Money and Social Life Among Rural Migrants in Shanghai

Entrepreneurial Aspiration: Money and Social Life among Rural Migrants in Shanghai De ambitie voor ondernemerschap: Geld en Sociaal Leven onder rurale migranten in Shanghai (met een samenvatting in het Nederlands) Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit Utrecht op gezag van de rector magnificus, prof.dr. G.J. van der Zwaan, ingevolge het besluit van het college voor promoties in het openbaar te verdedigen op maandag 23 oktober 2017 des middags te 12.45 uur door Xiao He geboren op 8 maart 1988 te Susong, China Contents Introduction 1 1. “Seizing the opportunity:” Mind, Fever economy, and Timing 25 2. “It’s a Money Society Now:” Equivalence, Morality, and Money 53 3. “Dead Money” and “Live Money:” Wage labor, Freedom and Entrepreneurship 82 4. Eating bitterness: Memory, Hard work and Sacrifice 114 5. “Everything can be forged:” Money, Speech and Fraud 147 Conclusion 180 Bibliography 191 Abstract 207 Acknowledgement 210 Introduction Rural-Urban Migration and Socio-economic Restructuring Rural-urban migration in China has arisen along with the socio-economic restructuring of the country since de-collectivization and economic liberalisation in the early 1980s. People from villages and small towns have been flowing into cities, despite the constraints of the household registration system (hu kou 户口), a particular institutional legacy of Maoist socialism which controls the distribution of important welfare goods (education and health insurance, for instance) and the movement of people. Scholars have striven to grasp how rural-urban migration reflects the great socio-economic transformations that have occurred in contemporary China, from socialism to late socialism (Zhang 2001), planned economy to market economy (Solinger 1999), and socialism to neoliberalism (Yan 2008). Rural-urban migration raises two important issues about these transformations: the first is how the socialist state negotiates its relationship with the emerging market economy and society, while the second is how to connect these transformations as they have occurred in China with the general pattern of capitalist modernity. Rural migrants in cities are often seen as victims of both state power and capitalist development. Based on an ethnography of rural migrants in Shanghai, my dissertation presents an analysis of their own understandings of the great socio-economic transformations that have taken place in contemporary China. There are two models for describing the socio-economic configuration in China. The first model takes the form of a critique from the angle of political economy. Taking rural-urban migration as an example, the critique proceeds in two different ways. One group of scholars is concerned with the politics of the redistribution of public goods. This line of inquiry often comes to the conclusion that, although migrants cultivate an alternative social space for 1 themselves through emerging markets and informal social networks (Solinger 1999, Zhang 2001), the authoritarian state still holds a great deal of sway through the household registration system. Another group of scholars presents a critique of capitalism by writing about resistance and subaltern identity-formation from below. This body of research addresses how migrants become the victimized underclass of the neoliberal logic of the market and state, as well as how they act in the world through resistance and criticism (Pun 2005; Yan 2008). The second model for describing recent socio-economic developments can be described as the moral economy approach. This too takes two different forms. One group of scholars looks at how specific values orient economic practices. Hill Gates (1996) tries to locate the motor of Chinese capitalism in the culturally specific dialect between household-based petty capitalism and the state-based tributary mode. Scholars have also written extensively about the entanglement of personal network (guan xi 关系) in the post-Mao market economy (Yang 1994; Osburg 2013b). Recently Julie Chu (2010) has introduced cosmology into the study of transnational migration in Fujian. Her point of entry is cosmologies of credit: “by speaking of ‘cosmologies of credit’ rather than ‘cosmologies of capitalism’, I aim to move beyond an examination of value production as accumulation, growth, or surplus to a broader inquiry into credit-able practices that include such activities as the personal assumption of loss and the collective generation of karmic debt and its repayment” (7). A second group of scholars investigates transformations of morality in the context of the expanding market economy by exploring the relationship between economic development and moral anxiety in contemporary China (Liu 2002; Osburg 2013b). The political economy and moral economy approaches both follow the paradigm of social embeddedness: that is to say, they situate the economy in its social context. Here the “social” is defined by either the political or the moral. For many anthropologists, Karl Polanyi’s (2001) description of the great transformation in the Europe of the eighteen and nineteenth centuries 2 establishes a paradigm against which economic transformations in other places and times can be measured. Social embeddedness is our default position, one that counters the utopia of the self-regulating market promulgated by economic liberalism. The disciplinary separation between economics and anthropology or sociology also justifies our concentration on social embeddedness. We now seem to be too complacent about reducing our analysis of the economy to a moral-political critique. However, this has not always been the case. In his writings on the history of European economic thought, Albert Hirshman (1992) notes that the eighteenth century had a quite positive attitude toward economic activities as taming mankind’s destructive passions; scholars only came to a very critical view of the market under the circumstances of the nineteenth-century triumph of capitalism. If we do not assume on the one hand that society is constituted by morality and political power and on the other that the economy is not easily identified as capitalism or neoliberalism, we can ask the classic question of the great transformation anew. Instead of identifying a social context (such as post-socialism, neoliberalism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics) in which to embed the expanding economy, in my dissertation I seek to demonstrate how my informants understand the emerging socio-economical configuration and their position within it. For my informants, the economy has still not been differentiated from society; money always spills over its economic function and spreads into the different spheres of social life. For my informants, money economy is sometimes negatively embedded in their social lives. If there is no money, one cannot have a harmonious family or become a full member of one’s home town and society at large. My informants’ response to this negative embeddedness of money in social life is not collective politics and solidarity, but an embracing of entrepreneurship. They find the possibility of their inclusion in society not through political movement but through entrepreneurial aspiration. 3 China scholars have captured the emerging form of the entrepreneurial, self-motivating, desiring, risk-taking subject in contemporary China (Rofel 2007; Yan 2008; Ong and Zhang 2008), often attributing the entrepreneurial self to the governing effects of neoliberalism and state power. Anthropologists have also noted that entrepreneurship even becomes a policy of development to remove poverty from the poor and marginalized (Dolan 2012). Is the rural migrants’ embracing of entrepreneurial aspiration a pathological condition of our neoliberal era? Is it our task just to provide yet another critique of neoliberalism? My dissertation argues that rural migrants’ entrepreneurial aspirations should not be understood as the power effects of neoliberalism on subject-making; rather they are related to their understanding of the emerging society and their position within it with reference to the money economy. Critiques of neoliberalism often make the individual “subject” the starting point of the social analysis, assume the totalizing power of the market and define society narrowly as an imagery of collective political action, failing to take into consideration our informants’ own understandings of the relationship between the economy and society. Entrepreneurial aspirations between society and the economy The emergence of a market economy and, in particular, capitalism introduces a new problematic into our understanding of society at large. Sociology and anthropology were developed out of attempts to understand the socio-economic configuration of modernity. In his grand work Economy and Society, Max Weber (1978) attempts to develop an understanding of the modern economic order from the meaning of action. He first distinguishes economic action from economically oriented action. Many types of action are economically oriented, such as the direct appropriation of goods by violence. He also makes a great effort to distinguish the economy from technology. He argues that economic action is not defined by the meanings they have for human action. Ultimately he defines economic action as the peaceful 4 exercise of an actor’s control over resources, which has as its main impulse an orientation toward economic ends. Anthropologists have long been interested in understanding the economy and the meaning of economic

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