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China's economic reforms since the late 1970s have been a dramatic negation of the country's former socialist economic system.1 The mid-1990s witnessed the large-scale privatization of state-owned enterprises, which resulted in the layoffs of 26.8 million state workers.2 Meanwhile, sweatshops mushroomed in urban coastal regions, attracting millions of rural migrant workers from the near-bankrupt countryside.3
As China's urban economy continued to boom, its migrant population experienced unprecedented expansion, growing from 79 million in 20004 to 281.71 million in 2016,5 becoming the dominant portion of China's working-class population. Among the 169 million “going-out” rural migrants (waichu nongmingong 外出农民工) in 2016, over 80 per cent worked in urban areas predominantly engaged in manual labour, with 50.2 per cent being employed in manufacturing and construction and 46.7 per cent in the service industries.6 To distinguish them from workers under the old socialist system, some scholars call these migrant workers “China's new workers.”7
They are “new” workers because unlike the “old” socialist workers, who were entitled to a full range of benefits in healthcare, housing, education, job security and political power, rural migrant workers enjoy little labour protection and endure long working hours, subsistence-level wages and harsh working conditions.8 These “new workers” have made significant contributions to China's reform and growing competitiveness in the global market but are locked near the bottom of the production chain.9 The term “China's new workers” belies the bitter struggles these rural migrant workers face.
Despite their numbers, rural migrant workers rarely take collective actions to protest against the injustices they experience. Instead, their forms of resistance are usually individualistic, such as changing jobs. Yet, as Jenny Chan and Ngai Pun conclude in their study of migrant industrial workers in south China, collective action is the central element for class formation.10 Although an increasing number of rural migrants choose legal approaches and labour movements to protect their rights and interests, passive reactions in response to social inequalities are still prevalent among migrant workers,11 demonstrating a lack of consciousness of their collective class fate.
This study aims to address the dearth of literature on the formation of migrant workers’ class consciousness. It does so not by focusing directly on migrant workers but rather...