WeChat as a migration infrastructure: translocal support mobilisation and digital inequalities among construction migrant workers in urban China

The role of WeChat in mediating translocal support for construction migrant workers (CMWs) in China remains inadequately understood. Of particular concern is how within-group heterogeneity produces fine-grained inequalities in the capacity to mobilise such provision. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with CMWs across four construction sites in Chengdu, this study develops a translocal account of how workers use WeChat to organise ties and mobilise functional support through them across multiple socio-spatial contexts. The findings show that WeChat enables CMWs to manage, maintain and extend dispersed family and origin-based ties, current worksite ties and wider industry ties embedded in multiple socio-spatial contexts. CMWs mobilise emotional, informational and instrumental support through these WeChat-mediated translocal ties. However, these benefits are unevenly realised. Inequalities in education, age, gender and employment position intersect in different ways, shaping unequal WeChat access and use, and unequal capacities to mobilise translocal support. Among CMWs, four types of WeChat users can be identified according to these intersections: highly engaged managerial and supervisory users, emotion-oriented manual-worker users, constrained users, and non-users. The study contributes to migration studies by integrating digitally mediated support and digital inequalities within a translocal perspective, and by showing how they are embedded in construction labour regimes.