Introduction Excerpt for Contesting Inequalities

INTRODUCTION

FORMING COUNTERHEGEMONIC FORCES

Resistance Movements and the Possibility of Change

The last four decades of neoliberal transitions have resulted in stark inequalities between elites and working populations across the global North and South. With the increasing trends of marketization, deregulation, privatization, and austerity measures, a small group of elites has consolidated the majority of the world’s power and wealth. While politicians, CEOs, bankers, and celebrities in different countries lead extravagant lives, underprivileged and marginalized groups, collectively comprising a global underclass, struggle with unemployment and underemployment, lack of labor protection, inadequate housing, limited access to healthcare and education, and discrimination and social exclusion. Rural-to-urban migrant workers in contemporary China belong to this global underclass. Emerging as a social group in the early 1980s, this migrant population has grown rapidly alongside the acceleration of China’s economic reform since the 1990s. By 2022, there were 290 million rural migrant workers in China.¹ They are subject to exploitation of transnational and domestic capital as cheap laborers, the deprivation of political and civic rights by the party-state as secondary citizens, and marginalization and exclusion by mainstream media and culture as inferior and deviant others. The inequality and injustice experienced by rural migrant workers are the manifestations of the intertwined unequal power structures in contemporary China and worldwide.

On one hand, China’s enormous and rapid economic growth has often been celebrated in official and popular discourse as the success of a unique Chinese model of development, a socialist market economy under the leadership of a communist party. Deng Xiaoping’s famous slogan “Let some people get rich first” has resonated strongly among the political and business elites and the urban middle class, who have been the main beneficiaries of the economic liberalization and uneven distribution of wealth and power in reformist China. Celebratory accounts that champion the power of the market while preserving the state’s discursive commitment to socialism have bypassed any substantial critique of China’s integration into capitalist globalization as a factory for the world at the expense of rising inequality, disenfranchisement of the rural and urban poor and working class, environmental degradation, and an increasing dependence on transnational capital. Meanwhile, the party-state’s sustaining authoritarian power remains intact.

On the other hand, the past two decades have seen a growing number of labor strikes among rural migrant workers, who demand better working conditions, fair wages, and benefits. Most of these have clustered in factories in industrial areas in South China.² These protests and strikes belong to the rising waves of workers’ collective actions and resistance in the era of neoliberal globalization in different parts of the world, including manufacturing workers’ strikes in India, South Korea, and South Africa, and gig and low-income service workers’ protests and unionizing in the United Kingdom, Canada, and United States. But workers’ resistance encounters varied reactionary forces. For instance, in India and South Korea, workers’ protests are often broken up by the repressive governments.³ In Western liberal democracies, such as Canada and the United States, it is usually the corporations and employers that set obstacles to discourage workers from organizing or participating in collective actions.⁴ In China, migrant-worker actions in factories face rather brutal suppression by local governments, including police violence.⁵ Due to the Chinese state’s extensive control over mainstream-media and social media platforms, labor strikes receive little coverage from mainstream news media and have little presence in social media; this prevents the broader public awareness of the workers’ continuous struggles.

As rural migrant workers in postsocialist China face the formidable powers of the state, the market, and cultural domination, what are the possibilities for them to form resistance movements? Proceeding from that central question, this book explores possibilities of change and social transformation by shedding light on bottom-up, grassroots struggles toward equality and justice. I move beyond conventional interpretations of workers’ struggles that see them as focused on substantial rights and against labor exploitation, and that move leads me to ask and address additional questions: How do Chinese rural migrant workers become a new historical subject of change? What forms of collective resistance, other than labor strikes, arise from workers’ everyday lives and are more sustainable in authoritarian contexts, like China? To what extent can the formation of workers’ collective power build solidarity and alliances with other groups of marginalized people to form a broader base of resistance? These questions respond to the division between labor movements and new social movements since the 1960s, which scholars have criticized.⁶ I suggest that only by tying class struggles to resistance efforts against other long-lasting power structures, such as patriarchy and heteronormativity, can an inclusive and transformative counterpower be developed.

In this book, I attend to a range of media, cultural, and communicative practices that rural migrant workers deploy as the main means and sites for their collective resistance efforts. I characterize these practices as mediated labor activism. “Mediated labor activism” refers to the integration of a variety of media, cultural, and communicative practices, such as theater performance, music, cultural production, and uses of digital media, into daily activism for migrant workers’ labor rights, equality, and justice. This book investigates diverse social actors and forms of mediated labor activism to demonstrate how mediated labor activism has enabled new possibilities for socioeconomic change in contemporary China. Through multisited and digital ethnography, I explore the experiences of rural migrant workers and engage with varied participants in mediated labor activism, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), advocacy groups, activists, scholars, volunteers, and journalists. The research project, carried out between March 2016 and August 2022 in Beijing and Xi’an, diverges from coastal manufacturing hubs. Instead, it concentrates on the construction and service sectors prevalent in northern China, where rural migrant workers constitute the primary workforce.

In the mass media age, representation in the mainstream news media has remained one of the most crucial means by which social and labor movements can enhance their public visibility and influence. But the relationship between mainstream media and social and labor movements has been contentious. Media opportunities, together with political opportunities, have become structural forces that shape social movements’ ability to reach the general public.¹⁴ Media attention scales the success of the protest, and the relationship between social movements and mass media is far from being a symbiotic one.¹⁵ Radical protests rarely get coverage in mainstream news media.¹⁶ Social movements are often the subject of distorted reports in mass media, which either circumvent their authentic political goals and messages or foster public resentment and hostility.¹⁷ In European news representation of trade unions and labor strikes in Europe, workers’ perspectives and voices are almost entirely excluded from reports, and workers are portrayed merely as noisy dissenters.¹⁸

Activists and movement participants approach and use mass media with one of two broad strategies: resistant and collaborative. Resistant actions include what Dieter Rucht categorizes as “abstention” and “attack.”¹⁹ Abstention occurs when, due to negative experiences with mass media, social movements and protest groups stop seeking media coverage. Activists may take verbal and physical actions to prevent media distortion. Examples include student protesters’ effort to impede the distribution of Springer newspapers in 1960s Germany, and Greenham women’s uses of parody to contest the mainstream media’s misrepresentation of their peaceful protest against the siting of US nuclear weapons in the United Kingdom in the 1980s.²⁰ The collaborative approach occurs when activists, realizing the importance of media visibility, strategically seek attention from the mainstream media. Staging spectacular events, establishing public relations units, and hiring professional journalists are some of the ways various progressive movements have sought to reach mainstream media, often at the expense of some of their political goals.²¹ In contemporary China, individual workers often resort to getting media coverage as part of their protest strategies to push employing companies/factories and local governments to address their grievances.²² But labor strikes and protests as collective actions rarely gain visibility in China’s mainstream news media. In this book, I explore how mediated labor activism navigates media opportunities in China to gain visibility and reach a wider public.

