), Kuashiji de Youhuan: Yingxiang Zhongguo Wengding Fazhan de Zhuya Shehui Wenti [Millenial Angst: Major Social Problems Affecting China’s Stability and Development],

Notes 207

25. 26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Lanzhou: Lanzhou Daxue Chubanshe, 1998. [Lanzhou: Lanzhou University Press, 1998]. J. Stacey, Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). See, for example L. Rofel, ‘Liberation Nostalgia and a Yearning for Modernity’, in Gilmartin, C. K., Hershatter, G., Rofel, L., White, T. (eds), Engendering China: Women, Culture, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) pp. 226–49; E. Judd, Gender and Power in Rural North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); D. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Rofel, 1999. L. H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 1. Quoted in Liu, p. 3. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) p. 3. Ibid., pp. 17–18. J. Vickers, Reinventing Political Science: A Feminist Approach (Halifax: Fernwood Publishing, 1997) p. 28. D. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). J. Oi, ‘The Role of the Local State in China’s Transitional Economy’, The China Quarterly, 144 (December 1995) pp. 1132–49; A. G. Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). M. Yang, ‘The Modernity of Power in the Chinese Socialist Order’, Cultural Anthropology, (November 1988) 410. E. Grosz, ‘Contemporary Theories of Power and Subjectivity’, in Gunew S. (ed.), Feminist Knowledge: Critique and Construct (London and New York: Routledge, 1990) p. 89. S. Hall, Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices (London: Sage Publication, 1997) p. 44. M. Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972). Hall, 1997, p. 45. J. Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault (New York: Routledge, 1991) p. 23. P. Bourdieu, The Outline of Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) p. 170. Ibid., p. 171. The term ‘subaltern’ is borrowed from Spivak’s article ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988) pp. 271–313. By subaltern, Spivak meant ‘the space of difference from foreign elite, indigenous elite and then the area within indigenous space which is accessible to class mobility’. See P. Cheah, ‘Situation of Value: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on Feminism and Cultural Work in a Postcolonial Neocolonial Conjuncture’, Australian Feminist Studies, 17 (1993) 152.

208

Notes

43. For a more detailed analysis of the issue ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in China, see G. Hershatter, ‘The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subaltern Theory and Chinese History’, positions, 1:1 (1992) 103–30. 44. Ong, 1987; Hossfeld, 1990; Mohanty, 1997. 45. M. Burawoy, The Politics of Production (London: Verso, 1985). 46. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1980). 47. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1985) especially Ch. 3. 48. Ong, 1987, especially Ch. 4. 49. G. Konrád and I. Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979). 50. Honig, Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai, 1850–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 51. F. Anthias and N. Yuval-Davis, ‘Contextualizing Feminism – Gender, Ethnic and Class Division’, Feminist Review, 15 (1983) 63. 52. B. Jessop, State Theory: Putting Capitalist States in their Place (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990) pp. 9–13. 53. I thank Jamie Lawson for helping me think through this idea. 54. Jessop, 1990, Introduction. 55. R. Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) p. 108. 56. L. Mani, ‘Multiple Mediations: Feminist Scholarship in the Age of Multinational Reception’, Feminist Review, 35 (1990) 25. 57. D. Haraway, ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’, in Haraway, D., Simian, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) pp. 183–201. 58. Mani, 1990, p. 26. 59. Major exceptions are Rofel on silk workers and economic reform in Hangzhou (Rofel, 1994 and 1999); and Judd on Chinese women in rural northern China (Judd, 1994). 60. Wolf, 1992, p. 25.

1 The ‘Strategic Silence’ and ‘Tactical Noise’ in Economic Reform 1. Personal interview conducted on 8 March 1996. 2. Personal interview conducted on 8 March 1996. 3. See Dang de Shisijiesanzhong Quanhui Jueding [Decision made at the Third Plenum of the Fourteenth Session of the Central Committee], 1994. 4. D. Goodman, ‘China: The State and Capitalist Revolution’, Pacific Review, 5:4 (1992) 350–9; M. Blecher, China against the Tides: Restructuring through Revolution, Radicalism and Reform (London: Pinter, 1997); Meisner, 1996. 5. Rofel, 1994 and 1999; C. K. Lee, Women Workers and Manufacturing Miracle: Gender, Labour Markets, and Production in South China, PhD Dissertation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Judd, 1994. 6. E. Honig and G. Hershatter, Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); T. Jacka, Women’s Work in Rural

Notes 209

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

China: Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Rofel, 1994: Rofel, 1999. T. Barlow, ‘Politics and Protocols of Funü: (Un)Making National Woman’, in C. Gilmartin et al. (eds), 1994, pp. 341–2. D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Inquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990) p. 12. A. Dirlik, ‘Modernism and Antimodernism in Mao Zedong’s Marxism’, in Dirlik, A., Healy, P. and Night, N. (eds), Critical Perspectives on Mao Zedong’s Thought (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997) p. 60. For an excellent critique of Enlightenment History writing in China since early in the twentieth century, see Duara, 1995. History is capitalized here to differentiate alternative histories from national History. See Duara, 1995. Ibid., p. 139. For an elaboration of this point, see A. Ong, ‘Anthropology, China and Modernities: The Geopolitics of Cultural Knowledge’, in Moore, H. L. (ed.), The Future of Anthropological Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1996) pp. 60–92. For the text of Heshang, see Cui W. H. (ed.), Lun Heshang [On Heshang], Beijing: Wenyiyishu Chubanshe [Culture and Arts Press, 1988]. Lu Yi et al. (eds), Qiuji: Yige Shijixin de Xuanze [Global Membership: Choice of the Century], Shanghai: Baijia Chubanshe [One-Hundred-Schools Press, 1989]. Ibid., pp. 39–40. Zhongguo Lishi Weiwu Zhuyi Xuehui [Chinese Society of Historical Materialism] he Guoqing Diaocha Gongzuo Weiyuanhui [and Working Committee on the National Situation] (eds), Dachao Xinqi: Deng Xiaoping Nanxun Qianqian Houhou [The New Big Tide: The Ins and Outs of Deng Xiaoping’s Tour of the South], Beijing: Zhongguo Guangbu Dianshi Chubanshe [Chinese TV and Broadcasting Press, 1992] p. 66. All the translations are mine unless noted. See, for example, Ibid. I. Bakker, ‘Introduction: The Gendered Foundations of Restructuring in Canada’, in Bakker, I. (ed.), Rethinking Restructuring: Gender and Change in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996) p. 4. I. Bakker, Identity, Interests and Ideology: The Gendered Terrain of Global Restructuring, Unpublished manuscript, p. 11. J. Brodie, ‘Canadian Women, Changing State Forms, and Public Policy’, in Brodie, J. (ed.), Women in Canadian Public Policy (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Javonovitch, 1994) p. 56. G. Standing, ‘Global Feminization through Flexible Labor’, World Development, 17:7 (1989) 1077. For more on the SAPs and their negative consequences on women in developing countries, see, for example, L. Benería and S. Feldman (eds), Unequal Burdens: Economic Crisis, Persistent Poverty, and Women’s Work (Boulder: Westview, 1992). For the negative consequences of structural adjustment on women in the developed countries, see, for example, Bakker, 1996. Brodie, 1994, p. 56. See, for example, H. Afshar and C. Dennis (eds), Women and Adjustment Policies in the Third World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991).

