Guerrilla workfare: Migrant renovators, state power, and informal work in urban China

Politics and Society

Volumn 33, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 481-506

  Guang, Lei ^a  

^a SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Chinese labor; Construction workers; Home renovation; Informal sector; Migrant

Indexed keywords

EID: 24944480892     PISSN: 00323292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0032329205278464     Document Type: Review

References (112)

1. Andrew Walder, "The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class, 1949-1981," Modern China 10, no. 1 (1984): 3-48;
2. and Andrew Walder, Communist Neo-Traditionalism: Work and Authority in Chinese Industry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
3. On the rupture in the formation of Chinese urban social class represented by 1949, see also Deborah S. Davis, "Social Class Transformation in Urban China: Training, Hiring, and Promoting Urban Professionals and Managers after 1949," Modern China 26, no. 3 (2000): 251-75.
4. Walder, "The Remaking of the Chinese Working Class," 4-5.
5. Andrew Walder, "Organized Dependence and Cultures of Authority in Chinese Industry," Journal of Asian Studies 43, no. 1 (1983): 51-76;
6. Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry, Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative Perspective, Socialism and Social Movements (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997);
7. Davis, "Social Class Transformation in Urban China";
8. Mark W. Frazier, The Making of the Chinese Industrial Workplace: State, Revolution, and Labor Management, Cambridge Modern China Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002);
9. and Jackie Sheehan, Chinese Workers: A New History, Routledge Studies in Modern History of Asia, no. 2 (London: Routledge, 1998).
10. Others have also noted similar ruptures in China's labor regime that came with the reform. For example, see Ching Kwan Lee, "From Organized Dependence to Disorganized Despotism: Changing Labor Regimes in Chinese Factories," China Quarterly, no. 157 (1999): 44-71.
11. On the historical fragmentation of Chinese labor, see Elizabeth Perry, Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993).
12. Ching Kwan Lee, "The Labor Politics of Market Socialism," Modern China 24, no. 1 (1998): 3-33;
13. Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998);
14. Dorothy Solinger, "Labor Market Reform and the Plight of the Laid-Off Proletariat," China Quarterly 170 (2002): 304-26;
15. Edward S. Steinfeld, Forging Reform in China: The Fate of State-Owned Industry, Cambridge Modern China Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998);
16. Luigi Tomba, Paradoxes of Labor Reform: Chinese Labor Theory and Practice from Socialism to Market (London: Routledge, 2002);
17. Fei-Ling Wang, From Family to Market: Labor Allocation in Contemporary China (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998);
18. Minghua Zhao and Theo Nichols, "Management Control of Labor in State-Owned Enterprise: Cases from the Textile Industry," China Journal 36 (1996): 1-21;
19. and Anita Chan, China's Workers under Assault (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2001).
20. Margaret M. Pearson, Joint Ventures in the People's Republic of China: The Control of Foreign Direct Investment under Socialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991);
21. and Susan Young, Private Business and Economic Reform in China, Studies in Contemporary China (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1995).
22. The state-owned construction companies began to reduce the number of permanent urban employees and use large numbers of rural contract workers after the early 1980s. For example, the Beijing No. 1 Construction Company employed 214,460 rural workers in 1997, twice the number of the regular urban employees in that year. All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), Zhongguo nongmingong wenti diaocha (Beijing: ACFTU zhengce yanjiu shi, 1997), 84.
23. Yue Yuan, "Luoren: Beijing liumin de zuzhihua zhuangkuang yanjiu baogao" (Beijing: Beijing Horizon Market Research and Analysis Company, 1995), 30.
