Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change.

Huang, Xin

Rural Women in Urban China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change. By Tamara Jacka. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2006. 329 pp. $29.95 (paper).

Tamara Jacka's book makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of rural women's migration experience in China. It attends to the voice of migrant women and brings "the margins to the centre" by offeting rich documentation of women's accounts of their experiences (p. 16). By comparing and analyzing the discursive construction of migrant experiences and subjects in dominant discourses of state officials and urban elites, as well as migrant women's narratives, this book illuminates the dynamic interaction between social discourses and personal identities and provides insight into migrant women's struggles over narratives and meaning-making through their negotiation with the dominant discourses.

This book is based primarily on the author's field research in 1999-2002 in China and includes interviews and informal conversations, participant observations, and focus groups, as well as questionnaire surveys with migrant women in Beijing. The ethnographic research is supplemented by text analysis of articles written by scholars and journalists about rural migrant women and by stories written by migrant women themselves.

Jacka traces the genealogy of the discourses of rural/urban difference and outsider/local status and gender and argues that the "denial of coevalness" between city and country in Chinese intellectual discourses casts the rural as "traditional" and "backward" and the urban as both the site and the engine of the nation's modern future. These discourses facilitated the processes of differentiation and constricting inequalities and justified the subordination of rural migrants in contemporary China. Jacka investigates the regulatory regime, including the household registration system and accompanying discriminatory restrictions that control migrants' movement, employment, fertility, education, and housing, as well as the discrimination, exploitation, and marginalization migrant women experience. Jacka finds that migrant women's narratives about places often reflect and reinforce dominant discourses. The countryside is represented as the place that belongs to the past, of stasis and confinement, associated with childhood, old age, and retreat. The city, on the other hand, is represented as the place of the future and modernity, of youth and desire, and of development.

Jacka gives a balanced account of the construction of a vulnerable young dagongmei (working sister) subject position by the Rural Women and Working Sister journals and through the activities of the Migrant Women's Club in Beijing. While recognizing their contributions in furthering the interests of rural migrant women, Jacka also points out that such construction reproduced dominant discourses and did not challenge the fundamental underpinnings of gender and rural/urban hierarchies and inequalities.

Some of Jacka's important findings are in contrast to much existing literature on labor migration in Asia. For instance, contrary to the household strategy and filial daughter models, many young unmarried women seem to fit the rebellious daughter model at first glance. Their migration is driven by a desire for education and a wish to avoid or postpone marriage and the traditional role of "virtuous wife and good mother." However, meeting filial obligations continues to be important for them. By preserving good relations with their rural families, they cultivate an identity that is both independent and modern, and moral and caring. Another example is that married women migrants are not merely passive dependents, as the associational model suggests. In contrast to some feminist claims that migration and work in the city enable women to renegotiate gender relations in the family, Jacka notes that married migrant women are severely disadvantaged in the labor force and experience relatively high levels of domestic discord and violence. Jacka's analysis also shows that the local ties are not always as deep or as significant to migrant women's emotional well-being as previous studies have suggested. When it comes to identification, Jacka argues that while the identities and experiences of rural migrant women are shaped through complex imbrications of gender, class, and regional origin, overall the division between the locals and outsiders, and that between urbanites and rural people, dominate their sense of identity.

In the last part of the book, Jacka provides an excellent analysis of the narrative form and structure of migrant women's stories. She notes that in the "migration as interlude" narrative, migration is seen as a break from the rural life course. However, migrant women's understandings of the meaning of such temporal change vary. Some view migration as an economic strategy, an escape from the countryside, a chance to see the world and have fun, or as a process of self-development. In the narrative of complaint or "speaking bitterness," migrant women speak about capitalist exploitation, inequalities, injustices, and indignities; more recently, they borrow from a new language of human rights. Each of these narrative forms exhibits a specific way of relating and negotiating with dominant discourses, by drawing upon elements of some and rejecting others.

In her analysis, Jacka seems pessimistic about the fate of migrant women's journey in the city. On the one hand, she notes that migrant women may experience a liberating sense of autonomy from parental, spousal, and other forms of authority and a broadening of horizons when they migrate to the city; on the other hand, she admits that often women who go to the city to escape rural patriarchy end up exploited by the capitalist market economy and discriminated against and marginalized by urban bias. The heroism of hard work does not bring about the promised self-development. However, Jacka finds it puzzling that even though unable to achieve more than mere survival in miserable conditions in the city, many migrant women still want to stay in the city as long as they can and strongly believe that migration enables a change in fate. In the book, one woman's decision to migrate is inspired by her father's and grandmother's experiences of working in the factories. Maybe the impact and legacy of these women's migration experience will be much more far-reaching. Maybe the hopes they cannot now realize will inspire and improve the chances for those yet to come.

One of the major strengths of this book is the use and analysis of migrant women's narratives. Jacka's well-balanced analysis is attentive and empathetic but also maintains a critical stance. It demonstrates her profound understanding of Chinese society. However, problems arise in using life-story narratives in social science research. When paragraphs are extracted from personal narratives, the narratives sometimes become fragmented and lose their reference to the narrators and narratives as a whole, leaving the reader to wonder who was speaking and in what context.

I highly recommend this empirically rich and brilliantly written book to anyone who is interested in migration, gender studies, and China.

Xin Huang

Centre for Women's and Gender Studies

University of British Columbia