With the rise of the gig economy and short-term, task-based labor around the globe, what happens to the largest workforce in the world? In the past few years, work ethics among Chinese youths has attracted much media attention, domestically and overseas. Two concurrent and almost conflicting trends stand out. On the one hand, there is the almost smothering “996” work culture, which means working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, along with the seemingly inescapable “involution” (内卷) that makes people engage in endless and meaningless competitions at school and at work, thus burning out from a young age (see, e.g., Liu Reference Li and Chen2021). On the other hand, there is increasing discussion of the “lying flat” (躺平) generation, the sang (丧) or “mourning” culture – slacking off and learning to accept the status quo when all efforts seem to be futile – and the low-desire life (低欲望生活) that some young people are determined to lead (see, e.g., Feng and Cao Reference Feng and Cao2022; Liu Reference Liu2020). However, both trends are two sides of the same coin: what is the point of working hard when it does not lead to upward social mobility? They are not new phenomena either – they are simply made more visible through the internet and the social media as a result of their proliferation into the middle classes and the disillusioned urban youth, who no longer wish to be the normative, competitive, and consumerist subjects; and they become more prominent as China’s economic growth slows down. Migrant workers, on the other hand, have long engaged in the so-called “996” work schedule with even less protection and more intensity. While they have typically been portrayed as willing to put up with all the sufferings and hence as the backbone of China’s economic engine, making China the workshop of the world, things are changing with the rise of a new generation of migrant workers.

In the summer of 2018 I encountered on YouTube a documentary produced that year by Japan’s national broadcasting organization, NHK. The documentary is entitled “Sanhe Talent Market: China’s Youths Who Live on a Daily Wage of 1,500 Japanese Yen [Roughly US$13].” It depicts the lives of a group of day laborers who live in the Longhua District of Shenzhen, a southern megacity that borders Hong Kong and has pioneered China’s economic reforms. Drawn by the personal stories depicted in the documentary, the particular conundrums the younger generations of Chinese migrant workers faced in their life choices, and their reflections on factory work and low-skilled jobs, I decided that this would be the research project for my sabbatical in 2019–2020.

Located on the outskirts of Shenzhen, there is an employment service center called Sanhe Talent Market (三和人才市场) where thousands of migrant workers look for jobs, mostly low-skilled ones, every day. Nearby there are other staffing agencies of varying sizes. People often refer to the whole area as Sanhe. Each day a group of young people, almost all male and born mostly in the 1990s but also in the late 1980s and early 2000s, would gather in the adjacent Haixin Square (海信广场), in front of Haixinxin Human Resources Market (海新信人力资源市场) across from Sanhe Talent Market. Instead of stepping inside the employment agencies for formal, long-term employment, they are day laborers in search of contingent jobs and odd jobs; these range from temporary work on construction sites or being security guards for special events to being bussers at wedding banquets or packing and sorting at storage and distribution centers for e-commerce. Haixin Square is thus often called “the same-day pay square” (日结广场). Those young people call themselves Sanhe dashen (三和大神), which can be literally translated as the “great gods of Sanhe.”

Contrary to the stereotypical view of Chinese migrant workers as hard-working, driven, and filial pious, “Sanhe gods” are described as having no interest in looking for tedious factory jobs that would tie them to hopeless assembly lines. They would rather look for jobs that pay them by the end of the day, so that they may earn some quick cash. They would then spend the next couple of days indulging in online video games or online gambling, or simply roaming around until they run out of money and have to hunt for jobs again. This is described in the documentary with a somewhat sarcastic, yet catchy buzz phrase: “work for one day and play for three days” (做一天阔以玩三天). In spite of the increasing consumerism in China, the Sanhe dashen seem to spend the bare minimum, relying on the cheap housing, food, and internet surfing offered in the nearby urban village (城中村): Jingle New Village (景乐新村), right behind the walls of Sanhe.

Also popularized by the documentary and other media reports are words representing Sanhe dashen’s lifestyle. Guabi (挂逼), which can be roughly translated as “being broke” or “becoming desperate,” is used by the Sanhe dashen to express, often in a self-deprecating manner, the idea that they are running out of money or ways of survival. Guabi has almost become a way for people to greet each other in Sanhe and depicts a shared identity among the Sanhe dashen. Things that symbolize a guabi lifestyle include eating the 4 yuan (roughly 0.58 USD) noodles,Footnote ² drinking the 2 yuan (roughly 0.3 USD) 2-liter bottled water,Footnote ³ sleeping in a cramped room with bunk beds for 15 yuan (roughly 2 USD) per night, and surfing the internet for 1.5 yuan (roughly 0.2 USD) per hour in the many unlicensed internet cafés in Jingle Village. Guabi is also used as an adjective, to describe anything that is sold for survival – such as guabi cellphones, which are often resold by street peddlers in Haixin Square – or bought out of need, in association with the guabi lifestyle – for instance, guabi noodles, guabi water, a guabi bed, a guabi internet café. It can also be used to depict people – such as young women in Sanhe, who do not seem to look for factory work or any formal employment and are called guabi women (挂逼女). Women rarely appear in Jingle, and the few who do are usually formal residents or persons who either own businesses in the community or work in them. In consequence, women who are seen roaming the streets of Jingle or Haixin Square, especially young women, will quickly get discussed among the Sanhe dashen. The assumption is often that these women are desperate and have no other means of survival; hence they are called guabi women. Although men sometimes call themselves guabi boys (挂逼仔), in a self-deprecating manner, they typically address one another as diaomao (叼毛) – a curse word that designates a worthless person but is often used in a friendly or joking way – or as laoge (老哥), which literally means “old brother.” The latter is not used to show respect, but rather adopted from the jargon of online gamblers and lottery-ticket buyers, to indicate camaraderie.

