Gendered Pragmatism and Subaltern Masculinity in China

Gender, Migration, and Masculinity in China

Following the gradual removal of barriers to rural-to-urban migration, post-Mao China probably witnessed the largest human migration in history (X. Peng, 2011). However, there are few studies examining the impact migration has had on family and gender. This overlooks the large number of households that are affected by migration. According to some estimates, around half of China’s rural population of over 600 million live in households with at least one migrant worker (Demurger & Xu, 2011). More important, the changing nature of female rural-to-urban migration is posing unprecedented challenges to gender relationships within the family. Past studies suggest that the majority of the earliest cohorts of female rural-to-urban migrants in China were either dependents of migrants or “maiden workers/factory girls” (Jacka, 2012; C. K. Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005) whose migration trajectory tended to be truncated by marriage, child care, and other family responsibilities (X. Zhu, 2005). However, there is evidence that an increasing number of rural Chinese women prefer the life of an urban worker over that of a rural peasant, and, find a life of rural domesticity less desirable than the newfound independence and power rural-to-urban migration and city income has brought them. They therefore seek to return to city employment after marriage and child birth (Chang, 2008; H. Yan, 2008; Y. Zhu & Chen, 2010). This coincides with changing patterns of rural-to-urban migration in the past decade. Whereas married male migrants used to leave their children, their wife, and their elderly parents behind, nowadays migration tends to involve couples or even the whole nuclear family (Fan, 2008).

Men’s dominance over women in Chinese society was discursively based on a rigid system of sex segregation that reserved the public realm for men, secluding and confining women to the domestic sphere (Mann, 2011). However, researchers have suggested that the confinement of women within the domestic sphere has been more of a cultural ideal than a reality, at least for most Chinese peasant women (Hsu, 1971). While the domestic sphere is regarded as women’s primary responsibility, peasant women have seldom been exempted from productive labor outside the home throughout contemporary Chinese history. For instance, encouraging women to participate in production was one of the main policy goals of the Communist Revolution (Croll, 1983; Judd, 1994; Y. Yan, 2003). This means that Chinese peasant women are expected to work both inside and outside the home; albeit their duties inside the home often take precedence over their outside engagements. While peasant boys may need to help with domestic chores from a young age, once married, they firmly see domestic chores as the duty of their wife rather than being their responsibility (Judd, 1994). Ethnographers of rural China thus often observe that, in comparison with peasant men, peasant women in China often have the heavier workload (Hsu, 1971; Judd, 1994). They often work in the field or have paid employment during day and then return home to do a second shift of child care and domestic chores after work (Croll, 1981). When peasant women stay in the village, the arrangement that women work both inside and outside the home is generally seen as unproblematic. However, when married rural women want to leave their children behind and migrate to cities to seek employment, they directly challenge the cultural norm that associates womanhood primarily with domesticity, and the gender division of labor of peasant households.

Contemporary China is characterized by inequalities structured along work units (Danwei) (Lin & Bian, 1991) and the household registration system (the hukou system), both of which exclude migrant workers from the social security system (Solinger, 1999) and relegate them to the status of second-class residents (Wu & Treiman, 2007). Excluded and marginalized, rural-to-urban migrant men are nonetheless exposed to the dominant ideals of manhood, upheld through popular discourse in the cities. This discourse of hegemonic masculinity stresses the role of wealth and entrepreneurship (Lu, 2000). If women bargain with patriarchy to maximize their gains within a system of oppression (Kandiyoti, 1988), Chinese rural-to-urban migrant men, faced with their wife migrating to an urban area to take up full-time employment, have to engage in a balancing act of defending patriarchy and their patriarchal dividend (Connell, 1998) while taking note of their family’s economic reality and the financial contribution their migrant wife is making. They must also deal with their own precarious and marginalized existence and reinvent a respectable, albeit subaltern, masculinity.