Alternative forms of media have been among the most prevalent and significant mediated-activism practices, designed to constitute a counterpower to that of the mainstream media. They are “alternative” in the sense that they intend to supplement, contest, and resist the power of a media system that benefits the elites, largely by establishing independent media outlets for marginalized and silenced groups.²³ Civil society organizations and local communities play a leading role in producing alternative forms of media in various national contexts.²⁴ In China’s media and communication system, the party-state’s political regulation and profit-driven commercial forces coexist as dominant powers in the print, broadcasting, and digital media landscape.²⁵ In response, local communities and NGOs have built alternative forms of media toward specific objectives for social justice and equality. Mainstream media are constitutive of the cultural and social inequality of rural migrant workers, portraying them as degraded others in urban China.²⁶ My book then examines how migrant workers and labor activists confront their misrepresentation and underrepresentation in mainstream media with their own media practices.

Information-communication technologies (ICTs), such as the internet, mobile technologies, and social media, have greatly expanded the opportunities for activism and resistance movements. Proponents of ICTs’ positive roles in facilitating social change mostly follow Manuel Castells’s argument that ICTs enable the formation of networks of transnational social movements.²⁷ W. Lance Bennett builds upon Castells’s idea of a network society and claims that the internet fosters the “growth of new global publics” and that “perhaps the next step is a thoroughly personalized information system in which the boundaries of different issues and political approaches become permeable, enabling ordinary citizens to join campaigns, protests, and virtual communities with few ideological or partisan divisions.”¹⁸ Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg’s concept “connective action” provides a framework to capture a new form of social movements based on individuals sharing content through social media networks.²⁹ Connective actions are large-scale and deploy inclusive discourse/memes whereby individuals may connect their personalized experiences with those of the movements, and social media play a vital role in the formation process. The transnational flow of MeToo movements is an example of connective action: women and girls, who were previously silenced by the victim-blaming culture, feel empowered by other survivors’ stories and actions to speak up and challenge the pervasive sexual violence and harassments.

Contesting the excessive attention to connective actions, Graham Meikle points out that connective action is “the personalization of politics” and argues, “There is no reason to think that the connective has replaced the collective, and the concepts are best understood as complementary.”³⁰ In a similar vein, Paolo Gerbaudo and Emiliano Trere argue that we should avoid overfragmented politics and go back to the collective identity to search for the “we” in social media activism.³¹ I contend that in the context of contemporary China, digital media may enable migrant workers to express their voices and share their personal stories, but as an underprivileged and marginalized group, they must build a collective identity and organize collective action to form a truly effective collective counterpower. For social groups who are disenfranchised and lack access to basic rights, forming a collective resistance force is more effective than connective action in contesting material disparities and cultural domination.

We also need to be mindful of the recent scholarly overemphasis on digital technologies in enabling activism and social movements. Drawing upon the cases of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements, Christian Fuchs argues that social media do not cause revolutions; instead, it is people facing deep-seated structural problems, such as wealth gaps and political suppression, who make rebellions.³² Employing a Marxist politico-economic perspective, Fuchs observes that corporate-controlled social media primarily produce commercial and mundane spaces where politics is the exception.³³ In their work on labor movements and digital media, Lina Dencik and Peter Wilkin stress that while digital technologies can be important tools for labor movements, they still should be recognized as an extension of state and corporate power for surveillance, control, and profit making.³⁴ Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong collect case studies across the global South and North and demonstrate that street protests “are more underpinned by small-scale interpersonal and transnational networks that operate across a range of online and offline environments, rather than by technology-based decentralized networks.”³⁵ Digital and social media such as Facebook and X (formerly, Twitter) are only additive to prevailing conditions and movements.³⁶ In other words, digital protests do not stand alone as being technology enabled; they are part of the larger body of diverse existing protests.

My approach to mediated labor activism resonates with these critiques. Rather than privileging the role of ICTs in mediated labor activism, I explore how the use of ICTs is embedded in the ongoing struggles and various practices. I suggest a dialectical understanding of ICTs in the context of activism and resistance movements. Digital media carry a significant potential to facilitate activism, but technologies are not a determining factor in advancing resistance and forming collective power. What remains to examine is how activists and advocacy groups adopt ICTs in various ways to build and maintain their offline and online activities, connections, and networks. In considering the Chinese context of heavy state surveillance of the internet and social media, I address how workers and activists navigate these conditions in their collective resistance.

Neoliberalism has gained hegemony in the past four decades at a global scale, inflected by local specificities and variations. The Gramscian perspective sees hegemony as being formed through both coercion and consensus. Ruling groups exercise domination through war, military, and police force, while moral leadership and mass support are manufactured by economic and political compromises, such as reforms and granting certain political rights, and cultural and political institutions, including schools, media, and political parties.³⁷ In our current moment, the expansion of neoliberal globalization has been backed up by the US-led military force and financial domination through institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank.³⁸ Domestically, nation-states set up legal and policy structures to secure the power of corporations and create markets in the industries of real estate, transportation, education, healthcare, and social security. The military-industrial and prison-industrial complexes benefit the state and corporate interests and lead to the mass incarceration and disenfranchisement of Black populations in the Western world.³⁹ Developing countries, either voluntarily or by coercion, embrace neoliberal reforms to deregulate markets, privatize public resources and services, and suppress local labor struggles.⁴⁰ The coercive power of the state and capital consolidates the political and economic systems of neoliberalism.