Media exposure has created diverging views of the low-income migrants clustered in Sanhe and their lives. Skimming through the online comments sections of the media coverage, one can immediately notice that some despise the Sanhe dashen as a group of lazy and hopeless social misfits, while others show sympathy for their misfortune and realize that even the middle classes are perhaps just one big medical bill or one redundancy notice away from a similar fate. All those discussions resonate well with the long-term debate among social scientists on the causes of poverty – whether it is a result of individual and cultural attributes or the effect of structural factors such as systemic discrimination and lack of institutional support. Related to this “blame the victim” versus “blame the system” debate are, of course, the different solutions to poverty: to let it be, to force the poor to work, to offer social benefits, to provide training and employment opportunities, or to simply segregate and keep the poor out of sight.

As a sociologist who studies post-socialist China, when I first came across stories about the Sanhe dashen, I was immediately intrigued by the many paradoxes they experienced in their lives. First, these young migrants belong to a new generation: they are often dubbed “second-generation migrant workers” – workers who are not as attached to their home villages as their parents were and who go straight from school to the city, having little training and experience in farming. Working in the city has become the norm over the past three decades of reform in China, yet settling in the city is increasingly difficult, given the rising costs of living, especially in major metropolitan areas. Second, many of the dashen held full-time factory jobs earlier on but found the working hours, conditions, and disciplinary measures intolerable, or were conned by tricksters and frauds, for example recruiters who held back their pay. Instead of looking for the “stability” of factory work and instead of hoping for a better future, they focus on the present and work only if they need to. They seem to find more security and autonomy in temporary jobs that pay by the day or by the week than in long-term jobs that pay by the month, because they can quit whenever they want or in case something goes wrong. Third, they grew up in a period when consumerism was on the rise in China, yet their life shows a deep contradiction. On the one hand, they live without much consumption at all: they survive on the cheapest food and housing, having given up on dreams of home ownership, marriage, and upward social mobility, and when they run out of money they even sleep in the park or on the street, as the warm weather in Shenzhen makes such an option possible. After all, gods have no desires. On the other hand, they spend a lot of time living in a virtual world of wealth, relationships, love, and dreams: the online video game and gambling world, where there is plenty of consumption. Many arrived in Sanhe exactly as a result of falling prey to consumerism and having accumulated personal debts that they cannot repay. They also live in a highly commodified community, where everything, from identity cards to sex, can be bought and sold for money.

Sociologist Robert Merton (Reference Merton1938) developed the strain theory of deviance, arguing that, when there is a gap between cultural goals and institutionalized or socially approved means to achieve those goals, individuals may experience strain and adapt in different ways. One of the ways to adapt is retreatism, the tendency to withdraw and reject both the goals in question (e.g., getting rich, moving upward in society) and the institutionalized means of realizing them (e.g., hard work, education). On the surface, what the Sanhe dashen are doing fits perfectly into the category of retreatism, but could it also be a form of resistance on the part of people who are, structurally, among the least powerful? Could young migrant workers retreating from the formal labor market and factory work ultimately force employers to raise wages and improve working conditions? In short, their stories have many layers of control and desperation – or perhaps of finding control in desperation and of applying one’s agency in the face of structural inequality.

Existing literature on migrant workers in China often focuses either on factory workers in what Pun Ngai (Reference Pun2016) calls the “dormitory labor regime” or on social capital in migrant enclaves (e.g., Liu et al. Reference Liu, Li, Liu and Chen2015; Xiang Reference Xiang2005; Zhang Reference Zhang2001), where migrant workers bond with one another through formal employment in factories or through social relationships formed via their home villages. Other works that study migrant workers with more individualized forms of employment often concentrate on service workers or self-employed migrants such as nannies and street vendors (e.g., Gaetano Reference Gaetano2015; Zavoretti Reference Zavoretti2017). Little attention has been paid to young migrant workers such as the Sanhe dashen, who are mostly male, who do not form social networks based on where they come from even though they live in migrant enclaves, and who engage predominantly in manual work without establishing formal labor relations with any particular employer.

