The worker subject

At the intersection of global capitalism and the Chinese modernity
project

Young migrant daughters--a new subject—”diligent, well-educated and
docile Chinese women workers who are willing to toil for twelve hours
each day, who are fitting to the just-in-time production, and who are the
potential consumers for the global products” (4)

China’s state socialist system grafted on to global capitalism: a world
factory (relying on cheap labour and land); party-state-market complex

Resulting social violence—restructuring of society, polity, the individual

Triple oppressions: global capitalism, state socialism and patriarchal
family
Quest for modernity
 Influx of capitalism in economic, political and social life
 How does it affect individual lives? bodies?
 New subjects, new identities, new relationships of power
and resistance
 State and individual desires
 New configurations of the universal and the specific/local
Narrative of arrival
 Search for money, away from the land
 independence
 Newness of the city
 transience=--short term waged work before marriage
 loneliness
Techniques of the self
 Process of individuation—beyond east/west
dichotomy (atomised individuation and relational
subject-making)
 From rural to urban
Social resistance
 Spontaneous defiance and everydau tactics (unionising
not allowed)
 Kinship networks