Welfare for Migrant Factory Workers
(ERC Project: No 803614)
Publications
- Special issue introduction "The Good Life in Late Socialism: Aspirations, Politics and Possibilities"
Abstract:
Contributors to this special issue examine the notion of “the good life” and its influence on late socialist social life through the perspectives of communities living amid political economic transformation across China, Laos, and Vietnam. The essays feature ethnographic analyses of diverse social domains—from pop culture, religion, and consumption to environmental discourses and philanthropic activities—to reveal how the contradictions of late socialism limit the possibilities of living well together and the moral agency of people negotiating seemingly incommensurable value frameworks and social orders.
Authors: Jake Lin; Minh T.N. Nguyen and Phill Wilxoc
- Welfare in Crisis: Labor and Social Protection in the Global South
Abstract:
Welfare expansion in the global South is partly in response to the social crises caused by neoliberal restructuring since the 1980s, with the 2008 global financial crisis escalating them, and the covid-19 pandemic further exposing the impact on the most precarious working populations. What are the new dynamics of labor struggles against these structural, industrial, and health crises under the expansion of social protection or the lack thereof? How do the state and non-state actors manage recurring and new capitalist crises by reconfiguring labor and social policies? The contributions in this special issue address these questions by engaging with workers’ lived experiences across the global South and post-communist states. They show that current labor and social policies fail the test under various crises. We argue that the neoliberalization of labor and welfare reconfigurations and the recurring crises of global capitalism have reproduced each other in these global South countries.
Authors: Jake Lin, Dennis Arnold and Minh T.N. Nguyen
- The Entrepreneurial Self of Market Socialism: Life Insurance Agents in Rural Central Vietnam
Abstract:
Casting the self as the primary unit of profit-making and value creation, the entrepreneurial self evolves from neoliberal ideas of self-enterprise and self-development to find ramifications in varying contexts. This article characterizes the entrepreneurial self of market socialism through the case of life insurance agents in Vietnam, where despite deepening marketization, socialist genealogies remain salient alongside cultural frameworks of care and belonging. In their entrepreneurial pursuits, the sales agents must present themselves as both caring and real believers in life insurance as a modern form of care while framing their goals in patriotic and relational terms. This morally activated market actor has emerged in the new economy, where the mandate to be self-entrepreneurial and self-responsible sits alongside the mandate to be a collectively spirited person. Remoralized through collective frameworks, the entrepreneurial self of market socialism betrays the illusory power of the self as it navigates contradictory moral demands.
Author: Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Rural-urban Migration, the Commodification of Labour and Welfare in China and Vietnam
- Peasant Traders, Migrant Workers and “Supermarkets”: Low-end Provisions and the Reproduction of Migrant Labor in China
Abstract:
This article analyzes the social and spatial dynamics of the mobile trade in low‐cost goods by rural people from a mountainous region of China's Zhejiang province and how these interact with the mobility and social reproductive patterns of the rural–urban migrant workers they cater to. Also formally categorized as peasants, the traders not only supply the goods necessary for the maintenance of the workers but also of their spatially divided household, thus contributing to the reproduction of migrant labor power more generally. In doing so, they assume mobility trajectories that align with those of factory production and experience familial trade‐offs commonly experienced by migrant workers. Meanwhile, the provision of low‐cost goods to migrant workers has enabled a thriving economy employing peasant families for whom agricultural livelihoods slowly disappear. These dynamics indicate the mutual connection between waged and self‐employed labor that works in the interest of capital accumulation at the same time with the differentiation of migrant labor. As in other comparable Asian contexts, their connection lies at the heart of the state‐sponsored production regime premised on the low‐cost reproduction of flexible migrant labor.