The study that comes closest to my analysis in this book is Sarah Swider’s (Reference Swider2015) Building China: Informal Work and the New Precariat. Swider describes four types of employment and labor relations in the construction industry, one of which is individualized employment. She places in this category individuals who find jobs in the illegal “street labor markets” or “black labor markets” and indicates violence as the main mechanism of control in this type of employment. She compares individualized employment to unfree labor and argues that migrants in this category are hypermobile and hypervulnerable, as they are often perceived as vagrants, beggars, and criminals by the local state and by local citizens. However, even in this case workers are actively looking for jobs in one particular industry, which differs from what the Sanhe dashen do. In addition, Swider fails to explore the different levels of vulnerability and mobility found among those more individualized workers and the relationships and coping strategies they develop, especially as informal and temporary employment through labor subcontracting and labor dispatch (劳务派遣)Footnote ⁴ has become more common and has been institutionalized in China in the decade since Swider’s research. There is also little discussion in the book about the workers’ lives beyond work.

The purpose of my book is thus to explore the lives of second-generation migrant workers who are engaged in various kinds of informal economy, from temporary work in factories and other job sites to work in the “gray” and sometimes illegal sectors of the economy, by looking at two migrant communities in China. One of them is Sanhe in Shenzhen, an area covering Sanhe Talent Market, Haixin Square, and Jingle New Village (an adjacent urban village). While focusing on Sanhe, I also include a second migrant enclave called Zhonghuayuan (中华园, literally “China Garden”), located in Kunshan city in the province of Jiangsu, in order to expand the scope of the study. Kunshan is a county-level city under the administration of the prefecture-level city of Suzhou, and borders with Shanghai. It is known for its hundreds of high-tech companies and factories, mostly owned by Taiwanese businesspeople, which deliver electronic products for global multinational companies such as Apple. Unlike Shenzhen, which has subtropical weather, Kunshan has crisp autumns and cold winters, which make sleeping outdoors less of a choice once the summer is gone. In addition, the city itself does not offer many opportunities for informal employment outside the factory system, since it is not as big as Shenzhen. However, as part of the Yangtze River Delta, one of the most economically developed regions in China, Kunshan is close to a number of first- and second-tier cities in China such as Shanghai, Suzhou, Wuxi, and Nanjing, where the demand for informal workers is high. Thus Kunshan has developed into another well-known hub for day laborers in China.

Informality, Precarity, and Migration

The concept of the precariat – a neologism that combines “precariousness” and “proletariat” – has been popularized through Guy Standing’s (Reference Standing2011) book The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, although sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Reference Bourdieu1963) was one of the first to discuss labor precariousness (precarité) in his portrayal of the racialized class divide between casual or contingent workers and permanently employed workers in Algeria in the 1950s. Standing’s (Reference Standing2011, p. vii) conception of the precariat, on the other hand, involves workers’ “distinctive bundle of insecurities” marked by unstable employment and income and by lack of protection and representation, thus living on the margins of established class structures and institutions. But scholars have critiqued Standing’s approach of lumping extremely heterogeneous groups into one analytical category, itself based on a dichotomy between secure and casual employment; and they questioned whether the precariat indeed constitutes a class in the Marxist sense (Breman Reference Breman2013; Smit and Pun Reference Smith and Pun2018).

The rise of the precariat is often attributed to neoliberal globalization and the increasingly neoliberal state that undermines labor organization and welfare provision and promotes flexible labor relations designed to maximize profits and to shift the risks onto workers. However, the decline of Fordism and the welfare state in the West is not a universal experience. Precarious labor and livelihoods not only have had a long history in advanced capitalist economies but have always dominated in the Global South. It is thus important to understand the distinctive political, social, cultural, and economic processes of precarization in different parts of the world, as precarity can be shaped by colonialism and the developmental state as much as by neoliberalization (Bhattacharya and Kesar Reference Bhattacharya and Kesar2020; Lee and Kofman Reference Lee and Kofman2012; Munck Reference Munck2013; Neilson and Rossiter Reference Neilson and Rossiter2008; Swider Reference Swider2017).

Scholars have also explored pracarity’s interconnectedness with migration, youths, and large metropolises. Internal and international migrant workers are often the ones most vulnerable to precarization, as they lack citizenship rights and frequently face the worst employment conditions (Goldring and Landolt Reference Goldring and Landolt2011; Lee and Kofman Reference Lee and Kofman2012). Youths have historically entered precarious jobs such as internships, and the commodification of education has made it more difficult to foster any hope of social mobility (Standing Reference Standing2011). Spatially, large metropolitan areas are major places that produce precarious labor and precarious living conditions, as polarization and exclusion are often embedded in urban policies on residence, health, and education that segregate different social classes on the basis of race, ethnicity, and migration status (Anderson Reference Anderson2010; Mingione Reference Mingione1996; Sassen Reference Sassen1991; Wilson Reference Wilson1993).

