Rural migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou,China: Multi-positionality and negotiated living strategies

Introduction

This paper seeks to contribute to research on China’s rural migrants by investigating their agency. Focusing on rural migrants’ local connectivity and their social position, this paper discusses their place-specific social relations and thereby the diverse ways to negotiate a living in urban China. Recent studies on China’s rural migration suggest a growing trend of integration in some local neighbourhoods (Li and Wu, 2014). While this finding challenges the view that rural migrants are a temporary feature in cities responding passively to economic opportunities, it begs new questions such as: how do rural migrants adapt to the urban environment? As they no longer consider themselves ‘temporary’ residents, how do they develop a new relationship with their urban environment? Specifically, how do they negotiate their everyday lives from an institutionally disadvantaged position?

The above questions have led to a new research focus as well as a new methodology for investigating China’s migrants. The former includes studying migrants’ agency and subjectivity. These ideas are not new in population geography and migration research but they have received insufficient attention in studies to date of China’s rural migrants (Liu et al., 2015). Exploring migrants’ agency reveals the dynamic interplay between migrants with differing subject positions (such as social positions and cultural vantage points), interactions and social forces impacting on their behaviour. This exploration informs how experience is framed and articulated in particular contexts – the actual experiences and subjective dimensions of a migrant’s social life. The application of these ideas is grounded in the narrative approach. Eastmond (2007: 249) suggests that personal narratives allow actors to express their ‘subjective dimension’ of experience, thus exploring ‘the diversity behind over-generalized notions’ of the migrant experience. Thus, the rich stories told by rural migrants in China can provide alternatives to the ‘plight and victim’ image that was constructed following Solinger’s (2006) influential study on the making of an urban underclass in Chinese cities.

As noted, very few efforts have been made to investigate China’s rural migrant agency. Drawing on the stories of a migrant family who moved from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau to northwest China, Zhang’s (2014) ethnographical study revealed not only the social and cultural costs of migration across China’s urban–rural divide, but also the way that migrants responded to various challenges in the host city. Zhang (2001), to add to this approach, went a step further by taking the space and power relationship in urban China into her articulation of migrant stories in Beijing city. Focusing on migrant subjects, the power relationships in patron–client networks and the making of space, Zhang (2001) examined in detail the dialectic relationship between Zhejiang migrants and the construction and maintenance of their habitat – Zhejiangcun. Like Zhang (2014), Zhang (2001) also considered migrants as ‘active agents’ with their own dynamics, desires and identities, arguing that they are both being shaped and are shaping themselves during the migration process. Nevertheless, Zhang (2001) further described Zhang’s (2014) aspatial analysis by articulating the relationship between power and the production of a migrant habitat in the city.

The relationship between migrants and their habitats in Chinese cities was further elaborated by Andersson’s (2014) discussion on translocal movements. Drawing on Brickell and Datta’s (2011) argument on ‘situatedness’, she argued that rural migrants are indeed ‘mobile’ within the city (Andersson, 2014). The term mobile does not refer to the conventional understanding that migrants are ‘out of place’ and ‘on the move’. Rather it indicates migrant linkages and interactions with multiple sites within a city. Investigating migrants’ local movements both within and beyond their habitats, she challenged the orthodox view that considers rural migrants as displaced and impotent (Andersson, 2014). The idea of translocal was also employed by Liu et al. (2015) to investigate how Hubei migrants tap into long-distance resources to enhance their economic wellbeing in a migrant enclave in Guangzhou. Emphasising the agency of migrants, their study demonstrated how the everyday practices of migrants collectively shape and transform their neighbourhood.

The above studies provide a foundation for a further investigation of the socio-spatial relationship between rural migrants in cities – in their communities and in their everyday lives at two levels. These are: (a) the dialectic relationship between people and place at the neighbourhood scale; and (b) the particular way that physical location and social roles are intertwined at an individual level. Contemporary thinking on the meaning of ‘space’ suggests that space/place is neither physical nor comprises defined social and economic conditions; rather it is a dynamic setting with different forces that shape social relationships and interactions, and is, at the same time, being shaped by these social relationships (Soja, 1980). Migrant enclaves, such as Zhejiangcun in Beijing and villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou, are not only a product of migrants’ activities, they also shape interactions and events that affect migrants’ experiences in the urban area. The ‘intensity that connects sociality to spatiality in everyday life’ is another way of describing this conception of ‘place’ (Dovey, 2010: 1).