Authors: Minh T.N. Nguyen and Lan Wei
- More equitable fiscal systems are needed to improve welfare provision for migrant workers in China and Vietnam
Abstract:
China and Vietnam have a relatively low proportion of tax revenue contributing to their public expenditure budgets. Various forms of tax incentive are given to investors, which has come at the expense of government fiscal revenue. Although this has facilitated fast economic growth, public expenditure on social protection in Vietnam and China has lagged behind most developed and developing economies,
which constrains the scope and scale of social protection to citizens. The costs of social protection in both countries, particularly for the working population, have been mostly shouldered by employers and employees, with increasing involvement of the market players. This article starts with an overview of taxation revenue in China and Vietnam—two countries that are comparable due to their socialist legacies and similar development trajectories—before illustrating the public expenditure structures in both countries. To do so, it seeks to explore the logics of revenue making and public spending, and
how they work for the welfare of the people, particularly migrant workers who work at global factories in China and Vietnam, making the two countries known as ‘the factories of the world’.Authors: Jake Lin and Jingyu Mao
- Factory worker welfare and the commodification of labour in market socialist Vietnam: Debates on overtime work in the revised labour code
Abstract:
State socialist Vietnam formally embraced market reforms in the mid-1980s, and since then advancing marketization under the undisrupted rule of the Communist party. As marketization deepens, the party state’s legitimacy continues to rest on socialist practices of governance, structures of feeling and visions of a class-free society. This political-economic context gives rise to struggles between market and socialist logics over the social question in an economy that now powers global production with raw material and cheap labour, much of which is migrant labour. This article highlights these struggles through an analysis of the public debates around the regulation of overtime work during the revision of the 1994 Labour Code by Vietnam’s National Assembly in 2019, which foresees limiting it to ensure workers’ well-being. While parties to the debate position themselves as pro-business or pro-workers, they all evoke socialist narratives of nation-building, solidarity and care while emphasizing the market ethos of competitiveness and productivity. In arguing for removing the limit, the pro-business camp highlights the workers’ responsibility to contribute to the competitiveness of the country and their employers by working overtime to make up for their low productivity. In contrast, the pro-worker camp pleads for limiting overtime work on the grounds of workers’ poor health and difficult family lives, portraying their sufferings as deserving compassion. Despite these contrasting justifications, both arguments are characterized by the assumption of self-responsibility as the mainstay of well-being and failure to acknowledge the deeper societal problems posed by the commodification of labour.
Authors: Ngoc Luong and Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Doing Ethnicity: Multi-layered Ethnic Scripts in Contemporary China
Abstract:
Drawing on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork with ethnic performers in South-West China, this article seeks to explore the multi-layered ethnic scripts in contemporary China. Ethnic performers are people who perform ethnic songs and dances in restaurants or tourist sites, most of whom are rural–urban migrants from ethnic minority backgrounds. Ethnic performers’ ambivalences regarding whether they are “authentic minorities” points to the inadequacy of attempting to understand ethnicity in an essentialized way. Understanding ethnicity as something people do rather than who they are, the concept of “ethnic scripts” is proposed as a conceptual tool to illuminate the cultural and social repertoires which deeply shape people's understanding of and ways of doing ethnicity. By exploring the multi-layered meaning of ethnic scripts in contemporary China, this article highlights the ways that ethnic scripts are closely related.
Author: Jingyu Mao
- Bringing emotional reflexivity and emotional regime to understanding ‘the hukou puzzle’ in contemporary China
Abstract:
This article examines the dialogic relationship between emotional reflexivity and emotional regime as it explores ‘the hukou puzzle’ in China. In theory, migrants in small- to medium-scale cities can transfer their hukou (household registration) to urban areas, yet are unwilling to do so in practice. Relying on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork and 60 in-depth interviews with ethnic migrant performers, this article argues that previous theorisation of the hukou puzzle neglects emotions and assumes migrants are making rational choices to maximise their profits. In reality, different emotions and feelings inform migrants’ reflexivity regarding an opaque migration regime, which highlights the crucial role of how they exercise their reflexivity in emotional and relational ways. Moreover, a neoliberal emotional regime at the Chinese societal level – which emphasises positive energy, happiness and ‘the China Dream’ – also significantly shapes migrants’ emotional reflexivity. This article points to the need to further explore the intersection between emotional reflexivity and emotional regime in relation to migration.
Author: Jingyu Mao
- ‘Friends are those who can help you out’: unpacking the understanding and experiences of friendship among young migrant workers in China
Abstract:
Based on lengthy ethnographic fieldwork in Southwest China, this article unpacks how precarity and migration have deeply shaped young migrant workers’ understanding and experiences of friendship. The precarious work and living conditions compel young migrants to put more emphasis on the instrumental aspects of friendship, in which they deeply value friends’ help and practical support, which also intertwine closely with the emotional aspects of friendship. High mobility does not mean that migrants are not able to form and maintain ‘meaningful’ social relationships; rather, it is friends’ support and help which sustain migrants’ precarious and highly mobile ways of living. This article also discusses the burdens and risks that are associated with such friendship practices, and how, despite these ‘dark sides of friendship’, young migrant workers still largely rely on their friends to survive and keep going in the city.