In addition, precarity is often associated with informality, and scholars have increasingly sought to integrate the two separately developed discourses – informal and precarious work – as both imply insecurity: the former emphasizes a lack of recognition and protection within legal and regulatory frameworks while the latter goes beyond the workplace, to encompass workers’ social locations and lack of dignity (Siegmann and Schiphorst Reference Siegmann and Schiphorst2016). Some suggest that the topic of precarious labor should replace the discussion of informal labor, as the informal–formal and standard–nonstandard binaries no longer hold in a world of increasingly complex labor arrangements and employment relations (Kalleberg and Hewison Reference Kalleberg and Hewison2013; Standing Reference Standing2014). Others point out instead the differences between the two conceptualizations and the need to keep both, given that not all precarious work is informal and informal precarious workers, unlike their formal counterparts, often do not have labor contracts and in many cases are not even recognized as workers, thus being more likely to become invisible (Swider Reference Swider2017). No matter whether the concepts of informal and precarious work are interchangeable, Lee (Reference Lee2019, p. 137) argues that it is important to conceptualize informality and precarity as “relational struggles” whose meanings are not only context-specific but also subject to ongoing negotiations. Lee thus suggests that precarity can be analyzed as relational and relative along three dimensions: regulation (protection and regulation by laws and state policies in production), recognition (workers’ symbolic and normative status and standing), and social reproduction (care and subsistence provisions on a daily and generational basis).

Although precarity and informality existed in China during the Mao era,Footnote ⁵ new forms have emerged since 1978, when China began its market reforms and a private economy started to develop alongside the restructuring of state sectors. The rise of precarious workers during the period of reform is associated with a couple of institutions and policies. The first one is hukou, household registration, which assigns rural and urban residency status to citizens at birth, in order to limit and control physical and social mobility. Although the hukou system has been loosened in the reform era so as to allow rural surplus labor to travel and work in cities, it continues to restrict the access of migrant workers with rural hukou status to public goods and services in the city, thus creating de facto second-class citizens in urban China (Solinger Reference Solinger1999). Migrant workers’ vulnerability increases as a result not only of the rising costs of living, which raise a further barrier to settling in cities, but also of land grabs by local states in the process of urbanization, which has created many landless farmers with basically no land to fall back on or go back to. I will revisit this point in the next section.

The second factor is China’s increasing participation in globalization, a process that ties its economy with the global commodity chain and subjects its workers to exploitation from both global and domestic capital. China’s growing embeddedness in global capitalism happens in conjunction with (a) the withdrawal of the state from various social provisions; (b) the restructuring of state sectors through massive layoffs and processes in which labor contracts replace permanent employment and labor markets replace job allocation by the state (Kuruvilla et al. Reference Kuruvilla, Lee and Gallagher2011; Lee Reference Lee2007);Footnote ⁶ and (c) the emergence of the pro-business developmental state, whose legitimacy and cadre promotion have largely been based on economic performance (Li and Zhou Reference Li and Zhou2005; Yang and Zhao Reference Yang and Zhao2015; Zhu Reference Zhu2011).

Like elsewhere, in China, too, the pursuit of profitability, high employment pressure, and increasing labor migration have led to demands for flexible employment; and labor dispatch – a mechanism whereby employment service agencies instead of actual user enterprises establish employment relationships with workers – has become entrenched and is widely used by employers in order to mitigate labor liability, avoid labor inspection, and lower labor costs. Given the lack of official reports and statistics, the various estimates of the size of dispatch workers in China in the 2010s range from 27 million to 75 million. These workers were engaged not only in private and foreign enterprises but also in the state sectors, and the general sense is that the number has increased since the late 1990s, the majority being rural migrant workers (Feng Reference Feng2019; Liu Reference Liu2014; Zhang Reference Zhang2021).

Although initially labor dispatch fulfilled various purposes depending on the ownership type and the size of the enterprise, its use was expanded in order for employers to bypass the 2008 Labor Contract Law,Footnote ⁷ which required them to make social insurance contributions, that is, to pay wuxian yijin (五险一金). Wuxian yijin includes the five kinds of social insurance – healthcare, retirement, work-related injury, unemployment, and maternity – and the housing provident fund, which could amount to 30–40 percent of employees’ total wages (Feng Reference Feng2019). Labor dispatch is also preferred by companies that cope with seasonal production changes and want to fill labor shortages in peak season – as do for instance electronics manufacturers in need of hourly paid workers for rush orders – but do not want to keep these workers for the slower season or deal with severance pay. Despite multiple amendments to labor laws to reduce and regulate the use of agency workers and protect workers’ rights, noncompliance remains rampant – often with local states’ complicity or acquiescence – and the private employment agency industry is booming (Liu Reference Liu2014; Feng Reference Feng2019).

In this book I focus on young male migrants who engage in informal and precarious work, lying at the intersection of multiple identities and vulnerabilities. The way in which they opt in and out of the factory regime, going back and forth, indicates the blurry line between the formal and the informal and the various levels and dimensions of precarity. Jobs in the factory regime, for example, may offer longer-term employment opportunities than day labor and other types of informal employment, but the regimented production and social life takes a huge toll on workers’ mental and physical health, and this has been well documented. Within the factory regime, formal workers with contracts may be better protected and receive not only wages but also social security benefits. Informal and dispatch workers, on the other hand, may receive higher wages without social insurance deductions and may be offered additional sign-on bonuses by their employment service agencies during peak season or labor shortages. All this is perceived by some workers as amounting to a better deal than to be a formal worker, as it could potentially lead to higher savings and does not require a long-term commitment to the job. Nevertheless, there are multiple tricks and restrictions that employment agencies frequently use to make it difficult for workers to actually receive those bonuses or to prevent them from quitting the job too soon, and labor disputes often arise as a result.