Recent debates over the conceptualisation of place have suggested a progressive view (Massey, 1997) that considers places to be in a state of continual change rather than being closed, stable and finished. Drawing on Deleuze’s assemblage theory, Dovey (2010) further suggested that places should be considered assemblages. According to him, an assemblage is not a ‘collection of parts’ but rather comprises aggregated connections between parts including people, material things and flows (Dovey, 2010: 14). Place formation is thus dynamic and contingent rather than static and necessary. Such a view not only echoes the progressive view of place, it also suggests that people’s everyday lives are not predetermined. The implication of this discussion on the investigation of migrants’ experiences is that place is a dynamic assemblage of people and their environments. Migrants’ everyday lives are not primordial and their relationships with the place they inhabit (such as a migrant enclave) are negotiable.

This socio-spatial dialectic suggests that, at the individual level, a person’s social role is shaped by particular social relationships but is also place-based. This is particularly the case in the context of translocal movement. When migrants develop different linkages and interactions with multiple sites, they, at the same time, position themselves in various, place-based, social relationships and develop different social roles. The shifting of physical location is thus associated with a change in social role and comprises what I call the ‘multi-positionality’ of migrants. By including the changing roles of migrants, this conceptualisation has extended conventional discussions on translocality, which traditionally have focused only on multiple physical locations (Andersson, 2014; Brickell and Datta, 2011; Conradson and Mckay, 2007; Liu et al., 2015)

The multi-positionality of rural migrants thus reveals the complex relationship between space and social relationships and the diversity and complexity of the migrant experience. It is the objective of this paper to articulate such relationships and how they serve as socio-spatial resources to empower rural migrants. Specifically, individual migrants’ (a) changing physical locations; and (b) shifts between roles will be considered in the context of a dynamic assemblage of place in an attempt to shed light on the way that multiple social relationships are created among different residents. Rural migrants’ stories will be used to unfold their agency, their production of place-specific social relationships and the exercise of them through their lived experiences. This approach does not aim to generalise their experience; rather it seeks to show diversity and complexity. Focusing on the multi-positionality of rural migrants and their socio-spatial resources, this study will also shed light on migrants’ capacity to carve out a living in an institutionally disadvantaged urban environment. In the following section, conventional views on China’s rural migrants are given. This is followed by an introduction of villages-in-the-city (cheng zhong cun) in Guangzhou ¹ where most migrants live. It is also the place where sociality and spatiality are connected, thus shaping the everyday lives of urban migrants. Migrants’ everyday stories will then elaborate on the arguments developed in the paper. The migrant stories were collected through extensive research in a village-in-the-city in Guangzhou, one of the most prosperous coastal city in China, between 2008 and 2009. A total of 16 migrants were interviewed in depth. Semi-structured questions were used to understand their living in general and spatial movement, both inside and outside their neighbourhood in particular. Special attention is paid to the purposes of their spot-to-spot movements. Based on migrants’ shifting, and multiple, physical and social positions, this study identifies how they develop place-specific social relationships and hence living strategies. Four stories that demonstrate various forms of multi-positionality – from a simple movement between physical locations to a complex relationship of shifting physical positions and social roles – and hence different socio-spatial relations are presented here. In the autumn of 2015, a specific follow-up study of migrants in the same neighbourhood was conducted to update their change.

