This is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Chinese migrant labour. In this book, the anthropologist Yan Hairong depicts a very personal and intimate portrait of a particular group of women migrant workers – domestics, or baomu, who work in middle-class homes in Chinese cities and who have until now been overshadowed in academic writings by their factory sisters. Yan focuses on women originating from Wuwei, Anhui, which has supplied Beijing elites with domestics since before the reform era. In addition to conducting interviews with employers and domestics, and observing training sessions for new recruits provided by employment agencies and NGOs, Yan also analyses newspaper reports, workers’ personal letters, films and literary works with themes on domestics.
At the core of the book are critical analyses of a series of “keywords” in circulation in post-socialist China. Together they construe a master narrative of China's growth and development, and the necessary costs and pains entailed in making progress. By examining how these “keywords” – such as suzhi, dagong, self-development, modernity, backwardness, and advancing with the times – function in everyday life and shape experiences, Yan reveals both the personal struggles and anxieties among migrant domestic workers, and a more public, epistemic shift from the Mao-era to the post-Mao period.
One of the keywords that features prominently in the book is “suzhi,” an elusive, catch-all concept for “qualities” ranging from cleanliness, dress style to discipline, independence and entrepreneurialism. Yan details how popular, official and academic discourses deploy this notion of suzhi, or more accurately its lack among China's peasants and migrants, to mobilize their subjectivity for migration and to conceal exploitation. “The labor mobility is coded as a form of accumulation of suzhi that will lead to self development and class mobility. What this coding makes invisible is how the labor power of migrant workers creates surplus value for capital accumulation” (p. 129).
The most illuminating moments of the book are when Yan goes beyond texts and discourses to their impacts on social settings and everyday behaviour. Her accounts of the practical training sessions provided by NGOs and employment agencies, which constantly invoke successful examples of domestics-turned-entrepreneurs, show how civil society, not just the state, is also complicit in engineering migrant subjectivity. While most women migrants adjust by changing their subjectivity, there are also telling instances of resistance. For instance, a model domestic worker, sent by an NGO to speak to the media and to overseas audiences, refused to participate in the master narrative of suzhi and development, and instead pointed to the limited choice of dirty, tiring and bitter jobs available to women migrants. Yan suggests that this woman articulates a liminal subjectivity (belonging neither to the city nor the countryside) and acts out a politics of hao (meaning exhausted, consumed): insisting on a presence that demands and pressures, enabled by a desperate act of self-depletion, but refusing to go back to the countryside.
If the strength of this book lies in its many empathetic interpretations of the emotional worlds of these workers, the weakness is the lack of rigorous analysis in at least several areas. First, Yan has ignored that beyond and between discourses and desires, her twin foci, there exists a wide and complex terrain of social, legal and economic institutions that mediate their constitutions, interactions and effects. The despondence and powerlessness that she finds among migrant domestic workers may have to do with the private nature of the workplace, the exclusion of domestics from China's National Labour Law, the involvement of the local state in the organization of the labour market, etc. Moreover, the omission of any serious discussion of these institutional forces means sidestepping women migrants’ material interests (as opposed to identity). The unfortunate result is a strange flattening of their subjectivity, something that undermines Yan's own goal. Second, due to the lack of any theory-driven comparative analysis, Yan fails to understand the specificities of migrants as domestics, compared to those who work in restaurants or factories. The lack of reference to the vast feminist literature on domestic workers worldwide has at times led her to make sweeping generalizations about the predicament of all Chinese migrant workers, while passing up the opportunity of exploring the complex dynamics of gender and class power and the specific ways they play out in China. Finally, I would take issue with Yan's stark, binary conceptualization of the Chinese political economy into the “Mao-era” versus the “post-Mao reform” period and her facile qualification of China as “neo-liberal.” These terms elide rather than elucidate contradictory and mixed features of Chinese development that should be taken seriously in any study of migrant labour.