The existence of precarious employment also creates business opportunities for people in urban villages to offer goods and services tailored to migrant workers who are in transition between jobs or who seek shelter there, and this in turn helps sustain and reproduce precarious labor and form the multiple interconnected layers of an informal economy. Therefore, to understand this segment of precarious workers, it is important to go beyond the binaries of employer versus employee, capital versus labor, or state versus workers and include actors such as employment service agencies and other intermediaries in the chain that supplies workers with job opportunities and livelihoods and facilitates the reproduction of their precarious work and life.

Previous discussions on precarious work, including Lee’s (Reference Lee2019) three-dimensional lens, often take a top-down structural approach: they analyze how much labor is recognized, protected, and regulated by the state and by employers but overlook the workers’ own agency and the coping strategies and informal institutions they develop. Standing (Reference Standing2011) includes in the precariat both individuals who take on temporary odd jobs by choice – “grinners,” as he calls them – and individuals who do it by necessity – whom he calls “groaners.” According to his categorization, the former have support from a previous career, a spouse, or someone who keeps them financially secure, while the latter do not have such a safety net. However, the boundary between choice and necessity is not always clear-cut or defined by the level of financial security. Sanhe gods, who are in no way financially secure, are nonetheless not groaners. The dynamic relations between choice and necessity and the process of getting in and out of precarious work and from one form of precarious work to another are in need of further study.

Furthermore, although work may be one dimension that differentiates between members of this group, it is certainly not the only dimension, as precarious workers’ identities are often not defined by their work. Their social relations, and their life after work and outside the work space and labor market are no less important than the kind of work they do in allowing us to understand precarity and precarization.

Although historically women, especially women of color, have been (and still are) one of the categories most vulnerable to precarity (Flores Garrido Reference Flores Garrido2020; Mosoetsa, et al. Reference Mosoetsa, Stillerman and Tilly2016), discussions have emerged on the topic of a “challenge” to masculinity: young men are said to become increasingly alienated and anomic as a result of the feminization of laborFootnote ⁸ and lack of male role models for the working class (Standing Reference Standing2011). Such discussions are often based on the idea that masculinity is defined by breadwinning and carrying on the family lineage in patriarchal societies. However, looked at from an intersectional lens (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989), masculinity varies across social classes, races, ethnicities, migration statuses, and so on. Studies have also shown that in China hukou status plays a more important role than gender in determining workers’ engagement in informal employment (Li and Tang Reference Li and Tang2002). The particular group of migrant workers that I study in this book is predominantly male, yet its members’ existence and their relations to the state, their employers, various intermediaries, and other precarious workers reveal the complicated process of resisting and reclaiming masculinity that affects their aspirations, their consumption patterns, the (gendered) types of informal work they take on, and the coping strategies they develop.

Therefore, instead of focusing on the state or on employers, I present in this book the various processes through which migrant workers draw boundaries and become part of the informal and precarious labor, their coping strategies, and the informal institutions they develop. Essential to these processes are the diverse intermediaries who supply migrant workers with jobs and livelihoods and sustain and reproduce their work and life, while gender and their intersecting identities are implicated in their work, life choices, aspirations, daily interactions, and relationships, as well as in how the state and other authorities perceive and deal with them.

Urban Villages and Spatial Regulation

Since the protagonists of this book reside largely in urban villages, in addition to changes in the Chinese labor market and the social institutions that lead to the informalization and precarization of labor, it is necessary to discuss how urban villages came into existence and what the social and economic functions of such spaces are.

Urban villages are creations of China’s dual land tenure system. In urban areas the land is owned by the state, while in rural villages it is owned by the village collectives. But in the process of urban expansion rural villages have come to be surrounded by urban developments, and their farmland has been put to nonagricultural uses even as villagers retained their ownership rights. This has brought into existence the urban village or the village within the city. Because urban villages provide migrant workers with cheap rental housing, food, and services in otherwise unaffordable cities, they became almost synonymous with migrant enclaves. These spaces have also turned local villagers into landlords and business owners who serve and profit from the cities’ migrants.

Despite China’s system of state and collective land ownership, a bundle of property rights (Walder Reference Walder, Granovetter and Swedberg2011) – such as the right to use and the right to transfer – have been privatized, causing commercial real estate markets to boom since 1998, when the central state decided to end its urban housing allocation system. However, laws and policies in support of the sales and transfers of land use rights have focused on urban land, prohibiting the legal transfer of rural land use rights and thus excluding individual villagers from the real estate market. The only legal method of converting rural land into urban land is requisition by the state for “public interest,” a process that grants local states monopoly on rural-to-urban land conversion. This process is known as land nationalization, because it turns rural collective-owned land into urban state-owned land. Such land policies make land the most important source of fiscal revenue for local states and incentivize them to seize rural land for urban development, as villagers need to be compensated only for the agricultural value of the land, while the local government can sell the requisitioned land at a much higher price on the urban land market. Thus land nationalization creates millions of landless peasants and rural migrant workers who do not have sufficient land to fall back on (Peng Reference Peng2018; Qiao Reference Qiao2018; Whiting Reference Whiting2022).

