Suchergebnisse

The recent demolition of entire areas in the suburbs of Beijing and the ensuing wave of evictions of tens of thousands of rural migrants have served as harsh reminders of the subaltern condition of many of these people in China today. The previous issue of Made in China focussed on the ongoing debate on precariousness in contemporary China, shedding light on the complex changes affecting labour regimes and the increasingly diverse and fragmented labour landscapes across the country. In this essay, I will delve into a different but related issue: how rural migrant workers have been represented through a specific form of intervention—Chinese independent documentary films. The importance of looking at the ways various categories of rural migrants are represented, and how migrants themselves take part in their own self-representation—the so-called cultural politics of labour—hinges upon the assumption that both the study of the political economy and sociology of labour on the one hand, and the study of the cultural politics of labour on the other, are needed to apprehend the subject-making processes of migrant workers in today's China (Sun 2014).

is paper highlights how much the notion of governmental innovation is closely related to the idea of incremental transformation of the political system and to the strengthening of the Party-state's capacity to govern as well as to its legitimacy. The focus is also put on the relevance of the institutional genre of expression and to the use by the political scientist Yu Keping to highly recurrent modes of formulation that firstly stress the achievements in the Party-state's endeavours to improve governance in order secondly to put forward functional improvements to the governing mechanisms. ; Peer reviewed

Souvent traités séparément, les cas chinois et européens de l'Est sont abordés conjointement dans un ouvrage interdisciplinaire consacré aux institutions politiques et sociales, aux transformations socio-économiques et aux relations entre État et société. L'angle d'approche tend à présenter l'action de l'État-Parti en Chine sous un jour favorable.

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.

Comment rendre compte de la complexité de la question de l'expression d'une parole publique et politique en Chine contemporaine autrement que par le biais d'une opposition frontale entre expression et répression ? Dans cette contribution, se penchant sur le cas de la presse et des nouveaux médias, l'auteur propose une approche de cette question mettant l'accent sur les rapports de force, les oppositions et les accommodements entre l'État-Parti et les différentes catégories de la population chinoise, ainsi que sur les luttes symboliques et matérielles qui animent la société chinoise aujourd'hui.

Since the launching of market-oriented reforms in post-Mao China, the Chinese party-state has re-deployed some of its categorization, allocation, and spatialization prerogatives. The rapid societal changes at work in post-Mao China have implied a complex process of transformation of the Party-state's sponsored economy of signs and values. The various ways in which rural migrant workers have been represented are in this respect particularly worth studying, this at least for two interrelated reasons. Firstly, migrant workers have been playing a central economic role within the Pearl River Delta's but also within the whole country's economic growth since they provide the vast majority of manpower in the labour-intensive industries. Since the capacity to generate high levels of economic growth and to improve people's living standards are crucial in the Party's legitimisation building, migrants also play an important political role. But at the same time, the vary harsh labour regimes implemented in the Pearl River Delta and the violence ─ both physical and symbolic ─ that the meeting of global capitalism and post-Mao China state socialism generate upon migrant workers also constitutes a challenge for a ruling party whose founding narratives are still grounded precisely upon the rejection of capitalist exploitation. In this paper I want to show that by delving into migrant workers' narratives of their experience of 'dagong' and more specifically within their migration rationale one can get a glimpse of the at once empowering and also highly constrained dimension of migrant agency. Within specific patterns of accumulation, that is a context of combined "dull compulsion of economic relations" and of "routine repression", I will document the process by which "people's experiences and "practical engagements with the daily world" are linked to "historically produced institutional and structural settings" (Smith, 1996). As migration is intimately linked to unstable identification processes (at the individual and collective levels) and to the state project of legitimation, migrant narratives provide a particularly interesting vintage point to examine these processes of hegemonic contention and struggle. In the last section of the paper I will argue for the need to take into account contradictions seriously when studying migration experiences through ethnographic work. The data used for this paper are part of an extensive analysis by the author of the Shenzhen mainstream written press, participant observation, in-depth interviews with about 10-15 rural migrants, short informal interviews in the streets with about 70-100 people from 2001 to 2008, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor of several migrants' magazines. ; Peer reviewed

'Dagongzhe' Write to the magazines: suffering, borders stretching and longings. Dialectics of identification and legitimation. Eric Florence, PhD in Political and Social Sciences, Researcher at the Centre for Ethnic and Migration Studies, the University of Liege. In this paper, I will look at the different kinds of values that are fostered within articles (diaries, letters, etc.) published in magazines for rural migrant workers. After having detailed the criterion used by editors of these magazines in the process of selecting or rejecting writings sent to them by migrant authors, I will detail three types of narrative modes found in magazines aimed at migrant workers. The first one signals suffering, disillusionment and sometimes irony. The second narrative mode entails claim making by migrant workers which are often backed by editors. I argue that this belongs to what O'Brien calls "contentious politics". Eventually, the third mode examined in this paper will be thought of as strategic narrative framing on the part of migrant authors. In such framing the pedagogic role of guidance by editors is central I shall stress. But I shall argue at the same time that despite such framing, much of these writings are permeated by a powerful politics of desire and that such politics is particularly hard to analyse. In addition to a qualitative analysis of both published and unpublished writings by migrant workers and editors, I will also confront such writings and the values they convey to the fruit of my ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Pearl River Delta between 2001 and 200 ; Peer reviewed

With the introduction of capitalist labor relations into China certain attitudes, competencies, and values associated with global capitalism seem to be increasingly valorized. This article analyzes the values and principles ascribed to migrant workers as part of practices linked to modes of government. The author confronts the dominant form of cultural construction of migrant workers through the Shenzhen official press with migrant workers' own narratives about their experience of work (dagong) in the city as the narratives are mediated through two different sites, namely, participant observation, interviews with rural migrants, and a body of unpublished letters to the editor acquired from several magazines dedicated to migrant workers. The article sheds light on the ways in which migrant workers' narratives confirm or, on the contrary, contest the pivotal elements of the hegemonic construction. Three different narratives that migrant workers produce about their own lives and about Shenzhen are examined. These narratives range from affirmations of dominant discourses about migrant workers and expressions of disillusionment about such discourses, to strategic uses of dominant discourses to justify the claims made by migrant workers. (Crit Asian Stud/GIGA)

This article focuses on the ways in which migrants from the countryside were represented in the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when migration was becoming a major topic of public debate. Basing his argument on a close study of daily and weekly press articles, scientific journals, and reportage literature published between 1986 and 1991, he shows how a struggle has developed over the way the migratory movements are represented, and how it is articulated around an unresolved duality, namely the state and the market economy. The central issue in this controversy is the legitimacy of the migrants' presence in the towns, and this involves redefining the social and geographical hierarchy. The author also shows in historical terms how certain categories and labels like "blind migrant" have come into being; they participate in developing areas of state intervention. (China Perspect/GIGA)