Since the late 2000s, the Chinese state has embraced new industrial policies that have focused on upgrading its manufacturing quality, resulting in labor, welfare and population law reforms. According to ILR Assistant Professor Yiran Zhang, an unintended result of these policies is a shift in the workforce that has driven women from factory jobs that were on par with their male counterparts into precarious and lower-quality home-based industrial work in their inland hometowns.
Zhang has published a pair of papers exploring the garment supply chain in China - both factory jobs and informal, home-based ones that have sprung up out of need as women try to make money while also serving as "companion mothers" to their school-aged children.
"I think the biggest theoretical takeaway is that we really have to understand gender dynamics and family dynamics as being integral to economic developmental policies and to the transformation of industry jobs," Zhang said. "If you don't understand those dynamics, you cannot make full sense of the changes."
The two papers are "The Paradox of Upgrading: Standards of Social Reproduction and the Gendered Precarization of Garment Work in China," published in Critical Sociology and "Gender, Value-Chain Upgrading, and The Costs of Human Capital: The Case of a Garment Supply Chain in China," forthcoming in the Cornell International Law Journal. They draw on Zhang's fieldwork in one coastal industrial town and two inland labor emigration regions while she was researching China's law and policy, as well as sociological and ethnographic aspects of China's migrant workers.
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Julie Greco is a senior communications specialist at the ILR School.
