Neoliberalism and the question of governmentality

Neoliberalism has different meanings from different points of view.Footnote ¹⁵ As Aihwa Ong suggests, in the United States, neoliberalism is usually termed as “market-based policies” and “neoconservatism,” indicating the seeking of strategies “to eliminate social programs and promote the interests of big capital.” In Asia, neoliberalism is viewed by politicians and pundits as “America's overweening power” for destructive market domination over Asian economics; in popular discourse, neoliberalism represents “unregulated financial flows” that threaten national currencies and living conditions. But in general, neoliberalism is often viewed as a market ideology that opposes the governence and activity of state.Footnote ¹⁶ Some scholars construct a framework of neoliberal North versus a South under siege, stating that neoliberalism from the North sweeps the South and engenders conflicting responses. Some scholars seek to identify “neoliberal states” that centralize capital and monopolize power “at the global level.”Footnote ¹⁷ However, as many scholars have pointed out, neoliberalism can also be understood as the technology of government, “a new relationship between government and knowledge through which governing activities are recast as nonpolitical and nonideological problems that need technical solutions.”Footnote ¹⁸ In other words, neoliberalism is a newly developed technique of Michel Foucault's “biopolitics” that relies on market knowledge, the politics of subjection and subject-making to govern modern human beings. Since state, as Foucault suggests, has no essence and the institutional nature of the state is a function of changes in practices of government,Footnote ¹⁹ neoliberalism as technology of government should not be taken as the natural existing sphere that contradicts the overpowering state, but a new form of state planning for optimizing public resources and population control. In Thomas Lemke's terms, neoliberalism is above all a political project that endeavors to create a social reality, whose forms of governance need to be studied.Footnote ²⁰

Foucault defines government as “the conduct of conduct.” meaning “the array of knowledges and techniques that are concerned with the systematic and pragmatic guidance and regulation of everyday conduct.”Footnote ²¹ As a guidance of subjects' daily life, governmentality covers a range of practices from “governing others” to “governing self.” The concept of governmentality helps us to open the conceptual space to recognize that neoliberal rationality functions as a politics of truth, insinuating market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics, “producing new forms of knowledge, and inventing new notions and concepts that contribute to the government of new domains of regulation and intervention.”Footnote ²² From the perspective of governmentality, the retreat of the state in advanced liberal democracies under the neoliberal policies is in fact a prolonged government. Neoliberalism is far from the end of politics, but a transformed politics that restructures the power relations in society. Neoliberal forms of government extend from political government to forms of self-regulation, featuring not only direct intervention of state apparatuses, but also indirect techniques for leading and controlling individuals.Footnote ²³

The question of whether it is appropriate to apply the concept of neoliberalism to study postcolonial, authoritarian, or postsocialist situations in emerging countries with nonliberal/illiberal traditions has been lively debated among scholars. I agree with Aihwa Ong and othersFootnote ²⁴ that we should focus on “the active, interventionist aspect of neoliberalism in non-Western contexts,” where “neoliberalism as exception is introduced in sites of transformation where market-driven calculations are introduced in the management of population and the administration of spaces.”Footnote ²⁵ Similarly, Gary Sigley has proposed “liberal despotism,” meaning “authoritarian and illiberal measures are constitutive of the way in which a liberal arts of government operates.”Footnote ²⁶ Following their arguments, I argue that we should use neoliberalism as exception to understand the postsocialist situation in China because neoliberalism has been constitutive of the government operation, even with neoliberal practice's not being the general characteristic of technologies of governing. The “wedding” of neoliberal techniques and active state regulations has paved the way for the mode of “governing through freedom” and producing “self-enterprising citizen-subject[s]” that aim to “[optimize] conditions for responding technically and ethically to globalized uncertainty and threat.”Footnote ²⁷

How neoliberal governmentality in post-Mao China transforms individual rural migrant laborers to “responsible,” “self-reliant” subjects through the state's promotion of the discourse of ziyou (freedom) is the focus of this paper. In what follows, the paper provides a brief review of China's reform of its labor system after the late 1970s—since this reform plays a crucial role in turning individual rural migrants into “self-responsible,” “self-motivated,” and “self-determined” subjects. After the reform, labor was no longer the collective possession but something belonging to individuals and something that can be sold. This transformation promotes the idea of free choice and free will among laborers. The expression of free will on the basis of a self-determined decision paves the way for the formation of “responsible” laborers whose moral quality is based on the fact that they alone choose their occupations and bear the consequences of their choices. As many scholars have observed, “this strategy … leads to social responsibility becoming a matter of personal provisions.”Footnote ²⁸

The Rise of a “Free” Labor Market and the Production of Ziyou Subjectivity

Post-reform China witnessed a quick prevalence of the term ziyou (freedom) in people's daily life, such as geren ziyou (individual freedom), yanlun ziyou (freedom of speech), and xiaofei ziyou (freedom in consumption), freeing individuals from the highly socialist state and political coercion and reclaiming individual autonomy and choices that had been largely erased during the Maoist era.

