Migrant worker museums in China: public cultures of migrant labour in state and grassroots initiatives

This paper offers a comparative investigation of two rural migrant
workers museums, one state-run in Shenzhen and another
grassroots project in the suburbs of Beijing. We take museums as
institutions of the politics of recognition and identity politics par
excellence, and as fields of forces through which the matrices of
political economy, state formation and popular culture are played
out. The theoretical problematiques that frame our analyses are
twofold. On the one hand, what are the ways in which the postMao political economy and socioeconomic changes are
represented in the symbolic rituals enacted in the museums? On
the other hand, how such representational schemes cast light on
issues of labour, technologies of the self, and the collective
identity of migrant workers? We argue that the Shenzhen
Museum, albeit providing idealising and heroizing portrays of
migrant workers, reifies a development- and market-centred view
of the city that is deliberately oblivious to the structural roots of
migrant marginality. In contrast, the Beijing Museum offers a
powerful counternarrative to the centrality of capital logic. By
prioritising migrants’ lived experiences of labouring and living, it
underscores claims for fair evaluation of migrant labour, welfare
protection, dignity of labouring bodies, and collective voice and
identity.