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Under the Chinese dormitory labour regime the lives of women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labour. The dormitory labour system is a gendered form of labour use to fuel global production in new industrialized regions, especially in South China. The system also forms the basis for the development of class consciousness and alternative struggles for labour rights.
China is well known as a 'world factory; attracting transnational corporations from all over the world, especially from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the USA, and Western Europe. Rapid expansion of export-oriented production has led to a sharp rise in jobs in private, foreign-owned, and joint-venture enterprises that dot the coastal cities of China. The formation of a new working class of internal rural migrant labourers, in contrast to the Maoist working-class, has been taking shape in contemporary China. The Fifth National Population Census of China in 2000, estimated that there were over 120 million internal migrant workers in cities, and today the estimates range from 130 to 200 million persons.
Situating women in the world's factory
Since the early 1990s the development of special economic zones and technology development zones across China, similar to the development in most other developing economies, was based on a massive harnessing of young workers, in particular of unmarried women, who are often the cheapest and most compliant labour (Lee 1998). These migrant women workers - dagongmei - constitute a new gendered labour identity, produced at the particular moment when private and transnational capital emerged in post-socialist China. As a newly coined term, dagongmei embraces multi-layered meanings and denotes a new kind of labour relationship fundamentally different from those of Mao's period. Dagong means 'working for the boss' or 'selling labour', which connotes commodification and a capitalist exchange of labour for wages (Pun 2005). It is a new concept that stands in contradiction to Chinese socialist history. Labour, especially alienated (wage) labour, supposedly emancipated with the Chinese revolution, is again sold to the capitalists, and this time under the auspices of the state. In contrast to the term gongren, worker, which carried the highest status in the socialist rhetoric of Mao's day, the new word dagong signifies a lesser identity - that of a hired hand -...