The spectacular rise of China's modern cities is possible because of the strength and labor of a vast workforce from the countryside. This project explores how economic, legal, and social reforms in China have redefined urban labor, and how construction workers experience these changes in their daily lives. It engages questions about the relationship between law and society, and aims to discover novel ways that citizens are governed, how legal consciousness is developing, and how citizenship is transforming under a changing economic and political system. The study also complements a large body of research on gender that explores the work of migrant women, employed in large numbers in China's factories. Construction, an almost exclusively male industry, allows for a comparison of masculinity and male migrants' experience of urban work. Further, this study investigates the transnational role of American and European architecture firms in Chinese development, including the workplace relationships and modes of communication about design between foreign architects and local labor.
The researcher works in conjunction with local scholars in Xian to better understand the daily lives of construction workers in China; a population that, to-date, has been largely invisible and under-represented in current research on Chinese development.
Rural migrant construction workers make possible the massive scale of city construction and breakneck pace of China’s urbanization. Many times these workers are "rural" in name only. Living most of their lives in the cities, they inherit the rural classification from their parents’ registration statuses. Officially rural people, they are barred from many urban opportunities, including comprehensive healthcare and education for their children. I undertook my study to understand what it means to be a "rural" person working on an urban construction site in China today. From a legal, social, and political perspective, these workers often have little protection, they work without contracts, and they are often in highly contentious relationships to their employers. I worked and lived alongside construction workers in Xi’an, I interviewed architectsaround the country to understand how they understand the labor that physically creates the buildings they design. I returned with workers to their villages for holidays and for harvest seasons to document their journeys across the boundaries of urban and rural China, and I interviewed young people working in civil society organizations and volunteer outreach programs for migrant workers. This research was in support of a dissertation I am writing to understand how migrant workers’ experiences of gender, class and employment are changing the face of Chinese urban life. While many studies have looked at how planning and physical changes to the cities are affecting social life, my project turns the equation around in order to understand how the social relationships put into play to build the city are changing the life in China’s cities.
