Trajectory of a Migrant Woman in South China
Mun Young Cho
Introduction
The People’s Republic of China has been characterized as the “world’s factory” for several decades. This label has survived despite the relocation of
many factories to other countries due to rising labor costs and workforce
reductions from automated manufacturing and robotization. “Made in
China” still prevails in global consumer culture, and labor disputes loom
large despite state repression; despite growing interest in “a multiplicity of
figures of labour to appear,” industrial capitalism and the working class (or
the proletariat) have constituted the dominant discourses in labor studies
in China (Franceschini and Sorace 2022: 22; see also Lee 2007; Chan 2012;
Leung 2015).
However, the simultaneous growth of the manufacturing and service
industries, as well as information and communication technology, suggests
positions 31:2 doi 10.1215/10679847-10300253
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Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory:
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that China should not be excluded from post-Fordist discussions of precarious labor, class, and production (Zhang 2015). Labor activists whom I met
in China often mentioned Chun Tae-il, whose suicide protest in 1970 woke
South Korean workers to their miserable condition. Unlike Chun Tae-il,
however, many young workers in China oscillate between factory labor
and service labor, like insurance or real estate sales, and labor both on- and
offline, as reflected in the country’s boom in e-commerce. Based on communication, collaboration, and affective relationships, labor is increasingly
oriented toward the creation of forms of social life — that is, the production
of new subjectivities (Hardt and Negri 2004: 66).
Foxconn workers, with whom I have been meeting in Shenzhen since
2013, are no exception. Since 2010, when fourteen young migrant workers
jumped to their death at the Longhua plant in Shenzhen, Foxconn, the
world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer and the primary supplier
for Apple, has emerged as a critical site through which labor activists and
researchers in Greater China have unveiled the grueling working conditions
of Chinese workers as well as the de facto collusion of global capital, the
local state, and the IT industry (Pun and Chan 2010; Pun, Chan, and Selden
2015). However, my interviewees, for whom Foxconn was just one of many
workplaces, were lukewarm about the serial suicides. Zhang Ying1 was only
seventeen years old when he started working for Foxconn. When I raised
the incidents, he asked, “Is it really a big deal that in a company with more
than a million employees, a few people died from falling?”2
Yet I am not suggesting that the condition of Chinese workers is not as
grievous as activists and scholars have proclaimed. Two years after I first
interviewed him, Zhang Ying suddenly texted me that he had been in a psychiatric hospital in Beijing for several weeks. Zhang, like the other twentyodd Foxconn workers whose life trajectories I have traced, moved from one
precarious job to another. They experienced various forms of alienation and
discrimination beyond the assembly line while reacting in more complex
and elusive ways than what is often seen as “resistance,” reminding us of
“how vulnerability and politics are interwoven in concrete lives” (Han 2018:
340).
What does a Chinese worker today actually do in order to survive?
What methodological approach is useful if we are aware of the fact that
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the bounded concept of the working class does not fully align with the
empirical reality, while being attentive to the workers’ vulnerability under
the increasingly sophisticated regime of capital accumulation? As a possible response, I have constructed the ethnography of one woman, whom I
call Zuo Mei, pointing out the intersection of different forms of labor she
engaged in instead of anchoring her to one specific factory. Zuo Mei was
one of the Foxconn workers-cum-volunteers whom I interviewed at a community service center in Shenzhen’s Foxconn town in 2013. Contingency is
inherent in anthropological fieldwork, in which an ethnographer seeks “the
actual performances of social life” rather than “underlying ‘real’ identities
and orientations” (Ferguson 1999: 97 – 98). While I continued research on
social work in Shenzhen as I had originally planned (Cho 2017), following
Zuo’s labor trajectory for over six and a half years allowed me to expand
my understanding of the fluid boundaries of labor. Through an unavoidably fragmentary process, I went back and forth between Shenzhen and her
hometown in Jiangxi. With her permission, I explored how Zuo engaged
in on- and offline labor, how her participation in different forms of labor
changed, and how her experience in one type of labor affected her perception of another.
My navigation of Zuo Mei’s zigzag trajectory goes beyond predetermined
notions of what constitutes “factory” and “labor.” In doing so, I move from
a Foxconn factory to what Mario Tronti (2019: 26, 20) calls the “social factory,” where “the whole society becomes an articulation of production” and
“labor-power is no longer only exploited by the capitalist but integrated
within capital.” Tronti’s notion of the social factory calls attention to how
paid and unpaid forms of labor are inseparable under the conditions of late
capitalism. However, Kylie Jarrett (2018) draws on the feminist scholarship
on social reproduction and asserts that seeing the social factory as a novel
effect arising from the digital and financial economy risks missing the fact
that the family and the domestic sphere have always been crucial sites for
interrogating the permeation of the capitalist mode of production into all
aspects of life. The social factory “began and was centered above all in the
kitchen, the bedroom, and the home — insofar as these were the centers for
the production of labor-power” — where the unpaid reproductive labor of
women was assumed (Federici 2012: 7 – 8).