210

Notes

26. For example, see Y. J. Bian, ‘Guanxi and the Allocation of Urban Jobs in China’, The China Quarterly, (December 1994) 971–97. 27. See, for example, Zhongguo Lishiweiwuzhuyi Xuehui he Guoqing Diaocha Gongzuoweiyuanhui [China’s Historical Materialism Society and National Situation Survey Working Committee] (eds), 1992, pp. 24–7. 28. A. Anagnost, ‘Socialist Ethics and the Legal System’, in Wasserstrom, J. N. and Perry, E. J. (eds), Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China (Boulder: Westview, 1992) p. 180. 29. See, for example, Oi, 1995. 30. For example, D. Elson, ‘Gender-Aware Analysis and Development Economics’, Journal of International Development, 5:2 (1991) 237–47; Afshar and Dennis, 1991. 31. For a feminist economic critique of neoliberal economics, see, for example, Bakker, 1994, pp. 1–29. 32. N. Kabeer and J. Humphrey, ‘Neo-Liberalism, Gender, and the Limits of the Market’, in Colclough, C. and Manor, J. (eds), States and Markets? NeoLiberalism and the Development Policy Debate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) pp. 78–100. 33. Ibid., pp. 78–100. 34. Standing, 1989; Ward, 1990. 35. Standing, 1989. 36. Ward, ‘Introduction and Overview’, in Ward, 1990, p. 2. 37. See, for example, Fernández-Kelly, 1983, pp. 85–90. 38. Blecher, 1997, p. 157. 39. S. G. Zhang, ‘Reform the Economic Structure and Increase the Macroeconomic Results: An Analysis of China’s Economic Structure and the Changes in Economic Results’, Social Science in China, (March 1982) 58. 40. Honig and Hershatter, ‘Women and Work’, in Honig and Hershatter, 1988, pp. 243–71. 41. C. Li, Rediscovering China: Dynamics and Dilemma of Reform (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers Inc, 1997) p. 122. 42. M. Y. K. Woo, ‘Chinese Women Workers: The Delicate Balance between Protection and Equality’, in Gilmartin et al. (eds), 1994, p. 280. 43. Ibid., p. 244. 44. Z. Mo, ‘Tiansheng Wocai Biyouyong’ [Everybody is Useful According to her/ his Ability], in Zhongguo Funü [Women of China], (May 1996) p. 27. 45. For example, see Zhongguo Funü, vols 1–12, 1996 for a wide range of discussions on the ‘advantages and disadvantages of middle-aged women in employment’. 46. According to national statistics of 1988, only 50 per cent of urban children were enrolled in day care centres. 47. X. J. Li, ‘Economic Reform and the Awakening of Women’s Consciousness’, in Gilmartin, C. et al. (eds), 1994, p. 364. 48. C. Gilmartin, Engendering the Chinese Revolution: Radical Women, Communist Politics, and Mass Movements in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 30. 49. Ibid. 50. Honig and Hershatter, 1988, p. 243. 51. Woo, 1994, p. 284.

Notes 211 52. E. Croll (ed.), The Women’s Movement in China: A Selection of Readings (Nottingham: Anglo-Chinese Educational Institute, 1973) pp. 17–29. 53. Wan Mu-chun, ‘How the Problem of Women Should be Viewed’, in Ibid., p. 20. 54. Lu Tonglin (ed.), Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Chinese Literature and Society (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) pp. 7–8. 55. For a detailed ethnographical analysis of this issue, see Rofel, 1994. 56. Anagnost, 1992, p. 180. 57. Woo, 1994, p. 286. 58. Ibid., p. 282. 59. Ibid. 60. Refuting the past in order to establish the legitimacy and authority of the present regime and policies is nothing new. One only needs to recall the ‘speaking bitterness’ campaign in the 1950s. 61. Honig and Hershatter, 1988, p. 30. 62. Ibid., p. 47. 63. L. H. M. Ling, ‘The Other Side of Globalization: Hypermasculine Developmentalism in East Asia’, Paper Presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Toronto, 1997, pp. 12–13.

2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

‘Emergent Classes’ and Sicheng Society Personal interview 23 March 1996. Personal interview 4 March 1996. Personal interview 22 March 1996. Personal interview 15 March 1996. Personal interview 6 March 1996. Personal interview 17 March 1996. C. Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Sociology: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986) p. 194. E. M. Wood, The Retreat from Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (London: Verso, 1986). Ong, 1987, pp. 74–8. Ibid., pp. 57–8. This discussion has been informed in particular by Goodman, 1992; Meisner, 1996; X. B. Lü and Perry, E., Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, Inc, 1997); Unger, 1994 and Yang et al. 1993. Lü and Perry, ‘Introduction: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective’, in Lü and Perry, 1997, pp. 6–8; Y. Q. Yang, et al., Shei Ye Bao Bu Zhu Tiefanwan: Shiye Jiushiniandai Diyi Weiji [No One Can Guarantee the Iron Rice Bowl: Unemployment – The Foremost Crisis of the 90s] Chengdu: Sichuan Daxue Chubanshe [Chengdu: Sichuan University Press, 1993] pp. 257–60. Goodman, 1992, p. 291. For a thorough study of guanxi in China, see M. Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) esp, pp. 1–2.

212

Notes

15. B. Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) pp. 207–8. 16. Quoted in A. Dirlik, ‘The Predicament of Marxist Revolutionary Consciousness: Mao Zedong, Antonio Gramsci, and the Reformulation of Marxist Revolutionary Theory’, Modern China, 9:2 (1983) 200. 17. Ibid., p. 183. 18. Ibid., pp. 22–3. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., p. 193. 21. Ibid., p. 195. 22. A. Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation and Power in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) p. 28. 23. Ibid., p. 196. 24. W. Hinton, Fanshen: A Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). 25. Dirlik, 1983, p. 204. 26. Anagnost, 1997, p. 29. 27. J. Billeter, ‘The System of “Class-Status”’, in Schram, S. (ed.), The Scope of State Power in China (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1985) p. 128. 28. Ibid., p. 129. 29. Hinton, 1966, p. 286. 30. Dirlik, 1983, p. 197. 31. Blecher, 1997, pp. 146–7. 32. For an example of how enemies had to be invented during the Cultural Revolution, see for example, B. M. Frolic, ‘Kill the Chickens to Scare the Monkeys: The Cultural Revolution in a Peking Office’, in Frolic, B. M., Mao’s People: Sixteen Portraits of Life in Revolutionary China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) pp. 157–77. 33. See, for example C. Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) Ch. 8. 34. Ibid., p. 50. 35. Z. D. Mao, Selected Works. vol. IV (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967) p. 167. 36. A. Dirlik, ‘Spiritual Solutions to Material Problems: The “Socialist Ethics and Courtesy Month” in China’, The South Atlantic Quarterly, 81:4 (Autumn 1982) 371. 37. Riskin, 1987, p. 67. 38. Ibid., p. 95. 39. Ibid., p. 45. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., p. 82. 42. Ibid., p. 251. 43. Ibid., p. 163. 44. Ibid., p. 192. 45. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 46. Personal interview 2 April 1996. 47. Personal interview 12 March 1996. 48. Personal interview 7 March 1996.

