New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development and Women Workers in China By Hairong Yan

Anthropologist Hairong Yan’s New Masters, New Servants is an exceptional critique of neoliberal governance in post-socialist China. Employing an interdisciplinary critical Marxist approach and drawing upon miscellaneous sources such as ethnographic interviews, literary texts, films, printed media reports as well as letters, Yan documents the migratory trajectory of the Chinese domestic helpers (baomu in Chinese) between their rural villages and the megacities. Baomu as a category, as the book title suggests, is treated as an allegory of the reversal of the master-slave relation in post-Mao China, which foreshadows a key argument of the book: the reemergence of the specter of class.

The impetus of the migration of women domestic helpers is the emaciation of rural China. In Chapter 1, Yan gives a powerful account of how China’s urban-centric developmentalism profoundly reconfigured the rural-urban relation in the sense that the city is seen as the abode of modernity while the countryside is the city’s backward other and also modernity’s abject other. However, Yan insightfully points out that what underlines this reconfiguration is a negation of Maoist modernity in favor of post-Mao modernity coded in its developmentalism obsession that “has authored its own vision and practices of modernity as the emancipatory and normalizing process that will earn China a rightful position on the playing field of global capitalism” (82). This echoes Lisa Rofel’s observation that the re-worlding project of China in the post-socialist period rests on what she calls “structured forgettings” about China’s socialist past (Rofel 1999,2007).

Chapter 2 is divided into two parts. First, Yan provides a close reading of two short stories published shortly after China's reform and opening that grapple with the triumvirate of gender/class/domestic responsibilities and the fear of failing to fulfil the expectations of one's subject position. Part two of the chapter turns an ethnographic eye onto the web of affect, kinship, economics and expectations at work in the selection and recruitment of domestic workers. As ‘affective commodities’ (103), domestic workers are expected to undergo a totalizing subjective transformation (93) as they are ‘subject to’ the authority of their employers (and recruiters) and all the while ‘subject of’ the self‐knowledge and identity work demanded of individuals in a neoliberal regime (101-2).

Chapter 3 and 4 make pathbreaking contribution to the emerging scholarship on neoliberal governance in contemporary China with emphases on the discourse of suzhi, development and class analysis. Central to Yan’s critique of neoliberal governance in chapter 3 is the colloquial notion of suzhi, or “human quality” which has been a catchword in China since the adoption of the one-child policy in 1980s. Suzhi animates a whole set of hierarchical and binary cultural imagination between east and west, the rural and the urban, barbarity and civility, the backward and the modern, etc. Yan notes that despite its indeterminate and catch-all nature of suzhi, the notion thrives as a social fact that provokes quantitative and qualitative measurement (170). Yan takes a critical Marxist approach in understanding suzhi which behaves much like value in Marx’s analysis of commodities. Empty in itself, suzhi “is a new form of value that represents human value to the teleology of development and articulates a structural adjustment in the sphere of human subjectivity” (163). In other words, suzhi is the reification of human subjectivity, which is captured in what Yan coins “neohumanism”(195). Suzhi also normally works in tandem with the notion of development insomuch as suzhi has to be coded as a lack and thus something to be permanently desired and in need of development as its salvation. As Yan’s Marxist analysis perceptively demonstrates, the accumulation of suzhi among the women migrant workers through internalized self-development and the coding of labor mobility as suzhi mobility actually eclipsed and facilitated the extraction of surplus value (179).

But how to achieve and validate one’s possession of suzhi? In chapter 4, Yan reveals that the acquiring of high suzhi is equated with cosmopolitan consumption experience. Unlike in socialist China, labor has lost to consumption as a desirable vehicle in one’s identity formation. However, as Yan argues against scholars like Deborah Davis, consumption is far from an autonomous and liberating arena external to the sway of the state, on the contrary, it “constructs a new hegemonic and oppressive ‘system of recognition’, hierarchy and exclusion” (222) insomuch as women migrant workers’ identity as a capable consumer is structurally constrained by their wage and their association with labor (248). By doing so, Yan also ostensibly takes issue with those following James Scott’s notion of “everyday resistance” as a weapon for the weak who are posited as autonomous and self-determined individual subjects behind the acts of resistance (295). Instead, Yan acknowledges some of her informants’ disavowal of everyday resistance and she contends that the seemingly totalizing and hegemonic discursive power also creates its limits when women migrant workers’ self no longer cohere with the ideal ego and their self-development path is derailed. In other words, the alternative arena of possible subversion of the subaltern lies exactly in their inconsistence with the hegemonic discourse or their failure in fully aligning with it. That the “reality of material and discursive subjection and immobility cannot be displaced or liberated by the mobility of signs” (294) throws in sharp relief the specter of class which has been dismissed by the neoliberal logic. Therefore, the resumption and recalibration of class analysis might be the starting point for imagining a radical leftist critique, though Yan doesn’t seem to further explicate to what extent a refashioning of a class-based critique is possible beyond a mere recognition of the reemergence of the de facto class in post-socialist China.

New Masters, New Servants is laudable in adopting a critical Marxist analysis, which is far from the norm in the post-structuralism-prevalent mainstream in anthropology on contemporary China. My only reservation about the book is that it seems tinged with a teleological thinking, which is disturbingly worrisome. Yan’s positionality as a recognizable “New Left”(新左派) intellectual seems to have made her data and analysis too coherent and smooth to accommodate what might escape her textual coherence. In fact, one gets the impression that her unflagging disavowal of and engrained hostility against the whopping neoliberalism make her ethnographic data allegedly predated or even hijacked by her arguments. In other words, the research subject or topic itself doesn’t necessarily exist in its own right, instead, it serves or aims to provide a non-western case in point for her telos of neoliberalism critique in general. With a predetermined critique against neoliberalism in mind, one is at liberty to substitute anything in contemporary Chinese society for what she discusses in this book and subsequently anything can be identified as an illustration of neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics and is thus at the back and call of the analytic eye. In that sense, neoliberalism, much like the discourse of suzhi, becomes a one-size-fits-all explanatory trope to size up post-socialist China. A similar sleight of hand can also be found in the already booming strand of Chinese study scholarship on governmentality.

Andrew Kipnis identifies that a tendency towards the overuse and reification of the term of neoliberalism as an overarching trope has emerged (Kipnis 2007:383). Instead of lumping everything together under the umbrella term of neoliberalism, Kipnis asks us to differentiate various forms of liberal and neoliberal thinking with a nod towards the un-liberal and the anti-liberal elements, without which “analyses of neoliberal discourse can be read as if they were asserting a social whole even when this is not the author’s intent” (ibid, 396).

My criticism aside, Hairong Yan’s monograph, with its theoretical perceptiveness and analytical adeptness, makes substantial and valuable contribution to the key debates and grand themes in post-socialist China. Written more than a decade ago, the overall arguments and analysis in the book still resonate today and have the lasting capacity to grip those who work on contemporary China and beyond.

References

Kipnis, Andrew.2007. Neoliberalism reified: suzhi discourse and tropes of neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 13, 383-400.

Rofel, Lisa. 2007. Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

1999. Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. Oakland: University of California Press.

Yan, Hairong. 2008. New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development and Women Workers in China. Durham: Duke University Press.