The revised 2004 Land Administrative Law allowed for rural land to be acquired for urban development on the condition that villagers be appropriately compensated. If the requisitioned land falls into the category of “land for dwelling” (宅基地) – that is, land for villagers’ residential homes, as opposed to “land for construction” or “land for farming” – then, in addition to compensating the villagers financially, the authority also needs to convert their hukou status from rural to urban and to integrate them into the urban welfare system. While “land for construction and farming was frequently tapped for urban development and renewal, land for dwelling was left untouched until large-scale urban redevelopment projects began in the mid-2000s” (Cheng Reference Cheng2014: 31). This was because of the higher economic and social costs and potential political risk of requisitioning the latter type of land. Building on “land for dwelling” – and this includes constructions without legal titles as well as their selling and leasingFootnote ⁹ – has become a way for farmers to participate in and benefit from urban real estate markets, even though without legal protection or authorization (Qiao Reference Qiao2018). It is observed that, in cities such as Shenzhen, “illegal” buildings without formal legal titles not only account for a significant proportion of property transactions but also serve a wide range of residential, industrial, and social purposes as shopping malls, office spaces, public facilities, and the like. More than just informal settlements, many of these buildings are of decent quality, being built with durable materials by professional construction teams, and are typically five to ten floors high, especially the ones built after 2000 (Cheng Reference Cheng2014; Qiao Reference Qiao2018). It is in this context of land rights, requisition mechanisms, and real estate markets that urban villages emerged and started to develop.

The formation of urban villages in China is thus a combined result of rapid urbanization, the dual land tenure system, and partial land reforms and marketization that prioritize urban development. The ambiguous legal status of urban villages makes their existence and management subject to various formal and informal institutions.

On the one hand, the “differential treatment of farming, construction, and dwelling land has structurally determined the parameters of urban villages” (Cheng Reference Cheng2014, p. 34), making their development sporadic and fragile. The presence of urban villages is often seen as problematic in the eyes of local states, especially as cities focus on beautifying their spaces and upgrading their services to attract capital, the wealthy, and the middle classes and to compete among themselves for talent (Zhan and Tong Reference Zhan and Tong2018; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2021). Urban villages are antithetical to the kind of modern and orderly spaces that developmental states are trying to build. Cities such as Shenzhen aim at redeveloping and renewing urban villages through both demolition and renovation, in order to make a more profitable use of land and to upgrade the “quality” of their human capital (Haack Reference Haack2018; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2021). During my fieldwork I witnessed a part of the local state’s intensified renovation and gentrification of Jingle New Village.

On the other hand, the level of intervention from local states relates to the ability of village organizations – such as the villagers’ committee, or joint-stock companies in which local villagers have become shareholders – to govern the space and to negotiate terms with the government and other actors, who may have vested interests in urban villages and the land they occupy. Collective land ownership means that the village collectives or their intermediate agencies do have certain levels of authority and autonomy within the confines of their villages – they can deploy coercive force to maintain security, for example – and the various rationalization projects planned by the city often have to be channeled through village organizations (Cheng Reference Cheng2014; Wang Reference Wang2016).

As inequality increases in China’s big cities, urban villages serve the function of offering a livelihood to the many migrants and low-income people whom cities rely on, yet whom they are often unwilling or unable to take care of. Even though in urban villages poverty and substandard living conditions coexist with certain illicit activities (e.g., prostitution, gambling, and petty theft), this is not tantamount with political anarchy, and scholars have noted significant differences between urban villages and squatter or informal settlements (Cheng Reference Cheng2014; Mobrand Reference Mobrand2006; Wang Reference Wang2016). Depending on their location, urban villages may serve different migrant groups (Cheng Reference Cheng2014; O’Donnell Reference O’Donnell2021). For example, those in Shenzhen’s city center, where land is of much higher value, serve mainly migrant entrepreneurs and white-collar migrants and offer better public goods and services, as well as various cultural and institutional resources, while urban villages on the city’s outskirts, for instance Jingle New Village, where the Sanhe dashen are based, accommodate mainly low-skilled migrant workers who do not live in factory dormitories. Therefore, as social spaces, urban villages vary in terms of economic organization, physical presentation, and state presence and serve as important settings for the discussion of informal precarious workers. Jingle New Village is a place where individual employment intermediaries come and recruit and where migrant workers gather between two jobs; as a result, economic and social activities deployed here largely center around the needs of migrant workers, although not without intervention and surveillance by the state. The multilayered informal economy constituted in this space is built upon the divide between locals and migrants of older and younger generations, who have arrived in Shenzhen at different times. In Jingle one rarely sees any of the original residents, as most have rented out their buildings to “head tenants,” erfangdong (二房东), who may be earlier migrants (or their parents) and who have become business owners in the community. The erfangdong may hire other migrants to watch their stores or to solicit business, while their targeted clients are, ironically, the most precarious of them all.

