Tag Archives: subculture

Migrant labour culture in post-Mao China

Eric Florence (2013), Migrant labour culture in post-Mao China, Institut du Monde Contemporain (Collège de France) http://hdl.handle.net/2268/144791.

Against a backdrop of economic growth and growing spate of collective actions, rural migrant workers have developed narratives of migrant labour. This essay studies articles, diaries, poems and online songs asserting their collective subaltern identity and specific norms and values.

A political economy of rapid accumulation, a very harsh labour regime, and the violence ─ both physical and symbolic ─ generated by the combination of global capitalism and post-Mao China state socialism are a challenge for a regime whose founding narratives are grounded upon the rejection of capitalist exploitation. The whole social hierarchy of post-Mao China as well as its economy of representations have been reworked, and labour is the field where transformations in societal values and norms have been most important. This is why focusing on the cultural practices related to rural migrant labour provides an interesting vantage point to study processes of workers’ collective identification. Examining the political economy of the Pearl River Delta highlights two major features: on the one hand, the combined action of residence and labour permit mechanisms have gone hand in hand with factories’ disciplinary labour regimes, imposing a high degree of flexibility upon workers and keeping wages at an extremely low level; on the other hand, a whole body of legislations and regulations has been developed by the Party-state in the face of increasingly conflicting labour-relations. These elements are crucial to understand the narrative practices relating to dagong.

Read the full text of the article on the open archive Orbi