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Social Media in Industrial China

UCL Press

Introduction

In the decades since the de facto Chinese leader Deng Xiao Ping ended the cultural revolution and opened up the economy towards more capitalist forces, China has witnessed the largest ever human migration. Such an unprecedented flow of labour from China's rural interior to more coastal factories and cities has resulted in vast economic growth, urbanisation and the proliferation of labour-intensive industries. In 2015 the number of Chinese peasants who had left their hometowns to work in these factories had risen to 277.47 million. If Chinese rural migrants were the population of a country, it would be the fourth largest in the world.

In 2013, following an assumption that those Chinese migrant workers would be highly dependent on the boom in Chinese social media to remain in contact with the families they had left behind, I went to study social media usage in a small factory town in southeast China, a site for tens of thousands of migrant workers. However, during the subsequent 15 months of field work, mostly spent living inside one of these factories, I began to understand that the reality is very different from anything I had imagined.

First, I was surprised about the motivations for migration among the new generations, which I had assumed would be essentially economic. Second, I was largely wrong about what kind of social media use I would find among what is known in China as a 'floating population': it was not mainly about retaining links to users' places of origin. Most of all I had not anticipated my primary finding, which was that this would be a study of two migrations conducted in parallel: one from rural to urban, and another, undertaken simultaneously, from offline to online. We can call these parallel because both, in their own ways, were journeys to the same destination of an imagined modern China. Finally this book will make a surprising claim as to which of these migrations seems to have been more successful in reaching this goal.

Chinese migrant workers are evidently Chinese. However, many key stereotypes of Chinese people do not apply to this particular population. For example, many migrant families have managed to dodge China's one-child policy and usually have at least two children. Education, generally believed to be highly valued in Chinese society, is actually valued in a far more utilitarian way. Many, if not most, rural migrant parents as well as rural migrant youth in my field site did not see success in school as a priority. In such a situation, as Chapter 3 argues, social media plays a key role in filling gaps left by lack of education. For young migrant workers who dropped out of school early and became factory workers before adulthood, social media is a form of 'post-school' education and schooling that implies their 'coming of age'.

It is also necessary to update the most widely held perception, in and out of China, of these Chinese migrant workers in terms of their social development. Recent migrants are very different from the initial wave upon which most academic accounts are still based, and which tend to focus on economic concerns. For example, poverty is no longer the only reason behind migration. The initial motivation of the rural-to-urban migration was economic necessity. Low productivity in the countryside could not support the livelihoods of the Chinese peasants who constituted the majority of the country's population; working in factories and cities seemed to be the only viable solution. Nowadays, however, the economic advantages of migration have become less clear. The combination of higher living expenses and increased consumption (influenced by the general lifestyle of urban areas) means that marginal improvements in migrants' incomes hardly warrant the costs of, for example, no longer being able to care for their parents. For the new generation of rural migrants, the whole trajectory of rural-to-urban migration has shifted from the 'push' factor of economic necessity towards the 'pull' factor of aspirations towards modernity. For young migrant workers, migration means 'to see the outside world' and to gain autonomy from one's family. In such a context, social media is less of a bridge that connects individuals with what they have left behind in villages and more of a projector illuminating an ideal modern life to which they aspire.

Tens of thousands of migrant workers live in the small town where I conducted my field work, but almost none of them see the place where they live as 'home'. The living quarters in this factory town, as we will see later in this chapter, mainly serve to provide 'infrastructure for labourers rather than offering places in which human beings can maintain social relationships and feel security and emotional belonging'. So where do people actually live? What does it mean when a young factory girl says 'life outside the mobile phone is unbearable'? By mobile phone she meant her social media profile, to which she keeps constantly logged in and in which she portrays herself as a modern lady. What her statement suggests is precisely that social media has become an alternative, and indeed a better, home to those migrant workers: given the offline conditions of their floating lives, many find social media to be the place where a new personal identity, with a 'higher human quality' (you suzhi), can be created. This point is central to the ethnography that informs this volume. True, I spent most of this period of field work living in a factory, whereas most people just work there. In some ways I too lived with these factory workers, in as much as I shared the active social and imaginative lives they led online, rather than merely spent time in the same physical space.