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Reconsidering the concept of the social factory through a feminist lens,
I view waged and unwaged, productive, and reproductive labor through a
broader lens that sees labor as a “value-creating practice” (Hardt and Negri
1994: 7). As Hardt and Negri suggest, the practices that comprise labor are
not fixed: “The definition itself constitutes a mobile site of social contestation” (9). In Zuo’s trajectory, I attend to the intersections of forms of labor
(factory, service, volunteer, and domestic), across the urban and rural, the
material and immaterial, and on- and offline. Factory and service labor
belong to the waged labor regime: the former refers to Zuo’s work in a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen and a garment factory in Jiangxi, while the latter
entails her work at a gas station in Jiangxi, in insurance sales in Shenzhen,
and in e-commerce. Volunteer labor, part of the unwaged labor regime,
which Zuo passionately undertook at a community service center in a Foxconn town, “produces and accumulates the value of the relation” (Muehlebach 2012: 7). Domestic (unpaid) labor encompasses not only reproductive
labor but also what James Ferguson (2015: 97) calls “distributive labor”: a
series of processes of “seeking and securing distributive outcomes.” Against
the coupling of the concept of labor with the process of production, this
notion helps us better understand Zuo’s pursuit of marriage as part of her
struggle for family survival.
In tracing intersected labor in the social factory, what I found most poignant is that Zuo’s suffering did not end outside any specific factory but
extended to wherever social relations become capitalized. Her suffering was
not just due to the institutional constraints or labor exploitation but was also
a consequence of her efforts to overcome alienation and seek dignity. Zuo’s
ethnography unveils the paradox in which actions taken against suffering
produce other types of suffering as multiple forms of labor are encountered
in often unforeseeable ways. This paradox is related to the question that
Wanning Sun, in her article in this special issue, raises as she notes that from
a Marxist-feminist perspective, the poet Zheng Xiaoqiong and her interlocutors (migrant workers) do not seem politically transgressive: “What viable,
realistic options are actually available to migrant men and women?” Vigilant about the leftist preoccupation with the history of class struggle, Jacques
Rancière (2005: 80, 82) warns about the danger of reducing the proletariat
to “someone who has only one thing to do — to make the revolution” while
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
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Zuo Mei’s Labor Trajectory
In January 2013, I visited a Foxconn town in Shenzhen not long after a spate
of suicides at the company. A professor in Shenzhen University brought me
to a community service center where he had served as an adviser. Opened in
December 2011 under a contract with the local government, the center was
expected to “help young migrant workers — particularly Foxconn workers —
to relieve stress, extend social networks, and build a sense of belonging to
the city.”4 The center invited Foxconn workers to act not only as service
recipients but also as volunteers (Cho 2018). Out of about three hundred
volunteers, twenty-four-year-old Zuo Mei was so active that the social workers proudly introduced her to me first. She and I became friends quickly, in
part because both of us, a volunteer and a fieldworker, often had a lot of free
time at the center.
Zuo was born in a remote village in Jiangxi. After graduating from high
school, she worked in a small textile factory in Wenzhou for three years and
then moved to Shenzhen in 2011 to “find a new path in the south to develop
myself.” In fall 2013, Zuo began to sell life insurance after an introduction by
another volunteer. She quit Foxconn in January 2014 to focus on insurance,
but in the end, sales were disappointing. Succumbing to parental pressure
to marry, she returned to Jiangxi in December 2015.
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the “desire to do something else” is elided. Although this critique leads us
to attend to workers’ creation beyond what is assumed to be the proletariat,
the desire to do something else is limited by the resources and opportunities
accessible to migrant workers like Zuo Mei.
This article is divided into two parts. The first introduces my ethnographic
methods — how I followed Zuo’s trajectory on- and offline.3 I present an outline of Zuo’s intersected labor and then analyze her WeChat Moments, which
I see as a mediated diary, from that period. The second part comprises ethnographic descriptions of how Zuo Mei navigated various affective and material
circuits that gave form to her world and herself while engaging in multiple
forms of labor. I pay particular attention to marriage — a contingent outcome
of this trajectory and a precarious, desperate act that shows how the society
she struggled to belong to was reduced to just family.
