Both of these studies, by Yan Hairong and Tiantian Zheng, respectively, deal with the experiences of young migrant women workers in urban China in the post-Mao era. Yan focuses on domestic workers, and Zheng on those engaging in sex work.
Yan's study offers insights into the subject formation of young migrant workers by analyzing ethnographic data as well as media materials and cultural products. Chapter 1 explores the shift in state discourse on rural–urban relations. Yan details the ways in which the new development discourse constructed the city as a place for a new life for rural youth. The hierarchical relation between urban and rural in China's modernization project, however, undermined migrant workers’ ability to become subjects of modernity.
Chapter 2 (divided into two parts) sets the context in which domestic workers surfaced at a great pace in urban settings. Part 1 is an examination of the cultural process in the 1980s whereby domestic work was highlighted as a burden for intellectuals. Part 2 details the process by which the new rationality of time management brought by rapid reform in the 1990s accelerated the demand among urban families for domestic workers. By discussing the employers’ search for a “proper” domestic worker, Yan reveals the ways in which urban employers tried to inscribe a new form of subjectivity onto young migrant workers in order to realize the governance of migrants’ bodies.
In chapter 3, Yan analyzes suzhi (roughly translated as “quality”), a keyword in the discourse of China's development, and its impact on the discursive construction of labor migration. Yan argues that suzhi has become a new form of human value in neoliberal governmentality that “renders human subjectivity commensurable for Development” (p. 119). The deployment of suzhi discourse in the recruitment and training process of migrant workers disguised and facilitated the economic exploitation of surplus value extracted from rural migrant workers.
Chapter 4 explores how the prominence of consumption shaped domestic workers’ experiences. In a context in which consumption activities overtook labor to become a focal point of the post-Mao desire for modernity and expression of distinction, migrant women, as producers for domestic consumption in the cities as well as perceived modernized consumers when returning to the villages, were caught in the contradiction between consumption and production. Yan claims that such a contradiction incited them into migration but also rendered them open to ridicule and exploitation, both materially and in representation.
Chapter 5 examines another discourse—the discourse of self-development—and its consequences for the formation of migrant workers’ collective agency. It was generally considered, Yan argues, that the migrant women's acquisition of suzhi was central to their self-development and to their transformation into new urban subjects. However, the process of accumulating suzhi to compete for social mobility also had a negative implication for the migrant women's collective agency. Furthermore, the gap between the discourse of self-development and their lived experiences in the cities resulted in varied responses of resistance.
The final chapter addresses the question of migrant workers’ self representation. While middle-class Chinese scholars and state policy makers expected migrant workers to locate their agency in accordance with the laws of economic development, the examination of some migrant activists’ speeches and women's letters demonstrated their resistance to subsuming their experiences into the narrative of the nation-state's project. Yan concludes that such a refusal and their strategies of enacting a politics of presence hold promise for the “imagining of a new collective identity in the open ended process of struggle” (p. 249).
Unlike many other studies on migrant labor that focus on the experiences of work, Yan offers a cultural analysis of the contestations over the meanings of migrant labor. With its focus on the relations of postsocialist state discourses to development and modernization, Yan's study shows the ways in which such discourses shaped migrant workers’ subject formation.
Zheng's research, by contrast, provides a vivid and richly detailed picture of the everyday, nuanced lives of migrant workers engaged in the sex industry through an ethnographic study of karaoke bar hostesses in the city of Dalian. Chapter 1 introduces the social history of Dalian and identifies its unique position as a colonial city under the lengthy Japanese occupation. Zheng highlights the Japanese influence on the prostitution system in Dalian, and the ambivalent feelings of the people of Dalian toward the Japanese, who once brought the city economic prosperity, and toward the Chinese state, which lifted them from colonial rule. Chapter 2 discusses the rise of karaoke bars in Dalian in the post-Mao era and details the different relations with the bars forged by various actors: Japanese men used the bars to open the Chinese market; Chinese businessmen emulated their Japanese economic superiors in the consumption of women and used the bars to reclaim their masculine identity supposedly constrained by the old state order; the postsocialist state officially condemned prostitution as immoral while benefiting from the sex industry's stimulation of the local economy.
In chapter 3, Zheng turns to a close examination of the daily organization and management of three tiers of karaoke bars (high, middle and low, ranked by clients’ status). Regardless of the bars’ positions in the hierarchy, all three tiers shared an exploitative and violent working environment created by bar owners, managers, bouncers, madams, and state officials. Although migrant workers might form temporary networks providing mutual support, their hope for social mobility and internal competition jeopardized their chance of collective action. Chapter 4 draws on Susan Bownell's writings on the link between body symbolism and the workings of the state to examine the clients’ metaphoric use of liang (grain) in their references to having sex with their wives as turning in the grain tax to the state. According to Zheng, the consumption of sex acted as a means to demonstrate Chinese men's repulsion against the Maoist control of men through the repression of women's sexuality.
Chapter 5 traces the hostesses to their homes in the countryside, which, in their eyes, were only a temporary shelter from their dangerous lives in the city. However, while they hoped for a modern life in the city, they continued to fulfill their filial roles loyally. Zheng argues that although the women challenged the local rural codes of conduct of dress, gender, and marriage, their determination to be filial daughters contributed to their own victimization in the patriarchal structure. Chapter 6 examines how the hostesses managed to use consumption practices to claim an urban identity and to rebel against an urban environment that socially and institutionally discriminated against them. Chapter 7 addresses the social power of sex work. Zheng shows that the hostesses embraced the commodification of their bodies as an empowering practice. However, the performance they enacted was based on male stereotypes of rural women, which, paradoxically, reproduced state hegemonic discourse and reinforced their marginality.
Both studies contribute to our knowledge of migrant labor in post-Mao China. In particular, Zheng's book provides a fresh and engaging account of the lives of migrant workers in the sex industry. Zheng's detailed reflection on her ethnographic approach captures the emotions and the dynamic interactions between the researcher and the subjects of her study, adding a personal touch from which Yan's study would have benefited had the author also adopted such reflexivity.