In previous studies of Chinese rural migrants the issue of gender is one of the core topics. Almost all the studies focus on female Chinese rural migrants, suggesting that women workers are the most subordinated group within Chinese migrant populations. Some of these claims and findings are still relevant today, but other things have changed. For this particular migrant group gender inequality may in some respects have reversed, leading to male rural migrants becoming the relatively disadvantaged group. This does not apply only to the job market or marriage market, but also to the social pressure and discrimination they suffer, compared to that of female migrants. Through male migrants' social media usage such gender anxiety comes to be represented and experienced. It is worth noting, however, that this gender imbalance often reverts after marriage.

During the time of writing this book, the Economist published an article about the children of Chinese migrant families left behind by their parents. This article rightly pointed out that such children were a damaged generation, suffering significantly higher states of anxiety and depression than their peers – a situation that may be connected to a lack of support following early separation from their parents. It is said that in 2010 there were 61 million children below the age of 17 left behind in rural areas; in several provinces more than half of all rural children had been left behind. Such children have truly become a severe social problem in modern China. However, even this latest article still fails to cover some of the most recent developments and consequences of such problems. In the town where I conducted my research most young migrant workers had once been 'left-behind' children; they had dropped out of school at ages ranging from 14 to 17, and then joined their parents to work in factories. Even as academics and journalists continue to discuss the population of 'left-behind' children, many of their subjects have already made themselves part of a new generation of migrant workers.

Most research and reports about Chinese rural migrants focuses on the 'first tier' cities, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. However, the 2013 national survey on 'floating populations' shows that 47 per cent of Chinese rural migrants work and live in small and medium-sized towns. Here migrant parents are significantly more likely to live with their children (more than 60 per cent of the new generation of rural migrants live with core family members in migration destinations). In the factory town where I worked more than 80 per cent of newborn babies came from migrant families, while migrant children also represent the majority at the local primary school. This new generation faces difficulties, however, as it is not yet integrated into the local society. Today's young migrants confront the same problem as their parents did, of not being able to access urban social welfare. They may feel even more frustrated by social discrimination, as they are usually keener to integrate into modern city life. This new generation of migrant workers has been experiencing insecurity and impermanence since childhood. As a result them seem to have learned to present themselves as unflappable or even unconcerned about their own lives. Such a highly performative attitude almost detaches them from either their own or other people's judgements. Once again it turned out that a study of social media was also a really effective strategy for understanding these young people; only through this inner but online world did it seem possible to find out who they really are and what they really want from life.

Social media use among Chinese migrant workers also challenges some basic ideas that have formed the premise of several heated debates about social media worldwide. For instance, there is a constant worry that the mediation of social media has rendered our social relationships in some way less authentic. Here, however, people find social media is the only place to establish a 'purer' (geng chun) relationship, free from all the practical concerns of offline life. Furthermore, when we are questioning the impact of social media on friendship we may not be aware that merely using the concept of 'friendship' is problematic. This is particularly so when applied to people from traditional communities in which kinship and regional relationships (such as fellow villagers) are dominant; the Western notion of a separate sphere of friendship may simply not exist.

As Chapter 4 illustrates, it is on social media that Chinese migrant workers have created and experienced a real sense of 'friendship' for the first time. A similar situation occurs when we look into the issue of privacy. In the West, it has become commonplace to accuse social media of being a threat to privacy, but what if the very idea and practice of privacy has hardly existed in a society? Migrant workers have their origins in village families with no provision for individualised space, a situation compounded in adulthood by current conditions of shared dormitories. Many are also linked to a traditional idea that 'anything that is hidden from others must be something shameful or bad' – in effect saying that a mere preference for privacy is a bad thing. Given such factors, one has to consider the use of social media from a totally different perspective. In the real life of migrant workers, social media has remarkably increased the experience of privacy and legitimised the right to it.

