Chinese Workers in Capitalist Globalization: Professor Siyuan Yin’s New Book on Migrant Worker Labour Activism in China

School of Communication professor Siyuan Yin recently published her first book, Contesting Inequalities: Mediated Labour Activism and Rural Migrant Workers in China. The book explores how rural-to-urban migrant workers in China have resorted to different labour activism practices based on economic social inequalities.

The book was developed from Yin’s PhD dissertation, which she completed in 2019 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her initial interest in this topic began during her undergraduate degree at Peking University in Beijing, when she visited a rural village in Northwest China.

“I observed very stark differences between urban middle-class people and the very deprived lives of rural people living in the villages,” says Yin.

In many ways, this book is the culmination of many years of interest and research in this topic, and nearly a decade of writing and revising for Yin, who got the idea to develop this book during the final years of her PhD.

“Personally, completing this book is a great accomplishment, but on the other hand, I’m rather disappointed and angry at the continued inequality that these workers are facing in China and beyond,” she says.

“Although my primary focus is on rural migrant workers in China, we can see many similarities across the globe of how migrant workers are facing economic inequality, labour exploitation, political deprivation, social exclusion, and discrimination.” 

Since joining SFU, Yin has also researched transnational migrant workers in Canada, for example, finding commonalities in the issues that they are facing compared to migrant workers in China.

Yin says that the situation for migrant workers in China has not noticeably improved since she began her fieldwork in 2016. However, workers and organizations have shifted strategies, and new information is becoming available on these new practices. Yin is interested in following these changes in the upcoming years, while commencing new research.

“This is not the end of a chapter since it is part of my long-held research and political interests, but I will take a pause for a few years to embark on something new. This isn’t because I’m tired of the topic, it’s because a lot of the practices in this area are in their initial stages of formation, and it may take several years to see how they develop and unfold,” she says.

Her new research will focus on the gender politics and feminist struggles in China. She plans to look into daily practices and discourse as a form of contestation among ordinary people, both online and offline, by discussing various issues related to gender, class and sexuality justice through in-person interviews with people across different age groups in China.

“There have been burgeoning forms of everyday collective and individual activities online and offline to navigate suppression and contest the long-existing unequal power structures in China,” she says.

While this research will require her to take a hiatus from the research she conducted to write her book, the plan is to combine these projects together in the future.

“I’ll keep exploring the possibilities of forging alliances between class-based labour movements and identity-based social movements as the new direction of contemporary social movements and activism,” says Yin.

Contesting Inequalities: Mediated Labour Activism and Rural Migrant Workers in China is now available for purchase.