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Specialization of the rural: Reinterpreting the labor mobility of rural young women in post‐Mao China
Author(s) -
Hairong Yan
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.2003.30.4.578
Subject(s) - subjectivity , china , contradiction , context (archaeology) , gender studies , identity (music) , sociology , rural area , political science , economic growth , geography , economics , aesthetics , law , art , philosophy , archaeology , epistemology
In this article I examine rural Chinese women's migration to the cities before and after the post‐Mao reform. I argue that rural young women's pursuit of a modern identity during the more recent migration has to be understood in the context of a changed rural‐urban relationship resulting from China's postsocialist development in an era of flexible accumulation. I analyze how a contradiction between freedom and violence dialectically constitutes the search for a new, modern subjectivity by rural young women in China today.