When it comes to the impact of social media on politics, the ideals of the 'cyber-utopian', which regards the internet as a politically progressive force and has become a very popular argument worldwide, may also be problematic. In the specific case of China and the Chinese internet, it is also widely believed that the development of the internet and social media might actively empower a future civil society. However, the ethnography suggests an entirely different picture, based on the evidence for the daily use of social media and its political content at a grass roots level. As will be shown in Chapter 5, the evidence here is that social media has far less impact on political participation than expected and rather than empowering or encouraging political participation, its use tends to diminish any motivation for turning discontented thoughts into active political action. Rather, in many ways social media helps to monitor and channel public opinion (yulun daoxiang) and further legitimise the Chinese party-state.

Here, then, is a litany of ways in which the results of this research differ from the expectations of both myself and others. Given the degree of these discrepancies, and the many quite surprising claims that follow, much of this book focuses on the evidence that arose from the ethnography and provides the foundation for these claims. It is also hoped that the detailed ethnographic descriptions will also provide a sense of empathy and immersion in the lives of these people. We perceive them in the irresistible tides of these social transformations, and can see what this 'floating population' felt, believed or mistrusted; what their fantasies, hopes and fears might be; how they understood situations and reacted offline and online. This book is composed from hundreds of voices and images and fragments of individuals' daily lives, but not one of them is trivial. In addition a bigger, but also very different and distinct picture of modern China appears in view when we bring these individuals together analytically.

A brief review of the book

This book is about a new population and a new media. It depicts a situation in which a very particular group of people has emerged as an adult working population alongside the rise of social media in China. The Chinese rural migrant population that did not exist three decades ago is taking on its new form, very much facilitated by the capability they find in social media. At the same time social media, a new media that did not exist two decades ago, has rapidly come into daily use for a large proportion of the population. We can only make sense of both modern China and social media if we appreciate the dynamic, dialectical context within which both are being formed.

In Chapter 1, besides an introduction to the context of this study, we take a tour around the factory town and meet the people who inhabit it. Chapter 2 gives a detailed description of the Chinese social media landscape and budget smartphone market, while Chapter 3 focuses on what people post on their personal social media profiles – thus opening a window on to individuals' aspirations and anxieties, expectations and social lives. Drawing on Chapters 2 and 3, Chapter 4 maps out social life on social media, exploring in detail the ways in which people navigate various relationships. Why, for example, are classmates, neighbours and colleagues valued less than strangers online? Why and how does the mediation of social media constitute a 'purer' interpersonal relationship? Answers to those questions can be found in Chapter 4. Meanwhile Chapter 5 focuses upon the specific impact of social media on politics and gender, both closely examined through the online and offline behaviour of different groups of local people.

Finally Chapter 6 further explores how we can make sense of the dialectical relationship between 'online' and 'offline' – from postings of deity images to bring good fortune to the QQ homeland albums which in a way 'transport' people's home villages to online; from 'recording the youth' in salon photography to practising a modern life online. An understanding of people's struggles and their negotiation between online and offline leads to one of the main arguments of this book: that dual migrations are taking place simultaneously in the daily lives of Chinese rural migrants – one from rural to urban, the other from offline to online. Could it be the latter which in practice proves more efficient and effective than physical migration, and which empowers people to achieve their aspiration of modernity?

Chinese family and hukou

Before presenting the evidence and arguments, there are two key historical questions that provide the foundations for the situation encountered here. Where do these migrant workers come from? And why have they had to take up a 'floating' life?

The first question is an inquiry into a traditional agricultural society in which not only these migrants but also the vast majority of Chinese people used to live – merely half a century ago. Here we can find answers in the anthropology of a more traditional China. The scholarship is simply too rich to review here, but a few key concepts will be briefly mentioned as a starting point. In Chinese the word 'family' (jia) actually refers not only to kinship, but also to a group of people, an estate of property or an economy (a set of economic activities). The Chinese institution of family is regarded as the nucleus of society. No one who has delved into the intricacies of Chinese social relations would deny the leading role kinship plays in Chinese political and economic affairs; this further sets the foundation for Chinese cosmology, where ancestors were worshipped as deities by descendants. Patrilineal descent, or agnate kinship, in which only men can inherit family property and a child's lineage is only calculated from the father's side, constitutes the social order of both the domestic and public domains.

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Excerpted from Social Media in Industrial China by Xinyuan Wang. Copyright © 2016 Xinyuan Wang. Excerpted by permission of UCL Press.
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