From translocalization to commuterization: Chinese migrant factory workers’ changing arrangements of welfare and care

Based on a 10-month fieldwork in central China and 60 in-depth interviews, I explore in this paper a paradoxical phenomenon where the expansion of institutional provision of welfare fails to reach its goal of safeguarding people's well-being but intensifies the condition of insecurity experienced by migrant factory workers and their families. Recent developments in metropolitanizing spaces through land-for-welfare policies, in-migration of capital, and industrial rezoning have incorporated those at the urban fringes into the Chinese state's regional development plan. Due to land expropriation, villagers living at the urban edges are gradually replacing the rural land with cash compensation, resettlement housing, residence-based social insurances, and factory employment to secure their livelihoods and maintain social relations. As the factory is located in the neighborhood, former peasants' trajectories of travel oscillate more frequently between work and home. This creates a new mix of care wherein thin social protection provided by the state allows deeper penetration of market actors. In response to the changing welfare landscape, peasants-turned-urbanites constantly have to make trade-offs between hypermobility and stability: they follow the seasonal hiring rhythm of the factory that provides flexible wages and discourages welfare participation; or they adhere to the rules of the welfare system which requires long-term stay in the factory with low pay. As a result, workers and their families either rely on unstable income to secure their future or participate in social protection schemes in combination with speculative financial activities such as utilizing the Housing Provident Fund together with reduced-interest mortgages. People's response to the deepening commodification of land, labor, and money therefore emerges from their everyday practices and arrangement of care. In other words, how people react to the conditions of insecurity remain entangled with the welfare structures that create them.