New York: New York University Press, 2013. xiii, 264 pp. (Figures, B&W photos.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8147-9526-2.
How have China’s national efforts for development affected the daily behaviour of its people? How are the conditions behind migrant labour different for women than for men in China? Are there avenues of social mobility available to these migrant workers? Cara Wallis answers these questions in her book, Technomobility in China, using one common item, mobile phones, to provide insight into the lives, struggles and accomplishments of young female migrant workers. Her study was conducted between 2007 and 2011 and included a number of ethnographic techniques such as interviews, online communication, comparing informants’ phone address books to their social media contact lists, as well as having a select few subjects keep journal accounts of their mobile phone use. The most poignant contribution of Wallis’ arguments is the agency she shows of individuals whose social status is otherwise reified as passive in Chinese society. The actions of these young migrant workers are conditioned by the ideological and economic constraints surrounding them, but as Wallis hints, the self-actualization these women engage in may be part of wider “transformations in the attitudes and values of China’s young people … contributing to … changes in how migrants might fare” in the future (115).
With a thorough explanation of particular social and historical contexts in contemporary China, Wallis isolates the “dagongmei” (working little sisters) as the subject of her study. Dagongmei are born in rural areas and break the confines of family security and government hukou (household registration) regulations to make a life in the city. Unlike their male counterparts and the first wave of migrants in the 1990s, these women often leave home for personal reasons, such as delaying marriage, rather than to provide financial support for their families, and often start their rural to urban migration as young as sixteen years old. Due to perceptions surrounding their education and abilities, these female migrants are limited to “three Ds” jobs; those which are dirty, demeaning and dangerous. Their birthplace, gender, age and economic status all serve to make these women a salient group which is often considered passive and compliant. Wallis drives this point home with examples of paternalism such as: a customer scolding an employee, a manager calling an employee to make an hour return trip to find misplaced inventory and other similar accounts.
Despite the sociopolitical barriers and unappealing “three D” labour, the numbers of migrants have continued to climb alongside an increase in the diffusion of mobile phones in China. With the stories of her informants, Wallis shows how mobile phones have been used to maintain and build relationships as well as to fulfill self-aspirational goals. Mobile phones make communication with family and other relations more convenient by providing a stable means to access these individuals who frequently relocate for employment. The camera function of the phones, while also noted as a means of keeping home close, was mainly highlighted in chapter 4, as a way for these women to demonstrate their aspirations. This was depicted by accounts of women associating with luxury goods by photographing magazine pictures, of purses and travel destinations, with such perfection that their photos could not be detected as copied images.
While Wallis challenges the idea that migrants’ desire for mobile phones, which was recorded in chapter 2 as many migrants’ first big urban purchase, represents false consciousness, she analyzes the desire as part of migrants’ self-regulation, a practice premised on the principle of “su zhi” (quality). “Su zhi” describes one’s mannerisms and is practically used to rate how “civilized,” “modern” or “cosmopolitan” one appears to be. Improving su zhi, one of the primary “mobilities” phones help migrant women act upon, is shown to operate in much the same manner as Foucault’s theories of governmentality and bio-power. Wallis argues this by demonstrating how the narratives which the Chinese Communist Party uses to describe their efforts to develop and modernize the nation operate at the level of individual self-regulation and personal fulfillment. This ranges from the very motivation to migrate to only taking fashionable pictures of one’s self, thereby digitally hiding one’s rural and marginalized status.
The mobility offered by phones, in terms of easing the migratory experience and providing an avenue for self-articulation, is shown at every turn to be limiting and socially confined. Wallis describes this concept as “immobile mobility.” She shows that although these migrant workers might use their phones to expand their social network, there was no serious indication that these networks were breaking social boundaries. Migrant workers primarily know other migrant workers. Wallis explains that while women use phones to find additional jobs there is little to capitalize on: with no examples of a job offer being leveraged, or any hint of better conditions elsewhere. Mobile phones are shown to be exploited by employers to exert a new means of surveillance and power over vulnerable workers.
In Technomobility in China, Wallis brings the story of young female migrant labourers to public attention. Their aspirations and the different strategies they use to “get by” in the city cuts through the stereotype that they are passive vessels waiting for instruction. The thick descriptions accompanying Wallis’ arguments of the ideological, social and economic barriers that tend to limit the success of the migrant workers’ efforts drive this point home: these barriers are neither necessary nor deterministic. Perhaps, just as Wallis gave back to the community while conducting her ethnography, her book will contribute to the improvement of the social and political conditions migrant labourers face.
Byron Rigel Hauck
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, Canada
pp. 588-590