The Paradox of Upgrading: Standards of Social Reproduction and the Gendered Precarization of Garment Work in China

This article presents a comparative case study that traces the reconfiguration of production and social reproduction processes under China’s upgrading reform across the hometown and worksite of a group of internal migrant garment workers. Although an upgrading regime is expected to promote labor formalization, this empirical study documents a gendered precarization in garment work. Investigating this paradox, this article makes two contributions to scholarship on informal work and social reproduction. First, the study proposes an understudied yet crucial factor impacting informal work: the standard of social reproduction. The change in the standard of social reproduction alters the expectations for women’s unpaid childcare duties and may draw workers and micro-entrepreneurs into generating new configurations of informal work. Second, the study identifies the role of the Chinese state’s workforce quality discourse on the development of the standard of social reproduction and demonstrates the upgrading reforms’ contradictory expectations for female informal workers.