Finding a place: Negotiations of modernization and globalization among rural women in Beijing

Critical Asian Studies

Volumn 37, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 51-74

  Jacka, Tamara ^a  

^a AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

GENDER ROLE; MIGRANT WORKER; RURAL-URBAN MIGRATION;

ASIA; BEIJING; CHINA; EASTERN HEMISPHERE; EURASIA; FAR EAST; WORLD;

EID: 16444364496     PISSN: 14672715     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/1467271052000305269     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. In order to protect identities, the names of all interlocutors referred to in this article have been changed. A few personal details have also been changed.
2. China's accession to the World Trade Organization was formally announced the day before this conversation took place.
3. In this article, the term "migrant" refers to a person whose relocation is not accompanied by a transfer of household registration. The Ministry of Agriculture estimates that in 2002 roughly nineteen out of every one hundred rural laborers worked away from home, and that rural out-migrants (including those who had moved to both rural and urban areas) numbered 94 million ("Rural-to-Town Labour Force on the Rise," China Daily, 23 January 2003). Nationally, about 30 percent of rural-to-urban migrants are women. For further discussion of the numbers and demographics of rural-to-urban migrants, see Tamara Jacka and Arianne Gaetano, "Introduction: Focusing on Migrant Women," in On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, ed. Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 20-24. In the 1990s and 2000s, reforms were introduced to make it easier for rural migrants living in small towns to transfer to nonagricultural urban household registration. In larger cities, however, such a transfer remains almost impossible for the majority. In the early 2000s the State Council issued directives aimed at improving the circumstances of migrants in urban areas. See Jacka and Gaetano, "Introduction," 19-20; Guowuyuan Bangongting [General Office of the State Council], "Guoban: Zuohao Nongmin Jincheng Wugong Jiuye Guanli he Fuwu Gongzuo" [General Office of the State Council: Improving Management and Services for Rural Labor Migrants Entering Cities], www.people.com.cn, 16 January 2003. Local governments and employers, however, have been very slow to implement these new policies. For further discussion of the circumstances of migrants in Beijing and of recent reform measures taken by the central government
4. see Tamara Jacka, Sisters and Outsiders: Rural Women in Urban China (Armonk N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, forthcoming, 2005).
5. For further information on Rural Women and on the Migrant Women's Club, see their website at http://www.nongjianv.org.
6. The questionnaire was prepared by myself, with help from the women working in the Migrant Women's Club office, and was administered by the women in the office and by my research assistant, Arianne Gaetano. The questionnaire was anonymous and confidential and respondents were self-selected. Ninety out of one hundred respondents were women. Their ages varied between seventeen and thirty-five, but most were in their twenties. Thirteen percent were married while another 7 percent were engaged (N=99). One respondent had not finished primary school and about 16 percent had primary school education. Of the remainder, most had either junior or senior high school education (46 percent and 30 percent respectively). Seven percent had been educated to the tertiary technical level (N=97). In the month prior to the survey, 60 percent of respondents were in waged employment (N=82). The largest proportions were employed in the service sector (55 percent) and as factory workers (16 percent) (N=64). Only 9 percent of respondents had urban household registration before coming to Beijing, but at the time of the questionnaire that had increased to 12 percent. Respondents came from a range of different provinces, but the largest numbers were from Shandong (34), Henan (18), and Shaanxi (7). These figures correspond roughly to the demographics of the Club membership as a whole, and indeed to the demographics of migrant women in Beijing more generally. The average length of time that respondents had spent in Beijing - 3.2 years - was, however, somewhat longer than the norm; most migrant women spend between six months and three years in the city (Beijingshi Tongjiju [Beijing Municipal Statistical Bureau], Beijing Tongji Nianjian 2002 [Beijing statistical yearbook 2002] [Beijing: Zhongguo Tongji Chubanshe, 2002], 579). The questionnaire included sixty-nine questions on a range of topics, from reasons for migration and length of sojourn in Beijing, to occupation and housing in Beijing, to perceptions of identity and aspirations for the future.
7. Altogether over these two periods, aside from participating in Club activities and interacting frequently on a casual basis with Club members, I conducted a total of fifty-five hours of formal, audiotaped interviews with twenty-two female members of the Club. These women came from rural areas all over China and ranged in age from sixteen to thirty-eight. Most worked as maids, office cleaners, or factory workers. Three were married with one child each, the rest were unmarried and without children. At the time, two of the married women were without work. One of the women had been in Beijing for just a few months, but the remainder had lived there for at least a year, most having migrated to the city in the mid to late 1990s. Four had been in Beijing for eight years or more.