Data, Sample, and Research Site

The field sites of this study were three cities: Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou, in South China. All are rapidly developing Chinese cities with a large number of rural-to-urban migrants. They are also the prime research sites for major ethnographic studies on rural-to-urban migration in China (Chang, 2008; Choi & Peng, 2015; C. K. Lee, 1998; Pun, 2005; Y. Peng & Choi, 2013). The study used a combination of purposive and convenient sampling to recruit the respondents. First, it was decided that the study should include migrants working in the manufacturing sector, the service sector, and construction sites as these were the major sectors that employed migrant workers. Second, three key informants with connections with migrant workers living in the six major migrant enclaves (chengzhongcun) in the field sites were employed to help invite migrant workers to join the study. All the interviews were one-to-one, face-to-face interviews conducted in private at venues (e.g., hotel or hostel rooms) rented by the research team. The interviews were open-ended and semistructured covering issues related to migration history, family life, peer subculture, and work in cities. All of the interviews were conducted in Mandarin or Cantonese, tape-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Respondents were informed that participation was entirely voluntary and written informed consent was obtained from all respondents. Respondents were given 100 yuan (approximately US$16) as an expression of our gratitude for their time and participation in the research. The research was approved by the research ethics committee of the author’s university. In addition to the interviews, we also observed the daily lives of migrant workers by visiting the hotels, restaurants, hair salons, beauty parlours, and construction sites where they worked, and the migrant enclaves and dormitories where they lived.

For this article, we drew mainly on interviews with 136 married migrant men. These included 84 married men whose spouses had migrated to the city for work (52 couple migrants and 32 family migrants), and 52 migrant men whose wives had stayed behind in their native village to take care of elderly family members or children. The mean age of these married male respondents was 39 years. Most of these men were interprovincial migrants coming from Hunan, Sichuan, and Hebei provinces. Others were intraprovincial migrants originating from rural Guangdong province. The majority of our respondents were peasants before they migrated to urban areas. Once in urban areas, they engaged in mostly low-paid and low-skilled jobs. A small minority of our respondents was able to achieve some modest upward mobility by securing a white-collar job or starting a small business such as a grocery shop, a small restaurant, or a vegetable stall. The monthly income of most of our respondents (65%) ranged from 1,800 to 3,500 yuan. This is substantially lower than the median income of city hukou residents in Dongguan, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou. In 2014, the median monthly income in these three cities was 5,868, 6,819, and 5,694 yuan respectively (“China’s top 10 cities,” 2014). While the income of our male migrant respondents are on average lower than city residents, they are quite representative of the migrant population in China. The 2014 National Migrant Worker Survey (National Bureau of Statistics of China, 2015) shows that the average monthly income of a male migrant was around 2,864 yuan. The lower income of these migrant men than their city counterparts reflect the overall marginalization of rural-to-urban migrant workers in China. The lower income also has implications for the financial situation these families face, and the attitudes these migrant men have toward their wives’ migration decision.

However, even if nearly all men in our sample acknowledge their family’s need for an added income, not all of them support the idea that their wife migrate to the city to seek employment. The comparison between rural-to-urban migrant men whose wives are also migrants and rural-to-urban migrant men whose wives stayed behind in the village illuminate the struggles rural Chinese families face, their various strategies for coping with the very conflicting demands of care and meeting their financial needs, and the negotiation of gender in this process.

The Multiple Contexts of Married Women’s Rural-to-Urban Migration

One cannot adequately understand rural-to-urban migrant men’s attitudes toward their wife migrating without locating their experiences within the household’s overall goal, changing member composition, and needs. The following cases illustrate the multiple contexts of wives’ staying behind or rural-to-urban migration.

Zong, a 58-year-old construction worker from Hunan province, migrated to Guangzhou to find work in the early 1990s. When we met him in 2013, his 23-year-old son was also a rural-to-urban migrant worker who held a factory job in Dongguan. His 53-year-old wife worked in a shoe factory in a town near their native village. Commenting on this arrangement, Zong told us:

We have old people [his parents] at home. My wife stayed so that she could take care of them. We [father and son] are out, and someone definitely needs to be at home . . . I am the elder son . . . I need to be a role model for my younger siblings. . . . everybody gets old and old people need to be taken care of.

Zong is the elder son, and in rural China, the birth order determines the son’s care obligations, with elder sons having the primary responsibility to care for their elderly parents. The care work, in turn, is often transferred to the elder son’s wife, who is expected to provide most of the physical elderly care. The gender transfer of care underlies the traditional gender division of labor in peasant households. Zong, for instance, considers women essential for the functioning of the Chinese family, arguing that:

A household cannot function without a woman. Every household needs to have a woman. Only with a woman could a household be called a family. Women cook, wash clothes, and provide company. Women work harder than men. Women are more considerate than men. It is much better to have a woman at home, she can take care of things. . . . The most critical event for a man is to get a wife. A man depends on his wife to manage his family.