Notes 213 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

75. 76. 77. 78.

Personal interview 13 March 1996. Personal interview 15 March 1996. Personal interview 15 March 1996. Personal interview 18 March 1996. Personal interview 7 April 1996. Cadres in China are ranked according to administrative levels: central government, provincial, municipality directly under the Central Government (Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjing), municipality, county, town and township. Dirlik, 1982, pp. 370–2. For a more detailed account of emerging social hierarchies in urban China, see, for example Goodman, 1992, pp. 350–9. Meisner, 1996, p. 251. Personal interview 15 March 1996. Yang, 1994, pp. 54–5. Ibid., p. 71. Ibid., p. 172. Ibid., p. 171. What is unsettling for some interviewees is the suspicion that the highest authorities are no longer siding with the ‘mice’, even if most accept that material prosperity has been the result. The Chinese government, as I will suggest later, works hard, through the ‘spiritual civilization’ campaign, to allay such suspicions. See also O. Odgaard, ‘Entrepreneurs and Elite Formation in Rural China’, The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, 28 (July 1992) pp. 89–108. K. Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1986) p. 97. Y. Mu, ‘Taolun: Zhongguo Xiangzhenqiye de Qiji Shi Zenyang Chuxian de?’ [Discussions: How Did the Miracle of Township- and Village-Owned Enterprises Occur?], in Ma, R. and Hua, C. H. (eds), Jiushiniandai Zhongguo Xiangzhenqiye Diaocha [The Nineties: Survey of Chinese Township- and Village-owned Enterprises] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) p. 437. A. Smart, ‘Gifts, Bribes, and Guanxi: A Reconsideration of Bourdieu’s Social Capital’, Cultural Anthropology, 8.3 (1993) 400. K. Marx, Capital. vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1986). For a further elaboration on this, see Oi, 1995. Judd, 1994, p. 252. Yang, 1994, p. 55. Konrád and Szelényi, 1979, Ch. 4. Ibid., p. 46. Corporations tend to sell their products to retail corporations or other middlemen at three different prices: the lowest is factory prices, then wholesale price and finally retail price. Personal interview 15 March 1996. Yang, 1994, p. 86. Personal interview 15 March 1996. The definition of a xiaokang living standard is very vague and has a status similar to the ‘middle class’ or ‘decent’ standard or a ‘family wage’ in English. According to official interpretation, xiaokang is more than having enough

214

79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

3 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Notes to eat. It means further improvement of living standard, richer material life, more rational consumption structure, great improvement in housing condition, richer entertainment, higher standards of health and more complete social services. For references, see for example Hongwei de Renwu: Xuexi Zhongguo Gongchandang Shisanjie Qizhong Quanhui Jingshen [The Great Task: Grasp the Spirit of Seventh Plenum of the Thirteenth Party Congress] Zhongguo Gongren Chubanshe [Chinese Workers Publishing], 1991, p. 7. Zhongguo Qingnian [Youth of China] 1 (1995) 11. Ibid. Personal interview 6 March 1996. A. Anagnost, ‘Prosperity and Counterprosperity: The Moral Discourse on Wealth in Post-Mao China’, in Dirlik, A. and Meisner, M. (eds), Marxism and the Chinese Experience: Issues in Contemporary Chinese Socialism (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1989) p. 229. G. R. Barmé, Shades of Mao: The Posthumous Cult of Great Leader (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996) p. 13. Anagnost, 1997, p. 104. Hongwei de Renwu [The Grand Task Writing Group] (ed.), Hongwei de Renwu: Xuexi Shisanjieqizhongquanhui Jingshen [The Grand Task: Study the Spirit of the Seventh Plenum of the thirteenth Session of the Party Congress] Zhongguo Gongren Chubanshe [Chinese Workers’ Publishing] 1991, pp. 42–4; Jiang Zeming, Jiakuai Gaige Kaifang he Xiandaihua Bufa, Duoqu Zhongguo Tese Shehuzhuyishiye de Gengda Shengli: Zai Zhongguo Gongchandang Dishisici Quanguo Daibiaodahuishangde Baogao [Speeding Up Reform, Opening to the Outside World, and Modernization Achieve Greater Success in Socialism with Chinese Characteristics: Report Delivered at the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party] 1992, pp. 36–8. Quoted in Zhonggong Suzhoushiwei Xuanchuanbu [Suzhou Communist Party Committee Propaganda] (ed.) Xuexi Dangde Shisijiesanzhongquanhui Jueding Zhuantijiangzuo [Seminar on Studying the Decision of the Third Session of the Fourteenth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party] Suzhou Daxue Chubanshe [Suzhou University Press] 1994, p. 137. Ibid. R. Williams, Marxism and Literature (London: Verso, 1972) p. 132. Anagnost, 1997, p. 76. Personal interview 5 March 1996. Zhongguo Lishiweiwuzhuyi Xuehui he Guoqing Diaocha Gongzuoweiyuanhui [China’s Historical Materialism Society and National Situation Survey Working Committee], 1992 pp. 13–16.

Building Material and Spiritual Civilization in Sicheng Personal interview 29 February 1996. Personal interview 12 March 1996. Personal interview 4 March 1996. Personal interview 4 March 1996. Personal interview 5 March 1996.