The consensus of neoliberalism is built through a series of ideological projects to promote free market doctrines and varied conservative and neoconservative values. For instance, in 1980s Britain, to gain popular support for neoliberal reforms and restore the hegemony of capitalism, Margaret Thatcher rebuilt the shared concept of “Englishness” by deploying the discourse of the free market and conservative values of nuclear family and nationalism.⁴¹ Thatcherism presented free markets and the preservation of an English way of life as solutions to address Britain’s economic recession and people’s fear of the loss of identity; in actuality, it displaced the deep political, economic, and social ruptures that had unsettled British society.⁴² In the United States, neoliberal ideology, perpetuated by corporations, media, universities, schools, churches, and professional associations, has simply become common sense. Politicians and dominant media extol individual freedom as the utmost political and cultural value to attain, when, in reality, the discourse of individual achievement camouflages corporate freedom, which helps corporations maximize their profit.⁴³ In the name of restoring a moral order, cultural nationalism and the discourse of “family values” divide the working class by using xenophobia and prejudice to scapegoat immigrants, women, and racial and sexual minorities.⁴⁴ In developing countries, states justify neoliberal reforms by invoking the goals of attracting foreign capital and advancing economic development. Neoliberalism also produces a particular subjective position for individuals to become an entrepreneurial self. In a Foucauldian sense, as Aihwa Ong argues, “neoliberalism is a governmentality that relies on market knowledge and calculations for a politics of subjection and subject-making.”⁴⁵

Struggles against neoliberalism take place at different scales and in different places. In the mid-1990s, the Zapatista rebellions resisted the Mexican state’s complicity with global capital and demanded rights and autonomy for indigenous people, eventually developing into a national movement against neoliberalism.⁴⁶ Elsewhere, cross-national, global justice movements emerged and developed in the late 1990s and early 2000s to protest neoliberal globalization and the unchecked power of multinational corporations.⁴⁷ The movements criticized international financial and trade organizations and free trade treaties for exacerbating wealth gaps between rich and poor countries. Shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, the Occupy movement, initiated in the United States, soon spread across the globe to oppose the increasing social inequality and deprivation of a significant portion of the world’s working-class population. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, labor and social movements arose alongside rapid industrialization to fight against neoliberal reforms and its detrimental impacts on workers and marginalized communities; these movements have grown since the 1980s and endured to the present.⁴⁸ These examples are not sporadic or unrelated but rather are evidence showing the resilience of counterhegemonic forces despite the formidable challenges posed by the state and capital.

Neoliberalism, as the latest stage of capitalist development, is, of course, by no means the only dominant power structure. Patriarchy, racism and white supremacy, and heteronormativity are systems of oppression that intertwine with capital exploitation and class inequality while retaining distinctive characteristics and effects. Iris M. Young, along with other feminist scholars, rightly reminds us to avoid “the exclusive and oversimplifying effects of reducing all oppressions to class oppressions” and to recognize the “the similarities and overlaps in the oppressions of different groups.”⁴⁹ Women, racial minorities, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ) groups, and people with disabilities constantly encounter sexism, racism, homophobia, and ableism in workplaces and their everyday lives, and systemic violence is produced and reproduced through the institutional powers of the state, the market, education, and media. The historical development of capitalism and the hegemonic formation of neoliberalism adapt to changes in existing power structures. For instance, capitalism intersects with patriarchy to exploit women’s productive and reproductive labor.⁵⁰ Colonialism fuels the primitive accumulation of capital to extract resources and exploit labor in colonies.⁵¹ The legacy of colonialism lives on in the postcolonial era as a system of power asymmetries that allow for the exploitation and disenfranchisement of racial minorities and immigrants in Western countries and workers in developing countries in the era of neoliberal globalization.

Past and current feminist and racial-justice movements have challenged these systems of oppression. In North America and Europe, the three waves of feminism occurring from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century fought for women’s suffrage, access to education, employment, women’s reproductive rights and justice, and the rights of LGBTQ people. The US civil rights movement has combated the systemic racism in the United States, while Black feminists have revealed and challenged the interlocking systems of patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, imperialism, and heteronormativity.⁵² In Asia and the Middle East, women’s emancipation movements were closely linked with national independence and democratic movements in the early twentieth century.⁵³ During the Cold War, transnational feminist alliances were formed among feminists from second and third world countries.⁵⁴ Throughout the twentieth century, these resistance movements endured at local, national, and global scales. In the past two decades, transnational feminist movements from SlutWalk to MeToo have flourished, with feminists, women, and Progressive men worldwide confronting patriarchal powers that discipline and control women’s body and sexuality. The more recent Black Lives Matter movement has revitalized a spirit of collective resistance against systematic racism in Western countries.

Expanding Antonio Gramsci’s class-based conception of “hegemony” to consider other systems of social hierarchy, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that there is a “need to create a chain of equivalence among the various democratic struggles against different forms of subordination. . . . Struggles against sexism, racism, sexual discrimination, and in the defense of the environment needed to be articulated with those of the workers.”⁵⁵ In this book, I suggest that workers’ struggles must be connected and allied with other collective resistant efforts against hegemonic power and domination. There is no single, universal process by which hegemony forms, but rather the mechanisms and dynamics of hegemony can vary significantly based on specific contexts, historical periods, and social structures. Understanding the constitution of particular hegemonies in particular conjunctures is thus a prerequisite for exploring the potential development of counterhegemonic power. To address the possibilities of forming counterhegemonic forces in contemporary China, it is necessary to first explicate the hegemonic power that currently prevails in the regime.

Structural inequalities in reformist, postsocialist China are sustained through the party-state, which holds unchecked political power through neoliberal globalization that enables transnational and domestic capital to profit from labor exploitation through the urban-rural hierarchy—which produces and sustains the privilege and superiority of the urban population—and through patriarchy—which grants male supremacy and domination over women’s bodies and sexuality. These intertwined systemic inequalities particularly affect marginalized and underprivileged groups, including women, sexual minorities, peasants, and the working class. Beginning with Mao Zedong’s program of socialism, the party-state’s authoritarian control over Chinese politics and society has persisted through the present era of market reform despite economic changes and social transformations.⁵⁶ The party-state grants limited political freedoms, imposes restrictions on civil society, and retains centralized control over decision-making. The state-led market reforms facilitate capital investment and foreign trade by privatizing state-owned enterprises and rural collective farms and by marketizing and commodifying essential public resources, including housing, education, and social welfare. China’s export-oriented economy relies on the labor exploitation of a significant rural population who become migrant workers employed in offshore manufacturing sites and low-income service work. The authoritarian party-state and capital power constitute the hegemonic bloc of contemporary China, which is defined by David Harvey as “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.”⁵⁷

