China has become the world's largest market of mobile phones within a short period. The fast diffusion of mobile phones in China, paralleling China's dramatic social transformations, has created new but significant inquiries into the relationship between media use and social changes. Cara Wallis's book, Technomobility in China: Young Migrant Women and Mobile Phones, represents an important and timely contribution to the growing literature on social implications of digital media uses in general and mobile phone use in China in particular.

As a feminist ethnographer, Wallis focuses on mobile communication among a group of marginalized women in urban China: young migrant women from rural areas working in low-level service sectors in Beijing. Using rich data obtained through over ten months of participant observation in China and about 100 qualitative interviews with migrant workers, Wallis shows a vivid picture of how mobile phone use shapes and transforms young migrant women's work, lives, romantic relationships and subjectivity on the one hand, and how it is reconstructed by migrant women through their agency and daily practices on the other. Her book is an impressive extension of our understanding of “the mutually constitutive nature” of socio-cultural changes and technological changes in contemporary societies (p. 6).

In Technomobility in China, Wallis embeds her discussion of young migrant women's mobile phone use in an intersectional context of mass internal migration, rapid penetration of communication technology, increasing economic inequality and dramatic socio-cultural transformations in contemporary China. She defines the uniqueness of migrant women's mobile phone use as “necessary convergence,” the “converging of multiple usages on a single device” because of users' “constrained economic resources and limited access to new media technologies” (pp. 8, 182), and differentiates it from privileged users' “selective convergence,” converging functions on one device “for the sake of convenience” (p. 7). For the majority of young migrant women, the mobile phone is their first big urban purchase after arriving in cities. When educated, urban youth enjoy various options among myriad digital devices, young migrant women have to rely on a mobile phone to experience advanced digital media, achieve urban modernity, and reproduce their “gender-, class-, age-, and place-based identities” in cities (p. 4). This digital divide, to some extent, reflects profound economic inequality, status differentiation and social polarization in contemporary China.

Wallis believes that the mobile phone is a both empowering and disciplining technology for young migrant women. As an economically and socially marginalized group in urban cities, young migrant women face various constraints derived from the hukou system, capitalism exploitation, patriarchy and a hegemonic discourse of “suzhi” (quality) promoted by the Chinese government. Yet, with a mobile phone, migrant women can overcome these constraints by creating an immobile mobility, “a socio-techno means of surpassing spatial, temporary, physical, and structural boundaries” (p. 6). The convenient and instantaneous communication brought by mobile phone use enables migrant women to overcome the spatial and temporal barriers, caused by their long working hours and limited spatial movements in urban cities, and maintain and even enrich their social networks. Young girls creatively use mobile communication to forge romantic relationships from a distance. This, to some extent, challenges and transforms traditional mating practices and norms in rural China. Camera phones allow migrant women to imagine and represent a world beyond their spatial and economic constraints through taking and storing pictures. Furthermore, mobile phone use becomes a way for migrant women to individually resist employers.

While empowering migrant women, mobile phone use also entraps them into new constraints. The necessary convergence and their lack of literacy and skills in texting messages strengthen their marginalized status in urban cities. Their efforts in constructing a modern, urban female subjectivity through mobile communication reflect their internalization of the discourse of suzhi and the dominant power of modern essentialized femininity. Although mobile phone use helps migrant women to get job-related information, it seldom improves their economic status or assists them in achieving upward social mobility. Mobile phones also become a surveillance tool for employers to track, locate and control migrant women in both working and non-working hours.

Through discussing the liberating and constraining socio-techno practices of migrant women in China, Wallis provides an in-depth, convincing analysis of “how marginalized groups engage with new media technologies amid myriad constraints” and the paradoxical interaction among technology, power, and subjectivity (p. 8). This book will definitely appeal to readers who have an interest in migration, gender and social media. It will also be highly recommended reading for scholars interested in contemporary China.