Notes 215 6. S. Greenblatt, ‘Introduction’, in Greenblatt, S. The People of Taihang: An Anthology of Family Histories (White Plains, NY: International Arts and Sciences Press, 1976) p. xx. 7. Ibid., pp. xii–lii. 8. When I was in Sicheng in 1996, I asked both town officials and union officials whether I could have copies of local histories written during the 1960s, but I got an unenthusiastic reception. Eventually I did get a copy of local Sicheng history and a copy of Yonghong factory’s history. The reception I got may be interpreted as follows: the history of class struggle is no longer relevant in the current economic reform, and therefore better forgotten. 9. E. Honig, ‘Regional Identity, Labor, and Ethnicity in Contemporary China’, in Perry, E. J. (ed.), (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 1996) p. 241. 10. For a more elaborate study of Shanghai weavers’ militancy, see E. J. Perry, ‘Strikes among Shanghai Silk Weavers, 1927–1937’, in Wakeman, F. Jr. and Yeh, W. (eds), Shanghai Sojourners (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) pp. 305–41. 11. Dangwei Yijiuqiqinian Xuanchuangongzuo Zongjie [Propaganda Work Summary of Party Committee] 1997, Manuscript, p. 5. (This manuscript is prepared by the Sicheng Party Committee. It is now in my possession.) 12. Lu, 1996, p. 145. 13. F. Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) p. 200. 14. It is ironic that contemporary Jiangnan people look down upon northerners for being ignorant of silk production. 15. Fei Xiaotong, Rural Development in China: Prospects and Retrospect, with a foreword by T. Tang (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) pp. 138–42. 16. K. Pomeranz, The Making of a Hinterland: State, Society, and Economy in Inland North China, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 17. Fei, 1989, p. 139. 18. Honig, 1992, pp. 29–31. 19. Honig, 1996, p. 149. 20. Fei, 1989. 21. A. Finnae, ‘The Origins of Prejudice: The Malintegration of Subei in Late Imperial China’, Comparative Study of Society and History, 35:2 (1993) 231. 22. Ibid., pp. 231–2. 23. XX Zhi [The Gazette for the Town of Sicheng] (1991) pp. 154–65. (I have a copy in my possession.) 24. Riskin, 1987, p. 117. 25. XX Zhi, p. 167. 26. Riskin, 1987, p. 209. 27. D. Solinger, ‘Despite Decentralization: Disadvantages, Dependence and Ongoing Central Power in the Inland – The Case of Wuhan’, The China Quarterly, 145 (March 1996) 17. 28. In this quote, there is a tension with modernization language. ‘New’ here means new to capital, the new investment frontier of the backward, and hence otherwise ‘old’ interior. ‘Old’ here means traditionally industrial regions, hence the ‘advanced’ coast.

216

Notes

29. Quoted in D. Solinger, China’s Transition from Socialism: Statist Legacies and Market Reforms, 1980–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) p. 158. 30. X. Liu, ‘Space, Mobility, and Flexibility: Chinese Villages and Scholars Negotiate Power at Home and Abroad’, in Ong, A. and Nonini, D. (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Chinese Transnationalism (New York: Routlege, 1997) p. 93. 31. This figure of speech refers to the character in the dragon parades of the Chinese New Year. The wulongren, a comic figure, together with a symbolic sphere or ball, bait the dragon of good fortune, and so leads the dragon forward along the parade route. 32. See also J. Oi, ‘Rational Choices and Attainment of Wealth and Power in the Countryside’, in Goodman, D. S. G. and Hoover, B. (eds), 1994, pp. 69–72. 33. XX Zhi, pp. 170–2. 34. Personal interview with the section chief (zhuren) of the Silk Market Management Committee on 18 March 1996. 35. D. Howland, Borders of Chinese Civilization: Geography and History at Empire’s End (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996) p. 172. 36. C. Mackerras, ‘Unofficial Regional Records’, in Leslie, D. D., Mackerras, C. and Wang Gungwu (eds), Essays on the Sources for Chinese History (Sydney: Australian National University, 1973) p. 75. 37. Teahouses functioned as information centres, where silk merchants exchanged information. 38. One is reminded of the latest debates on the regional differences in Canada. Such focus conceals the class, gender and race divisions within each region and locale in Canada. 39. See, for example Lee, 1994. 40. Ibid., p.149. 41. Ibid., p. 230. 42. Quoted in Honig, 1992, p. 112. 43. Honig, 1992. 44. Ibid., p. 150. 45. Honig, 1996, p. 148. 46. Yang, 1988, p. 413. 47. M. Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to ‘the People’ (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 48. Ibid. 49. Walder, 1986, p. 35. 50. A. Kipnis, ‘(Re)inventing Li: Koutou and Subjectification in Rural Shandong’, in Zito, A. and Barlow, T. (eds), 1994, p. 204. 51. H. Malle, ‘China’s Household Registration System under Reform’, Development and Change, 20 (1995) 2. 52. Walder, 1986, p. 37. 53. Ibid., p. 48. 54. Ibid., p. 38. 55. Similar argument that hukou takes up the meaning of citizenship is found in D. Solinger, 1999. 56. Quoted in D. Solinger, ‘The Floating Population in the Cities: Chances for Assimilation?’, in Davis, D., Karus, R. et al. (eds), Urban Spaces in Contemporary

Notes 217

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

4 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) pp. 126–7. D. Massey, ‘Power-Geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place’, in Bird, J., Curtis, B., Putnam, T., Roberston, G. and Tickner, L. (eds), Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change (London: Routledge, 1993) p. 61. Mohanty, 1997, p. 11. Ibid. Tiano, 1994. M. Mies, The Lace Makers of Narsapur: Indian Housewives Produce for the World Market (London: Zed, 1982). Hossfeld, 1990, pp. 149–78. Mohanty, 1997, p. 16. Ibid., p. 12.

New Factory Women in Time and Space Personal interview 1 March 1996. Personal interview 22 March 1996. Personal interview with Tao, a female migrant worker 4 March 1996. Y. Meng and J. H. Dai, Fuchu Lishidibiao: Zhonguo Xiandai Nüxing Yanjiu [Voices Emerging in the Foreground of History: A Study of Contemporary Chinese Women’s Literature], Taipei: Shibao Wenhua Chuban Youxian Gongsi [Time Newspaper Publication Ltd] 1993, pp. 5–6. P. B. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) p. 2. In Chinese, both women’s work and womanly work have the same term, nügong. Bray, 1997, p. 256. Ibid. Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 82. Ibid., p. 193. Ibid., p. 149. Ibid., p. 210. S. Y. Tong, Zhongguo Shougongye Shangye Fazhanshi [The History of China’s Handicraft Industry and Commerce], (Jinan: Qilu Shushe, 1981) pp. 72 and 107–8. Bray, p. 204. Ko, 1994, p. 20. P. Santangelo, ‘Urban Society in Late Imperial Suzhou’, in Cooke, J. L. (ed), Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) pp. 89–90. Ibid., p. 265. The issue of women’s history during the Song is beyond this work. For more elaborate studies of how women fared in the Song, see Ko, 1994 and Ebrey, 1993. Bray, p. 240.