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WeChat Moments as Mediated Diary
How did digital media reflect and shape Zuo Mei’s labor trajectory? In an
ethnography of marriage markets in China, Jean-Baptiste Pettier (2016: 88)
notes that participant observation is significant since it widens the affective
scope — “one in which the researcher does not work against emotions but
with emotions by giving affect its due consideration.” However, not every
subject is suited to intersubjective engagement through direct interaction.
Although Zuo Mei was sincere, she was not necessarily able to voice her
feelings. To describe a subaltern subject who struggles to express her emotions verbally, I look at social media in ways similar to how Wanning Sun
attends to poetry in her article. My understanding of Zuo’s thoughts and
feelings about marriage, family, youth, the city, and life in general came as
much from her WeChat Moments — pictures she shared and the captions —
as from our conversations. She recorded daily events and publicized her
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While working at a gas station near her village, Zuo got engaged in
November 2016 to a man from a nearby village that her cousin introduced
her to. While her fiancé worked in Guangdong, Zuo stayed in the village
and prepared for marriage. In the summer of 2017, she stopped working at
the gas station and moved to a small garment factory in a nearby township
and conducted e-commerce through WeChat’s micro business (weishang
微商). While working full-time at the factory, Zuo frequently visited her
fiancé’s family to help with the household chores.
However, the wedding, scheduled for spring 2018, was canceled. Zuo’s
fiancé already had another relationship in Guangdong, so he did not return.
In March, Zuo returned to the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen while continuing her e-commerce. In early summer, an uncle introduced her to Su
Yang, a man from a nearby village. Since Su was also working in a factory
in Shenzhen, he and Zuo dated there until they married in January 2019.
After the Spring Festival, they returned to Shenzhen and started working
at Foxconn together.
This has been a brief summary of Zuo’s labor trajectory at the intersection of factory, service, volunteer, and domestic labor, January 2013 – May
2019 (table 1). This will be considered alongside Zuo’s online trajectory,
introduced in the next section.
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
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Waged
Factory labor
Service labor
Foxconn
(electronics)
Jan. 2013 – Dec. 2015
(Shenzhen)
Jan. 2016 – Feb. 2018
(Jiangxi)
March 2018 – May
2019
(Shenzhen)
Unwaged
Volunteer labor
Domestic labor
Community
service center
Selling insurance
Gas station
Family work
Garment factory
Foxconn
(electronics)
Weishang
(E-commerce)
Marriage
views of the world by way of social media messages coordinated in particular ways. In this sense, Zuo’s WeChat Moments served as a mediated diary
through which she developed her own style of communication.5
WeChat 微信 is the most popular social media platform in China. Its
interface mainly consists of one-to-one chats, group chats, Moments (personal profiles), and subscriptions to public accounts. With Zuo’s consent, I
collected and analyzed her posts in Moments, which she shared with her
WeChat friends.
Between August 2013 and May 2015, Zuo Mei posted 376 Moments: 92
were her own, while 284 were reposts of other people’s.6 She created her
diary by sharing photos, text, and memes that drew her interest. Drawing on Xinyuan Wang’s (2016: 58) work on the use of social media among
migrant youth in China and partially revising her genres of visual posts, I
have classified Zuo’s posts into eleven categories and subcategories.7 Though
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Table 1. Zuo Mei’s offline labor trajectory
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Relationships
Life Advice
Archive
Travel
Events
Political
Commercial
Selfies
Trivia
Humor
Fantasy
Family
Friendship
Love
Women
Family and Marriage
Insurance
Othersi
Insurance
Hometown
Otherii
Family
Friends
Work
Family
Workplace
City
Nation
Generation
Insuranceiii
E-commerce
Aug. 2013 –
Dec. 2015
1
2
1
20
31
98
16
24
5
8
0
1
3
0
6
4
1
2
8
0
1
3
4
1
Jan. 2016 –
Feb. 2018
6
5
0
10
16
0
26
3
10
4
0
0
0
0
1
1
2
0
0
2
0
1
1
0
March 2018 –
May 2019
1
1
8
2
2
3
6
0
1
1
1
0
0
1
0
0
0
1
3
32
0
3
2
0
i. This category includes the topics of success, self-development, and old sayings.
ii. This category includes the topics of city information, recipes, and holiday origins.
iii. Unlike the topic of “insurance” under the categories of “life advice” and “archive,” which was more story-oriented,
“insurance” under the category of “commercial” contained promotional posts distributed directly from Zuo’s workplace.
there is some overlap, the categories show the distinctiveness of her posts
(table 2).