For Zong, the gender division of labor, where he and his son migrate in order to work and his wife stays behind, is thus a “natural outcome” of the intersection between the generational order that requires the elder son to be the primary caregiver of ageing parents and the gender order that insists on women being the primary caretaker of the household because of their supposedly superior ability to perform this task.

Fei is a 42-year-old construction worker of Henan native who worked in Shenzhen when our research team met him in 2013. Fei conceded that the financial pressure of supporting his family was large. He earned around 3,000 yuan per month. From this money, he used 1,000 yuan to cover his rent, food, and utility bills in the city. He sent around 1,000 yuan home to help pay for his two children’s boarding school fees and to support his wife and elderly parents. He tried to save the remaining money in the anticipation that if his children go to university or get married someday, he might need the money. Fei told us that he wanted to, but could not, return home to take care of his parents who were already in their 80s. Instead, his wife stayed to care for them. In his words:

My wife stays at home to take care of them. I have no other options. I could not return home. As a man, I could not just stay at home. If I stay at home, I would not be seen as a man. A man needs to work, a man could not just stay at home. I would become a joke. . . . People would ask, why isn’t this man going out to work? Why does he stay at home with his wife? . . . The villagers would tease me and I would feel awful about myself.

In Fei’s narrative, the outside and inside divide has been extended to the village/city boundary. In an era of rural-to-urban migration, rural men are expected to “go out” of the village and seek city employment. Many of our male respondents speak of the normative expectation that men ought to chuwai chuangyichuang (go out and explore the wilderness). Seeking adventure, taking risks, and trying new things are very much part of our male respondents’ expectation of manhood. The consequence of associating manhood with going out is that men are not supposed to stay at home, even if they want to. This in turn means that women have to stay, even if they desire otherwise.

There were 52 migrant men in our sample who had a wife who had stayed behind in their native villages. All the wives had to care for either their husbands’ elderly parents or their dependent children (except for one case in which the wife had to care for her own parents). However, many other married women migrate to the city even though they have dependent children and elderly parents to care for in their native village. Suen, Shen, Lau, and Xie are male migrant workers whose wives migrated.

Suen is a 30-year-old factory worker and Henan native. The research team met him in Shenzhen in 2013. Suen’s wife is also a factory worker in Shenzhen. They have a 1-year-old son in the village being cared for by Suen’s parents. Suen told us that he felt bad leaving his young son at home and not being able to serve his elderly parents:

Sometimes I feel that my parents are so old already, as their son I should be around to give them company. But I am in the city working; I could only visit them during the festive seasons twice a year. . . . Every time I return, I stay for a few days. . . . We left my son at home. He is so young. It breaks my heart. But I have no other options. Sometimes when I see other people with their children in the city, they remind me of my own son.

When asked why he or his wife did not return home to care for his son and parents, Suen said:

I have a family but no career. I am already 30 years old, but I am still a factory worker [earning less than 4,000 yuan a month]. I have no career . . . I should start a small business, I should do something. Many post-80s like me have their own business. . . . Among those who do not have a business, at least they take home a higher salary, a salary of around 6,000-8,000 yuan. . . . It troubles me because my wife earns more than me. Sometimes I question myself, how can a man earn less than a woman? I question myself every day. My wife earns more than me. This troubles me. A man is supposed to be able to support his family entirely. But I have failed to do so.

Suen and his wife work to save enough money for him to start a small business. His wife’s income is essential for him to achieve this goal. In fact, Suen conceded that his wife was more resourceful than him. She has been earning a higher income than him since even before they got married. It was also her idea to come to Shenzhen because she thought jobs paid more in Shenzhen than in other cities in South China. The association between manhood and career/entrepreneurship means that many rural-to-urban migrant men face pressure to meet these expectations. However, given their generally low income, they need their wives’ income from city jobs to realize their dream of staring a small business. Suen’s case further reveals the effects of the conflicting demands of manhood on men and their spouses. While Suen is on the path to fulfilling the normative expectation of being a man with his own business, he needs to reconcile and accept the reality that this goal could be achieved only with his wife’s higher salary and paramount economic contribution, and could come only at the expense of his left-behind parents and children.

