The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back: <i>Suzhi</i> (Human Quality), Social Mobility, and E-Commerce Economy in China

Qian, Linliang

doi:10.1080/10670564.2018.1488104

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…According to my research, a pioneering village online seller, Chien (male, born in 1985), learned about the concept of selling goods on the Taobao platform while he stayed at his relative's house in Xiamen, which has highly developed since the establishment of a special economic zone (Chang, 2000; Judd, 2014). Similar to the developments of other Taobao villages (Li, 2014; Qian, 2018), Chien, the pioneered online seller's act of teaching other villagers to engage in online businesses has played a vital role in facilitating the rise of e‐commerce industry in his natal village. After returning to Xinyi in 2009, Chien started teaching his brother and friends to merchandise products via the online marketplace.…”

Section: Return Migration and Online Entrepreneurship In The Taobao Vmentioning

confidence: 91%

Return migration, online entrepreneurship and gender performance in the Chinese ‘Taobao families’

Liu

2020

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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This paper centres on analysing how return migrants' participation in online businesses impacts marital power dynamics in rural families alongside the rise of e‐commerce in rural China. During 2016 and 2017, I conducted an ethnographic study in a Chinese ‘Taobao village’ which I have termed ‘Xinyi’ whereby the majority of villagers make their livelihoods by selling furniture via the online marketplace Taobao. The boom of e‐commerce has attracted many migrants to return to the village and start their online businesses. Inquiring into whether and how rural women's increased access to online entrepreneurship challenges the gender norm that upholds male dominance in marriage, I delineate the power relations in ‘Taobao families’ within which rural women jointly operate online shops with their husbands. Drawing from my ethnographic data, I propose a conceptual framework incorporating the lenses of returnee entrepreneurship, flexible inner‐outer boundary and performance of gender to examine discrepancies between the gender norm that upholds gender hierarchy, and the practice regarding the husbands and wives' equal engagements in online merchandising. This framework is developed to shed a more positive light on the nuances of women's exercise of agency that entails nominal conformity to the gender norm.

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Section: Return Migration and Online Entrepreneurship In The Taobao Vmentioning

confidence: 91%

Return migration, online entrepreneurship and gender performance in the Chinese ‘Taobao families’

Liu

2020

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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“…Those identified as having low suzhi are regarded as inferior and marginalised in the social hierarchy. Rural migrant populations in Chinese cities are usually stigmatised as "low suzhi," as their non-urban lifestyles and symbols are seen as inferior (e.g., Qian 2018;Jacka 2009). Migrant groups' continual display of traits in association with their rural hukou would reinforce their experience of social discrimination, limiting their opportunities to acquire life chances in cities in the long-run.…”

Section: Cultural and Linguistic Disadvantages Faced By Rural Hukou H...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Hukou System Influencing the Structural, Institutional Inequalities in China: The Multifaceted Disadvantages Rural Hukou Holders Face

Hung

2022

Social Sciences

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In this paper, the author investigates rural Chinese citizens’ encounters of structural and institutional inequalities and social (im)mobility. The author addresses social (im)mobility from a holistic perspective (i.e., in institutional, occupational, social, educational, cultural and political dimensions). In this regard, the author explores if a range of parental disadvantages serve as significant hindrances to the acquisition of social mobilising opportunities among the next generations in rural Chinese contexts. Here a holistic presentation helps understand the nuanced relationship between institutional barriers (i.e., rural hukou status) and alternative obstacles to social mobility; and explore, in part, how parental inheritance of rural hukou status would bar individuals’ from socially mobilising and result in some forms of unsustainability. Previous research on China restrictively measures social (im)mobility from limited perspectives, failing to fully and accurately reflect the extent of social (im)mobility Chinese populations face. This paper is a comprehensive literature review where relevant Chinese literature, exclusively found in the e-library system of the University of Cambridge, is included and thoroughly discussed. Articles that include the keywords of “hukou”, “China”, “social mobility” and (a) “economic”, (b) “social”, (c) “cultural”, (d) “linguistic” or (e) “political” are extensively studied, in a hope to understand the existing scholarship on multifaceted social (im)mobility in Chinese contexts. The author argues that, despite the 2014 hukou reform, further loosening the requirements for rural-to-urban hukou conversion should be prioritised by the Central Government of China in order to ensure the rural-urban divide and structural and institutional inequalities rural hukou holders face can curtain.

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“…Table 1 identifies three keywords used in CYD articles about left-behind children, including 'suzhi' (or quality), 'weilai' (future), and 'guojia' (the nation/country/state). Previous research suggests that the suzhi discourse constitutes a powerful rhetoric in post-reform China by urbanities to justify their exploitation of migrants while maintaining class distinctions, and by migrants to push back against such a stigmatization (Qian, 2018;Yan, 2003), and also to link family investment in children's education with education reform and national development/future (Anagnost, 1997(Anagnost, , 2004Woronov, 2008). In the case of left-behind children, the suzhi discourse combines the two abovementioned logics to socially construct an image of lower-class children whose underdevelopment (or lower suzhi) is regarded as a negative force dragging down the total suzhi of China's children.…”

Section: Left-behind Children As a National Crisismentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Save the children!’: Governing left-behind children through family in China’s Great Migration

2021

Current Sociology

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Existing scholarship on the lives and wellbeing of China’s left-behind children often frames the issues as a function of their parents’ migration, which leaves a significant gap in discussing the role of the state in shaping the institutional framework that these families operate within, cope or struggle with. Through critically interrogating public discourses based on articles from a mainstream newspaper and policy documents since the early 2000s, this article situates a sociological inquiry into the discursive and institutional framework addressing ‘the left-behind children problem’ in China within the problematic of the relationship between children, family, and the state. The analysis reveals seemingly ‘disingenuous’ articulations of left-behind children’s value in the mainstream media and official policies. On the one hand, there seems to be a prevailing concern over the welfare of left-behind children which has grave implications for the country’s future development. On the other hand, the dominant discourse attributes left-behind children’s ‘miserable’ plight to their ‘pathological’ family life, which translates into policy efforts to discipline rural migrant families according to a family ideology rooted in urban middle-class experiences. I argue that such inconsistencies should be contextualized in the state’s neoliberal-authoritarian governance of the migrant population in the post-reform era, which perpetuates a stereotype of ‘the pathological family’ to account for left-behind children’s disadvantages while evading, hence up until recent years avoiding to redress, the political-economic factors underlying their plight. I conclude the article by ruminating on the theoretical, social and policy implications of this study.

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The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back: Suzhi (Human Quality), Social Mobility, and E-Commerce Economy in China

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Return migration, online entrepreneurship and gender performance in the Chinese ‘Taobao families’

Return migration, online entrepreneurship and gender performance in the Chinese ‘Taobao families’

Hukou System Influencing the Structural, Institutional Inequalities in China: The Multifaceted Disadvantages Rural Hukou Holders Face

‘Save the children!’: Governing left-behind children through family in China’s Great Migration

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