In the following sections, I explore the intersection between Zuo’s onand offline lives through juxtaposing tables 1 and 2, my field notes, and
her WeChat Moments. Online socializing is important for young migrant
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Table 2. Zuo Mei’s WeChat Moments posts
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Ephemeral Dignity in Affective Labor
Zuo Mei’s WeChat diary begins with a post of a beach photo of herself and
a friend on August 10, 2013, at a picnic for volunteers from the community
service center in Shenzhen. From August 2013 to May 2019, this is the only
travel photo with a friend, although Zuo posted some with coworkers in
April 2014 when she was selling insurance in the city. She also reported on
a work trip to Xiamen, uploading a picture of her name tag, selfies with her
roommate, a picture of their hotel, and a group photo with a short message:
“Thank you for your support. I will work hard with all of you in 2014!”
In Zuo’s WeChat Moments, travel photos are rare; except for some photos
taken when she and her sister went to Shanghai in April 2018, her online
travel diary was limited to volunteer and service labor — particularly insurance sales. As forms of relational labor, volunteering and selling insurance
seem to be opposites. Whereas the former is unwaged labor that is “intent
on building social relations through acts of intense moral communion and
care” (Muehlebach 2012: 7), the latter is waged labor aimed at transforming
human relations into market-related ones.
Zuo and I agreed that the two forms of labor had something in common,
although from different perspectives. I noted that both volunteering and
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workers, who have few opportunities to develop their self-awareness or
share interests offline. It is in this context that Wang (2016: 6 – 7) sheds light
on “dual migrations” in the daily lives of Chinese rural migrants — “one
from rural to urban, the other from offline to online.” Given the floating,
insecure, and inequitable conditions of the migrants’ offline lives, Wang
argues that online social relationships are perceived as “more authentic” and
“much purer,” and seen as providing “new possibilities of sociality free from
social hierarchy” (118 – 19).
Without denying the increasing role of social media in the lives of young
migrants, taking a longitudinal perspective reminds us that their often
unbearable offline lives are as intimate and dynamic as their online lives.
I draw on E. Gabriella Coleman’s (2010: 489) proposal to “provincialize”
digital media with the questions of “how, where, and why it matters” to
attend to problems that emerge when the material and affective production
of value is made through the intersection of on- and offline lives over time.
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Why should you sell insurance to those closest to you? I don’t care if others buy insurance, but for those closest to me, I do. When a crisis comes,
friends can lend you 300 – 500 yuan, relatives 3,000 – 5,000 yuan, and families 30,000 – 50,000 yuan. Even if they want to help more, they can’t. Only
insurance companies can provide 300 – 500 thousand yuan or more. So,
don’t complain about the people who try to sell you insurance. They love
you more than anyone in the world! (shared post, August 14, 2014)
Zuo Mei valued volunteering and service labor as kinds of affective labor,
which is “itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective
subjectivities” (Hardt 1999: 89). Significantly, her convictions about caring
for others and having horizontal relationships with her coworkers gave her
a sense of self-respect and belonging that was rare at Foxconn. The QQ volunteers chatroom was full of photos of prizes and activity records that were
updated like a competition, as well as emoji for encouragement.
This desire for self-worth and equal membership as fellow citizens, not
peasant workers (nongmingong 农民工), runs through Zuo’s posts about
selling insurance. She proudly told me, “Retired teachers and bankers sell
insurance, just like I do.” She posted pictures of her nameplates and badges
that she was given at pep rallies and business meetings. On the photo of her
desk name plate, for instance, Zuo added a short message: “Dear Customer,
I can’t contact you for three days because I have meetings. I will be in touch
with you immediately afterward” (December 16, 2013). Attractive facilities
sponsored by her insurance company also helped to enhance her self-worth.
Sharing a photo of “XX Life Insurance Hall” at Beijing University, she
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insurance sales engage in the neoliberal dispersal of state redistributive functions by placing them on the shoulders of ethical citizens and they do so in
the profit-seeking business sector. In contrast, Zuo perceived commonality
between the two in terms of caring (guanhuai 关怀) and dignity (zunyan 尊严).
She often complained that people did not appreciate commercial insurance
and even saw it as fraudulent. Their distrust frustrated her because she was
convinced she was helping others by selling insurance. In Moments, Zuo
shared many posts about laws, policies, opinions, and interviews that she
found helpful in understanding the importance of life insurance. The following post conveys her view that selling insurance is a very “altruistic” act:
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wrote in Moments, along with a smiley face and a thumbs up emoji, “I am
proud to say that I’m attending a company meeting at Beijing University!
I’m so proud of XX!” (August 9, 2014).
