Much scholarly work in the last decade has addressed the lives of rural migrant workers in China. The 2013 Chinese census put the number of internal migrants at 262 million, more than a quarter of the world's mobile population. Scholars inside and outside China have portrayed migrant workers’ exploitation from various angles – rural/urban divisions, labour conditions, gender discrimination – and from diverse political viewpoints, though most offer a structural analysis of their lives (as opposed to an emphasis on individual motivation). Added to this scholarly work, and not just in prose, we find in China numerous documentary and feature films, television news programmes, soap operas, and online blogging and social media that all address various facets of rural migrant workers’ lives. Many of these latter representations are sympathetic, exposing the hardships that rural migrant workers face as they enable China's spectacular economic development. Yet, few of them, at least in the mainstream media, are told from the perspective of migrant workers themselves. Nor do they advocate a structural response to the exploitation of migrant workers, upholding instead the government's agenda for “social harmony” and social stability.
Wanning Sun's Subaltern China succeeds in making an original intervention in an already crowded field. The value of this study lies in its emphasis on cultural productions not only about but by rural migrant workers. In her analysis of the importance of these cultural productions to the subaltern lives of these workers, Sun navigates amongst several popular views about migrant workers: that they are not interested in culture because they only have the energy for sheer survival; that the new technologies in their lives (e.g. QQ, online games, mobile technologies) distract workers from organizing collectively to address their harsh working conditions (a view that Sun calls technological determinism); and conversely, that the only relevant aspects of their lives worth analysing are their economic and political conditions (a view that Sun calls economic determinism). In contradistinction to these assumptions, Sun argues that media and cultural practices are integral to the construction of a subaltern identity among rural migrant workers and constitutive of any possible subaltern politics that might address the exploitative conditions of their existence.
Sun offers a nuanced and sophisticated analysis of these cultural expressions of workers’ voices, using a judicious combination of ethnography, a quantitative survey that she administered, and textual analysis. She situates workers’ creative cultural practices in a complex field that includes state-influenced mainstream culture, market-induced media productions, cultural elite voices, and the consumption of popular media by workers themselves. Rather than treat workers’ cultural productions as existing in their own parallel universe, Sun analyses how they talk back to but also borrow some mainstream narrative strategies; how they reject being spoken for and about by cultural elites but also, at least among some, embrace aspirations for social mobility through their potential media success; and how many of their putative audience – other rural migrant workers – often want to escape their painful lives by watching comedies rather than depictions of the struggles they already know so well.
Sun's goal is the ambitious one of assessing the possibilities for a collective subaltern political consciousness. Sun is quite cognizant that migrant workers are a heterogeneous group, with internal differences and particular grievances depending on their type of employment. For example, a recurring problem for a vast number of construction workers is wage arrears; domestic servants, by contrast, are disrespected by their employers and often face sexual harassment; while factory workers must cope with alienation from their numbing and repetitive working conditions. Yet can they develop a shared politics about their exploitation? Sun's answer is cautious on this point. Her main argument is that such a political consciousness, if it does emerge, will be formed through media and cultural practice. While rural migrant workers are often viewed by cultural elites as lacking in media literacy, according to Sun they are in fact often quite astute in their critiques of stereotypical official and commercial media attempts to include recognition of them even as they hollow out any possibility to imagine a proletarian subjectivity. They are also often quite adroit in appropriating hegemonic media forms. For example, they have organized their own spring festival gala which, in contrast to CCTV's annual spectacle, refuses to make them into objects of society's sympathy and compassion.
Sun's account of culture and inequality in relation to migrant workers examines two main aspects: the process of negotiation and contestation between the hegemonic and the marginal; and the relationship between cultural forms and the historical experiences that shape their emergence. She traces these intertwined aspects through the production of news, urban cinema, documentary videos, photography, poetry and literature with a focus on sex. She devotes full and separate chapters to each of these practices. Sun finds that the “small” technologies of mobile phones, poetry that does not take a lot of time to write, and novels written in pieces through blogs online are most successful in expressing migrant workers’ perspectives. In contrast, workers’ attempts to make use of mainstream media's attention (e.g. by threatening to jump off of buildings to get justice in wage arrears) are not always successful, since the media can as easily portray them as opportunistic. Documentary films about them can often be successful among cultural elites and transnational audiences, but workers themselves prefer urban comedies that allow them to fantasize another life for themselves.
Sun navigates two paradoxes in her study that echo the paradoxes migrant workers face and sometimes discuss. First, what constitutes a subaltern political consciousness? While Sun carefully refuses to offer a static definition, she sometimes delineates what is definitely not part of a subaltern perspective: the views and writings of most cultural elites and official and commercial media. Migrant workers also often dismiss those who used to be one of them but whose success presumably made them sell out. Secondly, while Sun finds that some cultural elites have helped migrant workers to develop skills in new media technologies as well as in writing, she more often finds that these elites amass cultural capital that does not benefit workers. Yet, is not more attention paid to workers’ lives better than less?
I could not put this book down once I began to read it. Sun offers us a close-up view of workers’ hopes and desires, pains and disappointments, and understandings of their exploited situations, putting these in the context of neoliberal economic growth. I look forward to teaching this book in my classes.