Shen is a 38-year-old factory worker and Henan native. At the time of the interview, Shen’s 35-year-old wife was staying in their native village to raise livestock and look after their two children, aged 6 and 13 years. Shen’s wife’s migration has been a back and forth process between the village and the city. Shen first migrated to the city in search of work after his first child was born in 2000. His wife joined him in the city and left their 6-month-old daughter with Shen’s parents. When their second daughter was born 4 years later, his wife quit her job and stayed in the city to care for her until she was 3 years old. After that, she took her second daughter back home to their native village. As Shen elaborated:

My wife only looked after our elder daughter for six months. She said that our elder daughter treated her like a stranger, like an enemy. So she wanted to spend more time nurturing our second daughter. I told her that if she spent time with the children, the children would definitely be good to her in return. However, my wife said that it was expensive to raise a child in the city, so she took her home.

Shen’s wife has been bothered by her inability to develop more intimate bonds with her two daughters. She is troubled by the fact that her elder daughter feels and acts much more intimately to her grandmother than to her. So while Shen and his wife agree that she may earn a higher salary in the city than she can raising livestock in the village, they have decided that “children may not need much money, all they want is time with parents.” In fact, Shen wants to return home to join his family. As he told us:

I spent very little time with our children. For the younger child, I at least spent three years with her. For the elder child, I basically have not spent any time with her. She calls me father, but I know that deep down she feels distant from me. . . . We have had no chance to communicate with each other. She calls me father, but it sounds so empty.

Despite his desire to return home, Shen said that he could not return because he knew that he would not be able to earn as much at home as he does in the city. Shen told us that compared with his wife, he probably felt stronger emotions toward their two children, but he and his wife had never considered the reverse arrangement—of his wife staying in the city and he returning home to his native village to care for their children.

When the research team met Lau in Dongguan in 2012, he was a 32-year-old grocery store owner. His wife worked alongside him in their store and their 7-year-old son stayed in the village of their native Henan province under the care of Lau’s parents. The Laus could be considered a success story of rural-to-urban migrants because their small business is doing well and they earn a relatively high income of 15,000 to 20,000 yuan per month. Lau relies on his wife to run the store and manage the household finances because, in his own confession, he is a big spender who likes to gamble and dine out with friends. He also cannot resist the temptation to visit massage parlors and patronize sex workers. Lau had thought of bringing his son to the city to live with them:

We had considered bringing our son to the city to live with us. However, both of us worked in our grocery store and we have no time to take care of him. If he stays at home [in his native village], my father [a primary school teacher] and my mother [a retired farmer] could take good care of him. Furthermore, my parents are getting old and have not much to do at home. Having a grandchild living with them, gives them company.

For Lau, it has never been a question of having his wife stay in the village; rather, the question is whether they should bring their children to the city. For this decision, they need to consider the availability of care in the city and the village and the emotional support the grandchild provides for the grandparents. They also need to consider the continuity of their child’s education. If Lau were to bring his son to the city, his son would attend a private school catering to migrant children. Lau and his wife do not have much confidence in the quality of education in these schools (Goodburn, 2009). Lau is also concerned about how his son would cope with the different curriculums between his native province and Dongguan. The current Chinese law stipulates that migrant children can only take the university entrance examination in the province where they have household registration (hukou). This means that if Lau brings his son to the city to live with them and to receive education, when his son reaches the age when he is to take the university entrance examination, he would need to return to his native Hunan province to take it. The different curriculums between Dongguan and Hunan may become a factor affecting his son’s performance in the exams.

Xie is a 38-year-old construction worker and Hunan native. When we met him in Guangzhou in 2013, his wife was with him working as a factory worker while their two children, aged 8 and 12 years, stayed in their village under the care of Xie’s parents. Xie first came to Guangzhou to work in the early 1990s. He later returned to his native home to marry a local girl. Before marriage, Xie’s wife worked as a salesperson in a clothing shop in a town in Hunan. After their marriage, Xie returned to the city to work because he needed to save money to build a house. To build this house, they also incurred debts. To repay the debt, his wife joined him in the city in order to find work. When their elder son was born, they left him under the care of Xie’s parents. However, when their second child was born, they brought their elder child to the city to attend kindergarten. When their children were in the city, Xie’s mother came to help take care of them. When the elder child reached the age when he was to start primary school, Xie sent both children back home because of concerns about the cost and the quality of education in the city:

We cannot bring our children to the city to attend primary school. Not even bring one of them here. The fee in a private primary school for each child in the city would cost 2,700 yuan. For two it would be more than 5,000 yuan per semester. . . . Moreover, while the quality of kindergarten education in the city is better than that in our village, the quality of primary school education in the city is not as good as that in our village. . . . The private schools in cities where migrant children attend are mostly irresponsible. They want to earn your money. They care only about the school fees that you pay them. They care nothing about educating your children!

