Specialization of the rural: Reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural young women in post‐Mao China

Abstract

In this article I examine rural Chinese women's migration to the cities before and after the post‐Mao reform. I argue that rural young women's pursuit of a modern identity during the more recent migration has to be understood in the context of a changed rural‐urban relationship resulting from China's postsocialist development in an era of flexible accumulation. I analyze how a contradiction between freedom and violence dialectically constitutes the search for a new, modern subjectivity by rural young women in China today.