On people: A common representation of China’s rural to urban migrants

China researchers have generally agreed that rural migrants in Chinese cities are a new urban underclass suffering marginalisation and disempowerment because of the country’s urban–rural dualism and the household registration system (Chan, 2010, 2004; Siu, 2007; Solinger, 2006; Zhang et al., 2014; Zhao and Howden-Chapman, 2010). While such institutional injustice has been widely discussed, the way that rural migrants have been politically and socially represented has received relatively less attention. The cultural and political meaning of migrants is important as it clarifies their position in society and why various regulations were imposed on them by government authorities to manage their everyday lives. Generally, ‘floating’ (liu dong) and ‘peasant’ workers (nongmin gong) are the dominant images portraying the huge numbers of migrants in urban China. These representations are found in the media, scholarly works and government documents. The ‘floating’ and temporary character of rural migrants is backed up by large-scale surveys in Chinese cities, such as Beijing and Guangzhou, which reveal that migrants consider the city as a place to work rather than their home (Du and Li, 2012; Zheng et al., 2009). Zhang (2001) concisely summarised the characteristics of migrants in the 1990s. She suggested that rural migrants in Chinese cities were generally considered as a group of homogeneous, raw labour pushed to cities by rural poverty. In contrast to modern and sophisticated urban dwellers, they were considered to be uneducated and of ‘low quality’. Their ignorance and fluidity was also considered as a serious deviation from creating a stable people–place relationship, and therefore, would create problems centred around issues such as public security, crime, prostitution and uncontrolled births. In short, the ‘migrant population is represented as a monolithic and formless entity consisting of unregulated, dangerous laborers who require stringent social control and surveillance’ (Zhang, 2001: 33). This common representation of rural migrants provided strong justification for government authorities to impose all sorts of measures to regulate them.

In fact, this representation has been challenged by new findings on China’s migrants. Not only is there research showing the diverse characteristics, such as household registration status, occupations and residential types, of rural migrants (Liu et al., 2012; Wissink et al., 2014), a nationwide survey also demonstrates their changing attitude, views and expectations (Li and Tian, 2011). Indeed, many of them have lived and worked in cities for years and have developed a special identity (Wang and Fan, 2012). These migrants’ intention to stay in city varied but they do not consider themselves to be part of the uniform floating population (Li, 2006). Their stay in a particular neighbourhood, as Andersson (2014: 88) suggests, may be provisional but ‘their urban ambition tends to be of a more lasting character’. Thus, despite the constrain of different forms of institutional and social barriers (Wang and Fan, 2012), their desire to survive in an urban area has produced their capacity to negotiate social and spatial relationships to constitute a living strategy. While such a capacity enables migrants to achieve certain ends, its configuration in everyday practice is structured by the time-space position of migrants (De Certeau, 1984). Taking the abovementioned shifting physical and social positions into consideration, the following discussion will put migrants into the context of villages-in-the-city where most of the migrants in Guangzhou live. Through this endeavour, this paper will not only explore how rural migrants’ interactions with space shape their urban stories, it will also provide a better understanding of people–place relationships in villages-in-the-city.

On place: Villages-in-the-city as an assemblage

The negative representation of rural migrants has also created a negative image for their habitats – ghettos and hotbeds of crime threatening public security and management. In Guangzhou, where this study is conducted, 36% of the total population in 2011 were migrants (Guangzhou Statistical Bureau, 2012: 65). About 70% of these migrants lived in the 138 villages-in-the-city found in the city (Lin et al., 2011). Although these neighbourhoods have been described as dirty, chaotic and inferior ( Shenzhen Special Economic Zone News, 2004; Yangcheng Evening Post, 2000), the variety of activities in these settlements has produced strong social and economic opportunities. However, conventional discussions on the land use of villages-in-the-city (Hao et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2009), their planning and redevelopment (Chung, 2009, 2013; Chung and Zhou, 2011), their role in providing affordable housing solutions (Liu et al., 2010; Song et al., 2008; Zhang et al., 2003) and their economic and development process (Lin et al., 2011) have generally considered these neighbourhoods a stage where all actions take place. Employing an inside-out perspective, Chung (2010) considered the often overlooked social and cultural dimensions of these villages and argued for their uniqueness. The rural roots and strong presence of native villagers in these villages suggest that villages-in-the-city are dynamic places where people interact intensively with both their environment and different groups of people every day. Investigating different migrant neighbourhoods over the world, Saunders (2010) argued that the social capital rural migrants developed in their neighbourhoods made these sites a transitional space helping migrants to adapt to urban life. While Saunders (2010) advocated a positive image of migrant neighbourhoods, the conceptualisation of place as an assemblage, as noted, adds to an understanding of how the underlying dynamics are produced. Villages-in-the-city as assemblages are thus defined by connections, the relationships between the residents and their physical space, the native villagers and outsiders. These connections have made villages-in-the-city a dynamic ensemble, allowing migrants to develop different social relationships and hence tactics for everyday life.

