Futures of Learning

As China has become an increasingly central actor on the world stage, and with the 2008 Olympics recently held in Beijing, there is a great deal of interest in this vast and diverse nation. China is undergoing numerous changes, not least of which is its rapid growth in telecommunications: it currently leads the world in both number of mobile phone subscriptions and Internet users, with roughly 616 million and 253 million, respectively, according to Chinese government statistics. In this post I will discuss one aspect of digital media use in China: how young rural-to-urban migrants in Beijing are using mobile phones as a crucial tool for building and enriching their social networks. My discussion here is based on a portion of my recently completed research in Beijing (Wallis, 2008), in which I was concerned with how young migrants, especially young women, engaged with mobile phones to create meaning in their lives in the city, and what economic, social, cultural, and structural forces enabled and constrained such usage within the dislocations and contradictions that characterize contemporary China. I was primarily concerned with what I call “socio-techno practices,” or the ways in which new communication technologies are integrated into existing social practices and at the same time open up new spaces or possibilities for their enactment.

To briefly provide some context, while rural-to-urban migration is common throughout the world, the role of the state in China makes migration there an interesting phenomenon. Prior to the government’s policy of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) in the late seventies, China’s household registration system (hukou) severely restricted people’s mobility and with few exceptions kept the rural and the urban populations separated geographically and culturally. Though substantially weakened, the hukou still serves as an institutional barrier that prevents those from rural areas from gaining full urban citizenship, and it works as a cultural barrier, helping to perpetuate myriad forms of exploitation and discrimination against rural “peasants” who migrate from the countryside to seek work in China’s cities. Deemed a “floating population” (liudong renkou), migrant workers are largely responsible for building the incredible infrastructure that has gone up in China’s cities in recent years, including Beijing’s National Aquatics Center (the Water Cube) and the National Stadium (the Bird’s Nest) that were on display during the Olympics. And though migrants also staff the shops, restaurants, and marketplaces that are now everywhere, for the most part they cannot participate in such modes of consumption and leisure enjoyed by China’s rising middle class (and elites). Young migrant women are often called dagongmei, meaning “working little sister” or “maiden worker,” a term that connotes a young, unmarried woman with low status and few rights. In the media and official documents, they are frequently portrayed as weak and vulnerable, even though they might not see themselves that way.

My study involved about 70 women and 20 men who were young (aged 16 to 25), single, and had journeyed to Beijing after finishing some or all of middle school. They were employed in restaurants, marketplaces, and hair salons, where they hoped to earn some income, learn some skills, and “see the world,” as they put it. They tended to earn rather low wages, and many worked 10 or 12 hours a day, some with one or two days off per month and others with no days off except during Chinese New Year. The women in particular occupied a very limited social space; usually their lives revolved around their jobs and their dorm or tiny apartment, which was often supplied by their employer. Their circumscribed place was further enforced by spatial and discursive power relations that construct the city as unsafe and unwelcoming due to their position as women and outsiders, marked by their accent, their build, and their mannerisms. Several women told me that though they might have a relative in Beijing, such as an aunt, uncle, or sibling, their friends (as opposed to co-workers) did not live in Beijing, and even when they had friends in Beijing, it was often hard for them to meet due to work schedules and distances (Beijing is a very large city and traveling by bus, as migrants do, is often quite time consuming).

So how does a mobile phone make a difference for them? Many of the men and women I interviewed had grown up without a landline in their family home. They also did not have one in their residence in Beijing, and their access to fixed-line phones at work was either non-existent or very limited. While there are pay phones and “call bars” all over Beijing, these are inconvenient and lack privacy. Perhaps it is not surprising then that the first “big” item bought by all the migrants I knew was a cell phone. Buying their first phone was such a significant event that nearly every participant in my study could tell me the date, time, and place of the purchase, who had accompanied them, the price, and how long it had taken them to save up enough money (usually several months). Often sacrifices were involved in buying a mobile phone and tough choices had to be made: a phone was bought instead of new clothes, a television, a bike, or even a precious train ticket home after months of being away.

