Traversing Precarity: The Socioeconomic Mobility of Female Migrant Building Workers in China

Abstract

This article is located at the nexus of three bodies of geographical research. First, we respond to calls for careful and considered engagement with conditions, subjectivities, and experiences of precarity. Second, we contribute to the small but critically rich literature exploring structural organization of building industries and the everyday lives of workers. Third, we offer new ontological and epistemological momentum for long-standing study of migration in China. In doing so we interrogate ethnographic research focused on female migrants who work long hours, rarely take holidays, endure physical and emotional tiredness, extreme temperatures, dirty and dusty working conditions, family dislocations and, for some, challenging communal living. With an average age in the mid-forties, respondents nonetheless had moved from farms, factories, or both to building sites to secure higher salaries as well as contractual, financial, and familial stability. Few expressed concerns regarding working conditions nor articulated experiences of anxiety, uncertainty, and unmoored-ness at “the edges” of society. Drawing on feminist, materialist, and more-than-representational insights into resistance, resilience, and reworking, we unpack this empirical terrain, highlighting how female building workers respond to and shape relations of power, in and through mundane labor and domestic and family struggles. Overall, we contribute to progress in decolonizing geographical knowledge complexes.

Key Words:

• building workers
• China
• migration
• precarity
• socioeconomic mobility

Acknowledgments

The authors would like thank Wu Shuibao, Huang Xuebin, and Liu Jielin for their invaluable help in negotiating and enabling access to building sites, and Professor Kendra Strauss and the four anonymous referees for critical and challenging insights that have helped to significantly strengthen this article. Mark Jayne would also like to thank Professor Liu Yan (Shenzhen University, The People’s Republic of China), Liang Lidan (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium), and Wang Yuyi (University of Washington, USA) for their insightful comments on drafts of the article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

Thanks go to Sun Yat-Sen University for funding this research alongside Chinese National Social Science Foundation support (18XZW004, “Mobilities Theory and Practice in Contemporary Western Criticism”; 当代西方批评中的“移动性”理论与实践研究(西部项目)), and the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology for funding “Comparison between China and the West on Cultural Geography” 中西文化地理学比较 (G2021162010L).

Notes on contributors

Mark Jayne

MARK JAYNE is Professor of Human Geography in the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, The People’s Republic of China. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests are focused on urban social and cultural geography.

Wu Siying

WU SIYING is a PhD Student in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are focused on urban mobilities, through doctoral research exploring the “pendulum lives” of commuters in Beijing.

Wu Chenhui

WU CHENHUI is a PhD Student in the School of Geography and Planning, Sun Yat-Sen University, Guangzhou, The People’s Republic of China. E-mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are focused on maritime heritage through doctoral research exploring place-making, memory, and identity on Hainan Island.