24. The legality of their status for staying and working in the city was not entirely clear. If one were to use the minimal criterion of having proper residence permits, a substantially high proportion of the rural migrants were legally present in the cities. But if one were to classify a migrant as only "legal" if he or she had all the permits required (there were five such permits in Beijing in 2000), then only a small minority of the migrants were legally working in the cities. In one study of a municipal district in Beijing, Chinese sociologists Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang found that, out of the 320,000 rural migrants in the district, 230,000 had obtained proper residence permits, but only 31,000 of them had proper work permits. Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang, "Chengshi nongmingong yu chengshi zhong de fei zhenggui jiuye," Shehuixue yanjiu, no. 6 (2002): 20.
25. Jianmin Wang and Qi Hu, Zhongguo liudong renkou (Shanghai: Shanghai caijing daxue chubanshe, 1996), 109.
26. State Statistical Bureau, Zhongguo laodong tongji nianjian (Beijing: Zhongguo tongji chubanshe, 2003), 59. The official definition of locality or local area is not entirely clear in the statistical yearbook. It is usually scaled at the level of a county or city. So migrants in the official statistics refer to people who are from outside their native county, including those from outside the city or provinces.
27. Peng Xu, "Guanyu woguo jianzhu zhuangshi hangye fazhan de jidian sikao," Zhuangshi mingpin, no. 156 (2004): 23.
28. Bianjibu, Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo nianjian 2002, vol. 22 (Beijing: Zhonghua renmin gonghe guo nianjian she, 2002), 545. The 8.5 million workers in the renovation industry accounted for 21 percent of the entire construction industry workforce at the time. The entire renovation industry, including both home and commercial renovators, was valued at 550 billion yuan in 2000.
29. Peng Xu, "Guanyu woguo jianzhu zhuangshi," 22
30. "We in the renovation business are 'guerrilla workers' with no fixed place and schedule of work." Cheng Gong once said, "Everything is good when we have work to do. When we don't have any work, we couldn't do anything but wait." Interview with Cheng Gong, March 7, 1997. For more on the term guerrilla workers and the home renovation industry, see Lei Guang, "The Market as Social Convention: Rural Migrants and the Making of China's Home Renovation Market," Critical Asian Studies (2005).
31. In a broader sense, the term guerrilla workers may not just refer to the migrants but to a variety of workers in the urban informal economy, including the laid-off workers, poor retirees, and rural migrants. See Yihong Jin, "Fei zhenggui laodong li shichang xingcheng he fazhan zhong de jige wenti," Zhongguo laodong, no. 10 (2000): 7-10;
32. and Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang, "Chengshi nongmingong." Some scholars have used the term casual labor (sangong) to describe them.
33. See Xiang Mu, "Zhujiang sanjiaozhou dushi wailai sangong yanjiu," Chengshi wenti, no. 6 (2002): 44-48;
34. and Damin Zhou, "Guangzhou wailai sangong de diaocha yu fengxi," Shehuixue yanjiu, no. 4 (1994): 47-55.
35. See, for example, Sheehan, Chinese Workers;
36. and Tomba, Paradoxes of Labor Reform.
37. For studies of Chinese labor that do include migrant workers, see Chan, China's Workers;
38. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle;
39. and Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
40. Laomei is a fictitious name for a county located in the central part of Anhui Province.
41. Manuel Castells and Alejandro Portes, "World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics, and Effects of the Informal Economy," in The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, ed. Alejandro Portes, Manuel Castells, and Lauren Benton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 12.
42. On the rural migrants and informal economy in China, see Yihong Jin, "Fei zhenggui laodong li";
43. and Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang, "Chengshi nongmingong."
44. The public-sector workers are usually referred to as zhigong (translated as "staff and workers"), which acknowledges continuing paternalistic relations with the state and confers a formal status. Gail E. Henderson et al., "Re-Drawing the Boundaries of Work: Views on the Meaning of Work (Gongzuo)," in Re-Drawing Boundaries: Work, Households, and Gender in China, ed. Barbara Entwisle and Gail E. Henderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 33-50;
