Guerrilla Workfare: Migrant Renovators, State Power, and Informal Work in Urban China

Lei Guang
Additional contact information
Lei Guang: San Diego State University, lguang@mail.sdsu.edu

Politics & Society, 2005, vol. 33, issue 3, 481-506

Abstract: The article explores Chinese rural migrants’ perspective on work and their relations with each other and with the Chinese state by drawing upon the ethnographical study of a group of rural home renovators in Beijing in the 1990s. The rural renovators were dubbed “guerrilla†workers because of their physical mobility, irregular employment, and unregistered status. After considering the novelty of guerrilla workfare in China, the article demonstrates the bifurcation of migrants’ social networks along the lines of work and everyday association, locates the politics of worker-state interaction at the place of their everyday living, and explores their understanding of work that is remarkably devoid of nostalgia for state socialism.

Keywords: Chinese labor; migrant; informal sector; construction workers; home renovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032329205278464 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:polsoc:v:33:y:2005:i:3:p:481-506

DOI: 10.1177/0032329205278464

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Politics & Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().