218

Notes

21. S. Mann, ‘Household Handicrafts and the State Policy in Qing Times’, in Leonard, J. K. and Watt, J. R. (eds), To Achieve Security and Wealth: The Qing Imperial State and the Economy, 1644–1911, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992) p. 79. 22. Bray, p. 210. 23. A. Franklin, The Silk Industry of the World at the Opening of the Twentieth Century, (New York: New York Silk Association of America, 1904) p. 11. 24. For more details on the changing status of Chinese weavers in the 1920s, see Perry, 1992. 25. R. Eng, Economic Imperialism in China: Silk Production and Exports, 1861–1932, (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Press, 1986) p. 156. 26. Perry, 1992, p. 308. 27. Ibid., p. 312. 28. Ibid. 29. Perry, 1992. 30. Ibid. 31. D. Mao, Chun Can [Spring Silkworms], Jiulong, HK: Jiliu Shudian [Rapids Books], 1976. 32. Personal interview 12 June 1995. 33. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 34. Some people are suspicious of the accuracy of migrants’ response to the question of why they migrate, especially in international migration which often involves illegal immigrants. However, it is an important question to ask, and I situate my interviewees’ responses in the social, political, economic and cultural context to make sense of their responses. 35. Zhongguo Qingnian [Youth of China], no. 2, 1997. 36. Salaff, 1995; Wolf, 1992. 37. For Hong Kong, see Salaff, 1995; for Taiwan, see M. Wolf, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972). 38. Wolf, 1992, p. 27. 39. M. J. Maynes, A. Waltner, B. Soland and U. Strasser, Gender, Kinship, Power: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary History (New York: Routledge, 1994) p. 2. 40. Ibid., p. 17. 41. E. Judd, ‘Niangjia: Chinese Women and Their Natal Families’, The Journal of Asian Studies, 48:3 (August 1989) 543. 42. Rofel, 1999. 43. A. Chan, R. Madsen and J. Unger, Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao’s China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) pp. 33–4. 44. K. A. Johnson, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983) p. 174. 45. Kabeer, ‘Cultural Dopes or Rational Fools? Women and Labour Supply in the Bangladesh Garment Industry’, European Journal of Development Research, (November 1989) 138. 46. See, for example, Kabeer, 1989; Wolf, 1992. 47. Wolf, 1992, p. 106. 48. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 49. Personal interview 5 March 1996.

Notes 219 50. Quanguo Jingji he Sehui Fazhan Tongji [National Statistics on National Economy and Social Development], in Jingji Ribao [Economics Daily], April 5, 1997, p. 2. 51. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 52. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 53. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 54. Personal interview 22 March 1996. 55. Personal interview with Hua 4 March 1996. 56. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 57. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 58. Mengya [Budding], April 1993, pp. 6–8. (The journal is published by the trade union and Party office in Yonghong. I have several issues in my possession.) 59. Ong, 1987, p. 182. 60. Ibid., p. 183. 61. There are many stories in the Chinese media about women migrants being abducted or convinced to move under false pretenses. Among the publications covering these matters is Fazhi Ribao [Law Gazette]. 62. Personal interview 14 May 1995. 63. Personal interview 6 March 1996. 64. Lee, 1994, p. 106. 65. Ibid., p. 106. 66. Mccartney 1927, quoted in Hershatter, ‘Prostitution and Market in Women in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai’, in Watson, R. S. and Ebrey, P. B. (eds), Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) pp. 267–8. 67. Ong, 1987, p. 184. 68. Quoted in Ibid., p. 185. 69. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 70. Personal interview 8 March 1996. 71. Rofel, 1994, p. 229. 72. For more detailed discussion of this point, see Ibid.

5 A Close Watch in a Tight Space: Multiple Foci of Labour Control 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Personal interview 21 March 1996. Personal interview 7 March 1996. Personal interview 23 March 1996. Personal Interview 5 March 1996. Ong, 1987 and 1991; Lee, 1994. M. di Leonardo, ‘Introduction: Gender, Culture, and Political Economy: Feminist Anthropology in Historical Perspective’, in di Leonardo, M. (ed.), Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the Postmodern Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) p. 21. Hall, ‘Introduction’, Hall, 1997, p. 2. Hall, 1997, p. 4. Wolf, 1992, pp. 23–4. Spivak, 1988, p. 308. Hershatter, 1993, pp. 103–30.

220

Notes

12. J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 13. There are debates on whether bureaucratic elites in actually existing socialism constitute a class. It is not the intention of this study to engage with the debate. As far as what I have gathered from my personal interviews of both workers and managers, workers and managers do have a hierarchical relationship. Although managers have been trying hard to instill ‘working class consciousness’ in workers, workers continue to experience multiple identities based on gender, place of origin and class. 14. Mohanty, 1997. 15. See also Rofel, 1999, p. 265. 16. Elson and Pearson, 1981. 17. Q. Yu, ‘Lun ruohe diaodong gongren de gongzuo reqing [On How to Mobilize Workers’ Enthusiasm for Work]’, Mengya [Budding] (1992) 57. 18. Bourdieu, 1977, pp. 78–87. 19. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 20. M. H. Zhao and T. Nichols, ‘Management Control of Labor in StateOwned Enterprise: Cases from the Textile Industry’, The China Journal, (July 1996) 14. 21. Unpublished manuscript. It is now in my possession. 22. Frolic, 1980, pp. 242–56. 23. Burawoy, 1985, p. 172. 24. Personal interview 7 March 1996. 25. Personal interview 2 June 1995. 26. F. W. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1967) pp. 37–8. 27. I borrowed the term from Rofel. See L. Rofel, ‘Rethinking Modernity: Space and Factory Discipline in China’, Cultural Anthropology, (February 1992) 93–113. 28. Foucault, 1979. 29. Rofel, 1992, p. 98. 30. Guoying Qiye Zhigong Sixiangzhengzhigongzuo Gangyao [Programme on the Thought Work of SOEs Workers] Zhonggong Weiyuanhui [The Central Committee of the Communist Party], 1 July 1983. 31. For example, the state provides guidance to SOEs on such matters as sixianggongzuo and regulations on reward and punishment system. 32. Personal interview 23 March 1996. 33. Personal interview 21 March 1996. 34. Guorong, ‘Tansuo Zherenchengbaozhi xia Sixianggongzuo de Xinfangfa’ [Exploring New Methods in Combining Thought Work with Responsibility Contract System], Mengya [Budding], (1987) 77–82. 35. Mengya [Budding], (April 1993) 6–8. 36. Personal interview 7 March 1996. 37. Ibid., p. 53. 38. Burawoy, 1985, p. 189. 39. Williams, 1972, p. 132. 40. S. Brownell, Training the Body for China: Sports in the Moral Order of the People’s Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) p. 157. 41. Ibid., p. 173.

Notes 221 42. Personal interview 1 March 1996. 43. Rofel, 1992, p. 102.