Modernization, globalization, and development have become key concepts of the depoliticized ideology that has produced and perpetuated the consensus of hegemony. The party-state’s official discourse propagates these concepts, and mainstream media reinforce them, thereby legitimizing China’s integration into capitalist globalization and obscuring the increasing inequalities in the country.⁵⁸ In postsocialist China, as Lisa Rofel argues, national public culture is the main medium for creating neoliberal subjectivities.⁵⁹ The depoliticized and pragmatic approach to promoting economic prosperity is vital in producing neoliberal subjects. The official and popular discourses coordinate to convey a clear message: Chinese people should enhance their skills and capabilities and become self-reliant, competitive participants in the market economy. In doing so, they would contribute to the broader national goals of economic growth and the advancement of the country’s position on the world stage. In the cultural and social sphere, an ethos of consumption leads individual to pursue and prioritize material possessions. The flourishing consumerist values, along with the ever-increasing material disparity between the rich and poor, have further marginalized the underprivileged groups, who are deemed to be incapable consumers. The peasants and workers who were once championed as the revolutionary agents of socialist China have become, in the popular media discourse of urban superiority, degraded others and disposable labor.

Patriarchy runs deep throughout Chinese history. Despite the significant success of state-led initiatives for gender equality during the Mao era, male supremacy, misogyny, and feminization of housework have not been fundamentally challenged; nor have the continued dominance of heteronormativity and the pervasive homophobia in Chinese society.⁶⁰ Sexist values and norms have been incorporated into the marketization processes of postsocialist China, consolidating patriarchal power in politico-economic and sociocultural domains. Meanwhile, class division among women is conspicuous in reformist China. Whereas middle-class women are desirable consumers in their embrace of so-called modern lifestyles, rural and working-class women have become a cheap labor force used in factories and low-income service sectors.⁶¹

My book is a scholarly and political project that searches for counterhegemonic potential among the rural migrant workers of China. I begin with an examination of how hegemonic power structures configurate rural migrant workers’ lives in postsocialist China and how workers respond collectively to inequalities and injustices. From there, I move on to ask to what extent mediated labor activism may contribute to the formation of counterhegemonic power. Focused specifically on grassroots, bottom-up workers’ struggles in China, the book joins the ongoing efforts of scholars and activists who seek to envision and build an alternative world.

In considering the relationship between ideology and subject, Louis Althusser argues that “all ideology hails or interpellates concrete individuals as concrete subjects, by the functioning of the category of the subject.”⁶²According to Althusser, when individuals and their consciousnesses, values, beliefs, and actions are interpellated by ideology, which is an eternal entity, subjects are constituted. The subject thus becomes “a subjected being, stripped of all freedom except that of freely accepting his submission. . . . There are no subjects except by and for their subjection.”⁶³ Michel Foucault’s concept of “subjectification” poses a similar critique. “Subjectification” refers to the process through which the subject is constituted and becomes the product of power relations.⁶⁴ Although Foucault’s critique of power, knowledge, and discourse differs from Althusser’s focus on ideology, both philosophers are pessimistic about the possibility of a free, autonomous subjectivity and subject.

While I agree with Althusser’s and Foucault’s analyses of the effects of constitutive power on individuals, my approach to subject formation aligns more with Kathi Weeks’s discussion of the subject since her account suggests possibilities for change. Weeks draws upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s account of the subject: “Nietzsche’s subject is both autonomous and situated, there is tension, but no necessary contradiction between the fact that we are both always already constituted and at the same time, self-constituting.”⁶⁵ Weeks suggests two coexisting modes that exist within any subject: a mode of being and a mode of becoming. The mode of being acknowledges the dominant forces that affect individuals, as in Althusser’s and Foucault’s critiques. The mode of becoming recognizes the subject as an active agent of change. The coexistence of these modes allows the subject to transcend constituted subjectivities and challenge and reshape them.

It is the mode of becoming that opens possibilities to cultivate new subjectivity. English workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, experiencing the profound impacts of industrialization on their lives, developed working-class consciousness through their everyday lives, rituals of mutuality, community building, and shared radical thoughts.⁶⁶ Workers are produced by the dominant powers of state and capital as workers, but they also produce themselves as political subjects with working-class consciousness to realize their subordinated positions in the societal hierarchy and to defend their rights. Consciousness-raising is crucial for women, as they realize their collective experiences of oppression and subordination. ⁶⁷ Through consciousness-raising, there arises the possibility for a woman to become a feminist subject with feminist consciousness. Here, I use Sandra Lee Bartky’s definition of “feminist consciousness”; Bartky conceptualizes “feminist consciousness” as the consciousness of victimization: “The consciousness of victimization is a divided consciousness. To see myself as victim is to know that I have already sustained injury, that I live exposed to injury, that I have been at worst mutilated, at best diminished in my being. But at the same time, feminist consciousness is a joyous consciousness of one’s own power, of the possibility of unprecedented personal growth and the release of energy long suppressed. Thus, feminist consciousness is both consciousness of weakness and consciousness of strength.”^68> Developing a collective working-class or feminist consciousness enables marginalized individuals to transform themselves from a mode of being into a mode of becoming: overcoming the passive, alienated, and oppressed subjectivities and becoming an antagonist subject against capitalism and patriarchy.

Becoming is not a linear process but one that inevitably involves ambiguity, complexity, and unpredictability. A woman with a newly developed feminist consciousness may struggle to live a “feminist life.” She may wonder if wearing make-up and getting married are antifeminist acts or simply acts of self-expression and individual choice. Some people may refuse to identify as feminists even though they support gender equality. Workers may find themselves caught up between the conflicting maxims that “employers provide jobs” and “employers profit by exploiting workers.” Subordinate groups may find it difficult to overcome a feeling of inferiority, as the result of what Frantz Fanon describes as “psychic alienations.”⁶⁹ These tensions and difficulties can be attributed to the powerful impact of dominant norms and discourses that appear as “common sense” in people’s lives. Patriarchal culture compels women to pay extra attention to their appearance and molds their desire for heterosexual relationships. The stigmatization of feminism and feminist identity dissuades people from embracing the label of “feminist.” Capitalist ideology persuades workers to be grateful to their bosses for presenting employment opportunities. Sexist, classist, racist, homophobic, and ableist discrimination perpetuate a culture of inferiority in which marginalized and underprivileged people are systematically devalued and disenfranchised.