The location of a village-in-the-city plays a key role in affecting its social and economic composition. In Guangzhou, villages-in-the-city are found in city core, suburban areas and outskirts of the city. They are all villages with a shrinking amount of farmland but their land stock for rental and development purposes, land use intensity, economic activities and social composition are not exactly the same. Fieldworks in Guangzhou reveal that villages which locate in the suburban and the outskirts of the city have more land stock and therefore, on top of house rental, allows the development of small, manufacturing and handcraft industries. Such a development is usually associated with specialisation in business with a concentration of migrants from the same native place (Liu et al., 2015). Conversely, the lack of space in villages in the city core produces not only super-high building density, but also a tremendous number of small shops providing services and retailing functions. Chain migration is less common in these villages and migrants usually come from different corners of the country (Hu, 2002).

Migrants and their local counterparts are the two general, and fundamental, groups of people in villages-in-the-city, to understand the various socio-spatial relationships in these settlements. Native villagers are peasants who lived in these villages for generations. They are often outnumbered but their land use rights and existing social networks have made them the most powerful group in the village (Chung, 2013). The lack of effective urban planning enforcement and management prescriptions has allowed them, the de facto landowner of the village, to develop their houses aggressively and illegally, taking advantage of the massive influx of migrants to generate rental income (Tang and Chung, 2002; Wang et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2003). The super-high density development, indiscriminant land use as well as illegal constructions demonstrate a formal representation of space produced by native villagers. Thus, despite villages-in-the-city being spaces of informality, they still conform to a larger social and cultural process/norm derived from the urban land economy. This relationship between formality and informality connects villages-in-the-city to the larger, urban, socio-cultural system, providing specific spatial settings for residents to negotiate their social relations in their everyday experiences.

The involvement of migrants who live in villages-in-the-city has catalysed these relationships. These migrant tenants comprise a very high percentage of the total population in any village-in-the-city (Hu, 2002; Tang and Chung, 2002). Like the indigenous villagers, the majority of these migrants are peasants, institutionally excluded from the urban system. Further, in the context of the household registration system whereby one’s social, economic and political rights and welfare entitlement are determined by their household registration location (Smart and Smart, 2001), being a non-local has made rural migrants more vulnerable than the local peasants. While there are migrants who come from the same hometown working collectively to build a specialised industry in villages-in-the-city (Liu et al., 2015), a tremendous number of individual migrants use their particular and silent efforts to organise their livelihood. This is particularly the case in villages-in-the-city found in the city core. Through paying rent for living, or business, space, individual migrants develop a landlord–tenant relationship with native villagers in the first place. This situation has created what Siu (2007) described as both ‘displaced and emplaced’. While the former situation has forced migrants to develop livelihood tactics, the latter connects migrants to the practices and norms of an urban system. This situation provides opportunities for outsiders to organise their livelihoods and to cultivate a new identity.

The diversity of migrants in villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou’s city core has provided specific dynamics and opportunities for them to develop different social relationships. Different cultures, dialects and experiences demonstrate great diversity; and allow individual migrants to establish relative positions with others in their everyday experiences. Further, migrants’ mobility between their habitations and other urban areas produce other opportunities. Generally, jobs and incomes significantly affect their duration of stay in a particular neighbourhood in the city (Wu, 2014). To reduce commuting distance and cost, it is common to meet people who move from one village-in-the-city to another because of job and working location changes. Such a pattern has created local-to-local connections for migrants. Andersson (2014) considered this the ‘translocality’ of migrants, which allows migrants to capture socio-spatial resources to constitute a living strategy. In this sense, a migrant’s capacity is spatially constituted.

The relationships between (a) informality and formality; (b) native villagers and outsiders; and (c) different migrants have made villages-in-the-city a dynamic place to shape migrants’ experiences. A migrant’s position in these relationships allows him/her to develop different social relationships and hence their everyday tactics. It is to the stories of the migrants that the discussion now turns. The stories were found in Xiaocun, one of the villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou which is located 2 km to the south of the city’s east railway station.

Shifting locations, social roles and negotiated livelihoods

In Xiaocun, the village where I conducted ethnographic research, migrants accounted for 90% of the total population. ² For these migrants, in particular those with low income, Xiaocun is an ideal place because it offers not only affordable accommodation, but also a premium location in Guangzhou, giving them great locational advantages for jobs and many conveniences relevant to their everyday lives. Saunders (2010) further argued that neighbourhoods which accommodate rural migrants create social capital and connections, enabling migrants to integrate into urban life. Xiaocun is, therefore, more than a shelter; they are transitional spaces connecting rural migrants with the urban sphere. The heterogeneity of the various relationships developed in villages-in-the-city have provided a specific setting for migrants to negotiate their social relations through their everyday experiences.