6 Identities of Women Migrant Workers: The Intersection of Gender, Class and Place of Origin 1. Personal interview 4 March 1996. 2. Personal interview 6 March 1996. 3. See for example, S. Gunew and A. Yeatman (eds), Feminism and the Politics of Difference (Sydney: Allen and Unwin) 1993. 4. Dutton, 1992. 5. L. Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’, Cultural Anthropology, 1 (February 1992) 32. 6. Ibid., p. 33. 7. Soguk, 1996, p. 292. 8. Fazhi Ribao [Law Gazette], 11 August 1992. 9. Ibid. 10. Soguk, 1996, p. 303. 11. This is not unique to Sicheng. As Malle suggests, the general practice of local governments is to allow the existence of ‘floating migrants’, because this group is ‘a source of cheap labor, without being a great burden on the state budget, and because of its slightly ambiguous status, it can be controlled when necessary’. See Malle, 1995, p. 9. 12. Soguk, 1996, p. 299. 13. Malkki, 1992, p. 34. 14. Shaoguang, Wang, ‘The Politics of Private Time: Changing Leisure Patterns in Urban China’, in Davis, D. S. et al. (eds), 1995, p. 151. 15. Personal interview 6 March 1996. 16. Personal interview 2 March 1996. 17. E. Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mill, 1919–1949, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986) pp. 4–5. 18. Menya [Budding] 9 (1986) 1–4. 19. Ibid. 20. Personal interview 2 March 1996. 21. See, for example, Frolic, 1980, pp. 9–22. 22. Chow, 1993, pp. 104–7. 23. Statistics have shown that unmarried rural women who do non-farming work marry at a later age. See, for example, Liang, Z. T. and Yan, H. Q. Zhongguo Nongcun ü Zaohun Zaoyu he Duotaishengyu Wenti Yanjiu [A Study on the Issues of Rural Women’s Early Marriage, Early and Multiple Pregnancies], Sanxi Gaoxiao Lianhe Chubanshe [Taiyuan: Shangxi University United Press] 1992, p. 24. 24. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 25. Personal interview 5 March 1996. 26. T. L. Lu, Misogyny, Cultural Nihilism, and Opposition Politics: Contemporary Chinese Experimental Fictions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995) p. 183.

222

Notes

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Personal interview 5 March 1996. Personal interview 5 March 1996. Honig and Hershatter, 1988, pp. 309–29. Lu, 1995, p. 183. Personal interview 1 March 1996. D. Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994) p. 11. 33. Personal interview 4 March 1996.

Conclusion 1. See, for example, Yang, 1994, for a detailed account of how an Americantrained anthropologist was frustrated, and ultimately failed to get permission to conduct a participatory observation study of factory workers in Beijing. 2. A. Ong and M. Peletz, ‘Introduction’, in Ong, A. and Peletz, M. (eds), Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) p. 7.

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Index advertising, 121–2 Althusser, Louis, 52, 157, 159 Anagnost, Ann, 74, 96 Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N., 26–7 Asad, Talal, 20 Bakker, Isabella, 17, 42, 205, see gender and structural adjustment Barlow, Tani, 37, see woman, alternative Chinese terms for beauty salons, 104–5, 147–9, 183, 197 birth control, see population control boundaries, 8–9, 21, 30, 91–4, 121, 135–6, 169–71, 183–95, 203 Bourdieu, Pierre, on habitus, 164; on doxa, 24 Bray, Ebrey, on womanly work versus women’s work, 131–3 Brownell, Susan, 176–7, see civility/wenmin campaign, population quality (renkou suzhi) Burawoy, Michel, 26, 156–9, 167, 176; on culture and political economy, 26; on piece-rate, 167 Chow, Rey, 194 civility/wenmin campaign, 35, 97–100, see population quality (renkou suzhi); Anagnost, Ann; civilization, material and spiritual civilization, material and spiritual (wuzhi he jingshen wenmin), 2, 34–5, 102–28, 155–6, 172, 175 class, 18, 25–8, 63, 66, 71–80, 100–1, 180, 205; ‘for themselves’ versus ‘in themselves’, 62–3, 71, 97; and economic reform, 80–97; in other state-socialist systems, 26, 63–71, 180–98, see Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I.; in PRC, 58–101, 154–98

Communist Party, Chinese, 66–7, 73–8, 83–7, 92–8, 107–10, 115, 119, 160, 171–2, 201, 203; Central Committee, 3rd Plenum, 11th Session (1978), 13, 35, 44, 79, 97; 3rd Plenum, 14th Session (1992), 2; 14th Plenum (1994), 15 criminalization, of migrants, 181–8; see policing, local Cultural Revolution, 36, 50–2, 55, 62, 64, 77–9, 90, 98, 100, 113, 138, 152, 166, 169, 194, 199; and silk production, 112 culture (wenhua), 20, 35, 38, 40–2, 53, 55, 72, 73, 88, 90, 93, 98, 101, 104–5, 108–10, 118, 119, 121, 146–7, 156–7, 170, 172, 176–7, 182, 195, 197 daguofan (eating from one big pot), 78, 166; see iron rice bowl Daqiu village, 50–1; see gender division of labour Deng Xiaoping, see economic reform; southern tour (nanxun) 1992, 34, 200 dialectics, 61–80 Dirlik, Arif, 39, 76, 77, 87; on Gramsci, Antonio, 72–4; on Mao, Zedong, 72–4; see New Democracy Model; class discourse, and migrant workers, 181–83, 189–92 dormitories, conditions in, 30, 31, 99, 138, 142, 146, 149, 150, 153, 171, 173, 182, 184–9, 193, 200; see policing, factory Duara, Prasenjit, 17, 39 economic reform, 1–6, 11–8, 21–32 passim, 34–9, 120, 125, 138, 151, 155, 160, 165, 173–4, 184, 192, 199–204; and gender, 41–5, 47, 50, 234

Index 53–7; and class, 63, 80, 81, 84–6, 90, 92, 168–9, 176, 179, 187, 192; and party leadership, 95–100; and Sicheng, 105–9, 114–5, 119; and nationalism, 38–42; and silk production, 12–3, 115–7; and sixianggongzuo, 171–6; and SOEs, 116–7, 154, 159–60, 171–6 ethnicity, 8–9, 17, 35, 205; see place of origin ( jiguan) exams, failed, 70, 139, 142 exports, silk, 13, 80, 112, 117, 119 farming, 59, 60, 85, 86, 112, 132, 135, 191, 193, 197; and factory work, 59, 84, 116, 191, 193; see rural decollectivization Five Goods campaign (wuhao huodong), 51, 115 flexible accumulation, 2, 3, 12–5, 21, 35, 45, 47, 110, 117, 150, 152, 156, 172, 181, 201, 202; and gender, 125–7 Ford, Henry, and moral regulation, 188–9; see Huaqiang Foucault, Michel, 9, 17, 21–5, 93, 149, 158, 169, 179, 181, 201; on discourse, 23–4; on panopticon, 169, 179; on power, 17, 21–5, 93, 158, 169, 201; on power/knowledge, 9, 24, 181; on bio-power, 149 Four Histories Movement (Sishi Yundong), 107 Frolic, B. Michael, 166–7 funü, 37; see woman, alternative Chinese terms for gender, 4, 25–8, 31, 42, 94, 125, 130, 138, 140, 128–53, 156, 160, 180–98, 205; and economic reform, 4–5, 42–51, 129–30, 146–53, 186–8, and nationalism, 16–8; and structural adjustment, 2, 4, 35, 45–7, 56; identities, in China, 19–20, 52–3, 156; ideologies, and economic reform, 51–6; ideologies, in other developing countries, 47; ideologies, under