Enabling a mode of becoming thus requires transformative epistemological stances to destabilize the established norms, values, and dominant power that shape people’s subjectivities. To challenge the free market doctrine, Karl Marx and Marxist scholars have revealed labor exploitation, alienation, and the inherent inequality in capitalist modes of production. These politico-economic critiques continue to inspire workers worldwide to organize collective resistance from launching strikes and protests to forming unions and political parties to staging revolutions. Gramsci argues, “every revolution has been preceded by an intense labor of criticism, by the diffusion of culture and the spread of ideas amongst the masses.”⁷⁰ He is specifically referring to the spread of socialist ideas to contest the hegemony of the capitalist system, as Enlightenment ideas laid the groundwork for the bourgeois rebels against the feudal monarchs.

If we are to contest the hegemony of intertwined power structures, we need to employ a variety of critical ideas and approaches: aiming to expose male domination and patriarchal privilege, feminist scholars and activists encourage women to recognize, problematize, and resist sexism, sexual objectification, disciplinary power and norms, and everyday forms of violence experienced at individual and societal scales. Queer theory deconstructs normative understandings of gender and sexuality and has played a significant role in LGBTQ movements that advocate for the rights and social inclusion of sexual minorities and nonbinary people. Postcolonial theory interrogates the lasting impacts of colonialism and imperialism on people’s lives in the global South. The list of transformative epistemologies could certainly extend much further. What they share in common is a goal of disrupting the consensus of hegemonic power within a given context.

Since the 1950s, the world has witnessed a series of social movements that advocate for different yet often-overlapping forms of social justice, including feminist movements, the US civil rights movements, antiwar movements, student protests in western Europe, prodemocracy movements in eastern Europe, LGBTQ movements globally, etc. Responding to various social, political, and economic issues, these movements expand the conventional understanding of conflicts between labor and capital, which drives workers’ protests and working-class organizing into unions and parties. These social movements, with varied aims and participants, are often regarded as “new social movements.” Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani conceptualize informal networks as a key characteristic of new social movements.⁷¹ “Informal networks” refer to sustained relationships, connections, and interactions among individuals, groups, or organizations involved in a social movement that are not governed by formal structures or institutions. These informal networks often play a crucial role in mobilizing activists, sharing information, coordinating actions, and building solidarity within social movements. They can transcend traditional hierarchical structures and facilitate dynamic grassroots organizing.

Borrowing the concept of the “informal network” from social-movements studies, I suggest that informal networks are also essential to facilitate the formation of counterhegemonic power. Informal networks can foster a sense of solidarity and support among activists and individuals, who may feel marginalized or oppressed by dominant power structures. This emotional and practical support is crucial for the sustainability of collective resistance. Due to their diffuse and decentralized nature, informal networks tend to be more resilient in the face of suppression or resistance from established power structures. Informal networks have important implications for grassroots, bottom-up collective resistance in China’s context, as they can enable space for individuals and social groups, without formal affiliations with any advocacy organizations, to collaborate and connect in the process of promoting social change. Such space may reduce the risk of individuals being targeted by authorities and encourage people to participate in the collective efforts of resistance. A recent example is the transnational flow of the MeToo movement in China. The informal networks formed in the process of advancing the MeToo movement create a sense of community and support and inspire a great number of people to break their silence and speak up about sexual harassment and assault. When Feminist Voices (Nü quan zhi sheng; 女权之声)—a high-profile feminist-advocacy organization that played a leading role in facilitating the MeToo movement in China—was disciplined by the government, individuals and social groups connected by informal networks have been able to carry on the movement. ⁷² Decentralized activism allows people to share their stories, raise awareness, mobilize support, and organize local and community-based initiatives.

Informal networks have also become a vital part of the labor movement, complementing the work of traditional labor unions and expanding the reach of labor-advocacy efforts. Historically, unions have played a pivotal role in mobilizing and organizing workers’ strikes, protests, and labor movements. But many established unions have long faced criticism for their hierarchical structures and exclusion of women, racial minorities, and immigrant workers.⁷³ Legal barriers remain a major obstacle for underprivileged workers around the world who seek to unionize. In a sector of the informal economy, such as domestic service, workers face significant barriers to forming labor unions and collectively organizing in many developed and developing countries.⁷⁴ Transnational migrant workers are often prohibited or restricted by law from forming unions. These workers’ temporary or irregular status limits their ability to organize collectively with fear of retaliation, such as deportation or visa revocation. New and more flexible forms of labor organizing, such as worker centers, NGOs, and advocacy groups, have emerged to address some of these limitations, providing services and advocating for workers who may not be part of traditional unions. These new actors build connections and collaborations to exchange resources and provide mutual support, which enables a wide range of participants to join in labor advocacy. For instance, in Canada, a sustained network among NGOs, unions, advocacy groups, activists, academics, and migrant workers has formed to demand landed status and labor rights for transnational migrant workers.⁷⁵

In China, where independent labor unions are legally prohibited, labor NGOs have played a vital role in addressing various issues related to rural migrant workers. These NGOs often serve as grassroots forces for advocating labor rights, providing legal advice and assistance, and offering social and cultural services. Recognizing labor NGOs’ important presence in rural migrant workers’ lives, my book explores the role of labor NGOs in supporting and amplifying the efforts of rural migrant workers in their collective resistance. I address the interconnectedness of civil society, advocacy organizations, and grassroots collective resistance in the pursuit of labor rights and social justice in China.

I conducted field research in Beijing and Xi’an from March 2016 to August 2022. In contrast to coastal cities in southern China that serve as manufacturing hubs, Beijing, the capital city of China, and Xi’an, a provincial capital in northwestern China, are typical of northern China in that there is no large-scale, labor-intensive manufacturing and rural migrant workers mostly work in the construction and service industries. During fieldwork, I interviewed and had conversations with dozens of rural migrant workers to learn about their experiences, struggles, concerns, and aspirations. These workers belong to the two generations of rural migrants, with ages ranging from twenty to fifty-six years old. The first-generation rural migrants refer to those born in the 1960s and 1970s who moved from rural areas to urban or more developed areas in search of job opportunities. Most of these workers had only finished middle school and carried the financial burden of supporting their families. They usually work in labor-intensive and low-income service sectors, including manufacturing, construction, mining, domestic service, and restaurants. Wage arrears, work injuries, and social exclusion have been common problems faced by the first-generation migrant workers. The second-generation rural migrants are those born in the 1980s and 1990s in rural villages who seek jobs in cities. Compared with their parents, the second generation has attained a relatively higher education level, with high school degrees, and faces less financial burden. They do not need to send money back to their rural hometowns to support family members, as their parents did when they first migrated, and they are also more integrated into urban life. While many second-generation migrants continue to work in factories, an increasing number are finding employment in expanding service industries.

