Foxconn City—gendering urban consumption of the second generation Chinese peasant workers
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Chao, Hui-Lin
Abstract
Headquartered in Taiwan, the Foxconn Corporation is the largest electronic manufacturer in the world and Apple Computer’s principle offshore contractor. With migrating peasant workers constitute its labor base, Foxconn has built up immense factories in Shenzhen, operated on the scale of a city. It was in the dormitories within this rigorously-controlled Foxconn city that a series of suicides took place in 2010. The tragedies prompted questions on Foxconn’s labor practice as well as debates on China’s “world factory” position. My dissertation investigates patterns of consumption among the hundreds of thousands of second-generation peasant workers at Foxconn in the Pearl River delta metropolis: how does their everyday consumption reflect their position at the bottom of a worldwide production chain and how does the contemporary patriarchal society in China impact the gendering of urban consumption? In other words, my research focuses, first, on the gendering of urban consumption among Foxconn peasant workers in the years after wage increases, and, secondly, on the interactions of this gendered consumption with the labor conditions in manufacture and China’s changing patriarchal culture. My research indicates that the changing labor conditions after the wage increases prompt electronic contractors such as Foxconn to restructure their manufacturing model. They are forced to either upgrade their industrial production or relocate their factories to cheaper inland areas, the practice known as “spatial remedy of capitals.” Employed by factory owners to provide cheap labor for the international chain of production, those second-generation peasant workers confront the transformation of their gender and class identity in the aftermath of the new world order of manufacture. The consumption patterns of second-generation peasant workers have steadily deteriorated as a result of the industrial upgrade and spatial restructuring and the attendant gender and class shuffling. The gendered consumption of the post-wage increase second-generation peasant workers, who are oppressed by the triple forces of national structure, world capital, and patriarchal culture, opens the front of resistance with gendered and classed consumption.
Subjects
second-generation peasant workers
gendering
Chinese working class
urban consumption
labor force reproduction
SDGs
Type
thesis
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