The concepts of ziyou were first introduced to China by Fu Yan in the early twentieth century as he translated John Stuart Mill's work On Liberty into Chinese. Yan used the Chinese term ziyou for the word “liberty.” Yu Gao correctly pointed out that the meaning of ziyou is actually quite different from what is understood as freedom or liberty in the western world.Footnote ²⁹ According to Gao, the concept of ziyou has been constructed at two interconnected levels: the level of individual freedom and the level of national liberation. The ziyou discourse implies that national building and liberation has priority over individual freedom, and it is morally proper for individuals to sacrifice their personal freedom for the liberation of the nation. Individual freedom, Gao argues, was hardly the end of revolution but always a political tool in bombarding feudal despotism.

After the foundation of the PRC in 1949, the concept of individual freedom, which quickly mobilized many intellectuals and radical youth to revolutionary cause collapsed in the face of the vehement lashing out of socialist collectivism. Individual interests had to obey the nation's interests, and the discourse of individual freedom largely disappeared in a highly collective society (1949–1978). However, right after the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), a “de-Maoification movement” emerged in China, and the state was criticized for cruelly intruding into people's personal lives and harshly repressing individual freedom. So-called “trauma literature” (shanghen wenxue) and “reflection literature” (fansi wenxue) emerged in the 1980s, reflecting people's traumatic experience in the Cultural Revolution and spurring a popular craving for individual freedom in the post-Mao period.

The prevalence of the discourse of ziyou in the post-reform period also goes hand in hand with China's labor reform. According to Briane Becker and Yang Gao, labor had a “unique role”Footnote ³⁰ in socialist China, where the labor system was based on three important principles. First of all, labor was owned by the state rather than the individual, and the labor produced social value instead of private value. The state required that all able-bodied citizens contribute their labor to it and assigned jobs to workers through “unified allocation” (tongyi fenpei).Footnote ³¹ This principle left little room for workers to choose their preferred occupations. The second principle was a principle of egalitarianism that assumed that individual interests and state interests were one and that individual workers were supposed to work for the larger national goals. The third principle was that the labor system provided a compensation system to the workers where compensation varied with labor “inputs.” However, factors such as education and tenure rather than past or current productivity determined payment. This labor system made possible a relative balance of losses and gains among members of the society. Individual preference and gain were considered incompatible with the concepts of true socialism; labor contracts were considered tools of capitalism, especially during the Cultural Revolution period.Footnote ³²

However, with the economic reform in the early 1980s, these principles were disavowed as “out of date” in the official discourse. The job allocation system, the control of employment, and the egalitarian view toward wages were said to have hindered productivity and undermined the incentive to work and that a new environment would need to be constructed so that the labor force could flow freely in the market in accordance with the demands of enterprises and individual preferences. And this new “freedom” to work for individual material rewards, according to some leading proponents of the free labor market in China, guarantees a free labor market, in which people are allowed to choose their own jobs in an environment of equal opportunity and fair competition … with laborers bearing the economic risks for their own decisions on labor input.”Footnote ³³

On the other hand, in order to achieve the responsiveness of labor to the free market forces, the labor contract system (laodong hetongzhi) was constructed to replace the systems of job security (the Iron Rice Bowl) and egalitarian wages (eating from the big pot) in state-owned enterprises. Then the labor contract system was expanded to both state and collective sectors in urban areas. Chinese economists such as Lanrui Feng and Lukuan Zhao praised the new labor system for achieving a breakthrough in productivity. However, the labor contract system encountered vehement resistance from workers and was poorly implemented in state and collective sectors, although this resistance was interpreted by officials as the result of bureaucracy and a poor understanding of why or how things were to be done.Footnote ³⁴

At the same time, large numbers of state enterprise workers found that more freedom and autonomy in occupation choice did not bring them better material rewards and profits as promised by the reform. Instead, they were subjected to massive layoffs, a rampant reduction in earnings, and strict labor discipline in the workshops. Furthermore, they were largely excluded from the process of privatization or liquidation of their enterprises and were considered morally “incorrect” to ask for further social benefits from the state. They were expected by the state to take care of themselves and be responsible for their personal costs and benefits. They considered themselves to be “dumped” by the state.