Authors: Jingyu Mao and Yan Zhu
- Taxation and Welfare Provision in China and Vietnam
Abstract:
China and Vietnam have a relatively low proportion of tax revenue contributing to public expenditure budget. Partly thanks to both governments’ pro-growth priority, various forms of tax incentives are given to investors at the expense of tax revenue. Both countries, particularly China, increasingly rely
on land rights transaction for public budgetary revenue. Social insurance premiums have also become an important component of fiscal revenue that underscores the policy design of universal social insurance schemes that require as many citizens’ participation as possible. Although this has facilitated fast economic growth, China and Vietnam’s public expenditure on social protection has been lagging behind most developed and developing economies, which constrains the scope and scale of social protection to
citizens particularly the migrant workers. Instead, the costs of social protection in both countries, particularly for the working population, have been mostly shouldered by employers and employees, with increasing involvement of the market players.Authors: Jake Lin and Jingyu Mao
- Playing the edge ball: The politics of transgression in land development in southern China
Abstract:
This article analyzes a particular form of everyday politics through the case of land development in a Chinese village. Commonly referred to as edge ball politics ( cabianqiu ), it implies the act of transgressing certain rules or laws and testing the limits of what is socially and legally possible. We found that the state, the village leadership, private developers, and villagers all vie to influence the outcomes of land development in the village by engaging in this practice. We suggest that edge ball politics plays into the Chinese state’s governing strategies, which allow for a manageable space of negotiation to ward off a collective sense of injustice in the face of rampant dispossession of the weak and accumulation by the powerful.
Authors: Lan Wei and Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Life and Debt: Financial Precarity, COVID-19 and Ethical Dilemmas in Laos and Vietnam
Abstract:
The authors of this piece experienced fieldwork during the COVID-19 pandemic from both near and far. For Phill Wilcox, far away from research participants in Laos and with no prospect of returning anytime soon, fieldwork was reduced to internet messages and occasional video calls in which news of her area of research - perceptions of China in Laos researched through the new high-speed railway - were interspersed
with growing worries about the pandemic and, since March 2021, experiences of the lockdown in Laos. These included worries about reductions in the freedom to move, including to work in the rice fields, lost livelihoods for those working in the collapsed tourist industry, and for many the necessity of returning to their rural places of origin. For Ngoc Minh Luong, fieldwork consisted of ethnography on the ground in Vietnam from August 2020 to August 2021, focusing on welfare access for migrant workers at
global factories. She experienced first-hand the intensity and destruction of the four waves of COVID-19 by seeing workers being quarantined, losing their jobs, returning home and becoming infected with COVID-19.Author: Phill Wilcox and Ngoc Luong
- Changing Labour Laws and Worker Welfare in Vietnam and China
Abstract:
China and Vietnam started market reforms about four decades ago, transforming the socialist labour regime into a market-oriented one. Labour legislations and regulations have been prolific in keeping up with the rapidly changing labour markets as both countries became part of global supply chains, especially in mass consumer goods manufacturing. In general, labour law offers greater space for labour association and collective bargaining in Vietnam than in China, although the Communist Party in both states keep a cautious and sceptical eye on independent labour unionisation. Both countries have made numerous labour legislations to regulate workplace conditions and labour dispute resolution, prioritising strategies for industrial mediation and legal channels to de-escalate labour grievance and pacify workers’ unrest. Meanwhile, both China and Vietnam’s legislatures have also formalised labour social protection toward integrated universal resident-based social protection. However, the problem of law enforcement is pervasive in all three areas above, despite the principle of “rule by law”. Both countries’ judiciary is dependent on central and local governments for financing and personnel appointment. With local officials’ favourable treatment of businesses, the party state in both countries has considerable discretion in shaping the rights and welfare of workers through the legal system.
Authors: Jake Lin and Jingyu Mao
- Changing Household Registration and Worker Welfare in China and Vietnam
Abstract:
China and Vietnam are of the few countries that still implement household registration (hukou in Chinese and ho khau in Vietnamese). Regarded as one of the most important institutional mechanisms that underlie and sustain the profound rural–urban division in both countries, the systems record the mundane attributes
of each individual of a household yet determine many of the vital aspects of the life, if not the fate, of citizens, particularly the rural-urban migrants. The change and continuity of these systems are closely associated with these countries’ economic and social development, interacting with other processes such as industrialisation, liberalisation of the labour market, urbanisation, and rural development. Despite recent reforms, the household registration systems in both countries continue to shape migrant workers’ ability to access welfare.Authors: Jake Lin and Jingyu Mao
- "A New Job after Retirement": Negotiating Grandparenting and Intergenerational Relationships in Urban China
Abstract:
Based on interviews with 120 adult only children and their parents in urban Tianjin, this article shows how grandparenting becomes a crucial site for the intergenerational negotiation around childcare, family obligations, and the unfulfilled aspirations for individualisation. While only child couples rely heavily on their parents for childcare, a lot of tensions are involved in this process. Although grandparents do not always willingly embrace the heavy burden of intergenerational childcare, their concern about elderly care sometimes compels them to nevertheless take up the work. Through providing a nuanced picture of grandparenting in urban China, this article seeks to reveal the changing ideas of family obligation and responsibility, as well as the social transformation in China that underpins such change. It argues that the individualisation process is far from finished, as reality is pulling people back to solve problems within the family.
