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Abstract
This article explains the networked sociality of young Wa migrant workers made possible through the use of mobile phones and social media when these youths are on the move. Troubled by poor economic conditions in their rural homelands in southwest China, many Wa youth seek work in the urban manufacturing districts in southeast China. Most now rely on mobile phones to connect with the social media, QQ. Mobile networks promote a set of networked socialities which are integral to the continuity and development of Wa migrants’ ethnic ties. Their networking practices show both the constraints they face and the potentiality they develop for voicing social inequality and reconfiguring the dominant Chinese language ideology in urban work environments. Their networked sociality is virtual and yet rooted in their real-world activities involving fragmented engagements with mobile devices and everyday language use. The sociality that emerges is partly a matter of free-will and partly structure-constrained.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for Janet D. Keller’s support of my project focused on Wa youth’s labor migration and mobile communication. Parts of this article were presented at the 2011 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting at the panel ‘Tracing Mobile Language Practices across Digital Territories’, at the 2013 Taiwan Society for Anthropology and Ethnology Annual Meeting, and at the 2014 Taiwan Society for Anthropology and Ethnology Annual Meeting at a panel ‘New Media and Networked Sociality: Perspectives on the Human Condition and Digital Ethnography in Everyday Life’. I thank Alice Filmer, Kerim Friedman, Rob Moore, and Betsy Rymes for constructive suggestions to this research. I also thank Julie Yu-Wen Chen and two reviewers for comments on this article. Some of the data presented here were collected in a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan.
Notes
1. Breman, Outcast Labor in Asia; Pun, Made in China; and Yan, New Masters, New Servants.
2. According to the CWAC government’s published materials on population census, in 2010, the ethnic Wa population in Cangyuan was approximately 145,000 (85%). The remaining populations are the ethnic groups of Han Chinese, Lahu, Dai and Yi.
3. See Lin and Tong, “Mobile Cultures of Migrant Workers in Southern China.” Also see, Qiu, Working-Class Network Society; Wallis, “Mobile Phones without Guarantees”; Law and Peng, “Cellphones and the Social Lives”; and Florence, “Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta.”
4. See Hutchby, Conversation and Technology. Also see Lee, “Affordances and Text-Making Practices.”
5. See Castells, Communication Power; Castells et al., Mobile Communication and Society; and Donald, “Introduction.”
6. See Horst and Miller, The Cell Phone. Also see Madianou and Miller, Migration and New Media.
7. There has been no official census on the total populations of minority migrant workers in Shenzhen and Dongguan. This number is based on unpublished data collected by the township offices of the Cangyuan County Government. It only represents the numbers of Wa migrant workers coming from Cangyuan County. This number is quite similar to my own collected data on Wa migrant workers even though some of these Wa workers migrate between these two cities and their Wa homelands, intermittently. Other Wa migrants and ethnic minority workers from other parts of China are not included in this data.
8. Wittel, “Toward a Network Sociality,” 51.
9. Harbermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
10. Langman, “From Virtual Public Spheres to Global Justice.” Also see, Juris, “Reflection on #Occupy Everywhere.”
11. See Qiu, Working-Class Network Society, 7.
12. See Wallis, Technomobility in China.
13. See Agha, “The Social Life of Cultural Value.”
14. Pun, Made in China; Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle; Yan, New Masters, New Servants; and Wallis, Technomobility in China.
15. See note 11 above.
16. See Yang, The Power of the Internet in China; also see Zheng, Technological Empowerment.
17. See Chan, The Challenge of Labour in China.
18. Peng and Choi, “Mobile Phone Use among Migrant Factory Workers in South China.”
19. See the discussion of Han Chinese workers in Qiu, “Working-class ICTs, Migrants, and Empowerment in South China.” Also see the discussion of Han Chinese migrant women in Wallis, Technomobility in China.
20. See Zimmermann, “Redesigning Culture.”
21. See Dong and Blommaert, “Space, Scale and Accents.”
22. Also see boyd’s study of MySpace, “Why Youth Love Social Network Sites.”
23. Florence, “Migrant Workers in the Perl River Delta,” 38. Also see Bach, “They Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens.”
24. See Crystal, Txtng: The Gr8 Db8. Also see Jones and Schieffelin, “Talking Text and Talking Back.”
25. See the creative use of the Taiwanese writing system in Su, “The Multilingual and Multiorthographic Taiwan-Based Internet.” Also see Danet and Herring, “Introduction.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Tzu-kai Liu
Tzu-kai Liu, who received a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, is a part-time assistant professor at Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, and at Department of Southeast Asia, National Chi-Nan University. His publications include the following: ‘Reconstructing Cultural Heritage: Imagining Wa Primitiveness in the China/Myanmar Borderlands,’ in Cultural Heritage Politics, T. Blumenfield and H. Silverman, eds. (Springer 2013); and Planting a New House: Cultural Meanings of House Construction among the Wa in Yunnan, China (Tangshan Publisher, 2004, in Chinese).
Author’s postal address: Department of Anthropology, National Taiwan University, 1 Sec.4 Roosevelt Rd., Taipei, Taiwan.