The labor control over peasants during the Mao era, like that of the urbanite workers, was closely monitored by the socialist state, although the official regulation was not always effective.Footnote ³⁵ As explained by Dorothy Solinger, peasants were always a labor reserve to the socialist state. Rural-to-urban migrations between 1949 and 1978 were legally permitted by the state only when it met the state's economic ends. But after the reinforcement of the 1958 Household Registration Policy, the movement of peasants to the cities was rigorously prohibited. This program forced farmers to remain in the fields, growing the foodstuffs to feed the urban workers and to sustain the cities, and was backed up by a series of labor recruitment rulings, selective food allocation, and a lack of residential space for the migrant peasants in the cities.Footnote ³⁶

The advent of economic reform in the late 1970s, however, changed the peasants' situation dramatically. The socialist communes that firmly controlled the peasants' labor power and movement were dissolved beginning in 1979, generating a surplus of nearly 200 million rural farm laborers.Footnote ³⁷ An urban economy quickly developed, and foreign and overseas capital poured into China, which demanded large amounts of cheap labor. As a response to this new economic development, the Household Registration System began to relax and allowed rural migrants to live and work in the cities on a temporary basis. A series of economic policies authorized and facilitated peasants entering the cities for employment opportunities, calling on the government to “set the peasantry on the path to the market through ideological campaigns and policy designs and to lead, push and pull the peasantry from being ‘small producers’ to being ‘commodity producers’ in the market economy.”Footnote ³⁸

Central to constructing a market economy was the making of new subjects out of rural migrants whose labor was commodifized and ready for sale in the free market. Ironically, while encouraging the connection of peasants to the market through leading them to the cities, the state worried that the migrant population might possess too much ziyou. Rural migrant workers were labeled as a “floating population” (liudong renkou). (The word “floating” has a negative cultural implication of being rootless, unstable, and dangerous.)Footnote ³⁹ Li Zhang's research on rural migrants from the Zhejiang Province in Beijing revealed that the state conducted everyday forms of regulation over this population through mandatory registration, close monitoring and diffused surveillance, and birth control policies. Supervision and control of the “floating population” became the “big headache” for the local government.Footnote ⁴⁰

The brief review of the establishment of the free labor market in both rural and urban China clearly shows that the neoliberal rationality, when applied to the labor system by the state, produced the discourse of ziyou (freedom) in occupation choice for the laborers. It endeavored to produce a new mode of subjectivity, namely a responsible and moral individual, and also an economically rational individual who assessed the costs and benefits when choosing an occupation. In Thomas Lemke's terms, neoliberalism made individual life into an “entrepreneurial form.” However, this new mode of laborers' autonomy in occupation choice was not a natural product of the free market but largely a product of the state's intervention and regulation, which aimed to achieve certain economic ends for the nation-state.

Among the millions of self-reliant laborers, the bangbang in Chongqing city have been seen as a group of rural migrant laborers who are largely self-employed and who claim to exercise extraordinary ziyou in their work. Many bangbang also perceive their work as more ziyou or “free” than other jobs. Through an examination of their experience in choosing their own occupation, this paper seeks answers for the following questions: What does ziyou mean for these rural migrant workers? What kind of ziyou does bangbang work give them? Why are the narratives of ziyou so strong among bangbang? What subjectivity does the discourse of ziyou form among these workers?

Bangbang in the Mountainous City

The recent movement of an estimated 200 million people from rural to urban China may be the largest mass migration the world has ever seen.Footnote ⁴¹ China's eastern coastal region and largest cities (e.g., Beijing and Shenzhen) were the initial destinations of most rural laborers, but destinations now include large inland cities, such as Chongqing. As the largest city of southwest China and with an alleged population of thirty million, Chongqing has been undergoing rapid urbanization since the 1990s against the backdrop of China's plan to reduce the imbalance between the prosperous coast and more sluggish interior. Money from state-owned banks and the government has poured into Chongqing to initiate the Three Gorges Dam Project in 1996, and the “Western Big Development” project in 2000. In 1997, Chongqing became one of the four municipalities under the direct control of the central government, following Beijing, Shanghai, and Tianjin. Since Chongqing's economy is based on river transportation, steel, smelting, and the manufacture of motorcycles and automotive spare parts, and since its topography is notoriously hilly, it has been in great need of low-skilled and unskilled labor to do heavy work, especially in transportation. Rural job seekers have flocked into this city since the mid-1990s (In 2003 alone, Chongqing attracted over two million migrants from its own rural area).Footnote ⁴² The city is also implementing a plan called the “one-hour economy circle,” through which it wants to move two million rural residents into newly urbanized areas within an hour's driving distance from the city center—all within the next five years—and another two million in the five years after that.Footnote ⁴³

