Keep On Moving: Rural University Graduates as Sales Workers in South and Central China

Between 1978 and 2018 the percentage of the Chinese workforce in the service sector rose from 12.2 to 46.3. A large share of this workforce is in sales, selling products ranging from household goods, insurance, advertising space, and education, to various other services. The proliferation of salespeople in China is facilitated by the dramatic increase in the number of university graduates. Personnel in sales jobs, which are particularly popular among graduates from rural backgrounds with degrees from universities with indifferent reputations, experience an extraordinarily high level of mobility. They typically change jobs every few months, either because they are fired or they pursue better opportunities. Based on one year of fieldwork undertaken between 2015 and 2017, this article shows how the rapid expansion of China’s higher education subjects students from rural backgrounds to new inequalities, which, in turn, reconfigure the rural-urban divide into multiple intersecting hierarchies. Building on the concept of complexed development, this article analyzes how salespeople experience contradictory mobilities in a web of intersecting hierarchies. It shows how they achieve upward status mobility by breaking away from agricultural and manual labour and becoming university graduates and white-collar workers; but also, how they sometimes experience downward mobility in terms of income in comparison to previous generations of migrants and their less-educated peers.

从不止步：华南华中地区从事销售的农村大学毕业生

关键词：劳工, 销售员, 青年, 高等教育, 交叉等级制, 复杂流动。

1978年至2018年期间，在中国从事服务业的劳动力占比从12.2%上升到了46.3%。 这些劳动人口中很一大部分集中在销售领域，出售家居用品、保险、广告发布空间和教育等产品以及其它各种服务项目。 中国销售从业人员的繁荣是高校毕业生人数急遽增长促成的。对于来自农村、毕业于声誉平平的高校的大学生来说，销售工作特别有吸引力， 而销售人员的流动水平则高的异乎寻常。 他们通常每过几个月就会更换工作，不是被解聘就是因为要追求更好的机会。本论文根据2015-2017期间进行的为期一年的田野调查，表明中国高等教育的高速扩张是如何使农村背景的学生遭受新的不平等对待，并将城乡对立重建为交叉的多重等级制。 本论文以复杂发展这一概念为基础，分析了销售人员是如何在一个交叉的等级制网络里进行矛盾地流动的。论文表明了他们如何通过摆脱农业和体力劳动并成为大学毕业生和白领工人而实现了向上的身份流动，但与以往代际的移民以及教育程度比他们低的同辈人的收入相比，他们又常常经历向下的流动。

Translated from English by Li Guo