https://www.sup.org/books/asian-studies/contesting-inequalities

Yajie Chen: Even though I am familiar with the context and with some of the activist groups, you gave such vivid accounts of their stories and histories. You mentioned you started fieldwork in March 2016. What is significant about this time, and what was the process like for you to start doing fieldwork?

Siyuan Yin: I knew the Migrant Women’s Club before I started my dissertation because I was studying in Beijing back in college and traced some of their work through a friend’s network. The Migrant Women’s Club was a very well-established NGO founded in the mid-90s, and it is the first NGO in midland China working on migrant women’s issues, founded by a well-established staff member, Xie Lihua, who had connection with the government and concerns for women’s rights, rural women’s rights in particular. In the early years of my Ph.D., I contacted the NGO staff members and had some interviews with them on another project. That is how I started these connections with them.

I also searched online and found the NGO, Migrant Workers’ Home, because they were very visible back then with all their cultural activities, music, and all kind of events. When I entered a field back in March 2016, I went to the NGOs physically to talk to people there. There are two other organizations that I included in my book: Jiuye, the feminist music band, and Jianjiao Buluo, the online community and feminist media, which was introduced by a migrant worker who was writing for the alternative media. That is how I ended up working with these four cases.

I think I was lucky that I entered the field before COVID. Although after 2012, the political environment has been increasingly depressive, and also suppressive, there was still space and opportunities. Because large-scale protests are not really possible in China, my initial interest in writing this book springs from the fact that workers protest in China face rather brutal suppression and often receive very little mainstream attention and coverage. So I was very interested to know how, on a daily basis, there could be a more sustainable, feasible mode of everyday labor activism. That really drew me to pay attention to these communicative, mediated practices, for instance, performance, music, digital media production, community media, or writing groups. Back then, I was very optimistic before COVID, I would say. In the post-COVID period, after I have seen the collapse of all these softer ways of activism, I think the whole ecology of activism in China is really going bad. I do not see a sign in the near future to revive this ecology. But there is something else, right? There is something else that has burgeoned in, or emerged in contemporary China, as you probably have followed on all kinds of social media on this gender antagonist discussions. I think people are always finding ways to do, if not large-scale resistance, at least some kind of rebellious actions.

Yajie Chen: I was really intrigued by how you described in the post-COVID moment the kind of mediated labor activism you documented is even less possible and less visible. You said a lot of the groups basically disbanded after COVID, or even before it. Looking back to all the groups, the NGOs, and activist strategies you wrote about now, what would you envision this book to be, or become? Your writings felt like a documentary of this historical period to me, now that young people interested in labor issues might not even be able to see it in person. What would you envision this book to be in this sense for an intended audience?

Siyuan Yin: I would say, empirically, as you beautifully summarized of my book, it is an attempt to document what has been done by people on the ground, at grassroots level, bottom-up, their imaginations, aspirations, learning, grievances, hopes, desires, and courage to engage these collective, different forms of collective resistance. That is the empirical contribution of the book.

I think theoretically, I try to develop a conceptual framework to talk about the very contingent formation of counter-hegemonic power in contexts like China, where there is little political tolerance for large-scale resistance. I focus on three elements, although there could be many more. The first one is to search for a new political subject. In the book, I locate rural migrant workers as a new historical political subject in a Marxist sense, as an agent of change. However, I did not regard these people as already formed subject as an agent of change. It does require efforts of mobilizing, organizing, education, and engagement. For instance, the case of the advocacy performance program is a perfect example to show that there are ways to mobilize workers who did not occupy this subjective position of seeing themselves as an agent of change. They later transform their subjectivities, start to see themselves as being able to speak up for themselves, and call for more systemic structural changes.

The second element focuses on critical and transformative epistemology and counter-discourse. How can we develop counter discourses to this hegemonic power, for instance, urban supremacy or patriarchal culture, heteronormativity, structural inequalities that a lot of people do believe or take for granted, no matter what class or gender positions they occupy. It is very important to develop this counter-hegemonic discourses to challenge and destabilize those dominant discourses and dominant ideologies in China.

The third is to form informal networks. Again, it is difficult to formally organize large-scale resistance in China. However, as we have seen from those workers’ resistance, which my book documents, through different small-scale informal networks, there could be some possible actions. What this book has demonstrated is just one of those examples, and there are numerous examples, as we can see for instance, in the realm of LGBTQ activism in China, gender antagonism and feminist struggles. There are still a lot of online or offline, small groups, small networks among social groups who have strived to form their alliances. I think those are all the contributions, or what I hope the audience or the readers could receive from the book.

Yajie Chen: You started the book by framing Chinese migrant workers’ struggles as part of the larger global working-class struggles. Could you speak more about the claim and its significance? How would it allow us to see emerging migrant worker subjectivity differently?