Among the thousands of rural migrants working in “China's Chicago,”Footnote ⁴⁴ many work as bangbang. In Chongqing, the term “bangbang” refers to the shoulder porters who loiter at the docks along the Yangtzi and Jailing Rivers, in various markets, commercial zones, and public transportation terminals, carrying bamboo poles and ropes used for low-paying, heavy-labor service work. Some of them do extra part-time jobs such as scavenging, doorkeeping, and working on construction sites and in schools, factories, and small restaurants. The history of bangbang in Chongqing can be traced back to the late Qing Dynasty when Chongqing became one of the most important trading ports in southwest China. No official data are available as to how many bangbang are in contemporary Chongqing, but estimates range from 200 thousand to 1 million. Shiming Jian, emeritus professor at the Chongqing Academy of Social Sciences and the author of The Bangbang Army in the Mountainous City,Footnote ⁴⁵ estimated (at the time he wrote this book) that the total population of bangbang amounted to between 200–300 thousand. His rough estimate of the bangbang population in the Yuzhong subdistrict of Chongqing ranged from 50–60 thousand.Footnote ⁴⁶ The bangbang population is dominated by economically poor, unskilled, rural male migrants from the nearby villages of Chongqing and occasionally from the Sichuan and Guizhou Provinces. Recently, laid-off and newly retired urban factory workers as well as some wives of bangbang have begun to join this “bangbang army.”

Bangbang work is somewhat comparable to taxi driving in the United States. Although bangbang call the people they work for by the respectful term laoban or “boss,” many actually think of these people as their customers. Most bangbang do not have fixed customers. They haul goods for whoever can afford their labor, carrying almost anything, using their hands, backs and shoulders with the help of ropes and bamboo poles. They get paid in cash as soon as they finish a job, and then immediately look for another customer. In an effort to compete for work opportunities, bangbang often organize themselves into one of three different kinds of groups. The first is a group of bangbang that claims a certain territory and shares the benefits and risks of working together. They distribute the collective earnings equally among themselves after each complete job or day by day. Some of these bangbang groups also live, cook, eat, and wash clothes together and share living expenses and earnings. In this case, the group members are often tied by place, blood, and marriage, and they often know each other very well. In the second kind of group, the bangbang may work regularly for some work units that need cheap labor, such as schools, large supermarkets, long-distance bus stations, railway stations, and commercial zones. But these work units neither sign any contracts with the bangbang nor provide the bangbang with wages or benefits. These bangbang receive earnings by serving the customers, such as the faculty of the school, the passengers in the railway stations, and the customers of the stores in the commercial zone. At the same time, these bangbang have to pay a monthly “management fee” (about twenty-five yuan/three US dollars) to the labor management department of the work units to secure their jobs. Because of this, they often ask for a higher payment from the customers to compensate for the money that they submit to the work units. The third kind of bangbang group has no blood, marriage, or place relations and work together in a certain territory. They are colleagues who share the workload, the business opportunities, and the trouble in negotiating with the customers. Sometimes, however, they fight with each other for business opportunities. But when a bangbang from another place attempts to seek business in their territory, they often unite to chase away the competitor. Within some territories, bangbang divide themselves into several factions, and the competition between factions is at times fierce and even violent.

Within a workplace, some bangbang are more capable than others. They often become the “little boss,” the middleman who hires bangbang for the customers, handles conflicts and problems, and tries to make a profit out of doing so. A good reputation among bangbang depends on great physical strength, experience, a wide and useful personal network, a good personality, and credibility. Bangbang with relatively weak physical strength, however, may be respected for their experience and number of customers. Although young and new bangbang have greater physical strength, they may have to depend on older and experienced bangbang for business opportunities, or even endure being bullied by the experienced ones. Some newcomers experience “upset,” “depression,” and “desperation” in the first several months of working because of a lack of customers, the stress in negotiating with customers for payment, and conflicts with other bangbang.