Can we conclude that whereas Zuo’s product in the Foxconn factory
remained an alien object, her production of social bonds and self-worth in
the social factory allowed her to have control or ownership over what she
produced? Tracing Zuo’s trajectory, I found that the seemingly horizontal
relationship through which she identified herself with Shenzhen citizens
was blocked by cultural and structural barriers. With access only to ethical
citizenship that binds people with “moral and affective ties” (Muehlebach
2012: 43) and not to the legal rights of urban citizens, Foxconn workerscum-volunteers like Zuo were encouraged to contribute to the growth of
cooperation and communication networks in Shenzhen, while their structural exclusion from the city was ignored: they were seen as “flawed” subjects even by their supporters (Cho 2018: 91 – 94). A social worker was skeptical about Zuo Mei’s desire to become a social worker, saying, “She asked
me how to prepare for the exam, but she doesn’t have enough suzhi (素质,
human quality) for it, let alone the education” (July 11, 2014).8
Over time, Zuo began to feel unwelcome in and unsuited to service and
volunteer labor. Once, she proudly brought up an ex-banker as an insurance salesperson that she was equal to, but when he was later depicted as a
successful entrepreneur rich in social capital, she stopped comparing herself to him. In a study of young cell phone novelists in Japan, Gabriella
Lukacs (2015: 46) notes that people who engage in affective labor invest not
only their emotions but also “their subjectivity — affective commitments,
intimate beliefs, personal memories, and political sensibilities — as the raw
material for the extraction of surplus value.” However, the creativity, affect,
and selves that people invest into the production process are differentially
and hierarchically valued in society (Zhang 2015: 519).
In the social factory where “social relations directly become relations of
production” (Federici 2012: 7), Zuo’s robust production of the value of the
city brand and affective care was not compensated fairly. Unable to endure
the uncertainty of insurance sales (she was only given an allowance, not a
salary), Zuo eventually quit her job and returned to her hometown. Her four
years in Shenzhen were no longer a topic of our online conversations. Back
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in her hometown, she posted a picture of homemade millet bread that she
had baked with her mother (fig. 1).
Factory Labor Repositioned
It was rare for Zuo to directly express her problems on WeChat: they appear
only in a few posts under “generation” and “city.” When she tired of insurance sales, for example, Zuo posted a meme about China’s post-1980s generation: “We’ve become the first ‘only children’ in the nation’s history,” and
she added her own text: “Does our generation have an easy life?” (October 30, 2015). As for Shenzhen, her posts were ambivalent. She describes
it as full of “passion” and a “sense of loss,” and as “a city where no one can
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Figure 1 Homemade
millet bread that Zuo Mei
had baked with her mother.
Photograph by Zuo Mei.
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be underestimated. It’s also a city where no one looks at you however much
you cry for help. In this city, I get swindled one day and I swindle another”
(February 6, 2014).
Interestingly, no explicit criticism of factory labor appeared in her
Moments. Zuo had worked in the quality control department at Foxconn.
In offline interviews, she referred to the low wages, overtime work, and
militaristic labor discipline. In her WeChat Moments, however, mentions
of the factory are almost nonexistent. Pictures of Foxconn’s annual banquet
appeared only once in a shared post about how Shenzhen was forcing people
out. Her criticism targeted the city, not the factory: “Why are so many people unable to leave this city where living is no better than dying?” (May 24,
2016).
To better understand what factory labor meant to Zuo Mei, we can see
how her feelings about factory labor changed in its intersection with other
forms of labor: it unfolds in its relationship to her insurance sales, gas station
work, and preparation for marriage.
First, Zuo highlighted the cruelty of factory labor at Foxconn by contrasting it with insurance sales. Since commercial insurance is blamed for the
individualization and privatization of risk, I was puzzled by her positive
attitude toward it. For Zuo, insurance provided what Foxconn didn’t: freedom (not surveillance), openness (not secretiveness), useful knowledge (not
a repetitive skill), entrepreneurship (not working for others), and the expansion of personal networks (not reduction). Her comparison prompted me to
reread my field notes, and I realized how she had criticized factory labor in
terms of its negation of freedom and self-identity, from the excessive surveillance (she had to be “careful about sleep in my eyes or earwax in my ears”)
to the dormitory system (it “put ten people into one small room”). Yet, the
more she engaged in other forms of labor, the less she criticized factory
labor. When her insurance sales dropped, Zuo quickly returned to a factory
to seek more clients. By her account, factory labor was reduced to a side job
of little significance.
