Cultural production in the working-class resistance: labour activism, gender politics, and solidarities

ABSTRACT

Against the backdrop of China as a seemingly ideal model to justify and normalize capitalist globalization, this article seeks to demonstrate how grassroots and bottom-up resistance can disrupt hegemonic ideologies and dominant values. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a local NGO and an activist group from March 2016 to July 2017, my study demonstrates that labour activism through cultural production becomes an important constitution of contemporary working-class resistance in China. Collective cultural production, such as advocacy songs, live shows, and writing endorsement articles, expresses a working-class subjective position and an anti-capitalist standpoint. Rural migrant workers’ inequality serves as a political and ideological stance from which different social actors join together in activism and resistance to construct imaginations of a new socialist China where there are equal relations in production and distribution, and social inclusion and respect. In the process of forming solidarities, feminist agendas for gender equality are marginalized in working-class resistance and gendered power relations greatly shape activists’ subjectivities, practices, and experiences. This study contributes to the intersection of labour studies, cultural studies, and feminist studies in China. I argue that grassroots labour cultural production contributes to the discursive formation of counter-hegemonic power; yet a more inclusive activist agenda is still required to imagine and build an equal and just society.

KEYWORDS:

• Labour activism
• cultural production
• migrant workers
• gender
• ideological struggles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Siyuan Yin is an assistant professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She holds a Ph.D. from the Department of Communication at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completes her M.A. in Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago and B.A. in Journalism and Philosophy at Peking University. Research areas include cultural studies, feminism, media and technology, political economy, and social movements. Siyuan’s work has focused on inequalities and resistance, gender and class politics, migrant workers, and mediated activism. Her research has been published in leading journals such as Media, culture & society and international journal of communication.

Notes

1 2016 National Bureau of Statistics of China. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/zxfb/201704/t20170428_1489334.html

2 Dagong spring festival gala was first held by MWH in 2012. Since 2015, it has enabled live streaming video online and has an estimate number of accumulated views over a million. http://www.dashengchang.org.cn/index.htm.

3 Bu Wei has written many advocacy articles about MWH published on mainstream media and other platforms such as social media’s public accounts and MWH’s brochures.

4 Many media have interviewed Zhang Huiyu in their reports on MWH and the migrant workers’ writing group, including Xinhua, Pengpai, Jiemian, Tengxun, Sohu, etc. These media cover range from mainstream official and commercial media to various online media.

5 Guo Chunlin wrote an article, 当新工人遭遇 “梦想秀” (When new workers encounter dream shows) on a domestic left website, Wuyouzhixiang, and argued that the mainstream commercial culture silenced migrant workers’ voices. http://www.wyzxwk.com/Article/wenyi/2017/04/378737.html

6 Wang Hui published the article ‘两种新穷人及其未来--阶级政治的衰落、再形成与新穷人的尊严政治’ (Two types of the new poor and their futures – The fall of class politics, reformation and the new poor’s political dignity) in December, 2016 on an independent scholarly website, 人文与社会 (humanity and society). In the abstract, Wang Hui talked about MWH’s ‘being forced’ instance and expressed the support.

Retrieved from http://wen.org.cn/modules/article/view.article.php/4166.