Some scholars attribute the increase in labor strikes in China to greater class consciousness or rights consciousness among second-generation rural migrant workers.⁷⁶ My experience with the two generations of migrant workers complicates that interpretation. In actuality, both generations are active participants in mediated labor activism. In addition to talking with workers about their motivations for and experiences of participation in activism, I visited beauty salons and barbershops in Beijing and Xi’an to speak with young migrant workers who were not participants in activism to gain insights into their thinking.

The primary field sites in which I explored mediated labor activism were two labor NGOs, one activist group, and an alternative-media outlet. I chose these four sites because of their dedication to advocacy for migrant workers. These NGOs and advocacy groups represent a new wave of grassroots labor activism that relies on varied media and cultural practices. When I entered the field in March 2016 in Beijing, my primary research sites were two labor NGOs, the Migrant Women’s Club (MWC; Dagongmei zhi jia; 打工妹之家) and Migrant Workers’ Home (MWH; Gongyou zhi jia; 工友之家). I approached the two NGOs as organizational forces working toward social change and as spaces wherein social actors perform varied types of collective action.

Rural Women Knowing All (RWKA; Nongjia nü baishitong; 农家女百事通), the first NGO for the empowerment of rural women in China, was established in 1993 by Xie Lihua, a retired editor who had previously worked at an official media outlet. In 1996, Xie founded MWC as a branch of RWKA in Beijing, and it is one of the first NGOs to provide service to and advocate for rights for female rural migrant workers. Since its establishment, MWC has maintained a beneficial relationship with the state and has been recognized by scholars as a well-established NGO for female migrant workers.⁷⁷ MWC’s main work has been to provide services, resources, and skills training to female migrants and policy advocacy with the government. In this book, I specifically analyze MWC’s recent advocacy program Didinghua Theater (Didinghua jushe; 地丁花剧社) as part of MWC’s broader campaign to demand labor rights for migrant domestic workers.

Migrant Workers’ Home was founded by a group of migrant workers and activists in 2002 in Beijing. In contrast with MWC, whose founders and early organizers had relatively high social status, most MWH staff members have been migrant workers themselves. MWH represents the emerging trend of migrant workers organizing their own NGOs; most of them are small-scale and community based. MWH has gradually become one of the most influential grassroots migrant-worker NGOs. MWH’s activism focuses on constructing migrant workers’ culture and community as the main means to challenge their inequality and injustice.

The two main techniques through which multisited ethnography constructs its objects of study are “follow the people” and “follow the thing”—that is to say, tracking the movement of initial subjects and objects in complex cultural phenomena.⁷⁸ I deployed the two techniques to discover the participants and practices of various forms of mediated labor activism. My contact with members of MWH led me to explore activist projects that have grown out of MWH networks. A leading member of MWH told me about the feminist band Jiu Ye when we first met in late April 2016, shortly after the band was formed. Founded by three female activists, Jiu Ye uses its music to advocate gender and class equality for female migrant workers. Jiu Ye represents a typical trend among activist groups in China—namely, that they employ flexible forms of organizing without registering as NGOs.⁷⁹

Jianjiao buluo (尖椒部落; Pepper Community) is an online feminist-advocacy media outlet with a particular focus on female migrant workers. I was introduced to Jianjiao buluo by a migrant-worker participant of MWH who has written for and been a reader of Jianjiao for some time. Several activists founded and registered Jianjiao as an NGO in 2014. In recent years, China has witnessed a growing number of feminist-media NGOs that criticize the unequal power structure rooted in China’s patriarchal past and present. These feminist-media NGOs primarily rely on the internet to promote feminist views and analyses to the general public. However, the feminist agenda of these NGOs tends to prioritize gender issues faced by urban middle-class women while largely neglecting working-class politics. In this context, Jianjiao has taken a groundbreaking role in producing feminist nonprofit and advocacy media for migrant workers. I use the cases of Jiu Ye and Jianjiao to discuss how feminist ideas and practices have intervened in the sphere of labor activism and expanded the scope of mediated labor activism.

Over the course of six years of offline and online fieldwork, I adopted the mixed qualitative methods of textual analysis, participant observation, and interviews and have collected archival materials from NGOs, government documents, and news reports. I attended and participated in activities and events, had plentiful discussions with various participants, and conducted a total of fifty-two semistructured interviews with migrant workers, NGO staff members, activists, volunteers, and journalists. I followed the four research sites’ public accounts on social media to stay informed and updated about their activities and events and frequently talked with staff members and migrant-worker participants through WeChat. Up to the present, I remain connected with most of the research participants on WeChat.

My access to research sites and participants was largely facilitated by the existing networks among rural migrant workers, labor NGOs, activists, and scholars. I am grateful that these people were willing to, and often enthusiastic about, sharing their experiences, thoughts, and opinions with me. Feminist scholarship challenges the supposed objectivity of existent research methodologies and reveals that subjectivity and subjective relations with research subjects shape the knowledge-production process.⁸⁰ I have maintained an awareness that my positionality shapes the power relations and negotiations inherent in any ethnographic research. Growing up in an urban middle-class family in China, I had more class privilege than many rural migrant workers. But this privilege has not prevented me from being highly respectful toward migrant workers, and I continue to admire their resilience. My identity as a woman and a feminist helped me build rapport with female migrant workers and female activists. My academic and professional experience in higher education in China and North America has enabled me to establish connections with a group of domestic and international scholars dedicated to labor advocacy. Fortunately, I was able to build mutual trust with most of the research participants once they recognized our common concern for the well-being of rural migrant workers and other underprivileged and marginalized groups.

Notes

1. National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2022 Annual Report of Rural Migrant Workers, April 2023, https://www.stats.gov.cn/sj/zxfb/202304/t20230427_1939124.html.

