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>> 29 1 Market Reforms, Global Linkages, and (Dis) continuity in Post-Socialist China Market Reforms in Post-Socialist China In October 2008, a graphic appeared in an online KDS forum populated mostly by Shanghai residents. Utilizing the international symbol for “prohibited ,” it featured several words and abbreviations in both English and Chinese enclosed in a red circle with a red slash across it (see figure 2). In the center of the circle were the letters WDR. Above WDR a phoenix hovered over Chinese characters that read “Phoenix Man” (fenghuangnan), and inside the circle were also the phrases “New Shanghai Man” and “Western Digital Man.” For those familiar with China’s online realm, “no WDR” was easily understood as “no waidiren,” or “no outsiders,” and referred more specifically to rural-to-urban migrant workers in China’s cities. “Phoenix Man” and “New Shanghai Man” were variations on the same implied meaning.1 This graphic—expressing the common prejudice against migrant workers not only in Shanghai, but also in urban areas across China—could have 30 > 31 discriminatory nature of China’s hukou (household registration system); and related notions of culture/education (wenhua), class, gender, and wealth— it presents a microcosm of the larger socio-cultural context of contemporary China. With forum participants referring to issues of development and modernization along with social ills like prostitution and corruption, their comments also allude to the achievements and challenges of a society that is still in the midst of a profound transformation. The fact that this debate— and many others like it3 —took place online is also significant, for it is representative of China’s remarkable growth in telecommunications in the last few decades: the nation’s numbers of Internet users and mobile phone subscribers are the largest in the world and continue to grow. Finally, just as this online discussion reveals ruptures along a local/outsider, or urban-rural demarcation, it is indicative of the way such divides have been exacerbated by China’s reform policies of the last three decades. This chapter highlights key disjunctures and continuities that constitute the assemblage of post-socialist China in order to provide a backdrop for understanding young rural-to-urban migrant women’s engagement with mobile technologies. Over thirty years ago the Chinese government embarked on a course of development that unleashed processes of change, the consequences of which nobody, either inside China or “China watchers” outside the country, could have predicted. To jumpstart a stagnant economy and make a clear break with the Maoist past, in 1978 the Chinese leadership , under the direction of Deng Xiaoping, boldly embarked on a program of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang). Through advancing the “four modernizations ” (in industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense), eliminating class labels and class struggle, and integrating China into the global economy, the government sought to bring stability and prosperity to a nation still recovering from the economic, political, and social upheaval wrought by the Cultural Revolution (1966‒1976).4 The last few decades have thus seen a shift from a planned economy emphasizing heavy industry to a market economy—or “socialism with Chinese characteristics”—based on export processing (primarily centered in “Special Economic Zones” [SEZs] around China’s eastern coastal areas), the growth of the domestic service sector, and consumerism as a way of life. The marketization of China’s economy and its overall course of development have followed a teleology—where “some must get rich first and then others will follow”—that has emphasized “catching up” with other industrialized 32 > 33 the Mao era created an extremely modern and powerful mechanism of population management and organization.7 Today, despite economic liberalization and social transformations that have substantially weakened the hukou as a method for regulating people’s mobility, the household registration system still has profound effects in determining one’s life possibilities. Hukou Policy under Mao In the early years of the People’s Republic, as urban overcrowding, unemployment , and food shortages prompted fears of social instability, in 1955 the government issued a directive that categorized people as belonging to either “agricultural” (farmer/peasant) or “non-agricultural” (worker) households, according to whether they lived in a rural or urban area and regardless of whether some designated as “peasants” were not actually engaged in agricultural work. In the countryside the government also hastened collectivization in order to increase agricultural productivity, while Mao’s development strategy emphasized urban industrialization.8 In 1958, with the “Regulations on Hukou Registration in the People’s Republic...

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