Xie worries about his children’s safety attending schools in the village. This is because Xie’s mother is getting old and cannot accompany her grandchildren and walk the long distance to and from school. So Xie’s 12-year-old son walks with his younger sibling (who is 8 years old) to and from school, with no one else accompanying them. Xie and his wife fear for their safety when they walk home in the dark. However, even with this concern, Xie has not considered the possibility of having his wife return home:

If both of us work in the city, we could bring home 6,000-7,000 yuan a month. . . . We need to save for our children’s secondary school education. You see, the quality of secondary school education in our village is not as good as in the towns. They need to attend secondary schools in the towns. We are saving to buy a flat in the town.

For Xie, whether his wife stays at home or works in the city is very much dependent on what they consider to be best for their children’s long-term educational attainment. They moved their children and Xie’s mother back and forth between their native village and the city in response to the cost and quality of education in both locations. While Xie cherishes the gender ideal of male provider and female homemaker, commenting that “it is not an ideal situation that the mother leaves her children behind and goes out [meaning migrating to the city] to work,” he nonetheless has accepted that he and his family need the income from his wife’s employment in the city.

Not all men accept the reality that they need their wives’ income, or at least not all men do so without putting up some resistance. Tong, a 27-year-old factory worker from Sichuan Province, told us that his 25-year-old wife had left their son in his mother’s care to seek city employment when their son was 3 months old. Tong said that his wife simply did not like looking after babies and preferred paid factory employment in the city. Although Tong initially opposed his wife’s decision to leave their son behind in order to take a city job, his mother supported her because of the financial benefits her city job would have for the family. Tong’s resistance is mostly based on the belief that a mother would be a superior caregiver to a child compared with other caregivers, such as grandparents. This sentiment is quite common among our respondents. Chan, a 26-year-old taxi driver from rural Guangdong, argued:

Parents need to take care of their own children . . . grandparents and the younger generation have different ideas, if you let grandparents take care of your children, your children would learn outdated ideas.

Liu, a 42-year-old taxi driver from Hunan province, argued that:

Grandparents tend to spoil grandchildren. . . . Mothers would be stricter. For example, there are many types of food that young children should not eat, but want to eat. Mothers would not give them to their children, but grandparents would. Grandparents can only keep an eye on the children and play with them, no more than that.

Underlying both Chan and Liu’s concern is the quality of care. Both men made a distinction between providing physical care, instilling values in children, and exerting discipline. While they appreciate the physical care grandparents provide for their grandchildren, they expressed concerns about the grandparents’ ability to instill modern values in their children and to discipline them. These concerns, in turn, cause the men to be opposed to their wife migrating to the city in order to work.

Factors Shaping Migrant Men’s Attitudes Toward Their Wives’ Migration

The cases elaborated above and our analysis of all the 136 cases (including 84 couple and family migrants where the wife is living in the city and 52 individual male migrants with their wife living in the village) suggest that migrant men’s attitudes and responses toward their wife migrating to work is largely influenced by pragmatic considerations. Topping these pragmatic considerations is children—including the age and care needs of the children, the cost and quality of education in both rural and urban China, and the compatibility of the curriculums in these two locations.

Migrant men are more likely to accept and support their wives’ labor migration if the wife waits until their children can walk. Our respondents told us that the consideration was pragmatic—older children were sturdier, required less intensive care, and were easier for ageing grandparents to care for. Migrant men are more likely to have a positive attitude toward their wives’ labor migration if the grandparents are relatively young and in good health and can play a significant role in caring for the grandchildren. In fact, many respondents told us that peasants preferred to get married early so that they could have children at a time when their parents were still young enough to help care for them. While the availability of an alternative child care arrangement in the village is a push factor in the decision of married women to migrate in search of work, the unavailability of child care in the city serves as a factor inhibiting it. While some migrants, such as Xie, brought his mother to the city to help care for his two children when they attended kindergarten there, the majority of our respondents said that their parents were not used to city life and that the cost of living in the cities was too expensive for them to consider this option.