2. Chris King-chi Chan and Ngai Pun, “The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China,” China Quarterly 198 (June 2009): 287–303; Jenny Chan, “Jasic Workers Fight for Union Rights,” New Politics 17, no. 2 (Winter 2019): 84–89; Jenny Chan and Mark Selden, “China’s Rural Migrant Workers, the State, and Labor Politics,” Critical Asian Studies 46, no. 4 (2014): 599–620; Taihui Guo, “Rights in Action: The Impact of Chinese Migrant Workers’ Resistances on Citizenship Rights,” Journal of Chinese Political Science 19 (2014): 421–34; Parry P. Leung, Labor Activists and the New Working Class in China: Social Movements and Transformation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

3. Jennifer Jihye Chun, “The Contested Politics of Gender and Irregular Employment: Revitalizing the South Korean Democratic Labour Movement,” in Labour and the Challenges of Globalization: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity?, ed. Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg, and Devan Pillay (London: Pluto, 2008), 23–42; Sara Duvisac, “Reconstituting the Industrial Worker: Precarity in the Indian Auto Sector,” Critical Sociology 45, no. 4–5 (2019): 533–48.

4. Rachel K. Brickner and Meaghan Dalton, “Organizing Baristas in Halifax Cafes: Precarious Work and Gender and Class Identities in the Millennial Generation,” Critical Sociology 45, no 4. (2019): 485–500.

5. J. Chan, “Jasic Workers.”

6. Dan Clawson, The Next Upsurge: Labor and the New Social Movements (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Laurence Cox and Alf Gunvald Nilsen, We Make Our Own History: Marxism and Social Movements in the Twilight of Neoliberalism (London: Pluto, 2014); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Books, 2014); Peter Waterman, “Social-Movement Unionism: A New Union Model for a New World Order?” Review 16, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 245–78.

7. David Kerr, “Theater for Development,” in The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Thomas Tufte, and Rafael Obregon (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 207–25.

8. Kate Winskell and Daniel Enger, “Storytelling for Social Change,” in The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Thomas Tufte, and Rafael Obregon (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 189–206.

9. Mark McLell, “Art as Activism in Japan: The Case of a Good-for-Nothing Kid and Her Pussy,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 162–70.

10. Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Rob Rosenthal and Richard Flacks, Playing for Change: Music and Musicians in the Service of Social Movements (New York: Routledge, 2011).

11. Lina Dencik and Peter Wilkin, Worker Resistance and Media: Challenging Global Corporate Power in the 21st Century (New York: Peter Lang, 2015).

12. Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy, introduction to Mediation and Protest Movements, ed. Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 5.

13. WeChat is one of the most popular social media platforms in China.

14. Cammaerts, Mattoni, and McCurdy, introduction; Donatella della Porta, “Bridging Research on Democracy, Social Movements and Communication,” in Mediation and Protest Movements, ed. Bart Cammaerts, Alice Mattoni, and Patrick McCurdy (Bristol: Intellect, 2013), 21–39; Donatella della Porta and Elena Pavan, “The Nexus between Media, Communication and Social Movements: Looking Back and the Way Forward,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 29–37.

15. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); Dieter Rucht, “The Quadruple ‘A’: Media Strategies of Protest Movements since the 1960s,” in Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens, and Social Movements, ed. Wim van de Donk et al. (London: Routledge, 2004), 25–48.

16. Stephen Coleman and Karen Ross, The Media and the Public: “Them” and “Us” in Media Discourse (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

17. Rucht, “Quadruple ‘A.’”

18. Coleman and Ross, Media and the Public.

19. Rucht, “Quadruple ‘A.’”

20. Rucht, “Quadruple ‘A’”; Anna Feigenbaum, “Can the Women’s Peace Camp Be Televised? Challenging Mainstream Media Coverage of Greenham Common,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 47–56.

21. Coleman and Ross, Media and the Public; Rucht, “Quadruple ‘A.’”

22. Diana Fu, Mobilizing without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Wanning Sun, “Inequality and Culture: A New Pathway to Understand Social Inequality,” in Unequal China: The Political Economy and Cultural Politics of Inequality, ed. Wanning Sun and Yingjie Guo (New York: Routledge, 2013), 27–42.

23. Scholars have developed concepts of “alternative media” (Chris Atton), “citizens’ media” (Clemencia Rodriguez), and “social movement media” (John D. H. Downing) to refer to this specific form of mediated activism. See Chris Atton, Alternative Media (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2002); Chris Atton, “Alternative Media,” in Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, ed. John D. H. Downing (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2011), 15–19; Chris Atton, “A Reassessment of the Alternative Press,” Media, Culture and Society 21, no. 1 (1999): 51–76, https://doi.org/10.1177/016344399021001003; Clemencia Rodriguez, “Citizens’ Media,” in Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, ed. John D. H. Downing (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2011), 98–102; Clemencia Rodriguez, “Civil Society and Citizens’ Media: Peace Architects for the New Millennium,” in Redeveloping Communication for Social Change: Theory, Practice, and Power, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 147–62; John D. H. Downing, “Social Movement Media in the Process of Constructive Social Change,” in The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins, Thomas Tufte, and Rafael Obregon (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), 331–50.

24. Chris Atton, Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media (New York: Routledge, 2015); Gabriele Hadl, “Alternative Media: Policy Issues,” in Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media, ed. John D. H. Downing (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2011), 33–35; Martha Fuentes-Bautista and Gisela Gil-Egui, “Community Media and the Rearticulation of State–Civil Society Relations in Venezuela,” Communication, Culture and Critique 4, no. 3 (2011): 250–74.

25. Bingchun Meng, The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Yuezhi Zhao, Media, Market, and Democracy in China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998); Yuezhi Zhao, “Neoliberal Strategies, Socialist Legacies: Communication and State Transformation in China,” in Global Communications: Toward a Transnational Political Economy, ed. Paula Chakravartty and Yuezhi Zhao (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), 23–55.

26. Wanning Sun, “Indoctrination, Fetishization, and Compassion: Media Construction of the Migrant Women,” in On the Move: Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, ed. Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 109–30; Wanning Sun, Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).

27. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 1996); Manuel Castells, Communication Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope-Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2012).

28. W. Lance Bennett, “Communicating Global Activism: Some Strengths and Vulnerabilities of Networked Politics,” in Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movements, ed. Wim van de Donk et al. (London: Routledge, 2004), 128.

29. W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (London: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

30. Graham Meikle, “Introduction: Making Meanings and Making Trouble,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 7.