Next, Zuo’s experience at the gas station in Jiangxi shows how factory
labor made her feel deprived of fellowship as well as individuality. Unlike
the case with Foxconn, Zuo was willing to talk to me about her work environment at the gas station. Soon after starting to work there, she sent me a
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photo that showed her in a blue uniform with a big smile, unfolding her salary of a few 100-yuan notes. When we were chatting online, she sent more
pictures taken with coworkers in restaurants or karaoke. In a photo taken in
the station lounge, Zuo and her coworkers were smiling and flashing peace
signs while standing behind a table with some dumpling soup they had
cooked together. Unlike Foxconn, the small gas station provided Zuo with
neither social insurance nor grand banquets, but it did allow a little margin
for pleasure and intimacy. She played this up as her insurance sales cooled
in the face of competition. “XX Insurance Friends” was no longer in her
WeChat group chats, but “XX Gas Station Friends” was.
Finally, as Zuo prepared for marriage, she lost interest in problematizing
factory labor. Despite good memories of her coworkers, she quit her job and
moved to a small garment factory after becoming engaged to the man from
a nearby village. When I visited her hometown in summer 2017, she told
me, “I left the gas station for fear of aluminum intoxication. It could affect
a baby I may have in the future. I need to be careful for at least six months
before I get pregnant.” The garment factory where she took me was only
twenty minutes from her village by scooter. She explained, “We take cloth
from Fujian and make pants and hats. I don’t know where they are exported
to. They are too big and the quality is poor.” Zuo preferred the small workshop of only thirty-five employees to large-scale factories. Imagining her life
after marriage, she emphasized freedom — that is, the freedom to look after
her child at lunchtime, pick up her child after school, return to work after
feeding, and see a doctor if her child got sick.
From the perspective of feminist critiques about how the reproduction
of labor-power carried out in the home is made invisible and mystified as
“women’s labor” (Federici 2004: 74 – 75), Zuo’s narratives of “freedom” may
seem perplexing. Although what she meant by “freedom” indicated the
numerous duties imposed on women without payment, Zuo looked determined and emphasized the word. However, she did not take a traditional
role in the family for granted; it was only when she realized that she had
little chance of surviving in the city with dignity that she began to see marriage as the only viable option. At that point, her desire to marry (a type
of distributive labor) superseded the other forms of labor, and she began
“working hard to press a distributive claim” by performing a family role
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
393
Between Marriage as Insurance and Insurance for Marriage
In the summer of 2014, Zuo and I were chatting in her tiny room in Shenzhen. After arguing on the phone with her father, who was urging her to
get married, Zuo said to me, “I’m not thinking about marriage now. People
keep introducing men to me. I’m against it. I can make my own money,
wash my own clothes, and cook. I also send my parents money for building
a house. Why should I marry?” (July 29, 2014). Listening to her complaints,
my eyes were drawn to a faded wedding photo of a celebrity hanging on the
wall. What she wanted was to find a capable man who could pay for her
labor, not make claims about wages for housework or emancipation from
it. Marrying a poor man was what she needed to avoid if she was to take
responsibility for herself and her parents. Zuo’s father had injured his fingers while farming. With a small lot of only two mu (about 1,333 square
meters), Zuo’s parents had been peasants throughout their lives and they
received dibao 低保 (minimum livelihood guarantee) from the government.
No matter how ambivalent she felt about it, marriage became a reality when she failed at insurance sales and returned home. Zuo eventually
got engaged to a man nine years older than her. She sent me several photos of him, her engagement ring, and the three-story house he was building in his village.9 “I’ve already received 2,000 yuan from his family, and
30,000 – 40,000 yuan will be sent to my family as bridewealth.” When marriage seemed to be the only insurance for her family, Zuo calculated its
benefits and passionately pursued it. While her fiancé was working outside,
Zuo often engaged in distributive labor by taking care of his family. One
evening in August 2017, she brought me to his house and helped his mother
bathe the grandchildren. On our way back, Zuo indicated a new house
under construction: “After marriage, his parents will live on the third floor
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and invoking traditional morality (Ferguson 2015: 101). She valued the flexibility of working in the small factory while taking care of her prospective
husband’s family and preparing the ideal environment for a future family. It
is significant that marriage is not external to labor but materializes through
intersected labor. In particular, some of the values learned through insurance sales led Zuo to rethink her approach to marriage and family.
positions 31:2
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394
and we will move downstairs!” At this time, Zuo’s WeChat Moments were
full of posts about family matters: filial piety, family events, and a friend’s
wedding.
However, Zuo’s pursuit of marriage resulted in failure. Posts she shared
after the engagement reflected her frustration. She responded to a video clip
about a man who regretted his marriage, “Your wife is not your mother.
Don’t complain even if she doesn’t cook or do laundry for you” (February 6,
2018). In a post titled “Making Money — the Most Beautiful Words in Life,”
she wrote, “I try to make money, not because I love money too much, but
because I don’t want a lifetime of humiliation” (March 10, 2018).