Doing Fieldwork in Sanhe and Zhonghuayuan

I spent September and October 2019 conducting an ethnographic study in Sanhe and Zhonghuayuan. Although I made plans to return to both places for follow-up interviews in February 2020, the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 made this visit impossible. I was, however, able to keep in touch with some of my interviewees through Chinese social media, and they provided me with updates on how they fared during the pandemic. They also added me to social media groups for temporary and day labor employment in Sanhe and in Kunshan, which allows me to get the latest information on jobs and salary ranges and to continue to follow discussions of various factories, job intermediaries, and workers’ life experiences even when I am away from the communities.

In Sanhe I interviewed, formally and informally, over sixty people altogether. Among my interviewees are people who identified as great gods, other migrant workers who visited or lived in the Sanhe area for variable durations from a couple of days to a couple of years, business owners, and job intermediaries. I typically spent each day in North Section (北区) of Jingle New Village, where the great gods gather, and talked casually to people sitting or lying outside stores or in a little park endowed with exercise equipment and with a raised bed around a big tree where people can sit – the only common space in the community. Even those whom I did not interview knew of my presence and would either observe me from a distance or sit close and listen to the conversations, occasionally chiming in. Some would become interested in longer, more formal interviews later on. I also observed people in internet cafés and people who engaged in online and offline gambling. I spent time in Haixin Square too, and in the gated Sanhe Talent Market outside the village, observing and talking to people as they were looking for factory work or day labor jobs. Not all these people lived in Jingle; some came from places nearby such as Dalang Subdistrict (大浪街道) and Shiyan Subdistrict (石岩街道), west of Sanhe. I also visited the nearby Longhua Park and night market, where people would hang out, take a walk, find a place to rest, and at night date or look for sex workers. Longhua Park used to be one of the places where Sanhe gods stayed overnight when they could not afford even a bed in one of the flophouses in Jingle, but when I was there sleeping in the park was no longer allowed, not even during the day. Parapolice patrolled the park all day long, and at night the park was closed.

Initially in Sanhe I had to gain people’s trust by constantly reassuring them that I was neither a reporter nor a social media influencer who did live streaming, and that I did not carry recording devices. This is because many do not want their family or friends to find out that they are in Sanhe and are not doing well; others are afraid of being tracked down, say, by debt collectors through media exposure. Yet after only two days of hanging out in the community I became known as “the college teacher”; people started to call me laoshi (老师), “teacher,” and would greet me and talk to me each time I was there. Almost all the people I interacted with were men in their twenties and thirties; I was one of the few women there who looked relatively young, and maybe the only one who would spend hours chatting with them with interest and respect, without trying to sell them anything. Perhaps because of that, I generally felt welcome and safe in the community, except on a couple of occasions. In the Appendix I reflect on my fieldwork experience and on how my positionality may have affected my research.

My stay in Sanhe was cut short as a result of an intervention and threat made by members of the local State Security BureauFootnote ¹⁰ shortly before the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 2019, so I left Sanhe on September 30 and went to Zhonghuayuan in Kunshan ahead of the original schedule. Glasses, who became one of my key informants, texted me, checking to see if I was fine and saying that Sanhe laoge (meaning “the old brothers in Sanhe” or “the people in Sanhe”) were asking why laoshi does not come any more. I have since been able to stay in touch with a couple of them through social media.

In Zhonghuayuan people are more spread out, as the urban village is separated into three sections by busy streets: North Village, West Village, and East Village, the latter being the farthest from the staffing agencies. Together they occupy a larger area of land than Sanhe; the space is much less crowded, and a lot more of the original residents live in the villages. Many of them – mostly older adults – rent out rooms or apartments to migrant workers. These look more like decent living spaces, hugely different from the cramped bunk-bed flophouses in Sanhe. I interviewed more than twenty people in the park close to the staffing agencies and in the villages, and made observations in those places as well as in the internet cafés where workers typically hang out. I also interviewed staff from employment service agencies and landlords in the urban villages, and I observed and talked to newly recruited workers in front of one of the factories, as they were lining up and waiting to go in.

Through interviews, casual chats, and observations, along with online ethnography, I was able to piece together the work and life of Sanhe gods and other informal precarious workers. They are in no way a monolithic group, and one of the goals of my book is to offer a view as to the many reasons why people become great gods, engage in temporary employment and day labor, or even give up being wage laborers and step into illicit activities and jobs in the grey area. In this way I want to explore the process of precarization and the different dimensions of precarity among workers. The book also identifies the series of brokers – job intermediaries, employment service agencies, business owners in urban villages – who sustain the workers’ livelihood both within and outside the factory regime and at the same time join in the exploitation of labor and take a cut from the workers’ compensations. Finally, my research offers insight into the subculture surrounding the Sanhe gods and their social media presence, their various forms of resistance, and the local states’ governing mechanisms in response to the great gods’ presence in the urban space.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 2 discusses how workers in the migrant communities of Sanhe and Zhonghuayuan form their identities by engaging in boundary-setting to differentiate themselves from each other and from other groups of migrant workers. It presents their views on the process of precarization. For example, not everyone in Sanhe would consider themselves a Sanhe god; being one depends on how and why one has ended up in Sanhe, how much money one has saved, how long one has been in the community for, and whether one still hopes to leave it or is actively looking for jobs.

