International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

One feature of China’s post-Mao urban landscape is the dagongmei, young women who have migrated from the country to become domestic workers in the city. NEW MASTERS, NEW SERVANTS tells the story of their rural-to-urban migration, showing how the circumstances of the dagongmei distill larger questions about social and economic changes in late-twentieth-century China. Hairong Yan examines processes of postsocialist development through the lens of this gendered domestic labor. She demonstrates that the labor and bodies of migrant workers are focal points in a wide range of state and neoliberal debates about development, modernization, market economics, production, wage labor, and self-worth. NEW MASTERS, NEW SERVANTS examines how these women are subject to, make sense of, and change these discourses.

The six chapters build both from a rich archive of Yan’s ethnographic interviews with women who migrated from the Anhui province to serve as dagongmei and also from the portrayal of this experience in contemporary fiction. As Yan demonstrates throughout, the countryside figures as the field of symbolic death—of poverty, backwardness, and tradition against the pull of modernization and the city. Yan critiques this construction, resisting both the embrace of the flexibility of migrant labor and the celebration of the country-to-city development story. Her analysis begins by comparing two waves of migration, one during the years of Mao’s socialist rule and the other during the post-Mao decades. Her first chapter illustrates the radical shift in rural-urban relations that has taken place in the postsocialist era, where the rural has been impoverished both materially and symbolically and the urban has come to represent the only meaningful site for the construction of a modern identity. Another chapter analyzes the effects of this migration history on social difference, in particular the way in which the difference between manual and intellectual labor is cast as one of class rather than gender. Questions of how the production of domestic laborers transforms these women into the pedagogical object for a national project of modernization underlie this chapter. They continue in Yan’s discussion of how migrant women are transformed into producers and consumers in a global market and consequently how their entry into the marketplace as a geographically flexible work force solidifies a hierarchy of modernity. This transformation is epitomized in the image of the urbanized migrant worker, outfitted in the latest fashions, returning to the rural province from the cosmopolitan center as walking sign of modernity and modernity’s unequal distribution.