Authors: Qing Lin and Jingyu Mao
- The cycle of commodification: migrant labour, welfare, and the market in global China and Vietnam
Abstract:
China and Vietnam have experienced waves of labour and welfare reform since both countries shifted to market socialism, pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural–urban migrants in global factories. Their similar development trajectories are productive for theorizing the relationship between labour and welfare. This article conceptualises the two countries’ distinctive regime of migrant labour welfare as integral to a cycle of commodification that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodification, de-commodification and re-commodification of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodification of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural–urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the former socialist welfare system. It was then followed by de-commodification attempts aimed at providing forms of social protection that offset the labour precarity caused by decades of labour market liberalisation. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through financialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, these welfare regimes are undergoing a process of re-commodification in which the protection of labour is re-embedded into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. The “cycle of commodification” offers an analytical framework to understand welfare regimes as a social and political field that keeps evolving in response to the changing global valuation of labour.Authors: Jake Lin and Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Special Issue: Rural Life in Late Socialism: Politics of Development and Imaginaries of the Future
- Portfolios of Social Protection, Labour Mobility and the Rise of Life Insurance in Rural Central Vietnam
Abstract:
Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2018-19, this article analyses the changing composition of social protection on the ground in rural central Vietnam, including the recent spread of private life insurance among peasant families. The author uses the concept of portfolios of social protection to denote the emergence of an eclectic mix of measures to manage risks and to prepare for the future in the context of intensified perceptions of risks and the increasing privatization of care. Almost unheard of in this region just a few decades ago, private life insurance has come to be taken for granted by local people, many of whom are involved in precarious trajectories of transnational labour mobility. Underlying the rise of private life insurance in these rural communities is an uncertain process in which new prudentialist rationalities are domesticated into locally meaningful ideas of risk and care. In the context of hypermobility, such mutual entanglement makes it possible for global finance to turn the countryside into a new frontier. The article extends the Polanyian notion of double movement by showing the tendency of social protection to be reincorporated into the realm of the market.
Author: Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Review: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination: Comparisons with Hong Kong and Vietnam by Kaxton Siu, Singapore, Palgrave MacMillan
Abstract:
This book explores three major changes in the circumstances of the migrant working class in south China over the past three decades, from historical and comparative perspectives. It examines the rise of a male migrant working population in the export industries, a shift in material and social lives of migrant workers, and the emergence of a new non-coercive factory regime in the industries. By conducting on-site fieldwork regarding Hong Kong-invested garment factories in south China, Hong Kong and Vietnam, alongside factory-gate surveys in China and Vietnam, this book examines how and why the circumstances of workers in these localities are dissimilar even when under the same type of factory ownership. In analyzing workers’ lives within and outside factories, and the expansion of global capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, the book contributes to research on production politics and everyday life practice, and an understanding of how global and local forces interact.
Author: Minh T.N. Nguyen
- Precarity, Cognitive (Non-)Resistance and the Conservative Working Class in China
Abstract:
Workers’ resistance is crucial to understanding how the working class respond to the growing labour precarity in post-socialist China. The labour studies literature posits that inequality and volatile capital movements increase workers’ precarity and lead to stronger labour resistance, such as strikes. However, workers’ cognition as an integral part of resistance has been rarely studied. This article examines cognitive resistance by Chinese workers from different tier cities by looking at their social trust, class identity, understanding of policies and class solidarity. Despite capital movements and precarity causing more labour unrest, it does not necessarily lead to a stronger cognitive resistance. While inequality and precarity are greater in the more developed megacities with a shifting capital favourability, workers in megacities display a more conservative cognitive resistance than those from the lower-tier cities. This study of workers’ cognitive resistance provides insight into the future of the Chinese labour movement. It argues that the working class’s current cognitive non-resistance suggests that even if a window of opportunity were to appear in the wall of state oppression, workers are not cognitively prepared to coalesce into a coherent social movement that would bring about transformative changes.
Author: Jake Lin
- Chinese Politics and Labor Movements