31. Paolo Gerbaudo and Emiliano Trere, “In Search of the ‘We’ of Social Media Activism: Introduction to the Special Issue on Social Media and Protest Identities,” in “Social Media and Protest Identities,” ed. Paolo Gerbaudo and Emiliano Trere, special issue, Information, Communication and Society 18, no. 8 (2015): 865–71.

32. Christian Fuchs, “Critique of the Political Economy of Informational Capitalism and Social Media,” in Critique, Social Media and the Information Society, ed. Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval (New York: Routledge, 2013), 48–63.

33. Christian Fuchs, Social Media: A Critical Introduction (Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2014).

34. Dencik and Wilkin, Worker Resistance and Media.

35. Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong, introduction to Taking the Square: Mediated Dissent and Occupations of Public Space, ed. Maria Rovisco and Jonathan Corpus Ong (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 5.

36. John D. H. Downing, “Looking Back, Looking Ahead: What Has Changed in Social Movement Media since the Internet and Social Media?,” in The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism, ed. Graham Meikle (London: Routledge, 2018), 19–28; Fuchs, Social Media.

37. Antonio Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci: Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920, trans. John Mathews (New York: International Publishers, 1977).

38. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2006); David Harvey, “Neoliberalism as Creative Destruction,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 610, no. 1 (2007): 22–44; Jason Hickel, The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and Its Solutions (London: William Heinemann, 2017); Ellen Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2005).

39. Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (New York: Random House, 1981); Julia Sudbury, “A World without Prisons: Resisting Militarism, Globalized Punishment, and Empire,” Social Justice 31, no. 1 (2004): 9–30; Bryan Warde, “Black Male Disproportionality in the Criminal Justice Systems of the USA, Canada, and England: A Comparative Analysis of Incarceration,” Journal of African American Studies 17, no. 4 (2013): 461–79.

40. Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Immanuel Ness, Southern Insurgency: The Coming of the Global Working Class (London: Pluto, 2016).

41. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left (London: Verso Books, 1988).

42. Hall, Hard Road.

43. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism.

44. David Harvey, “Universal Alienation,” Triple C: Communication, Capitalism and Critique 16, no. 2 (2018): 424–39.

45. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 14.

46. Richard Stahler-Sholk, “Resisting Neoliberal Homogenization: The Zapatista Autonomy Movement,” Latin American Perspectives 34, no. 2 (2007): 48–63.

47. Donatella della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006).

48. Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg, and Devan Pillay, “The Future of the Global Working Class: An Introduction,” in Labour and the Challenges of Globalization: What Prospects for Transnational Solidarity?, ed. Andreas Bieler, Ingemar Lindberg, and Devan Pillay (London: Pluto, 2008), 1–11.

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50. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour (New York: Zed Books, 2022); Heidi I. Hartmann, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union,” Capital and Class 3, no. 2 (1979): 1–33.

51. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, The Process of Production of Capital (1867; repr., London: Penguin Classics, 1990).

52. bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000); Davis, Women, Race and Class; Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” in Campus Wars: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Difference, ed. John Arthur and Amy Shapiro (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995), 191–98.

53. Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (1986; repr., London: Verso Books, 2016).

54. Kristen Ghodsee, Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

55. Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, xviii.

56. Xueguang Zhou, The Logic of Governance in China: An Organizational Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). Zhou provides a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese party-state’s authoritarian governance.

57. Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 120.

58. Ngai Pun, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Hui Wang, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (New York: Verso Books, 2011); W. Sun, Subaltern China; B. Meng, Politics of Chinese Media; Y. Zhao, “Neoliberal Strategies.”

59. Lisa Rofel, Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).

60. Zheng Wang, Finding Women in the State: A Socialist Feminist Revolution in the People’s Republic of China, 1949–1964 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016); Siyuan Yin, “Re-articulating Feminisms: A Theoretical Critique of Feminist Struggles and Discourse in Historical and Contemporary China,” Cultural Studies 36, no. 6 (2022): 981–1004.

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62. Louis Althusser, On Ideology (1971; repr., London: Verso Books, 2008), 47.

63. Althusser, On Ideology, 56.

64. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 208–26.

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66. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Random House, 1966).

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69. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 48. Exposing the impacts of colonialism on colonized people, Fanon’s concept of “psychic alienation” refers to the psychological and emotional consequences of being subjected to systemic oppression, discrimination, and the devaluation of one’s identity and culture.

70. Gramsci, Antonio Gramsci, 11.

71. Della Porta and Diani, Social Movements.

72. Feminist Voices is an independent feminist-media outlet in China. It was established by a feminist activist in 2009 and was permanently shut down by the government in 2018.

73. Linda Briskin and Patricia McDermott, eds., Women Challenging Unions: Feminism, Democracy, and Militancy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Ann Shirley Leymon, “Unions and Social Inclusiveness: A Comparison of Changes in Union Member Attitudes,” Labor Studies Journal 36, no. 3 (2011): 388–407.

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77. The connection and networks of the founder have facilitated the later development of MWC, including funding from several international foundations, municipal governments’ support, and media reports. Many scholars have written about RWKA and MWC to recognize their contribution to the advocacy of rural women’s and female migrants’ rights and well-being through providing a range of services. Scholars also address limitations in serving as a radical and transformative force to contest structural inequalities. See, e.g., Jacka, Creating a Public Sphere; Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change (New York: Routledge, 2006); Diana Fu, “A Cage of Voices: Producing and Doing Dagongmei in Contemporary China,” Modern China 35, no. 5 (2009): 527–61; Siyuan Yin, “Producing Gendered Migration Narratives in China: A Case Study of Dagongmei Tongxun by a Local NGO,” International Journal of Communication 10 (2016): 4304–23.

78. George E. Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 105–7.

79. This type of activist group, such as Jiu Ye, is different from underground labor NGOs as organizations without legal registration. See Diana Fu, “Disguised Collective Action in China,” Comparative Political Studies 50, no. 4 (2017): 499–527. Unlike registered labor NGOs with full-time staff members and underground labor NGOs with migrant workers as activist, members of Jiu Ye all have their own full-time study or work.

80. Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); Patricia Hill Collins, “Some Group Matters: Intersectionality, Situated Standpoints, and Black Feminist Thought,” in A Companion to African-American Philosophy, ed. Tommy Lee Lott and John Pittman (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2003), 205–29.