Chapter 3 explores why workers like Sanhe gods opt out of factory work for day labor jobs and why many of them still rely periodically on the factory regime for employment and survival. In their daily conversations and in social media groups, workers share information on various employment opportunities and compare notes about their experience in different factories. Among the various types of informal work they take on, some jobs are favored over others, depending on pay, level of labor intensity and managerial control, and whether there are specific requirements or thresholds such as clothing style, a valid ID card, or a physical examination. Factory work is intense and dehumanizing, but the alternative forms of employment are not without traps and pitfalls. No matter whether workers engage in factory work or take day labor jobs, employment service agencies and job intermediaries play a crucial role in disseminating employment information, regulating job terms, and sustaining employers’ power and control over workers.

In the two migrant communities I researched, relationships are often transient, as people come and leave. Chapter 4 focuses on friendships and relationships within the community. Sometimes friendships are formed mainly because people find commonalities in their experiences or enjoy chatting with each other. Friends will then help each other find jobs, places to hide, or places to live. But friendships are easily broken, too, as people disappear for various reasons or trick their friends. One does not need much money to survive in the community at all, yet everything can be sold for money. In addition to informal workers engaging in the gray or illicit economy, various kinds of informal economy have developed in the community – for instance, unlicensed internet cafés where people can stay or sleep overnight, or small businesses that also serve as informal pawn shops where workers may leave cell phones and other valuable belongings as collaterals and get them back when they have the money.

As most of the informal workers I study are men in their twenties and early thirties, heterosexual and single, discussions about women, women’s bodies, and sexuality frequently occur. Even though prostitution is illegal in China, information about sex workers was widely shared and readily available among my interviewees. Chapter 5 explores this group’s diverse views on gender, sexuality, homosexuality, and the commodification of sex, as well as the dynamic process of compromising, reclaiming, and constructing masculinity in their work and daily interactions. The presence of a large number of women workers in factories is often contrasted with the near absence of women in the two migrant communities, indicating how gender and gender expectations are connected with employment options and with the gendered way of governance adopted by the state and employers and facilitated by intermediaries.

The final chapter investigates why some migrant workers’ withdrawal from the factory regime has not led to a fundamental reform of the system, even though China’s labor shortages and rising labor costs in manufacturing have been widely discussed. It analyzes the symbiotic relationship between the factory regime and the informal and flexible employment, and it explores the formal and informal institutions that sustain the social reproduction of precarious labor.

The reality is that workers’ withdrawal is often attributed to personal failures rather than systemic problems and, instead of addressing the root causes of labor precarity, the state and its agencies continue to crack down on, to surveil, and to marginalize informal precarious workers, discounting their experiences. Ultimately, the Sanhe gods seem to be moving back and forth between two traps: the exploitative factory regime and the no less (or even more) exploitative informal sectors. The heterogeneity and fragmentation that characterize the Sanhe gods make it difficult for them to mobilize against formal institutions on a broad scale, and by marginalizing their existence and problematizing their work ethics and morality the state is able to contain their influence and visibility.

Nevertheless, informal workers such as the Sanhe dashen are not without agency; and they do resist, sometimes through collective action but more often as individuals, through everyday forms of resistance (Scott Reference Scott1985), on and off work sites. One such form of resistance is the creation and use of sarcastic language to depict the factory system, wage labor, and one’s own life. The increasing polarization of social classes in China also means that Sanhe dashen’s experiences are not that far removed from those of so-called middle classes and white-collar workers, whose employment and socioeconomic status is by no means secure. With the expansion of enrollments in colleges and universities in China, young college graduates can fall into similar employment “traps,” where formal employment seems to be not only highly competitive but also unsatisfying and insecure, and the skyrocketing cost of living in big cities makes it difficult to accumulate wealth or move upward on the social ladder (see Bregnbæk Reference Bregnbæk2016 and Engebretsen Reference Engebretsen2013 for descriptions of unemployed college graduates living in “ant tribes” on the outskirts of Beijing).

The Sanhe dashen’s resistance to and rejection of the official discourse of “eating bitterness” and working hard foreshadow the recent prominence of the phenomenon of China’s youths “lying flat”Footnote ¹¹ or “chilling” as they rethink productivity and their life priorities. The emergence of this topic prompted the Chinese state to launch a campaign against it and to ban discussion of it on social media (Bandurski Reference Bandurski2021; Chen Reference Chen2021; Jeong Reference Jeong2021; Kuo Reference Kuo2021). Informal precarious workers such as the Sanhe dashen are in no way disappearing, despite the local state’s efforts to regulate their presence through both enclosure and dispersal, which have intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. And their very existence manifests the logic of capitalism built around surplus and productivity and the spatial contestation in which migrant workers have long engaged: they are welcome into cities only as productive forces, not as citizens entitled to claim their “right to the city” (Harvey Reference Harvey2008), and their legitimacy and worth have to be constantly proved. The rise of the precariat in China today blurs the boundary between the working class and the underclass and challenges the stereotypical view of migrant workers as a monolithic group whose members share similar aspirations and regard migration as a mechanism for upward social mobility.