Significantly, Zuo’s online posts show a series of messages about “insurance for marriage” as well as “marriage as insurance.” For example, “Marriage without insurance is no better than ‘naked marriage,’ ” or “Find a
lover, but be sure to find a lover with insurance!” On her Moments, most
posts fell under Life Advice. Mainly produced by insurance companies, this
category consists of story ads about women, family, and marriage, including the requirements for an ideal marriage, the qualifications of a good
husband, and women’s advice to men. Even after she returned to Jiangxi,
Zuo continued to share Life Advice posts. One example is a picture (fig. 2)
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Figure 2 Zuo Mei’s Life Advice post.
Courtesy of Zuo Mei.
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
395
of a woman walking confidently while men greet her politely: “Sister Xia
says that the struggle is not making money, but realizing one’s own value in
the world.” In a meme (fig. 3) highlighting red high heels, women are told
to “be the queen of yourself.” Competent, independent, and confident, the
“woman” in many of these posts is not a docile subject who surrenders her
destiny to a man but a self-sufficient subject who can lead a man.
In the summer of 2018, Zuo was introduced to another man, Su Yang,
from a nearby village; after dating him briefly, she decided to marry him.
Although Su’s family was poor, Zuo and her family thought that given
her age, it would be hard to find a better match. Zuo’s actions show how
she coordinated her affective labor while negotiating between a marriage
that was a barely adequate survival strategy and her aspirations to be a selfreliant woman.
At first, on her social media accounts, Zuo posted warm messages about
her new fiancé. Su first appeared in Zuo’s Moments on August 11, 2018,
when Zuo posted a chat with him saying, “My life is good thanks to you.”
The next day, she posted another chat message with Su: “Thanks. I hope
you will hug me for the rest of my life!” A few days before the wedding, Zuo
posted pictures of their dates in Shenzhen and of their marriage certificate.
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Figure 3 Zuo Mei’s Life Advice post.
Courtesy of Zuo Mei.
positions 31:2
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I’m going to manage my income separately after marriage. I need to
secure a retreat. What if Su and I don’t like each other and eventually
divorce? I’ll collect money and buy a house in my own name. It’s like
buying insurance. Who knows what the future will bring? I won’t say
anything now. Anyhow, I have to find a lawyer. A house would definitely
be mine if I bought it before registering for marriage. But after that, I
might have to divide my property. My parents only have two daughters,
and if I get divorced with nothing, things will get bad. (January 24, 2019)
When Zuo told me this, I thought of one of her shared posts that suggested a
strategy for women under China’s New Marriage Law: “Buy insurance first
and marry late. . . . A house purchased before marriage is individual property. If a man buys a house before marriage, his wife will be penniless after
the divorce” (July 6, 2014). Despite viewing marriage as an insufficient form
of insurance and continuing to seek other options, Zuo pursued romantic relationships, relying on “an array of knowledge and expert systems to
induce self-animation and self-government” (Ong 2006: 6). Although her life
insurance sales ended in failure, the cautiousness that resulted had a significant impact on her labor trajectory, making her more “rational, responsible,
knowledgeable, and calculable” (McFall 2010: 144). The way she managed
the potential risk (divorce) was intended to ensure both her own dignity and
the security of her family.
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Still, Zuo’s offline practices never seemed particularly romantic. In January 2019, I visited her village in Jiangxi again to attend her wedding ceremony. Every night, she confessed her worries: “Su’s family sent about 40,000
yuan to my parents as bridewealth but we still didn’t have enough money to
buy furniture and electronics. My parents added the 10,000 yuan that I gave
them while working in Shenzhen and they sent 50,000 yuan back to us. My
family lost more.”10 Since Su’s brother’s family was staying with his parents,
I suggested that Zuo and Su stay with her parents after the wedding. Zuo
refused, “No way. If things go wrong, Su’s parents’ house could be handed
over to his brother. When his parents pass away, Su and his brother have to
divide their parents’ property anyway.” The couple argued while preparing for their wedding. The night before the wedding, Zuo even mentioned
divorce:
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
397
Conclusion
On the morning of her wedding, Zuo Mei became upset with Su Yang
again. She almost missed her hair appointment because he picked her up
late. Despite this, the wedding ceremony went smoothly. After enjoying a
feast with her extended family and visiting the family shrine, Zuo left for
Su’s village, literally on his back. The loud suona horns gave way to the wailing of her aunt. Zuo’s father began to clean up the firework debris in the
alleys (fig. 4) while her mother and female relatives washed the dishes. Su’s
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Figure 4 Zuo Mei’s father
looking at fireworks debris after
Zuo’s departure (January 2019).
