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>> 1 Introduction Mobile Bodies, Mobile Technologies, and Immobile Mobility The Harmony Market sits at a busy intersection near one of Beijing’s embassy districts, and like many indoor marketplaces erected in the city in the new millennium, it consists of several floors packed with vendors—mostly ruralto -urban migrants—selling everything from souvenirs and crafts to knockoff designer clothing, footwear, and handbags.1 In the spring of 2007 I met Wu Huiying and Li Xiulan, two young rural women who worked in the basement of Harmony Market selling sports shoes. Li Xiulan was sixteen and from Henan province, and she had been in Beijing for six months working for her uncle. Wu Huiying was seventeen and from Anhui province, and when she had left home at fifteen she had originally joined her older sister, who was selling jeans at another large marketplace in Beijing. She and her sister had lived and worked together for nearly three years, but her sister was expecting a baby and had recently gone home. Wu Huiying had considered 2 > 3 a brand-name phone with a camera and Internet capability. Although she’d had a used phone passed down from a relative, her aunt had taken it away because she felt Li Xiulan was staying up too late texting with friends and as a result didn’t have any energy to work. “She thinks the phone has a bad effect on a young girl like me,” she said. We chatted a bit longer, but customers were arriving and browsing the rows of shoes, so I told the two women I should get going. As I was leaving, Wu Huiying asked for my mobile number so she could send me some jokes. Then she said she had to get back to work or her boss (who wasn’t present) would get angry, particularly if he saw her using her phone. My initial exchange with Wu Huiying and Li Xiulan, though in many ways quite ordinary, gives concrete form to numerous abstract forces—globalization , migration, marketization, and “informatization”—that have been constitutive of China’s path of “reform and opening” (gaige kaifang) over the last three decades. As China has become integrated into the world economy, it has opened itself to global cultural flows, and new identities, life opportunities , modes of consumption, and forms of communication have arisen, yet so, too, have new types of inclusion and exclusion. Though cities like Beijing have reaped the benefits of China’s modernization efforts, many rural areas have not. For this reason, like nearly all young rural women in China today, Wu Huiying and Li Xiulan had migrated not only to work, but also to “see the world,” learn some skills, and gain some autonomy vis-à-vis parents and other authority figures back home. However, in the city labor migrants face severe constraints due to institutional forces, such as the household registration system, or hukou, which confers different and unequal forms of citizenship according to whether one’s hukou is designated urban or rural (or non-agricultural/agricultural). Even though less stringent than in the past, the discriminatory nature of the hukou policy positions rural migrants as second-class citizens in China’s towns and cities, where they also must deal with labor exploitation, deep-seated urban prejudices against migrants, and powerful regulatory discourses regarding their inferior “quality” (suzhi). Although Wu Huiying and Li Xiulan were mobile in the sense of migrating from their home villages, like many rural-to-urban migrants in China, their long work hours, rare time off, and confined social world caused them to be relatively immobile in the city. At the same time, this immobility was overcome in certain ways by their use of mobile phones—even basic ones like Wu Huiying’s—for navigating various social networks, enjoying forms 4 > 5 approach—conceives of communication as a process in which messages are sent and delivered across space for purposes of information or control.7 Communication as ritual, however, is connected to notions of community, belonging, and shared beliefs.8 To Carey, communication is “a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed.”9 Mobile phones are obviously quite convenient for message transmission— Wu Huiying did in fact send me some jokes within thirty minutes of my departure from the market. Yet equally significant is the way cell phones, as “symbols of” reality, have become key in the constitution of selfhood, friendship, and group solidarity, especially among youth populations. In this sense, the...

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