Women migrant workers in China's economic reform: Interweaving gender, class, and place of origin.
详细信息
文摘
This dissertation studies unmarried women migrant workers' lived experiences of China's economic reform from a "bottom-up" approach. More than one hundred migrant, peasant, urban workers, retired workers, managers, business people and local government officials were interviewed during two field trips to Sicheng (a pseudonym), Jiangnan, China in 1995 and 1996. Interviews were conducted through open-ended questions. A post-structural methodology is used to bring personal narratives of workers I interviewed into constant dialogue and negotiation with Western theories on gender and work; analytical categories of gender, class, ethnicity, and state. This methodology is also intended to deconstruct the totalizing discourse of nationalism in China's reform policies and discourse. It contributes to a post-modern, post-colonial feminism, which emphasizes the fluidity and complexity of gender and other social dynamics, intersecting with ever-shifting and widening webs of power and dominance.;The dissertation develops new insights into China's modernization process by identifying which social groups are called on to make sacrifices in a particular sector and locale and why, who calls for such sacrifices, and the precise characteristics and gender implications of growth. Since 1992, managerial hiring power has meant that unmarried young rural women are being recruited for the first time in large numbers as supposedly cheap and docile labor. While the migrants' economic role is valued in Jiangnan, considerable effort is expended controlling them and containing their influence. The dissertation is distinctive in looking to the intersection of place of origin, class, and gender to explain not only how women workers are disciplined in factories, but also how they resist and survive from day to day.;The study has confirmed the continued importance of the Chinese State and Party in both material and ideological spheres, an importance crystallized in the building of "material and spiritual civilization"; the importance of socialist legacies in setting the contour of gender and class; the multiple identities of women workers; and the ongoing significance of firm ownership (e.g., township- vs. state-owned enterprises) in the balance of power in labour-management relationships.