The Cultural Politics of Labour in Postsocialist China

In this chapter, by reviewing the major scholarship focusing on the cultural politics of rural
migrant labour , I will tackle the following questions: how has the Party-state altered its ideological system and its own identity to the conditions of the political economy of global capitalism to
reconcile exploitative forms of labour with its own founding narratives? politics of labour inform the issue of the changing relationship built between the Party-state and
rural migrant workers, as well as with other subject categories? Moreover, the following complex question will be dealt with: how can the analysis of the cultural politics of rural workers’
labour inform the processes through which a “new field of articulation” is shaped where various
forces such as the Party-state, contemporary capitalism, as well as the agency of rural migrant
workers meet and are constituting the identity of the subject worker ( Pun 2005 : 7, 26).
The first section of the chapter provides some brief contextual information as to of post-Mao
economic reforms and the commodification of labour. Then I turn to an exploration of the
early representations of peasant workers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The third section deals
with the intense Party-state sponsored cultural construction of peasant workers as it is mediated
within the Shenzhen official press. In the last section of the chapter, I turn to an exploration of
the ways in which peasant workers narrate their experiences of labour and to the modalities of
articulation of these narratives with larger cultural and social formations.