Migrants were spread over the 390 houses in Xiaocun, which squeezed into a total area of 49,600 m². During the past two decades, these houses were redeveloped from single to multi-storey buildings, and renovated with small ensuites, for rental purposes. The owner and his/her family usually occupy the top floor and the flat roof and the remaining units are rented for income. For migrants, their relationship with the landlord is one of the formal relationships they develop in the city. Such landlord–tenant relationships link them to the social norms of an urban system. As a tenant, migrants usually conform to the conceived space of villages-in-the-city. At the same time, informal spaces give their creative pursuits a free rein. The narrow streets, for example, are built as walkways but they are usually used for social interaction. Wider streets are used as temporary points for hawking, or for private purposes such as parking, drying clothes, washing dishes and cooking. Food stalls that sell exotic dishes are often gathering points for migrants from the same region, providing ‘home style’ cooking and at the same time allowing exchange of local knowledge. Local markets are also information hubs, allowing migrants to share job, housing and service information and discuss local policy changes. Lamp posts and street-facing walls are often used as billboards for all kinds of advertisements and notices. Through these interactions migrants are able to hone their survival tactics and identities, thus building various strategies to live in the city.

Ms Lo was one of the hawkers peddling in the main street of Xiaocun. ³ She had lived in the village for two years but had been involved in peddling fresh flowers since her arrival in Guangzhou in 2005. Like many migrants who have no access to urban resources, Ms Lo desperately kept her expenses low. On moving to Xiaocun she used her rental unit as a workshop to pack fresh flowers. She sold her flowers at different entrances to the village; and later used a wagon bike as a mobile stall to sell them at various spots in the city. Such a practice allowed her to minimise costs from paying for a fixed booth. Another reason for her mobility was not having a proper business licence. Like many hawkers in town, Ms Lo was deliberately unlicensed because she did not want to pay a license fee, taxes and other associated administrative costs. She suggested that being ‘mobile’ had allowed her to catch up with different customers at various locations and hence earn more income. Another reason for not staying at a fixed point was to avoid competing with fellow migrants. According to her, street hawkers not only rushed headlong into certain trendy products, they also swarmed at certain locations. Such a pattern brought not only competition, but also attracted street peddling control. If she was caught, she would have to pay a heavy fine and her flowers and bike would be confiscated. She would also be detained. To avoid all these troubles, she chose a ‘guerrilla’ selling approach. Such a simple spot-to-spot movement has allowed Ms Lo, and many others, to capture customers in different locations and make a living in Guangzhou.

Mrs Chen’s experience further illustrates how migrants tap into socio-spatial resources to negotiate a living. ⁴ At the time I interviewed Mrs Chen, she had lived in Xiaocun for four years but had lived in Guangzhou for much longer. Before she moved to the neighbourhood, she shared a unit with her relatives in another village-in-the-city and sold vegetables in a wet market, her first working experience in Guangzhou. That experience provided her with market information such as which product was more profitable to sell, ways/channels to get cheap supplies and customers’ tastes. In 2004, she rented a fixed seafood booth in the fresh food market adjacent to Xiaocun and moved to the neighbourhood. Every day before dawn she went to one of the city’s aquatic product wholesale markets together with a former colleague to buy fresh seafood and then sell the products locally. According to her, the majority of her customers were white-collar workers who worked in the surrounding areas and were willing to buy high quality aquatic products, despite the slightly higher price. Occasionally, customers from her old neighbourhood came to buy from her and they chatted about what was happening there. Mrs Chen’s local-to-local connections thus provided her with useful information and tactics (that is, spatial resources) to negotiate a living in the city.