As the first major item purchased with one’s urban wages, and one on which an inordinate amount of money is spent – often one or two month’s salary even when cheaper models are available, as also noted in prior research among migrant workers in China’s southern factories (Law & Peng, 2006; Yang & Chu, 2006) – clearly a cell phone has symbolic meaning. But more importantly, such telephonic “leapfrogging” makes a profound difference in migrants’ ability both to increase and enhance their social networks. In other words, it allows them to build up contacts in a manner previously unavailable and provides an important means for expanding their personal networks (guanxiwang), something extremely vital in a culture where personal relationships and bonds of reciprocity are often crucial for facilitating numerous types of social functions. Perhaps even more important than the expanded social networks enabled by the mobile phone, however, is the way the cell phone is used to enrich social relationships. Given the constraints on migrants’ time, the circumscribed social world they occupy in the city, and the far distances that often separate them from those with whom they are emotionally close, the ability to surpass these spatial, temporal, and structural barriers is extremely important. What I noted on many occasions was that many close friendships were maintained strictly through a mobile phone; that is, it is not mostly a “supportive communication technology” (Yoon, 2003) for relationships that are primarily sustained through face-to-face contact. It was instead what I call an “expansive communication tool,” used not only for maintaining ties with friends who are now spread all over China but also with those who although in the same city are nonetheless geographically unreachable. 

For this reason, the connectivity provided through the mobile phone should not be underestimated. Connectivity means communication, which lies at the heart of the social world, and such connectivity allows migrants – often isolated, often discriminated against – an anchoring and inclusion in networks of sociality that are crucial to their well-being in the city. In this regard, the sheer convenience of the cell phone is also not a trivial matter (and it is interesting to note that not one of my informants ever mentioned safety as a reason for buying a phone). For most migrants, especially young women, the mobile phone is not just one more communication device added to a fixed-line phone and/or a computer with Internet access. It is their primary, if not only, means of keeping in touch with others. Certainly prior to the arrival of the mobile phone, migrant workers remained in contact with family and very close friends, through using public phones, writing letters, with pagers, and so forth. However, the transformation in ease and frequency of access facilitated via the mobile phone is hard to fathom for those of us who have been surrounded by ubiquitous telephony our entire lives. For China’s young rural-to-urban migrants, and most likely for other populations with similarly constrained material circumstances, inclusion in social networks via the mobile phone thus serves as a counter-domination tactic against such limiting and limited life conditions. Often studies of how marginalized populations use new communication technologies such as cell phones understandably put heavy emphasis on economic outcomes, yet the affective/emotional benefits for such groups are also extremely significant and a rich area for further exploration.

References
China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) (http://www.cnnic.cn).

China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (http://www.miit.gov.cn).

Law, Pui-lam, and Yinni Peng. “The Use of Mobile Phones among Migrant Workers in Southern China.” In New Technologies in Global Societies, edited by Pui-lam Law, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Shanhua Yang, 245-258. Singapore: World Scientific, 2006.

Yang, Shanhua, and Wai-chi Chu. ”Shouji: Quanqiuhua Beijingxia de ‘Zhudong’ Xuanze—Zhusanjiao Diqu Nongmingong Shouji Xiaofei de Wenhua he Xintai de Jiedu (“Mobile Phone: ‘Selecting Their Own Initiative’ under the Background of Globalization”).” In Jincheng Nongmingong: Xianzhuang, Qushi, Women Neng Zuo Xie Shenme (Rural-Urban Migrants: Situations, Trends and What we can do), 301-308. Beijing, China: People’s University Institute for Agriculture and Rural Development, 2006.

Yoon, Kyongwon. “Retraditionalizing the Mobile: Young People’s Sociality and Mobile Phone Use in Seoul, Korea,” European Journal of Cultural Studies, 6.33 (2003): 327-343.

Wallis, Cara. “Technomobility in the Margins: Mobile Phones and Young Rural Women in Beijing.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation. University of Southern California, 2008.