Turning to children’s educational needs, most migrant men in our sample see giving their children a good education as the surest way to help them achieve upward mobility and escape poverty. To achieve this goal, they consider the mother’s support of the children while they attend school to be essential. For example, migrant men spoke about “critical times” (guanjian shike) of children’s study, and the importance of having mothers supervise their children’s studies, making sure that they complete their homework and study hard, while cooking nutritious food to boost their children’s learning ability and giving them support during exam periods. Recognizing the importance of parental (mostly maternal) presence and the need to support their children’s education, our male respondents often have to struggle to meet two conflicting demands—although they want their wife to be with their children in order to give them support, they also need to earn and save enough money to pay for their children’s education. Although primary and secondary education in China is mostly free, parents still need to pay for uniforms, textbooks, food, transportation, and, for children in boarding houses and universities, their living costs. These costs can become a heavy burden for peasant households. Adding to their difficulties is the continued exclusion of migrant children from government schools in urban China. Despite a government policy shift with regard to education for migrant children in the early 2000s, major migrant receiving cities—such as Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Dongguan—have not wholeheartedly implemented these policies. Many migrant children have continued to be enrolled in poor quality and high fee–paying private schools (Goodburn, 2009). As the cases in the previous section illustrated, the consideration of the cost and quality of education, and, for older children, the prohibition against migrant children taking university entrance examinations in urban areas where they do not have a household registration, often result in children and their caregivers (mainly mothers) moving back and forth between rural and urban areas. These considerations are thus an important factor shaping the labor migration decisions of married women and the attitudes husbands have toward their wife migrating.

Another factor that influences the attitudes of migrant men toward their wives’ labor migration is the availability of employment opportunities for their wife in their native village or in nearby towns. All of the 52 migrant men’s wives who stayed in the village participated in productive labor. Some held clerical positions or factory jobs, some raised and sold livestock, and some farmed land of around 7 or 8 acres. Migrant men compare the income their wife can bring in working in their native village with what they can earn in the city. They also weight the pros and cons of their wives’ labor migration in terms of the income such a move might generate and what it might mean for the care, or lack of care, their children and the elderly members of the family will receive as a result. The family’s financial circumstance is an important factor shaping migrant men’s attitudes toward their wives’ labor migration. If the family had incurred debt because they borrowed to build a house or in order to pay for medical expenses, migrant men said that they had no option but to accept their wives’ labor migration.

The need to care for ageing parents is another factor influencing migrant men’s attitudes toward their wives’ labor migration. While Chinese sons, particularly the elder son, is charged with the primary responsibility to care for their parents, the care work is usually transferred to the daughter-in-law. Migrant sons speak of their desire to return home and serve their parents, but the gender norm that men must be the provider and that they should not stay inside (in the village) acts as powerful force against such a move. Although the wives of migrant men may stay in the village or return from the city to care for their parents-in-law, increasingly, only the oldest of the old—that is, elderly in their 80s—or elderly who are sick and chronically ill, are likely to receive this care and influence migrant men’s view that their wife should stay and not migrate (Choi & Peng, 2016).

Gendered Pragmatism and Subaltern Masculinities

Since the 1980s, feminist scholars, have worked to “bring gender from the periphery to the core of migration studies” (Mahler & Pessar, 2006, p. 27; see also Pedraza, 1991). This body of research draws attention to the central role gender plays in decisions about migration (Kanaiaupuni, 2000), the process and resulting outcome of settling in the host society, and decisions about returning (Boyd, 1989; Choi & Du, 2011; Constable, 1997; Flippen & Parrado, 2015; Hagan, 1998; Lan, 2006; Menjivar, 2000; Phizacklea, 2003). Despite their insights and their emphasis on gender, the focus has largely been on women and migration. Men’s voices, subjectivity, and experiences have been neglected. Filling this gap, the present article explores how married migrant men understand and respond to their wives’ migration. Although our case concerns China, we believe that our findings are relevant to the broader discussion about the transformative potential of migration on gender, family dynamics, and masculinity.