The average age of my 124 bangbang subjects was forty-one.Footnote ⁴⁷ Among them, ninety-six percent were married and had at least one child. If a bangbang and his wife decided to go to the city together, their child (children) was often left to the grandparents or a relative. If there was little help to be had from the older generation, the wife stayed in the village while her husband migrated to the city alone. But he occasionally traveled back to the village, for example, in the busy farming season, in a family emergency, and sometimes, for a break. Such bangbang often chose to live in a bangbang hotel,Footnote ⁴⁸ a very cheap shelterFootnote ⁴⁹ or a free place to stay as a night watchman. Bangbang wives often followed their husbands to the city after their children were thought to be able to take care of themselves, at the age of about thirteen or fourteen. In many cases, like their husbands, the wives also worked as bangbang. They often worked in the same workplace with their husbands but carried lighter goods and had less contact with customers than the husbands. The husbands tried to ensure that their wives did not need to look for business on the street. A bangbang couple often rented a small apartment or shared a larger apartment with other couples in order to save money. These families were often tied by blood or marriage. In rare cases, a bangbang's wife with a very young child would stay with him in the city. The wife may often have a part-time job as a shoe shiner, waitress, or private factory worker. In rarer cases, the wife stayed at home as a housewife, but she had to travel to the home village to deal with farming and family issues.

Neoliberal Governmentality through the Discourse of Ziyou

Bangbang do not just blindly “jump” into this occupation; neither do they choose this job because they do not have other options. On the contrary, many of them have previous working experiences in other occupations and deliberately choose this job because of many reasons like immediate cash, closeness to their home village, and no requirement of educational certificate. But one reason that came up repeatedly in my interviews with the bangbang was that this job afforded them “ziyou.” The term ziyou has multiple meanings for the bangbang.

The first meaning of ziyou is being free from an employer's bodily discipline and control, which is often a feature of other contract manual jobs, such as factory work. One bangbang and former factory worker compared bangbang work with factory work, saying:

These words reflect the firm and relentless control over the worker's body that a factory exerts. As Pun Ngai argued, the moving assembly line “coupled an individualized body with a specific position, but at the same time it linked the individuals to form a collective social body devoted to the singular aim of maximizing production.”Footnote ⁵¹ The worker's body was thus individualized and forced to adapt itself to the speed, time, and bodily movement controlled by the moving belt. By contrast, bangbang jobs do not require a worker to accommodate a certain production line, and there is no boss around. The workers, then, feel they have the option to decide when, where, and how long to work, as well as for whom they work, just like an entrepreneur.

The second meaning of ziyou is having the power to make one's own decisions, organize one's life, and make plans. This type of freedom is important because many bangbang still farm land in their home villages. They return to the village during the peak farming and harvest season (usually in early March and the middle of August). Similarly, many bangbang have wives and children in the villages who they want to visit occasionally. Working as a bangbang, they can leave for home at any time and stay in the village for any length of time with no worry of being fired or fined by an employer. The flexibility of bangbang jobs meets their needs.Footnote ⁵²

Big Brother Mo, a fifty-two-year-old bangbang and former quarry worker, told me that he liked bangbang work and would never go back to the quarry where he had worked for ten years. I asked if it was because quarrying was more arduous than bangbang work. He answered: “Both jobs require almost the same labor. But I get more ziyou by doing bangbang job.” I asked what ziyou he enjoyed. He seemed surprised that I asked this question but answered: “That's obvious. Don't you see we bangbang have no bosses? I'm my own boss. I decide if I work today or not, when and where to work, for whom I work, how long to work, and with whom I want to work. No one has the right to order me around. Can quarry workers have such ziyou?” He then told me about his painful experience, working in a private quarry where the quarrymen had to obey the boss's orders:

The third meaning of ziyou is that bangbang can use their labor in a flexible way to accumulate as much money as possible. Bangbang do not have written agreements with their customers. This allows them to change occupations easily. Many bangbang have several part-time jobs at the same time in order to make ends meet. Some bangbang do short-term jobs for immediate cash. They want, in their own words, “double security” and extra money.

A bangbang nicknamed Lao Tang worked as a reverse mold worker in the sculpture department at a fine arts college. He did it most often in June and July when “most students are graduating and they need helpers.” This temporary job “almost doubles the monthly earning of a bangbang.” Whenever the bangbang job did not enable him to make ends meet, he went to the college to find reverse mold work. In addition, he collected cardboard and other scraps to sell for extra money. Such jobs require that the laborers not be bound by any contract, employer, work time, or workplace.

