¹ Zhang, Z. W., Xiao Cun Community Newsletter, Xiao Cun, 2011Google Scholar.

² This cultural work bolsters Federici's argument that capitalism creates the figure of the housewife as a mode of primitive accumulation. She argues that since housework is non-waged, women's labour in the domestic realm tends to be naturalized as it is not considered productive labour. In practice, however, unpaid housework and domestic work, which include childcare, cooking, and cleaning, are essential to productive work in capitalism. Without these forms of non-waged labour, performed primarily by women, no other forms of production can take place. See Federici, S., Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and the Primitive, Autonomedia, New York, 2004Google Scholar.

³ The desiring subject, Rofel argues, emerges in China as a figure of aspiration, through which new ways of conducting one's self and normative ideas about being human in today's world are imagined and practised through people's transnational encounters with the mass media, particularly in regard to gender, sex, and the consumption of globally recognized brands. See Rofel, L., Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture, Duke University Press, Durham, 2007, p. 2Google Scholar.

⁴ Hsiung noted that a critical aspect of Taiwan's rapid industrialization during the 1980s was the Kuomintang's (KMT) two campaigns, ‘Mother's Workshops’ and ‘Living Rooms as Factories’. These programmes were designed to motivate married women to contribute their wage labour in the interest of the nation's economic development, while maintaining their prescribed roles as wives, mothers, and caretakers. These campaigns attested to the KMT's public politicization of women's labour that was commonly assigned to the domestic realm. See Hsiung, P.. Living Rooms as Factories: Class, Gender, and the Satellite Factory System, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1996Google Scholar.

⁵ Pun, N., Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace, Duke University Press, Durham, 2005Google Scholar.

⁶ Solinger, D., ‘The Floating Population in the Cities: Changes for Assimilation?’ In Urban Spaces in Contemporary China: The Potential for Autonomy and Community in Post-Mao China, Davis, D. (ed.), Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995Google Scholar; Davin, D., ‘Women and Migration in Contemporary China’, China Report, vol. 41 , February 2005, pp. 29–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Chu, J., Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China, Duke University Press, Durham, 2010Google Scholar.

⁸ Siu, H., ‘Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Postreform South China’, American Ethnologist, vol. 34 , May 2007, pp. 329–350CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ This jiagongchang was owned and operated by a middle-aged migrant couple from the neighbouring Guangxi province: Mr and Mrs Wong. They were among the first generation of factory wage workers in Shenzhen shortly after the introduction of market reforms in the early 1980s.

¹⁰ Wan, X., Maturing Megacities: The Pearl River Delta in Progressive Transformation, Springer Press, New York, 2014Google Scholar.

¹¹ To be sure, urban villages are not exclusive to the Pearl River Delta region. Scholars and observers have written about urban villages in Beijing, Chongqing, Hangzhou, Qingdao, Wenzhou, and Lanzhou, to name just a few. See also Al, S., Villages in the City: A Guide to South China's Informal Settlements, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2014Google Scholar.

¹² The hukou is a national policy of population control which designates people and land as either rural or urban, as well as either agricultural or non-agricultural. Over 120 million migrants from the countryside who have moved to cities are denied state-sponsored welfare benefits, such as housing, health care, education, and jobs. They are considered China's ‘floating population’. See Zhang, L., Strangers in the City: Reconfigurations of Space, Power, and Social Networks Within China's Floating Population, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2001Google Scholar.

¹³ Technically, land in China that was collectivized during the Maoist period currently falls under the governance of the local state in the name of ‘the people’. Collectives own the land, and individuals have administrative use-rights to the land for a negotiated period of time (approximately 70 years). As Verdery explains, the question of property under socialism is often concerned with the question of administrative use-rights rather than legal ownership. See Verdery, K., What was Socialism and What Comes Next?, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the case of China (as in the former Soviet bloc), few people are troubled with land ownership per se, but are more concerned over issues of administrative use-rights and the fair redistribution of money based on land value.

¹⁴ Piore, M. and Sabel, C., The Second Industrial Divide: Possibilities for Prosperity, Basic Books, New York, 1984Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Piore and Sabel, for example, attribute what they call ‘the tradition of familialism’ to the revival of a craft-industrial sector in Italy's textile manufacturing. This is evidenced by small firms owned by family units and kin-based confederations of firms that are organized by industrial clusters. Ibid. However, critics of Piore and Sabel, including Yanagisako, S., Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2002Google Scholar, argue that their conceptualizations of familialism, which focus on trust and solidarity, tend to simplify the feelings of distrust, suspicion, and betrayal that often colour kin-based dynamics in familial capitalism.

¹⁶ Dunaway, W. (ed.), Gendered Commodity Chains: Seeing Women's Work and Households in Global Production, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2014Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Ibid.

¹⁸ Dunn, E., Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2004Google Scholar.

¹⁹ A number of historians and social scientists have examined female migrants’ consumption practices as they attempt to adjust to urban life in China. Their studies analyse how rural-to-urban female migrants negotiate their experiences of labour exploitation, as well as family oppression, through their everyday consumption patterns and forms of socialization. See Solinger, ‘The Floating Population’; Zhang, Strangers in the City; A. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka (eds), On the Move: Women in Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China, Columbia University Press, New York, 2004; Pun, Made in China; Yan, H., New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008Google Scholar.

²⁰ Boym, S., The Future of Nostalgia, Basic Books, New York, 2001, p. 251Google Scholar.

²¹ Ibid., p. 256.

²² Ibid.

²³ Personal communication with Mrs Wong on 18 June 2010.