235

economic reform, 18, 36, 39, 51, 55, 127, 202; ideologies, under Mao, 36, 51–5, 113, 137–8, 147, 150–2 gender division of labour, 160–4; in silk production, 130–8 globalization, 6, 13, 16, 19, 20, 202, 205; concept of, 1–2 Gramsci, Antonio, 2, 22, 25, 64, 67, 72, 93, 156, 172, 200; on hegemony, 25, 72, 156, 172; on integral state, 2, 25, 67, 93, 201; on state and civil society, 2, 22, 25, 64, 67, 72, 93, 156, 172, 200; see hegemony Grand Canal, 110–2 Great Leap Forward (1958), 33, 78, 113, 137 Grewal, Inderpal, see Kaplan, Caren and Grewal, Inderpal guanxi, 14, 44, 58, 59, 60, 69, 70, 71, 82–4, 88–94, 116, 125, 190, 200 habitus, 164 Hall, Stuart, 23, 157, 205; on discourse, 23 Haraway, Donna, 28 Harvey, David, 39 hegemony, 25, 38, 72, 80, 99, 172, 174, 198; and Western modernism, 39; concept of, 20, 72–3, 156, 172; exercise of, 40, 107, 117, 156 Henan Province, textile factories, 147, 166 Hershatter, Gail, 49, 159, 196 Hinton, William 76; see class history, 17, 39, 108, 118 History-writing, historic purposes of, 107–8, 118; see Duara, Prasenjit Hong Kong, 5, 96, 105, 139, 183 Hongqi (Red Flag), 52; see All-China Women's Federation Honig, Emily, 9, 26, 49, 108, 120, 191, 196; see Hershatter, Gail; place of origin (jiguan) Hossfeld, Karen J., 25, 126, 205 household responsibility system, 85, 141 households, 138–52

236

Index

Huaqiang factory, 6, 11–3, 30, 31, 69, 142, 144, 150, 154–6, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 172–4, 176, 179, 187–9, 200–1; see township- and village-owned enterprises (TVEs) huiguan, 119; see place of origin ( jiguan) hukou system, 3, 36, 43, 45, 48, 57, 82, 109–10, 122–6, 142, 147, 152, 184, 192; and citizenship, 122–5, 185 Humphrey, John, see Kabeer, Naila and Humphrey, John International Monetary Fund, 2; see Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) iron girls (tianguniang), 52, 55 iron rice bowl, 49, 55 Jessop, Bob, 27–8 Jiangnan, 7–9, 16, 27–9, 109–14; and identity, 117–22 Judd, Ellen, 92, 140 Kabeer, Naila and Humphrey, John, 46 Kaplan, Caren and Grewal, Inderpal, 20, 21, 28 kinship, 2, 4–6, 48, 70–3, 76, 128–52, 186, 201–3; Indonesia and Malaysia compared, 139–40 Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I., 26, 63–6, 93 labour contract, 12, 116, 175 Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal, 26, 63–6, 77 laoban (‘boss’), 33, 58–9, 68, 83–93, 99, 103–5, 116; ambiguous class character of, 91–3; contemporary meaning of, 58, 68, 83, 88–91, 104–5, 116; historical origins of, 89 Lei, Feng, 98 Lenin, Vladimir, 63, 74 Li, Xiaojiang, 25, 37, 51 Liberation (1949), 5, 40, 52, 74–8, 80, 84–5, 87, 90, 94, 102–7, 120, 137, 147, 151, 166 Ling, Lily, 55, 94

Liu, Lydia, 20, 205 Lu, Tonglin, 195; see strong woman (nü qiangren) Malaysia, 5, 21, 26, 41, 66, 146–50, 152, 205; see Ong, Aihwa Malkki, Liisa, 182, 187 management, 185; class origins, 69, 177; local rural origins, 11 management styles, Huaqiang factory vs. Yonghong factory, 160, 172–9 Mani, Lata, 28 Mao, Dun, Spring Silkworm, 137 Mao, Zedong, 12–4, 18, 36, 40, 45, 48, 52, 69, 72–80, 92, 112–4, 147, 150–2, 166–8, 202; class analysis, 66–8, 87, 97; cult, under economic reform, 96–7; New Democracy Model, 77, 87; labour policies under, 166–8; thought work (sixianggongzuo), 160; welfare policies of, 102–3; ‘Analysis of Class in Chinese Society’, 74; On Contradiction, 76; see gender, ideologies, under Mao maquiladora, 126, 205 market, 85, 95; export, 8, 12, 43, 80, 114, 117, 205; Imperial monopoly, 5, 132, 133 marriage, 30, 33, 53, 54, 68, 70, 125–7, 131, 134, 140, 142–4, 148, 190, 195–7, 201; for love, 195, 201; migrant labour as a means to delay, 195 Marriage Law (1980), 54 Marx, Karl, 61, 70, 72; Capital, 61 Massey, Doreen, 125, 196 May Fourth Movement, 40, 51, 54, 137 mechanics, 136, 187; rural men, 58, 99, 188 mechanics and weavers; gender division of labour, 160–4; separation, 171, 186–8 Meisner, Maurice, 88 Meiya Company, 136–7, see silk production; United States Menya (Budding), 192, see trade unions method, in the field, 28–30, 199–201

Index Mexico-US border, 126, 182–5, 205 migration, from Sicheng to Shanghai, 111–12; from Subei to Sicheng, 117, 120–2, 129–30, 138–50, 183, 190, 198, 203–4; see hukou system Ming dynasty, 104, 111, 119, 131–5, 183 Mohanty, Chandra, 25–6, 126, 159, 205 Moore, Barrington, 72–3 Mouffe, Chantal, see Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal naming, 98–9, 117–8, 193–4; women, 37, 51, 53 neo-confucianism, contemporary, 1, 42; during Ming, Qing dynasties, 133–4; during Song dynasty, 132 New Democracy Model, 77, 87 New Household Economics (NHE), 141 New Person, 35, 38, 98, 118, 155 Nichols, T., see Zhao, M. H. and Nichols, T. nü qiangren, see strong woman nüren, 37, 51, 53; see woman, alternative Chinese terms for nüxing, 37; see woman, alternative Chinese terms for Ong, Aihwa, 25–6, 63, 66, 130, 146–7, 150, 156, 158, 205 opera, Beijing ( Jingju) and Shanghai (Kunju) styles, 104 Party-State, 26, 30, 66–7 personal competence (geren nengli), 18 piece-rate, 102, 162, 165–9, 171, 177–8; abolished under Mao, 166 place of origin ( jiguan), 25–8, 102–28, 160–4, 180–98, 201–4; and division of labour, 160–4 policing, factory, in dormitories, 186–9; on shopfloor, 10, 154–5; see population control policing, local, 123, 148, 183–6