Finally, some bangbang refer to ziyou as freedom from state regulation. The household registration system which requires each rural migrant to register at the local branch of Public Security Bureau does not work well in the case of bangbang for two reasons. First, there are too many bangbang and they are mostly hard to trace. One local authority that I talked to said: “Actually you never know where a bangbang plans to go, because he often moves.” Second, many bangbang do not bother to register because they think the process is costly, time-consuming, and it does not provide them with substantial benefits. One bangbang said, “Nobody can govern (guan) us bangbang, not even the Emperor of Heaven (tianwang laozi)!”

The narratives of ziyou are so strong among bangbang in contemporary Chongqing. But if we look back to the socialist era, ziyou was not such a big concern for the shoulder porters. After the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and especially in the early 1950s, under the policy of shengchanzijiu (to provide for oneself by production), many subdistrict offices (jiedao banshichu) organized the urban poor into shoulder porter groups to carry goods and materials for state-owned work units, such as the sugar and wine transfer stations. The porters worked under the supervision of the cadres who told them where, when, and how long to work, how much the workload was, and how far they had to carry the goods. Like workers in other occupations, they also had to fulfill political obligations, such as attending political meetings and doing volunteer work for work units. The majority of the porters at that time were urban residents who were controlled by the work units through the welfare system and redistributive economics. Their labor power was not a commodity to sell in the marketplace and was not a personal resource to be used flexibly and efficiently. The laborers also did not view themselves as individuals, but rather as members of the collective.

It was against this socialist regime that the emergence of a free labor market and the legitimacy of workers choosing jobs at will was seen as representing freedom from the state and a resumption of agency for individuals. This attitude can be explicitly seen in my conversations with porters who worked during the Maoist era. One porter said: “If you asked me what I think of the present bangbang, I would have to say that they have too much ziyou. When I worked as a bangbang in my work unit, I had to obey the assignment of the cadre all the time. We didn't have such choice as when and where to work, with whom to work, like today's bangbang. We didn't have time to relax. What we thought all the time was how to contribute to our country in a better way.” When I asked how she felt about working under the planned economy, she answered: “Well, I didn't think that much about myself. What I considered the most was how to finish the workload as efficiently as possible. My life was all contributed to the state, not like today's bangbang, who do everything only for themselves.”

However, bangbang themselves had contradictory feelings about ziyou. On the one hand, they felt the casualness of this work gives them autonomy to make many decisions themselves; on the other hand, they realized that this sort of ziyou involves a high degree of insecurity, which easily exposes bangbang to intense exploitation and danger. When these migrants chose bangbang work, they may have had to give up regular wages, written contracts, or work protection that a contract work might provide. One bangbang sighed to me: “Sometimes I think … bangbang have too much ziyou. … If [ziyou means] nobody wants to take care of me … then, what's the point of having so much ziyou?”

This bangbang is one of many that expressed their concern of “too much ziyou.” While I do not mean to discount the flexibility of bangbang work and bangbang's agency of making decisions of their lives, I want to know, with “too much ziyou,” do bangbang really have the autonomy and choices they claim to have? My ethnographic research suggests an answer that is not so optimistic. A further examination of the relations between bangbang and their customers shows that bodily discipline and control in fact permeate a bangbang's work. Many customers have specific and sometimes even detailed requirements about the ways bangbang move their bodies, place the goods, use the tools, and the efficiency that bangbang should demonstrate.

Take the working experience of one bangbang, Uncle Zhang, as an example. A customer asked him to unload a large amount of goods from a truck. The customer told him in detail how to move the goods. First, Uncle Zhang was required to move the goods from the truck and put them on the ground. Second, he was asked to distinguish different model numbers printed on the shipping package and put goods with the same model number together. Third, he was to pile the goods in groups, five pieces to a group. Fourth, he was to count the total number of pieces and report it to the customer. Fifth, he was to use the customer's cart to move the goods into the customer's truck, but he had to be very careful not to break the cart. Sixth, he was to sit in the truck to protect the goods from falling down when the truck was in transit. Seventh, he and other bangbang were to carry the goods into the customer's storehouse. Last, he was to return the cart to the customer's store. The whole “guidance” of working included many messages directed to the discipline and control of Uncle Zhang's body. When he was working, the customer came to the workplace and gave further direction about how Uncle Zhang should act. Such detailed supervision indicates that a bangbang may not have a single employer who strives to make the maximum profit out of them by controlling their bodies along the assembly line, yet they nonetheless can be subject to individualization and discipline by any customer for any service.

