Jingyu Mao – författare

Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.China and Vietnam are two of the remaining constitutionally socialist countries that are single-handedly governed by Communist parties. Their rapid economic growth has gone hand in hand with the deepening commodification of labour and the restructuring of welfare – producing new tensions between workers’ needs and state priorities. Grounded in rich empirical research from diverse regions of both countries, this book explores how everyday struggles for livelihoods and wellbeing are shaped by increasingly flexible labour regimes and welfare systems offering minimal protection. It reveals how such systems encourage self-entrepreneurship and individual responsibility, while exposing the conflict between ensuring workers’ wellbeing and maintaining the market socialist model.Connecting labour and welfare transformations to broader political-economic processes – including land restructuring and financialisation – the book offers an unparalleled comparative perspective on two of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.

This book explores the experiences of ethnic performers in a small Chinese city, aiming to better understand their work and migration journeys. Their unique position as service workers who have migrated within the same province provides valuable insights into the intersection of social inequalities related to the rural-urban divide, ethnicity and gender in contemporary China. Introducing the concept of ‘intimacy as a lens’, the author examines intimate negotiations involving emotions, sense of self and relationships as a way of understanding wider social inequalities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the book reveals the bordering mechanisms encountered by performers in their work as they navigate between rural and urban environments, as well as between ethnic minority and Han identities. Emphasising the intimate and personal nature of these encounters, the book argues that they can help inform understanding of broader social issues.