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The China Watch New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China By Yan Hairong DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2008
Reviewed by Katie Quan
Yan Hairong's New Masters, New Servants is an important contribution to academic literature on labor in China. As its provocative title suggests, the book describes a new kind of labor relations - between domestic workers and their household employers - in contemporary China. Though domestic work was practically eliminated after the 1949 revolution as a bitter symbol of feudal exploitation, it re-emerged after 1978 as the country turned toward a market economy, primarily as a support for professional women who work outside the home. Professor Yan brings together history, politics, economics, gender, and China studies - as well as cultural/anthropology studies - into a fascinating book, using domestic workers as a "trope" for critiquing "postsocialist" labor policies in today's China.
One of the book's greatest strengths is its rich collection of first-hand interviews with several dozen domestic workers, primarily women in northern China who migrated from rural areas to urban areas in order to find work. From these conversations with individual women, we get a picture of their long hours of cleaning, cooking, and caregiving, and feel the cruel indignity they face when employers treat them with the unmitigated arrogance of a master-servant relationship. These stories are placed in a context of the boredom these women felt in their rural villages ("If I had to live the life that my mother has lived, I would choose suicide," p. 25), their hopes and expectations for life in the city, and...