In some extreme cases, the customer not only verbally “guide” a bangbang's bodily movements, but also commit physical violence against the bangbang's body. One bangbang named Xiao Peng informed me that his customer “kicked his ass” to “indicate” to him that he should speed up when unloading the goods. I asked Xiao Peng if he kicked back. He answered: “No. I could have, but I just chose to ignore it. I can't be too upset with it, you know. Otherwise, I might lose my customer.” Then I asked whether he hated such “physical guidance,” He replied: “Of course, I don't like it. But what can I do? I am just a bangbang. I can only think, hmmm, he (the customer) is just an unconscious child.”

As Xiao Peng mentioned, since bangbang do not have any social welfare or insurance, customers are the life blood of bangbang's livelihood. When a negotiation between a customer and a bangbang threatens the bangbang's relationship with the customer, a bangbang often chooses to follow the customer's requirement and give up his or her ziyou. One bangbang said, when asked about the customers' “guidance”: “I told myself that I have to swallow it. I repeatedly reminded myself that I need nothing but my wage.” However, the bangbang-customer relationship is full of conflicts, especially when the customer refuses to pay for bangbang's medical treatment in case of an on-the-job injury. Sometimes, this type of conflict results in vehement physical violence. A bangbang sighed to me. “Our lives are as cheap as one Jiao; the customers' lives are as valuable as one Yuan (one jiao is ten cents RMB; One Yuan is worth ten times of one Jiao).”

Furthermore, bangbang's use of labor in a flexible way does not necessarily afford them ziyou, but rather often places them on a work schedule that squeezes every drop of strength out of them. A female bangbang said that she was fully occupied by her work schedule. She mainly worked as a bangbang but also had two part-time jobs. She began the day's work at five thirty in the morning, working as a bangbang in a food market. Then she left for a restaurant to deliver lunch for white-collar workers in a nearby building. After the delivery, she ran to another restaurant to wash dishes. She could eat her lunch only after the washing was done; normally it was already two or three in the afternoon by then. Then she went back to the food market and looked for customers until six or seven o'clock. Before going back home, she also collected cardboard to sell and firewood to cook her dinner at home. She has a young son who is going to school in the countryside and needs the wage from the part-time jobs to pay for her son's living expenses. She told me that she was often exhausted and longed for a break. But she couldn't afford to stop working.

The majority of bangbang I've met do not want their children to become bangbang. They expect their sons and daughters to be well educated and to work “in an office,” instead of “on the street.” However, most of them do not expect their children to economically support them when they get old. “You know,” one told me, “there is no life-long job anymore. You never know if you will be fired. My child might lose his/her job and depend on me for a living. What can I expect from him/her?”

My central research question is why do bangbang celebrate that the bangbang work gives them ziyou when in reality their experiences suggest that this ziyou is circumscribed by various forms of unfreedom? I argue that many factors contribute to the strong narratives of ziyou among bangbang. The concept of ziyou is packed with meaning against the historical backdrop of China's highly socialist past and in this particular juncture of Chinese history and socioeconomic transformations. I would like to highlight one factor: the role of the Chinese state in promoting the discourse of ziyou and in affecting rural migrant's subjectivity formation. Under the present neoliberal rationality, the post-Mao state infuses the discourse of ziyou into society through policymaking, political intervention, social regulation, education, and media representation. For decades, the state has been transforming rural migrants into self-reliant and self-entreprising subjects who are not supposed to beg for social welfare from the state. The bangbang, and other migrants, were pushed to the bottom of society and became the cheap labor that fuels China's economy.

This state project is implemented not through political persecution, suppression or coercion, but through “softer” ways. On the one hand, the state promotes the neoliberal ethos of autonomy and choice and normalizes the commoditization of labor and exploitation through policymaking, political intervention, and social regulation, and the cultural processes of media representation, education, and discourse production. On the other hand, the state extends its micropolitics to “a value articulation of human subjectivity” through the discourse of suzhi. This “neohumanism”Footnote ⁵² functions to encourage peasants to migrate to the cities, “learn in the ‘comprehensive social university,’ and aspire to urban middle-class standards of material consumption. Since rural migrants are devaluated as backward and having low suzhi, the extended risks of bodily impairment and exploitation at work are justified as the necessary training process that can improve their suzhi and disguise the exploitation of migrant workers' labor.

