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""New Masters, New Servants" is unique in its scope and ambition. One has the sense that Yan Hairong has really penetrated through several layers of mystification to see the inner workings of Chinese postsocialism and of neoliberalism at large. And through her sensitive and impassioned ethnographic engagement, she has animated the issues with lovingly rendered treatments of the circumstances and subject formation of domestic workers."--Louisa Schein, author of "Minority Rules: The Miao and the Feminine in China's Cultural Politics"

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New Masters, New Servants

Duke University Press

Contents

Preface......................................................................................viiIntroduction.................................................................................11. The Emaciation of the Rural: "No Way Out"................................................252. Mind and Body, Gender and Class..........................................................53Part I. "Intellectuals' Burdens" and Domestic Labor..........................................57Part II. Searching for the Proper Baomu......................................................80Intermezzo 1. A Survey of Employers..........................................................1093. Suzhi as a New Human Value: Neoliberal Governance of Labor Migration.....................111Intermezzo 2. Urban Folklore on Neoliberalism................................................1394. A Mirage of Modernity: Pas de Deux of Consumption and Production.........................1455. Self-Development and the Specter of Class................................................187Intermezzo 3. Diary and Song.................................................................2176. The Economic Law and Liminal Subjects....................................................221Notes........................................................................................251References...................................................................................287Index........................................................................................307

Chapter One

"No Way Out"

It's like going through a reincarnation and you still choose to be human [ren].

A YOUNG, RURAL MIGRANT WOMAN FROM HUBEI WORKING IN SHENZHEN, QUOTED IN CHING KWANLEE, GENDER AND THE SOUTH CHINA MIRACLE

If I had to live the life that my mother has lived, I would choose suicide.

XIAZI, A YOUNG, RURAL MIGRANT WOMAN INTERVIEWED IN BEIJING, IN LI HONG, RETURNING TO PHOENIX BRIDGE

Tomorrow, I will be more like a human [ren].

XU XUE, A MIGRANT WOMAN, IN CHINA'S YOUTH, 1995

When asked why she has returned to Shenzhen after surviving a blaze that took the lives of sixty-eight of her coworkers in a factory there in 1991, the young woman from Hubei expresses her determination to be ren, literally "human." The blaze has not diminished her resolve. The second woman, Xiazi, adamantly rejects her mother's way of life in the countryside, as it seems to her to be a life so lacking in meaning that it annuls livability altogether. The third young migrant, Xu Xue, resolutely expresses a hope of being more like ren. These young women invoke a meaning of ren that is not inherent within all humans, but is instead achieved through social action. Ren is a possessor of socially validated and meaningful personhood or subjectivity. As personhood is often associated with "culture," I adopt the concept of subjectivity in my analysis because it leads to questions of discourse, power, and history, and it facilitates an examination of a historically specific process of subject formation. In the discursive context of postsocialist development in China, these three statements register a dramatic rejection of the countryside as it is considered a field of death for the modern subjectivity desired by young women, who imagine the spaces of hope for such subjectivity to be somewhere else, in the city. What may appear in these statements to be desperate articulations of desire for a new, modern subjectivity encapsulates the ethos of the widespread longing among rural youth to "see the world" (jian jian shi mian), and the migration of these youth to the city both enables and is enabled by China's post-Mao efforts at "modernization" and accumulation.

Yet one cannot help noting in the women's comments that the imagining of a new, modern subjectivity is coupled with the idea of death, as expressed by the use of the terms reincarnation and suicide, as if violence were its necessary companion. Marx long ago revealed the contradiction inherent in primitive accumulation as simultaneously a process of laborers' emancipation from serfdom and guilds, and a history of expropriation and violence "written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire" (1977: 875). But the unprecedented rural-to-urban migration involving more than a hundred million free laborers, whose labor power has fed the engine of China's post-Mao accumulation since the early 1980s, is not based on the forced expropriation of land, as described by Marx more than a century ago. It is, ironically, based on the distribution of once collectively owned and managed land to individual rural households for production and management. Rural reform-the reapportioning of collective land to individual peasant households as accounting units, known as the "household responsibility system"-was introduced as the first measure of China's post-Mao structural adjustment in the early 1980s. This political economy of land, seemingly opposed to the classical model of primitive accumulation, provided a necessary condition for unfettering the mass of peasant labor power to drive a neoliberal, flexible machine of accumulation. It thus begs the following questions: how does the political economy of post-Mao China generate the conditions for a new carnival of accumulation, with its attendant contradiction of freedom and violence? Why was the countryside in the 1990s often invoked by rural young women as a symbolic field of death compelling them to seek a modern subjectivity elsewhere? Pursuing these questions requires one to link the political economy of development and the processes of subjectivity formation, and to track the discursive conditions and contradictions embedded in the struggles and agonies of subaltern subjectivity.

To capture the epistemic discontinuity in rural women's migration before and after the post-Mao reforms, I compare and analyze two cohorts of rural women migrating in the late Mao era of the 1970s and in the post-Mao era of the 1980s-1990s. Although both cohorts are migrant wage laborers, their experiences have been shaped by two modernization projects that hinge on radically different forms of rural-urban relations. A comparative analysis serves two purposes. First, it seeks to reveal the radical shift in rural-urban relations that has impressed itself on rural young women's subjectivity. Second, it places my analysis in conversation with the anthropological discussion of modernities. The experiences of two cohorts of migrant women illustrate modernities in the plural, not in terms of essentialized cultures to argue for a Chinese brand of modernity, but in terms of historicity to examine the tension and discontinuity in social processes, and thus to offer a critique of the teleology of capitalist modernity that has become hegemonic in China and elsewhere.

My interviews in Wuwei County in 1998 included 104 women in twelve villages in three townships. Eighty-eight women I interviewed had experienced migration, among whom fifty-nine had migrated on their own initiative, the rest having migrated with kin. Thirteen were over forty years of age and had migrated by themselves before and during the 1970s. Seventy-five were between their late teens...