45. and Steven Harrell, "The Changing Meanings of Work in China," in Entwisle and Henderson Re-Drawing Boundaries, 67-76.
46. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle;
47. and Chan, China's Workers.
48. These figures are clearly exaggerated. But there are no accurate statistics on the number of renovation workers. Here I cite his figures simply to underscore the significant presence of Anhui migrants in the renovation business.
49. Shukai Zhao, "Criminality and the Policing of Migrant Workers," China Journal (2000): 101-10;
50. Solinger, Contesting Citizenship;
51. and Li Zhang, Strangers in the City (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001).
52. Lee, "The Labor Politics."
53. Larissa Adler Lomnitz, Networks and Marginality: Life in a Mexican Shantytown (New York: Academic Press, 1977);
54. Alejandro Portes and Robert L. Bach, Latin Journey: Cuban and Mexican Immigrants in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985);
55. Kenneth L. Wilson and Alejandro Portes, "Immigrant Enclaves: An Analysis of the Labor Market Experiences of Cubans in Miami," American Journal of Sociology 86 (1980): 295-319;
56. and Min Zhou, "Revisiting Ethnic Entrepreneurship: Convergencies, Controversies, and Conceptual Advancements," International Migration Review 38, no. 3 (2004): 1040-75.
57. Ying Du and Nansheng Bai, Zouchu xiangcun: zhongguo nongcun laodongli liudong shizheng yanjiu (Beijing: Jingji kexue chubanshe, 1997), 86-89.
58. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, 84-88.
59. Shukai Zhao, Zongheng chengxiang: nongmin liudong de guancha yu yanjiu (Beijing: Zhongguo nongye chubanshe, 1998), 61-63.
60. Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, 116-23.
61. See the literature on "Zhejiang village" in Beijing: Chunguang Wang, Shehui liudong he shehui chonggou: jingcheng "Zhejiangcun" yanjiu (Beijing: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1995);
62. Biao Xiang, Kuayue bianjie de shequ: Beijing "Zhejiangcun" de shenghuo shi (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2000);
63. and Zhang, Strangers in the City.
64. See also Zhao, Zongheng chengxiang, 65.
65. Some teams are quite stable in their personnel composition, not so much because they have fiercely loyal kin or fellow villagers but because they manage to get steady work.
66. Localities have elastic boundaries. Depending on the context, one's locals may include people from the same village, township, county, or province. So the question of whether one is from the same "local" area as another cannot be ascertained on the basis of geography, but depends on perceived, intersubjective understanding of the parties in question. To the extent that one is not regarded as a laoxiang (person from one's native town or village) or jiali lai de (person from home area) by another person, they are not from the same locale, even if their rural residences are from the same region in some geographical sense (e.g., the same province). Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle, 84.
67. The same is true with kinship, another socially constructed category. "Fictive kinship" is a case in point. As Ole Bruun has noted in his study of family business in Chengdu, [T]he distinction between the categories of household members and strangers or between relatives and non-relatives... is often vague and frequently nonexistent. Kinship terms are often applied to close friends of the household-uncle, little sister, big brother, and so on. In the case of close cooperation, such terms are commonly used that an outsider finds it impossible to distinguish between relations of true kinship and those of friendship. (Ole Bruun, Business and Bureaucracy in a Chinese City [Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1993], 58)
68. Interview with Cheng Gong, March 7, 1997.
69. Interview with migrant worker, July 28, 1996.
70. Zhao, Zongheng chengxiang, 65.
71. Interview with migrant worker, February 4, 1997.
72. For example, one villager I know decided that her two sons from two different marriages should not migrate and work together because she was afraid that the two half-brothers "may not get along and would lose their brotherly love for each other."
73. Weibing Gong, Laodongli waichu jiuye yu nongcun shehui bianqian (Beijing: Wenwu chubanshe, 1998), 68.
74. Interview with Cheng Gong, May 1, 2004.
75. Interview with Cheng Gong, December 8, 2002.
76. Portes and Bach, Latin Journey,
