Rise of Capitalism and Chinese Women’s Internal and Cross-Border Migrations 1980–2020: A Gender Study

In this chapter, Beatrice Zani draws the contours of a gender approach to migrations in China. In China, women’s labor migrations from the countryside to the city and marriage migrations to Taiwan have been complexifying and pluralizing over the last 40 years. A crossed analysis of two generations of migrant women’s mobility experiences, professional paths, and economic practices helps to identify lines of continuity and of discontinuity in rural-to-urban and cross-border migratory patterns and to pinpoint broader social and economic transformations characterizing contemporary Chinese capitalism. This chapter provides an innovative gender approach to apprehend how women’s internal and cross-border migrations are framed into the large-scale historical restructuring of Chinese capitalism, society, and labor market. It combines a micro-sociological analysis of migrants’ biographical, professional, social, and economic careers with a gender perspective to project mobility experiences and practices into the larger scale of macro social and economic transformations. Both the first and second generations of Mainland Chinese rural women have been engaged in a double-step migration: from the countryside to the city in Mainland China and from the Mainland to Taiwan. By focusing on the changes in terms of marriage practices, as well as social and economic experiences in Chinese and Taiwanese societies, and labor markets, the author looks at the extent to which globalization and modernity contributed to the transformation of migratory paths as well as actors’ biographical and professional careers. These are nowadays increasingly oriented toward the achievement of urbanity, economic independence, and social mobility by young migrants. These prove their ability to mobilize innovative and inventive tools to achieve their projects, which digital labor and e-commerce are illustrative of.