With its focus on economic growth, the state does not provide support and insurance for peasants and migrant workers. It sides with factory owners and investors; the workers have no power in wage bargaining, work protection, or contract assignment; in the worst case, they are not even able to collect their pay. An extreme case that illustrates the helplessness, hopelessness, and agony of rural migrants is what happened throughout the coastal area in 2005. Workers were so infuriated that they were not willing to return to their jobs after a New Year's break. Factories in the Pearl River Delta found themselves unable to recruit enough workers.Footnote ⁵³

Some of my interviewees have had experience with other jobs, where they were unable to collect their wages. Bangbang Chen was one of many. He was a construction worker in the Guangdong Province. He once worked with a group of laoxiang (people from the same place) for a headman who was hired by a businessman to manage the workers. Chen was told that he would get all his wages after the work was done. For half a year, he lived on the work site, working day and night, with no immediate cash available. When the work was finished, however, the headman ran away with all the money for wages. When the laoxiang asked the businessman for their pay, he claimed that he had already paid the workers and then left. They wanted to sue the headman but could not afford the fee. They finally gave up and returned to Chongqing. After that, Chen decided to work as a bangbang. “At least I have cash!” he said.

In recent years, aware of the mounting inequality between social classes and concerned about the social unrest it may cause, the state has repeatedly attempted to intervene in the market and soothe the agony of the rural migrants. So far, however, scattered efforts from central and local governments to provide social welfare to peasants and rural migrants have been meager and never gained traction. For example, a policy introduced in 2006 by the City Council of Chongqing City aimed to extend pension welfare to migrant workers by promoting a new system with primary individual contributions, collective contributions from local enterprises, and government subsidies to replace the current system.Footnote ⁵⁴ For migrant workers, the current system requires a contribution of two to twenty-four yuan per month (twenty-six cents to 3.2 US dollars), with a payout rate of eight to nine yuan per month (around one US dollar), which is insufficient for providing any protection. It is no wonder that the policy has only about 56,000 subscribers among migrant workers, a 1.71 percent enrollment of migrants. However, the new system requires an even higher individual contribution ratio, while the government subsidy is ambiguous. It is not expected to change the situation that requires peasants and migrant workers to be self-reliant in old age. I asked some bangbang if they thought the new policy was helpful. Their answer was, “I don't care.” One bangbang explained: “Nothing changes. I have to have money in the first place to pay for the premium of the pension, don't I? But I don't have that much money! See, the new policy changes nothing.”

Similar situations can be easily observed with other welfare policies, such as medical coverage. Skyrocketing medical expenses have become an increasing burden for Chinese citizens, especially for peasants and migrant workers. In an attempt to alleviate this burden, in 2005 the Chongqing government designated certain hospitals for migrant workers, where presumably they would enjoy a waiver or discount on some medical fees. However, the Chongqing Business Daily reported that the prescribed medicines in these hospitals were fifteen to twenty percent more expensive than elsewhere. These hospitals wanted to recover the loss they suffered from lower fees by raising the medication prices. Migrant workers were fully aware of this trick. In the month after these hospitals opened the “migrant worker window,” they had only one migrant worker patient.Footnote ⁵⁵ For many bangbang, the only hope they have is to accumulate a small amount of personal savings for medical purposes and old age. As a bangbang told me, “We have nothing to rely on but a small amount of money that we saved throughout these years. No welfare, no insurance, no secure job for me. There is nobody there for us, either. Nobody can be trusted. That's why money is important. You have money, you are the master.”

The marketization and commodification that prevailed after the reform in 1978 dramatically changed the subjectivities, responsibilities, occupational choice, working conditions, and living state of peasants and migrant workers. The state provided no valid aid, no welfare, and made little effort to protect the legal rights of migrants. Rural migrants had to switch from a planned economy, where the state controlled every aspect of their lives, to a socialist market economy, where the state had regrouped basic functions and always sided with the market. They have found that the state was unreliable. The only security and aid they could get was to earn as much money as they could, and get the payment in cash as soon as possible.

Thus, bangbang is an ideal occupation for migrant workers who lack much skill or education. Although it provides no benefits or security beyond the cash payment, it gives the workers “freedom” to intensify their labor to earn a little extra money, especially immediate cash. Under the neoliberal regime, bangbang are not transformed without resistance into self-reliant and self-governing subjects. They are fully aware of the “tricks” that the state plays on them. Their agency of resisting and struggling is ironically expressed in choosing bangbang work, choosing to be responsible for themselves, and choosing to bear the consequences. They make use of the ethos of neoliberal rationality, taking advantage of ziyou, and so, earning as much money as they can is seen as the only way to secure their lives.