8. Craig Calhoun, "Social Theory and the Politics of Identity," in Social Theory and the Politics of Identity, ed. Craig Calhoun (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), 12.
9. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);
10. Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991);
11. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cambridge, Mass., and Oxford: Blackwell, 1990).
12. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 3-4;
13. Angelika Bammer, "Introduction," in Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question, ed. Angelika Bammer (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), xi.
14. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 141-88.
15. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess, "Introduction," in A Place in the World? Places, Cultures and Globalization, ed. Doreen Massey and Pat Jess (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 1-2.
16. In this article, "discourses" comprise bodies of social knowledge and also the language, structures, and practices through which those bodies of knowledge are produced and conveyed (Alec McHoul and Wendy Grace, A Foucault Primer. Discourse, Power and the Subject [Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1993], 31-56). Discourses embody relations of power, setting the conditions and the rules that enable and constrain what can be imagined, said, practiced, and even felt, how, and by whom. "Discourses of modernity" enable and constrain collective ideals of "modernity" and understandings of who and what are "modern." In this article I distinguish between "discourses of modernity" and "modernization," which refers to processes of material and cultural change, but of course the two are related. I examine some of the ways in which modernization, as it is manifested and experienced in the particular context of contemporary China, is shaped by a locally specific discourse of modernity, as well as by discourses of gender and rural/urban difference.
17. Nine of my interlocutors were born after the one-child policy was introduced in 1979, but none were single children. Three completed primary school, the rest left after completing junior high school. It is possible that in future cohorts of migrant women fewer will feel that their education was stymied by the combination of sexism and large family size. However, single daughters are still extremely rare in the countryside. It has always been the case that most villagers have got away with having a second child if their first was a girl, and since the beginning of the 1990s this has been allowed in official policy nationwide.
18. This image of rural life also contrasts with numerous journalist, academic, and official reports of life in the countryside that document gross inequalities, severe poverty, and underdevelopment in some areas, high levels of suicide, especially among young women, and alarming and rising levels of violent conflict, directed both at local officials accused of corruption and injustice and against other villagers. See Jonathan Unger, The Transformation of Rural China (Armonk, N.Y., and London: M.E. Sharpe, 2002),
19. and Jiang Wenran, "Unimaginable Poverty, Unbelievable Tragedy," South China Morning Post, 14 February 2004.
20. See, for example, Li Dazhao, "Qingnian yu Nongcun" [Youth and the Countryside], in Li Dazhao Wenji [The collected works of Li Dazhao] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984 [1919]), 648-52.
21. Examples include the television series Heshang [River Elegy] and the film Huang Tudi [Yellow Earth].
22. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
23. Diane Dorfman, "The Spirits of Reform: The Power of Belief in Northern China," positions: east asia cultures critique 4, no. 2 (1996): 269.
24. See, for example, Pnina Werbner, "Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among British Muslims," in Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), 167-85.
25. For discussion, see Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1999);
26. Scott Rozelle et al., "Leaving China's Farms: Survey Results of New Paths and Remaining Hurdles to Rural Migration," China Quarterly 58 (June 1999): 367-93;
27. Xiang Biao, "'Zhejiang Village' in Beijing: Creating a Visible Non-State Space through Migration and Marketized Traditional Networks," in Internal and International Migration. Chinese Perspectives, ed. Frank Pieke and Hein Mallee (London: Curzon, 1999), 215-50.
28. A minority of rural migrant settlements, such as "Zhejiang Village" in Beijing, present an exception, maintaining a well-developed sense of native-place-based community through shared cultural activities, restaurants selling food from the native place, etc. (See Xiang Biao, "'Zhejiang Village' in Beijing"; and Li Zhang, Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks within China's Floating Population [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001]). However, most migrant settlements are more heterogeneous and have a weaker sense of community than Zhejiang Village.
29. For examples, see Alice Goldstein and Sidney Goldstein, "Migration Motivations and Outcomes: Permanent and Temporary Migrants Compared," in China: The Many Facets of Demographic Cbange, ed. Alice Goldstein and Wang Feng (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996), 198;
30. and Thomas Scharping and Sun Huaiyang, Migration in China's Guangdong Province: Major Results of a 1993 Sample Survey on Migrants and Floating Population in Shenzhen and Foshan (Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, 1997), 45-47.
31. Most respondents to this survey indicated that they made the decision to leave home on their own. Respondents were asked to identify up to three of their most important reasons for out-migration. The percentages in figure 1 (p. 59) therefore add up to more than 100 percent.