Overall, our findings suggest that, while the Chinese patriarchy is based on Confucius’s teaching that prescribes a segregated gender division of labor, placing men within the public domain and confining women to the private domain, the men outside women inside (nanzhuwai nuzhunei) gender norm appears to be much more of a cultural ideal than a reality for peasant households in post-Mao China. The decision of rural women to migrate to urban areas for jobs and their husbands’ attitudes toward this decision are largely based on careful calculations that weigh the pros and cons of the decision in the context of the household’s care needs, goals, and financial circumstances. As our analysis shows, peasant men’s attitudes toward their wives’ labor migration are shaped by a multiperson and multilocation gendered framework. Peasant men compare the opportunities available to generate income, the cost, and quality of education in the villages and cities; they weight the gains and losses to the household in emotional and financial terms of their wife migrating, and they rank the needs of adults against those of the children in the household. For example, if grandparents are capable and available to take care of left-behind children, migrant men are more likely to support their wives’ migration.

While migrant men’s attitudes are remarkably pragmatic, they are also gendered. Despite reflecting on their own desire to be with their children and to serve their parents, and despite their hope to return home, all migrant men in our sample said that they would only consider returning if they could find income-generating opportunities in their native place that are more or less equivalent to what their city employment has afforded them. They are vehement that men cannot be financially supported by women, and that men cannot stay inside. While pragmatic considerations may prompt migrant men to hold more flexible attitudes toward the “women inside” cultural norm, to value women who work both outside and inside, and to accept, support, and even initiate the labor migration of their wife, pragmatic considerations have not in the same way changed their attitude toward the “men inside” prohibition.

These migrant men’s attitudes prompt us to reflect on the concept of subaltern masculinity. Rural-to-urban male migrants in contemporary China confront the tension between a patriarchal family context that eschews the economic provider role of men and the domestic responsibilities of women in rural China and the inferior social status and economic marginalization they experience in urban areas that prevent them from adequately providing for their family. They are also confronted with the tension between the dominant discourse in urban China that stresses the primacy of wealth and status as a manifestation of masculinity and their precarious economic existence and social marginalization in the cities. It is within this context that we should understand migrant men’s gendered and pragmatic responses toward their wives’ labor migration. Subaltern manhood in this case is not achieved by meeting the standard of hegemonic manhood to be the sole provider, but by insisting vehemently that men should not be “inside” and be financially supported by women. Peasant men’s pragmatic acceptance of women crossing the gender boundary that defines femininity as being primarily based on domesticity may suggest a flexibility and a permeability of the feminine gender boundary in contemporary China. And yet their adherence to the subscribed male provider role and their ardent rejection of men taking on the role of being the primary homemaker points to the fact that subaltern masculinity is not an equalitarian masculinity.

This conclusion brings us to reflect on the transformative potential of migration on gender relations and masculinity, a broader question addressed by many past research in other parts of the world (Hoang & Yeoh, 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Menjivar, 1999; Parreñas, 2005). Findings of past research are far from consistent, with researchers showing men in some groups or countries more likely to change their idea of manhood in response or related to their wives’ migration. For example, in her comparative study of Central American migrant families in the United States, Menjivar (1999) suggested that indigenous Guatemalan men did not appear as threatened as did their Ladino Guatemalan or Salvadoran counterparts by their wives’ employment. Hoang and Yeoh’s (2011) study of migrant families in Indonesia and the Philippines showed that some left-behind husbands had taken up the primary role of their left-behind children’s carer and revised their ideas about a man’s responsibilities in the family, whereas Parreñas’s (2005) study of migrant families in the Philippines suggested that migration had very limited impact on gender relations and ideas of manhood. In the Chinese case depicted here, married migrant men are happy to go along if their wives’ migration is consistent with their material and familial aspirations. For example, if her migration could help improve the family’s economic conditions and the children’s educational opportunities. However, men’s support for their wives’ migration may not be a “real” and “long-term” transformation of their masculinity. In fact, many of our male respondents have hinted that when their family’s financial circumstances improve, they would hope to “release” their wife from productive activities, let her “rest” and “enjoy” the life of a taitai (meaning rich housewives) like urban middle-class men and entrepreneurs have done. For them, this is one of the ultimate indicators of successful manhood. Peasant men’s gendered pragmatism is thus a precarious basis for building gender equality in contemporary China.