Datta (2011), in the study of Polish migrants’ translocal geographies, suggested that each place has its own network of power. This insight suggests that Ms Lo and Mrs Chen’s interactions with different sites (that is, wholesale markets, retail spots/streets and the Xiaocun neighbourhood) had connected them to different social networks. Such engagement, however, does not mean that profound and long-lasting social relationships have been developed between migrants and places. In fact, the connections that Ms Lo and Mrs Chen established in each place were functional, buying and selling relationships based on agreed prices. Both of them bought products from wholesalers and sold them to individual customers. Although their role changed from buyer to seller during the process, the relationship was straightforward. Back in their neighbourhood, since both Ms Lo and Mrs Chen spent long hours in their workplace, their only established social relationship was with their landlord. Once again, it was an economically based, landlord-and-tenant relationship. Their connections allowed Ms Lo and Mrs Chen to negotiate a living in urban Guangzhou but they did not cultivate the kind of social relationships that facilitate a change, or upgrade, in social position in a given network/structure.

Nevertheless, migrants who are able to move beyond the simple, physical, translocal strategy have carved out a dynamic, and sophisticated, form of multiple, shifting positions, allowing them to develop particular relationships with native villagers as well as with fellow migrants. Mr Chen is one of them. ⁵ Like the two stories already discussed, Mr Chen had formed various local-to-local connections before he moved to Xiaocun. He was a qualified electrician in his home town but such a qualification was not recognised in Guangzhou – an occupational barrier that excludes him from a stable job in the formal sector. Helped by friends, he worked as an assistant in a small grocery store in another migrant neighbourhood. Like many migrants who lived in the city, Mr Chen shared a small unit with others and left his family in their home town. At that time, he considered himself a ‘stranger’ in Guangzhou, trying hard to adapt to his new urban life. However, working in a grocery shop gave him the opportunity to interact with different residents (both native people and migrants) and to understand their needs in such a special socio-spatial setting. A few years later, he was already very knowledgeable about different migrant neighbourhoods in the city and had established certain networks with local people. These connections boosted his confidence about the future; he then moved to Xiaocun and started his handyman business there. He also brought his wife and younger daughter over from Shantou, his home town.

Mr Chen engaged actively with the neighbourhood. This was illustrated by the way that he perceived space in the village. Initially, he rented a slightly larger unit at ground level. He did not use it just for residential purposes; he converted it into a ‘daytime workshop and night time residence’ to kickstart his business. His business covers a wide range of services including repairs, buying and selling of secondhand products such as TVs and furniture – things that migrants need when they move into the neighbourhood. His wife also bought an old sewing machine and took on simple sewing work from the neighbourhood. A couple of years later, Mr Chen bought a pre-owned van and extended his service to goods delivery – a typical strategy that based on local mobility.

Initially, Mr Chen’s handyman business was entirely dependent on his connections and reciprocal network – an interdependent relationship between migrants. In the beginning, his customers were migrants. His excellent services have earned him a good reputation in the neighbourhood and his customers now include native villagers. He is now known as ‘the young electrician’ (diangong zai) in the neighbourhood. I interviewed a native villager, Mrs Li, who always asks Mr Chen for help for small repair works and his advice on many trivial matters. ⁶ She thinks Mr Chen is a reliable and responsible person and always does a good job for her. As the landlord of a number of units, Mrs Li occasionally asked Mr Chen to collect rent for her because she did not want to speak to migrants, specifically to some of the difficult tenants. Making use of his ‘migrant’ identity, Mr Chen developed a cooperative relationship with some of Mrs Li’s tenants so that he could get his assignments done. Such an achievement has received high praise from Mrs Li. A mutually beneficial relationship between the two parties has thus been built.

Such a relationship soon made Mr Chen an agent for native villagers whereby he was able to create specific relations with other migrants in the neighbourhood. This social relationship also helped his business as people liked to seek his assistance on various matters. Such a relationship has placed Mr Chen at a different side of the ‘shifting position’. As a result of unstable jobs and incomes, as noted, migrants who live in the neighbourhood come and go frequently. As time goes by, Mr Chen is able to play the role of a ‘local’ for newcomers who move into the neighbourhood. Therefore, Mr Chen’s ‘shifting position’ has enabled him to earn a living between roles, and his relations with different social groups have also enabled him to integrate into the neighbourhood reasonably well.