32. Yan Hairong, "Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the Labor Mobility of Rural Young Women in Post-Mao China," American Ethnologist 30, no. 4 (2003): 1-19.
33. Wang Shucheng and Li Renhu, "Wuwei: Baomu Xiaoying" [Wuwei: The effect of the nanny], Ban Yue Tan [Half Monthly Forum] 8 (1996): 24.
34. Tamara Jacka, Women's Work in Rural China. Change and Continuity in an Era of Reform (Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101-19.
35. See Rachel Murphy, How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 107;
36. Qian Cai, "Migrant Remittances and Family Ties: A Case Study in China," International Journal of Population Geography 9 (2003): 471-83;
37. Sally Sargeson, "Building for the Future Family," in Chinese Women: Living and Working, ed. Anne E. McLaren (London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), 159. These findings are in contrast to studies in other countries, which show that daughters usually remit more than sons (Murphy, How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China, 107.)
38. Rachel Murphy, "The Impact of Labor Migration on the Well-Being and Agency of Rural Chinese Women: Cultural and Economic Contexts and the Life Course," in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, 264-65;
39. Lou Binbin et al., "The Migration Experiences of Young Women from Four Counties in Sichuan and Anhui," in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move 236-39.
40. Dudley Poston and Chengrong Charles Duan, "The Floating Population in Beijing, China: New Evidence and Insights from the 1997 Census of Beijing's Floating Population," Texas Population Research Center Paper, no. 98-99-06 (1999): 17.
41. "Beijing Qunian Wailairenkou Yu 386 Wan Ren" [Last year, Beijng's outsider population exceeded 3.86 million], Zhongguo Xinwen Wang [China News Net], 21 January 2003;
42. http://www.cpirc.org.cn.
43. Cindy C. Fan, "Out to the City and Back to the Village: The Experiences and Contributions of Rural Women Migrating from Sichuan and Anhui," in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, 184.
44. See, for example, Sidney Goldstein, Lian Zai, and Alice Goldstein, "Migration, Gender, and Labor Force in Hubei Province, 1985-1990," in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China, ed. Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2000), 214-30.
45. In another survey, when 175 migrants were asked "Do you want to work long term in the city?" over half replied that they did not want to and another 22 percent said they did not know. However, subsequent interviews revealed that those who said they did not want to remain in the city actually meant that they believed they had no option but to return home (Zhao Shukai, cited in Murphy, How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China, 231-32, n. 67).
46. Delia Davin, "Migration, Women and Gender Issues in Contemporary China," in Floating Population and Migration in China: The Impact of Economic Reforms, ed. Thomas Scharping (Hamburg: Institut für Asienkunde, 1997), 311.
47. Louise Beynon, "Dilemmas of the Heart: Rural Working Women and Their Hopes for the Future," in Gaetano and Jacka, On the Move, 142.
48. Until recently, scholars generally assumed that most migrant women returned to their villages to marry and bear children, and did not migrate again. However, based on data from a survey of over 3000 women from Anhui and Sichuan provinces, Kenneth Roberts et al. argue that the situation has changed since the late 1990s. Today, it is common for married women from Anhui and Sichuan to migrate, both with and without their children. See Kenneth Roberts, Rachel Connelly, Zhenming Xie, and Zhenzhen Zheng, "Patterns of Temporary Labor Migration of Rural Women from Anhui and Sichuan," China Journal 52 (July 2004): 50.
49. A minority of rural migrant women look for an urban husband who, they hope, will enable them to stay in the city. However, most rural women recognize that the bias against an urban man marrying a rural woman is so great as to make such matches rare. This bias stems in part from serious practical concerns. One concern is that an urban worker in the state sector who marries someone without local household registration is not entitled to subsidized rental housing from his/her work unit. Another concern is that household registration is usually inherited from the mother. Therefore, the child of a couple in which the mother does not have local registration will also not be entitled to local registration, and will face discrimination in education, as well as in housing, employment, and other aspects of life. In August 1998 the State Council approved a change in policy, allowing children to inherit household registration from either of their parents. However, local governments, especially in larger cities, have been slow to implement this reform. By 2003 it had still not been systematically implemented in Beijing.
50. Tamara Jacka, "Working Sisters Answer Back: The Representation and Self-Representation of Women in China's Floating Population," China Information 13, no. 1 (1998): 69-70.
51. Beynon, "Dilemmas of the Heart," 144-45.
52. Feng Xiaoshuang, "The Costs and Benefits of Rural-Urban Migration: A Report on an Inquiry Conducted among Rural Women Employed in the Service, Retail, and Other Trades in Beijing," Social Sciences in China 18, no. 4 (1997): 52-65;
53. and Tan Shen, "Zhongguo Nongcun Laodongli Liudong de Xingbie Chayi" [Gender differences in the migration of the rural labor force]. Paper presented at the International Conference on Rural Labor Migration, Beijing, 1996;
54. cited in Beynon, "Dilemmas of the Heart," 144.