237

Pomeranz, Kenneth, 111 population control, 175, 186–7, 195 population quality (renkou suzhi), 17, 35, 71, 98–9, 176; see civilization, material and spiritual postcolonial theory, 20 poststructuralism, 19–25 prep workers, 102, 144, 160–1, 164, 170–1, 179 private entrepreneurs (getihu), 83, 87–9, 91–3, 173 productivity, 37, 51, 86, 165–8, 172, 177, 189, 191; and piece-rate, 102, 162, 165–8, 171, 177–8; and points system, 168 ‘punishment and reward’ management system, 154, 172; compare thought work (sixianggongzuo) Qing dynasty, 111, 134–5 raw material, 92, 112, 114, 134, 161, 164; artificial versus silk, 84; cost reduction, 167, 172 religion, 16, 146–7, 149–50, 152 resistance, worker, 176–9, 193–8; see strikes restaurants, 12, 81, 85, 116, 119, 147–9; see waitress, status of Riskin, Carl, 113; on Mao, Zedong, 77–8 River Elegy (He Shang), 40 Rofel, Lisa, 37, 140, 151, 157, 170, 179, 205 rural decollectivization, 3–4, 13, 44, 48, 68, 140 Said, Edward, 20 Sawicki, Jane, 23 Scott, James, 159 sericulture, 132, 134; progressive separation of, from production, 132–8 Shanghai, 48, 89, 99, 103, 108, 110–2, 114–5, 120, 135–6, 148, 191 shift work, 33–4; and place of origin (jiguan), 163–4

238

Index

Sicheng, 6–13, 27, 58–60, 70, 80–2, 85–9, 91, 102–4, 127–8, 189–90, 197–204; history of, 110–7; history of silk industry, 133–8; policing, 183–6; migrants' reported views, 106–10; historiography and civility/ wenmin campaign, 117–22; and motives of migrants, 143–53, 169–70, 178 silk culture, 104–5 silk market at Sicheng, 59, 81–9, 104, 116–7 silk production, 5, 9, 11, 49, 111, 130, 160–71; and gender, 130–8; history of, 110–7, 130–8; mechanics, 136, 187; prep work, 9, 102, 144, 160–4, 170–1, 179, 189; reeling, 112, 132, 134–5, 138, 144; sericulture, 132, 134; supervision, 111, 179; weaving, 5, 9, 13, 34, 49, 60, 86, 102, 108, 111–3, 130–6, 138, 148, 154, 160–4, 168, 170–1, 178–9, 189–90 skilling/deskilling, 9, 18, 36, 47–50, 88, 102, 164, 170, 174, 190, 194; versus bengshi, 14; see taylorism socialist market economy, 2, 15, 34, 38, 64, 71, 89, 90, 98, 100, 101, 127; compare socialist planned commodity economy socialist planned commodity economy, 34; compare socialist market economy Soguk, Nevzat, 182 Solinger, Dorothy, 22 Song dynasty, 111, 130–8 space, disciplinary power of, 169–71; see Foucault, Michel, on panopticon Special Economic Zones (SEZs), 3, 6, 8, 14, 114 Spivak, Gayatri, 158 Standing, Guy, 47 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), 15, 36, 38, 44–7, 49, 56, 69, 88, 91–4, 96, 113, 116–7, 123, 137–8; see Yonghong factory strikes, 69, 102–3, 154–6, 174 strong woman (nü qiangren), 56, 195, 196

Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs), 2–4, 35, 42–7, 56 subaltern, 74, 158 Subei, 4–8, 27, 85, 127–8, 130, 138, 151–2, 183, 192, 203–4; as source region for migration, 130; and decline of Grand Canal, 110–2; and motivation of migrants, 143–4; in discourse, versus Jiangnan, 7, 9–16, 114–22, 151–2 Subeiren, 31, 112, 119–21; see Subei Szelényi, I., see Konrád, G. and Szelényi, I. taxation, 15, 59, 81, 88, 114, 132–5; in-kind, 134; money, and gender division of labour, 134; silk market, 59 taylorism, 9, 63, 78, 137, 168–9; see skilling/deskilling temple, Silk Goddess in Sicheng, 106, 205 Thompson, E. P., 26, 157 thought work (sixianggongzuo), 12, 155, 160, 168, 171–76, 179, 183 Tiano, Susan, 126, 205 township- and village-owned enterprises (TVEs), 8, 38, 45, 47–8, 91–2, 109, 114–7; see Huaqiang factory trade unions, 154, 165, 173, 187, 191–2, 200; and SOEs, 154, 173–4, 191–2; and TVEs, 173 translation theory, 20, 73, 205 United States, 8, 40, 135; tariff policy and silk production (1920s), 135–6 wages and salaries, 15, 46–8, 68, 78, 102, 113, 126, 129, 137, 145, 147, 162, 165–7, 170, 171, 174, 178, 190–3, 203; and base wage, 162, 165; bonuses, 81, 162–3, 166; bonuses, history of, 80; caps, 166; minimum wage, 129, 165; piece-rate, 165–9, see piece-rate; public versus private sector, 80, 86 waitress, status of, 147–8 Wang, Shaoguang, 103, 108–9, 188

Index weavers, 102, 170; local rural women, 8, 13, 36, 60, 82, 87, 113, 116, 162–3, 167, 174, 179–81, 190–3, 196; migrant Subei women (wailaimei), 5, 6–9, 13, 21–2, 25–8, 30, 59, 87, 99, 101, 109, 116, 122–30, 138–52, 159, 162, 170, 176–98 weavers, male, 161; in Qing dynasty, 136 wenmin/quality discourse, 35, 38, 98, 110, 176; see civility/wenmin campaign; population quality (renkou suzhi); civilization, material and spiritual white collar workers, 68–9, 86, 116 Williams, Gwyn, on concept of hegemony, 72 Williams, Raymond, 99, 176 Wolf, Diane L., 29, 130, 141, 158, 205 Wolf, Margery, 139, 141

239

woman, alternative Chinese terms for, 37, 51, 53; see nüren, nüxing, funü womanly work, see Bray, Ebrey women's work, see Bray, Ebrey Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 65 World Bank, 2 world membership (qiu ji), 41 Yang, Mayfair Mei-hui, 89, 90, 93 Yonghong factory, 6, 9, 11–3, 30–1, 33, 59, 81, 102–3, 129, 138, 144–6, 150–1, 154–6, 159–66, 170, 172–6, 178–9, 181, 186–8, 190–1, 200–1; see state-owned enterprises (SOEs) Yuan dynasty, 132, 134–5 Yuval-Davis, N., see Anthias, F. and Yuval-Davis, N. Zhao, M. H. and Nichols, T. 166 Zhongguo Funü (Chinese Women), 49, 52, 121 Zhu, Rongji, 92