Such a shifting social position is not bounded by the neighbourhood that migrants live in. It also allows migrants to negotiate their livelihood beyond their neighbourhood. Mr Zhang’s story is a case in point. ⁷ Originally from Heilongjiang, Mr Zhang came to Guangzhou in 2003. His tongxiang (person from the same village) introduced him to the neighbourhood. According to him, he had no problems with the physical environment in the village but he does not like the native villagers’ attitude towards outsiders (seeing them as criminals). A major cultural barrier for him is language. Since most of the native villagers do not speak Mandarin, Mr Zhang rarely talked to them, nor did he involve in any social activities in the neighbourhood. Regular interactions with local villagers were limited to his landlord; and conversations only concentrated on rent collection. Such segregation reinforced Mr Zhang’s feelings as an outsider in the neighbourhood. Despite this, Mr Zhang and his wife have no plans to move, as the cheap rent and convenience (a five minute walk to an underground railway station) are precious resources that sustain their living in Guangzhou.

Like many rural migrants in Guangzhou, his primary school level of education did not grant him a decent, white-collar job. Once again, with the help of tongxiang, he finally got a job in one of his fellow provincial’s small stalls that repair and sell secondhand mobile phones, in a shopping mall near the neighbourhood. According to him, working in such a shop gave him the opportunity to meet different people, exchange information and develop social networks. He began to learn more about the business environment of Guangzhou, local consumers’ preferences and their differences with outsiders, and to develop a few stable connections with his customers. Three years ago, these connections brought him a new job – a hotel room salesman. He worked in a small office in the city and his major task was to sell hotel rooms to visitors to Guangzhou. Although modern technology allows Mr Zhang to sell his products on the internet, he still visited different travel agents, railway stations and long distance bus stations to look for business – a traditional marketing method through face-to-face interaction. This virtual and physical mobility empowers Mr Zhang by not only engaging him in the domain of urban business, but also enriches his local knowledge because he needs to provide various information to his customers, such as tourists and business visitors, from transportation to dining information and even supporting services such as car rental and shopping tips. Such a capacity has allowed Mr Zhang to shift his social position from an outsider to a local specialist. Taking advantage of this new role, he developed business relations with various customers and now earns a decent income – the result of a respectable sales record. A sense of belonging and familiarity with Guangzhou, according to him, has gradually developed.

Despite this, Mr Zhang’s role shifts back to an ‘outsider’ when he goes back to the neighbourhood. The feeling of ‘otherness’ is particularly strong as he speaks only Mandarin; and his interactions in the neighbourhood are still only limited to migrants from the same province. However, since he developed a shifting position through his job, he now feels less alienated in an urban setting. He soon made use of his shifting social position to help his tongxiang; and built interdependent and mutual aid relationships with them. These relationships are crucial and pragmatic for migrants as they enable them to negotiate their everyday lives in a difficult urban setting. According to Mr Zhang, such connections also eased his feeling of alienation within the neighbourhood.

Mr Zhang’s story vividly demonstrates ‘multi-positionality’ as noted – changing social roles and shifting physical location. Both of these empowered Mr Zhang to shape the way he lived in the city – the latter allows him to access/capture different types of social capital in different areas of Guangzhou; the former allows him to play different roles in different socio-spatial settings, and thus develop multiple social relationships with others. This multi-positionality has demonstrated Mr Zhang’s (as a migrant) capacity to create, change, connect and interlink. It provides him with positive forces to integrate into the urban, despite his marginalisation by urban institutions.

The above stories have demonstrated a variety of living strategies and social relations constituted by shifting physical location and social position. From Ms Chen’s mobile peddling to Mr Zhang’s multi-positionality, all the strategies have enabled the migrants to make a living in Guangzhou but different social relations hinted at different degrees of engagement, in particular with social networks and the utilisation of resources. Ms Lo and Mrs Chen’s mobility enabled them to establish temporally and spatially dispersed social networks; but they were not able to engage in a more sophisticated/dynamic relationship with other social groups and their reciprocal networks. Conversely, Mr Chen and Mr Zheng took a more active role in engaging in various social networks. Such engagement allows them to translate various local connections into precious social capital, which empowers them to shift their social positions in different socio-spatial settings. This shift not only allows them to cultivate their social space for integration in urban areas, but also to carve out a sense of fellowship/attachment in a habitat away from home.

The different outcomes do not necessarily represent the different phases of a process of building people–place relationships. Rather, they are a reflection of the four migrants’ own construction of such a relationship in Guangzhou. Ms Lo and Mrs Chen’s, both of whom adopted a physical mobility strategy as noted, vision of their own future sheds light on this argument. Both of them did not have thoughtful plans to sustain their stay in Guangzhou. Instead, Mrs Chen insisted that her stay in the neighbourhood, or even in Guangzhou, was a temporary one as she planned to move on once she discovered better opportunities for making money elsewhere. Likewise, Ms Lo did not intent to stay in the neighbourhood for long. She disclosed her strong feelings of loneliness and alienation during the interview; and she said she would eventually move back to her home town.

