Rural–urban migration, the commodification of labour and welfare restructuring in China and Vietnam

Since both countries shifted from state to market socialism, China and Vietnam have been pursuing a development model that depends on the labour of millions of rural-urban migrants working in global factories. This chapter conceptualizes the rural-urban migration and the provision of welfare for the migrant labour force as integral to a cycle of commodification that encompasses the overlapping processes of commodification, de-commodification, and re-commodification of labour. After decades of collectivized labour under state socialism, the cycle begins with the commodification of labour through market reforms that led to mass rural-urban migration and the rise of the global factory alongside the dismantling of the socialist welfare system. What followed were de-commodification attempts at providing forms of social protection that offset the labour precarity caused by marketization. Despite the emergence of new universal welfare programs, the market has increasingly intruded into social protection, especially through financialized products targeted at the labouring masses who must compensate for the failings of public welfare programs. As such, the protection of labour is re-inserted into the market as a commodity to be consumed by the migrant workers with their meagre wages. Successive welfare reforms thus have not been able to ensure proper social protection for the migrant workers, since they are constrained by the inherent paradox between market liberalization and socialist promises of non-alienated labour.