Photograph by the author.
positions 31:2
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extended family feasted until late, and Zuo had to go to Su’s brother’s home
to take a bath. (Due to lack of money, the new house that Su’s parents had
begun to build the previous May still had no plumbing.) After New Year’s
Day, Zuo and Su returned to Shenzhen to work at Foxconn together.
As before, Zuo posted nothing about her work at Foxconn. She continued
with her e-commerce while working there, filling her Moments with posts
about those products. On May 5, 2019, Zuo uploaded a video to WeChat
showing her walking beside some dirty water, with the caption, “Forced
to move.” She complained to me, “My landlord asked us to leave due to the
landslide risk. Su Yang procrastinated until we were forced to move out. He
is so lazy!”
My ethnography of Zuo Mei began with her work for Foxconn and ended
with her return to it. Yet the extraction of a surplus occurred not just in a
specific factory but in the social factory across the assembly line, the service station, the internet, and, above all, the home, where women’s social
reproduction work has always had a central place. Across urban and rural,
waged and unwaged, (re)productive and distributive, and on- and offline
labor, Zuo’s trajectory in the social factory reveals her experience of alienation as she navigated multiple forms of labor. In this ethnography of one
person, I have attempted to unveil concrete, intimate experiences that more
conventional, large-scale ethnographies cannot capture.
Marx’s (1844) alienation of the worker — alienation from the products of
labor, from the production process, from human essence, and from society —
explicitly runs through Zuo’s factory labor at Foxconn. Her insurance work
and voluntarism seemed to liberate her from this estrangement by bolstering her self-worth and weaving social bonds through affective labor. However, Zuo was alienated from urban citizenship despite her contribution to
the production of affects and desires, and to communities in the city. What
she produced in insurance sales was not so much “care” for others, as she
claimed, but her own subjectivity as a responsible, independent life manager. The sale of insurance shaped distinctively both her understanding of
her past Foxconn experience and her attitude toward the future marriage.
Deeply capitalized, marriage remained an arrangement which she had to
bolster with other forms of insurance. Her strategic pursuit of marriage
shows how inequality affects intimate relationships while contesting hegemonic notions of romantic love (Zheng 2008; Sun 2017).
Cho ∣ Intersecting Labor in the Social Factory
399
Notes
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
My unreserved gratitude goes to Zuo Mei, who generously allowed me to observe and be
connected to her life. I am also grateful for thoughtful comments from anonymous reviewers and all contributors in this special edition. This research was supported by the AMOREPACIFIC Foundation. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2020 Summer
Meeting of the Korean Association for Contemporary Chinese Studies and a talk invited by
the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2021.
In this article, except for large areas like Shenzhen and well-known names like Foxconn, all
names are pseudonyms.
The statements of my interviewees were originally given in Chinese. Unless otherwise
noted, all translations are my own.
Fieldwork in a Foxconn town in Shenzhen was conducted in January, July–August, and October 2013; July–August 2014; January and July 2015; and August 2018. Fieldwork in Zuo’s hometown in Jiangxi was conducted in August 2017 and January 2019. I also continued conversing with Zuo on WeChat and collected her WeChat Moments between August 2013 and May
2019.
From internal material from the community service center. On Foxconn workers’ volunteer
labor, see Cho 2018.
Unlike many migrants who embrace anonymity in their WeChat profile due to “frustration
in their ‘floating’ offline life” (Wang 2016: 44), Zuo Mei used her real first name and a real
picture taken in a photo studio.
Zuo Mei opened her WeChat account in August 2013. Previously, she had used the QQ
social media platform, mostly for group chats with volunteers in Shenzhen.
Of the fifteen main categories Wang suggests, four (“compulsorily shared,” “children,”
“food,” and “anti-mainstream”) were not found in Zuo’s Moments.
No single English term fully captures the meaning of suzhi. See Anagnost 2004.
Having only two daughters, her parents wanted Zuo to marry a man who would stay close
to them. That desire resonates with what Yan Yunxiang (2003: 180) found in a village in
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In sum, the intersections of labor in the social factory unveil the alienation
resulting from resistance to that alienation. Yet this reality is not predetermined but contingent. Moreover, Zuo’s resistance to alienation was informed
by her desires, aspirations, and passions — no matter how limited or stymied.
Given the complex entanglements of affect and conduct at the intersection of
different forms of on- and offline labor, I suggest that we recognize inequality
and vulnerability as a struggle and not as a passive condition. We must pay
more attention to the kinds of life opportunities and resources that can reach
migrant youths like Zuo Mei.
positions 31:2
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400
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