Spring Grass and Rivers strike it rich as they manage to establish a place for themselves in the urban market up north. While their move from the rural south posed countless risks as the two left their families and their lives on a business venture, their newfound financial stability depicts the lucrative potential of migrant workers. In the context of our discussion on the struggles of migrant workers, Spring Grass is an exception as she makes a handsome profit without encountering more than social ostracism as a rural citizen. However, the reality is that not only do rural workers, particularly farmers, experience structural barriers in terms of economic and legal restrictions, but the legacy of these structures have also resulted in a social construction of rural farmers centered around exclusion. As rural citizens grapple with their fixed labor identity, inherited from generations past, they are rendered as second-class citizens denied of rights, protection, and acceptance. Drawing from Renren and Peng, I argue that such discriminatory policies demonstrate the inextricable role of labor and the formation of an “other” in Chinese society, both in the past and present. With this framework centered around labor, the stratification of rural farmers in China parallels the critical role of labor in racial formation in the United States.
Agricultural workers have served as the backbone of development in China, yet they have been cast aside as a silent population majority exploited for its economic value. As China focused on the Soviet Union’s model for industrialization, the economic burden fell on farmers as China looked to cover capital costs by exporting food. Farmers were forced to sacrifice sizable amounts of produce as a result. Such economic demands also meant that farmers faced significant structural difficulty in leaving their rural homelands to pursue opportunities in industry. The movement towards a planned economy further posed a whole new set of challenges for farm workers. With the government’s control over the labor market, “people had no freedom to choose their means of livelihood, farmers were deprived of the ability to move freely to cities to earn a living” (Renren 42). Additionally, the government’s “anti-urbanization movements”, which concentrated skilled laborers in the countryside, created a surplus labor supply in rural areas.
As rural bodies are only acknowledged for their value in labor, this creates the conditions for reinforcing the separation of farmers from society. In the United States, the formation of surplus labor supply has made workers vulnerable to market forces while erasing their individual identities. Historically, white capitalists have relied on an external labor force, through enslavement of African Americans, the importation of Chinese workers, and the bracero program following the legal exclusion of Asian immigrants. This association of race with labor has always defined non-white bodies as something separate from American society. The market was never concerned with who these individual laborers were; all that mattered was that there was an easily exploitable mass for capital development, in which workers could easily be removed or replaced. In China, rural residence defined a particular deindividualized status in which workers were just another cog in the wheel to be wielded by the government. The collective labor of rural farmers proved to be fundamental in Chinese industrialization, but they were never recognized for their role. In fact, rural farmers soon came to be constructed as a separate group of people who were denied acceptance into urban society.
With the reestablishment of the hukou system, rural farmers were denied a multitude of rights and services that socially made them perpetual “foreigners” in China. Renren lists some rights denied to farmers, such as “the same right to vote as urban residents… right of association… labour rights as provided under the Labour Law… social security rights” (32). Furthermore, one had little mobility in their status as a rural or urban resident as this status was inherited and the government enforced barriers against changing this status. Due to this permanent nature of second-class citizenship, farmers had no choice but to accept their subjugated position in society. Simply put, their needs mattered less to the government compared to urban residents. Although the dual social structure was facilitated first and foremost by such legal policies, the presence of an outsider holds a crucial role in the development of a collective social identity.
In the context of American history, American identity has always been crafted in opposition to non-white people. Non-white people have been characterized as barbaric, subhuman, or unnatural, and in turn, contribute to the white consciousness of superiority. The association of Henan people with laziness and moral degeneracy (Peng, 2-3) arguably has little correlation to the actual actions of its residents. Rather, poverty rates in Henan and lasting perceptions of rural laborers as almost subhuman have in turn defined the urban identity as “the superior breed” (Renren 51) in comparison. Thus, the lack of this urban identity among Henan people paint them out to be an outsider upon which society projects its anxieties about morality and truth, particularly in the realm of news. This is demonstrated by Peng’s investigation of how presenting one’s location in media discourse contributes to ad hominem attacks on Henan residents’ origin and furthering existing stereotypes about Henan people (15). Here, labor has not only shaped the structural barriers of rural origins but also positioned farmers as a moral scapegoat.
The concept of an undefined but universally inferior rural class has subsequently constructed farmers and migrant workers as being backwards and undesirable. They are only included when their labor is necessary to fill up the demands of menial or difficult tasks; otherwise, the lack of anti-discrimination policies in China make society conducive to an environment of exclusion in terms of social relations and opportunities. Spring Grass is not exempt from how she is treated socially, either—despite her contributions to the Red Glory Department Store, the employees are reluctant at first to recognize her as a co-worker and only accept her upon recognizing her economic contributions to the store (Qiu, Chapter 14, 5). None of these conversations involve Spring Grass’s personality, morality, or actions beyond the context of labor. Even in a workplace setting, people are wary of hiring rural workers — the Wall Street Journal media report depicts the overt discrimination of Henan people in hiring practices: “When Ms. Wang was looking for a babysitter recently, she was surprised to hear the advice: Don’t hire people from Henan” (WSJ, 2-5). Such stereotypes further portray how the individual is erased when structures of labor and law make out rural farmers as an “other” through spatial association. It is not an uncommon practice in the United States for citizens to change their names, either, to avoid this geographical association. For instance, half-Chinese actress Chloe Bennet changed her last name from Wong to Bennet which allowed her to secure substantially more acting roles; a friend of mine recently told me how his Chinese family changed their surname from Wang to Lew while immigrating to America during Chinese exclusion such that their surname was still Chinese, but in a Jewish spelling. Even if many discriminatory structures no longer exist in China or the United States, such examples bring to light the social consequences of these structures.
The inherent association of rural communities with specifically agriculture-oriented labor has resulted in the stark division of Chinese society. The structural demands of China’s industrialization and development have made it incredibly difficult to not only grant equal rights and protections of all Chinese citizens, but also dismantle stereotypes and prejudice toward rural people. Ultimately, this construction of rural Chinese people as an “other” through labor mirrors the process of racialized labor in the United States. However, it remains difficult to imagine a future in Chinese society that has achieved even part of the progress that America has made thus far given the sheer amount of cultural, social, and legal precedent that lies in centuries of history.