Siyuan Yin: I think one of the key principles that really shaped my scholarship is to really get rid of methodological nationalism. That is also the trend of a lot of scholarship, especially critical scholarship. China scholars have this tendency, which I do not agree, to treat China as something special, with a special civilization, history, and circumstances to some extent. It is true, because every country has its unique trajectory of historical development. But this overemphasis on the uniqueness of context, history, or contemporary politics may overlook some common problems.

I see Chinese rural migrant workers as part of this global working class not only in a contemporary sense, but also in a historical sense. If we think about the enclosure movement in industrializing the United Kingdom 300 or 400 years ago, there was a large number of peasants moving from rural areas to the industrializing centers. Now, we have also seen large scale rural to urban labor migration domestically in newly industrializing countries like China and India, and not to mention, the ongoing transnational labor migration, especially from non-Western, less advanced countries moving to more advanced economies and areas. This is a global, transnational phenomenon. Although the national context people live in are quite different, the political, economic, and even structural, historical conditions people are facing share a lot of similarities: how local states’ policy are friendly towards capital investment and suppressive against local labor protests, for example in Singapore, Bangladesh, not to mention China. Political deprivation, labor exploitation, social exclusion, and cultural discrimination are the common issues those transnational and domestic migrant workers are facing in different contexts. They are not that different considering these structural and historical forces. I think that is what has really prompted me to draw this comparative lens to understand the similarities, or the similar circumstances that rural migrant workers in China and other migrant workers, or workers in general are facing in unequal power structures.

Yajie Chen: You coined “mediated labor activism” which is also the title of the book. What do you mean by mediated and what are some commonalities across the different cases that make them comparable?

Siyuan Yin: Let me clarify what I mean by “mediated labor activism.” I use this concept borrowing from media scholar, Bart Cammaerts, from his work on “mediated activism.” Mediated activism is a concept in communication scholarship referring to how media, communication practices, and technologies have been incorporated into activism or resistance. The emphasis is on the use of all kinds of media, and also the relationship with media or communicative practices.

I look at these forms of mediated practices among workers as essential parts of their labor activism because of their sustainability. The performance program survived for about 10 years, and the music group lasted even longer, almost two decades. It is this durability and sustainability of activism that really triggered my interest. I wanted to see if there was something that could be embedded in people’s everyday life, especially migrant workers’ everyday life. A lot of workers who were reluctant to join short-term, militarized labor strikes or protests may find mediated, communicative, resistant practices interesting and empowering. I also believed that these forms of activism might even be more effective to mobilize and engage a larger group of people, although it turned out to be different from what I expected. I have explained why mediated labor activism fails to become social movements in the conclusion chapter.

Yajie Chen: Your discussion in the book also points out the role of mainstream media in upholding cultural hegemony that oppresses migrant workers. Meanwhile, some mainstream outlets also take a more sympathetic stance and even highlight the advocacy work of activist groups. What are the roles mainstream media, or perhaps citizen media, can play in shaping public discourse in China?

Siyuan Yin: My approach to media, or any type of technology is always to de-center media and recenter people. The reason why I started this project and focused on mediated activism was not because I come from media scholarship tradition. I emphasis on media because this is what people do on the ground. If they have chosen other types of activism, maybe something completely irrelevant to media or communicative practices, I would do a whole new project. What I am saying is that what we need to follow is people’s actions. The reason why media is important is because people use media, not because media is important by itself.

In terms of mainstream media, I think it is very interesting that some journalists from the official media that I met were individuals, who were genuinely very concerned about and cared for migrant workers and their well-beings. They were trying to write a frank, accurate account, to document those people’s grievances. However, there are always institutional barriers. They could not publish their report. They were required by the editors to change the tone and content because of the media politics in China. I think that is also why the internet gives people some opportunities to document something especially for those individuals who either do not have access to mainstream media, or have been underrepresented or misrepresented by mainstream media.

However, it would be over-optimistic to emphasize on the role of the internet, considering this heavy censorship and surveillance on the internet. There are some very genuine concerns about social inequalities and injustices shared by a lot of people, regardless of their class positions or gender identities. There are structural forces that people are subject to that set certain parameters for people when they consider which actions are feasible and which actions could be dangerous to their own safety or well-being.

Yajie Chen: Is there anything else you would like to highlight about your first book?

Siyuan Yin: I think the book will be of interest to people who are concerned about the possibilities of change. Although I’ve heard that a lot of those activism, or activist activities have been cracked down afterwards while I was writing up the book, which is very sad, I still want to give people some hope based on what has happened before, and what would probably continue to flourish in the future.