A new paper by Yiran Zhang

As “the factory of the world,” China’s economy was once driven by a massive cheap-commodity manufacturing sector that relied on a cheap and informal workforce of internal migrants. Since the late 2000s, the People’s Republic of China has embraced a new developmental regime that focused on “upgrading” its manufacturing economy through industrial policies and enhancing the quality of its workforce through labor, welfare, and population law reforms, diverting the Chinese economy away from a cheap-labor regime. The industrial upgrading side, once known as “Made in China 2025,” invested in high-tech and more skill-demanding industries. On the “social upgrading” front, the state introduced more labor regulations, made significant efforts to close the urban-migrant social welfare gap, and promoted the stability of migrant families, aiming to transform its manufacturing workforce into one more formal and urbanized. Nevertheless, I find that the heavy dependence of this upgrading reform on parents’ role in the human capital investment of the next generation’s workforce—lacking sufficient public support—led to a downgrading of today’s manufacturing jobs, especially for women, and a new dynamic of gendered supply-chain subordination.

My finding draws from my 2018-19 fieldwork in the Yangtze River Delta that traced the reconfiguring of labor and migration norms across the hometown and worksite of a group of garment workers. In my field work, I observed a group of middle-aged, female industrial workers who had been laboring in coastal factories alongside their husbands for decades, recently returned to their inland hometowns, precisely at a time when labor and social reforms “upgraded” their old factory jobs into higher-quality employment. This trend of reverse migration was primarily motivated by an emerging community norm that may be translated as “student companion mothers (陪读妈妈)” in the region. As mothers of teenage children, women increasingly felt the community expectation that they should return to their hometown to accompany their children and support them as they entered middle or high school. In China, the household registration system (戶口) creates obstacles for students to go to school outside their permanent domicile. As parents seek work opportunities in coastal areas, they often have to leave their children in the care of their grandparents or other family members. Women increasingly decide to return to their hometowns, consciously prioritizing the demands of their children’s education over job and micro-entrepreneur opportunities at the East coast. “Student companion mothers” often live with their children in group housing next to the school and perform care as meticulously as possible, hoping to generate more study time for their children and thus boost their performance in crucial exams. The norm of intense parenting, which started among urban families in the early 2000s, has reached and adapted to migrant families.

This change in family norms also restructured the regional garment industry. The en masse return of female migrant workers gave rise to a new wave of home-based “mothers’ workshops” around inland schools that subcontracted sewing and other labor-intensive tasks from coastal factories. Owned and staffed by student companion mothers, these workshops form a new segment of precarious work— work that is poorly remunerated, low in productivity and contingent, and yet highly flexible as schedules are tailored to fit care work mothers perform for their children in school. The female workers accept what is less than one-third of their old wages because returning to their hometowns transformed their roles within their household from an equal wage earner to a caregiver. The contingency of this workforce also constrained these inland workshops’ bargaining power in the supply chain, creating feminized enclaves in the manufacturing economy that evade both the labor reform and the state’s industrial upgrading efforts.

My case study of garment workers in China raises three interconnected implications for labor and development law and policies. First, precarious work and women’s unpaid social reproductive labor is structurally integrated. Both the institutional arrangements and normative standards of social reproduction condition female workers’ participation in the paid workforce. Thus, mere legal reforms to paid jobs may not be adequate to raise women’s labor conditions. Second, value-chain-upgrading reforms—the primary policy prescription promoted by the mainstream global value chain literature—have a potential gender impact. As one key element in value-chain upgrading strategies, namely human capital accumulation, inevitably relies on highly gendered social institutions such as the household, it is worth examining how such development strategies distribute the costs and gains of upgrading in and beyond the value chain. Third, it remains of crucial importance to understand population and family policies as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China’s development policies. Such a more comprehensive understanding of development policies not only captures a more holistic picture of the state-society relationship, but also reveals that expectations a policy regime imposes on actors in its economy are competing and sometimes contradictory.

The blog post is based on a pair of articles: the sociological analysis, entitled “The Paradox of Upgrading: Standards of Social Reproduction and the Gendered Precarization of Garment Work in China,” appeared in Critical Sociology, and the policy analysis, entitled “Gender, Value-Chain Upgrading, and The Costs of Human Capital: The Case of a Garment Supply Chain in China,” appeared in Cornell International Law Journal vol 57 (2024). Yiran Zhang is the Proskauer Assistant Professor of Employment and Labor Law at Cornell University Industrial and Labor Relations (ILR) School and an Associate Faculty Member of the Cornell Law School. She writes about care, work, gender, and the law in the US and China. Her scholarship is available on SSRN.