77. Wilson and Portes, "Immigrant Enclaves";
78. and Zhou, "Revisiting Ethnic Entrepreneurship."
79. The renovation business is unique in that migrant renovators have to deal with people outside of their native-place networks (i.e., the urban home owners) all the time. This forecloses the possibility of home renovation becoming a self-enclosed enclave economy among the rural migrants. The urban consumers' competitive bidding for renovation service partly shapes how, and with whom, migrant renovators interact at mobile work sites.
80. For a detailed description of fake advertisement, see Guang, "The Market as Social Convention."
81. Interview with migrant worker, July 2, 1996.
82. See http://juran.com.cn (accessed June 17, 2005) for a description of the branch markets. By 2005, it has opened four branches in the city. Its northern branch on the 4th ring road (si huang) alone boasts retail space of 56,000 square meters and sales revenue of 1.5 billion yuan by 2002.
83. "Lai zi Shanghai jiazhuang shichang de neimo diaocha," attributed to Jiefang ribao, February 14, 2004, http://www.ijiajia.corn/news/ article.php?id=308 (accessed May 18, 2004).
84. For a more detailed look at urban policing and control of rural migrants, see Shukai Zhao, "Criminality."
85. For more on the "city image" patrols, see Lei Guang, "Rural Taste, Urban Fashions: The Cultural Politics of Rural/Urban Difference in Contemporary China," Positions: East Asian Cultures Critique 11, no. 3 (2003), 631-32.
86. Interview with several migrant workers in Guangzhou, August 5, 1996.
87. Interview with migrant worker in Beijing, July 2, 1996.
88. The incident occurred in 1994 and was related to me in an interview on May 19, 2004.
89. Xiang Mu, "Zhujiang sanjiaozhou";
90. and Damin Zhou, "Guangzhou wailai sangong."
91. Zhao, Zongheng chengxiang, 76-77.
92. Interview with migrant worker, July 3, 1996.
93. Interview with migrant worker, January 24, 1997.
94. Interview with migrant worker, July 2, 1996.
95. Yuan, "Luoren," 111.
96. Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 54.
97. Guang, "Rural Taste, Urban Fashions."
98. I take the central idea of moral economy to be that humans are interpretive animals and that their actions-work or protests-are guided by a collective sense of what is legitimate or fair in the society rather than by any pre-social or asocial interests. In using the term moral economy, I stress the sociopolitical considerations under which seemingly economic transactions take place. For more on the notion of moral economy, see Edward P. Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," in The Essential E. P. Thompson, ed. Dorothy Thompson (New York: New Press, 2001): 316-77;
99. and James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).
100. See also William James Booth, "A Note on the Idea of the Moral Economy," American Political Science Review 87, no. 4 (1993): 949-54.
101. See C. K. Lee's discussion of three types of reactions to the economic reform-socialism betrayed, transformed, and liberated-that are shaped by different memories of Chinese socialism. Lee, "The Labor Politics."
102. See also Marc Blecher, "Hegemony and Workers' Politics in China," China Quarterly, no. 170 (2002): 283-303.
103. According to Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang, a higher percentage of migrants experience job loss than urban workers. In 2002, 45.4 percent of the migrant workers in Beijing went without a job for three months or more, up from 33.5 percent for 2000. Qiang Li and Zhuang Tang, "Chengshi nongmingong," 22.
104. Interview with migrant worker, July 2, 1996.
105. Interview with migrant worker, July 5, 1996.
106. In this case, "Northerners" refers to the Beijing residents. Anhui migrants also use the word Northerners to refer to the people from northern China in general who are stereotyped to be not as industrious and flexible as the Southerners. Depending on context, the term may also refer narrowly to urban state-sector workers in the North.
107. Interview with Cheng Gong, May 19, 2004.
108. Yuan, "Luoren," 35.
109. Interview with migrant worker, July 5, 1996.
110. Rachel Murphy, How Migrant Labor Is Changing Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
111. Interview with migrant worker, July 3, 1996.
112. Teodor Shanin, "The Peasants Are Coming: Migrants Who Labor, Peasants Who Travel and Marxists Who Write," Race and Class 19, no. 3 (1978): 281-85.