A revisit to the migrants in Xiaocun in 2015 provided further evidence to verify the above argument. Mrs Chen and Ms Lo were no longer living in the neighbourhood. Conversely, Mr Chen was still in the neighbourhood. He had established close ties with a few villager-landlords and continued to make a living through multiple positions. Based in Xiaocun, he had developed a network of local-to-local connections. According to him, many former residents of the neighbourhood had returned to ask for his services, which ranged from home renovation to goods delivery. ⁸ Through these old customers, he had even subcontracted some small projects. Making use of changing roles, Mr Chen also worked as a property agent, introducing potential tenants to the neighbourhood. Such multi-positioning had built his sense of attachment to the neighbourhood and Guangzhou; he said he had felt uneasy when he went back to his home town for a holiday. In 2010, he rented a bigger shop located in the main street of the village. Since his two children are now studying in Guangzhou, he is working hard to save money, hoping to buy an apartment in the near future. Mr Zhang no longer lives in the neighbourhood. According to his landlord, he brought his old mother to Guangzhou and moved to a bigger apartment. As their living and working conditions had improved, Mr Chen and Mr Zhang’s lifestyle changes were considered an achievement. Thus, multi-positionality provided both of them with an upturn in their social mobility.

Concluding remarks

This study has demonstrated individual rural Chinese migrants’ agency through a variety of living strategies and social relationships constituted by shifting physical locations and social positions in Guangzhou. These have included simple approaches such as facilitating physical movement between different locations and more sophisticated approaches such as developing multiple roles with outsiders and native villagers in different localities. These strategies have demonstrated different forms of social relationships taken up by migrants – a functional and business relationship in the former case and a dynamic, mutually beneficial relationship in the latter case. While functional relationships allow migrants to use their local knowledge to make a living in the context of institutional exclusion and discrimination, mutually beneficial relationships lead to change and an improvement in social relations thus engendering a sense of success and attachment to place.

This study has also asserted the spatiality of these negotiated strategies. Not only are they derived from shifting physical locations and social positions, they are also embedded in the specific web of interactions in Xiaocun, one of the villages-in-the-city in Guangzhou. Such spatiality shows migrants’ experiences are diverse and contextual; but they also suggest that migrants’ living spaces and experiences in Chinese cities are not pre-determined. Despite the differences, varying patterns of social relationships have demonstrated the bottom-up power of individual migrants, suggesting that they are not necessarily powerless, displaced and ‘losers’. In fact, their everyday practices have allowed them to configure their socio-spatial resources and exercise them, despite being excluded from urban institutions and lacking collective efforts as showcased in Liu et al.’s (2015) study. As individuals, they have the ability to reshape themselves and direct their own lives in the city.

The analysis of rural migrants’ agency and multi-positionality has added depth to conventional discussions on translocality in two ways. First, the relationships underlying migrants’ changing physical and social positions have been articulated. Such relationships have demonstrated the particular way that each migrant tapped into the socio-spatial resources available to them to shape their lives in the city. Second, the changing roles of migrants have demonstrated a more complicated, negotiated living strategy; and extended translocal studies on migrants beyond the narrative of fixed locations. Like their physical connections between multiple sites, migrants’ multi-positionality is multi-scalar. This issue has been not addressed in this paper but it highlights a new direction for further discussion.

The assertion of multi-positionality has also shed light on studies of rural migrants’ settlement intentions. While various living strategies enable migrants to make use of local knowledge to make a living in the city, not all strategies have developed attachment to place. In fact, only migrants who have taken an active role in engaging in the neighbourhood are able to build dynamic relationships with different local/social groups and hence ease the feeling of alienation. At the same time, this engagement involves migrants in the broader urban network, helping them pursue a process of adaptation in economic, social and cultural terms. This has significant implications for a migrant’s decision to stay or leave the city. Whether multi-positionality will eventually lead to integration and/or assimilation of migrants is yet to be known. Further studies on this issue are recommended.

The relationship between migrants and their spatially configured resources also sheds light on the interpretation of people-place relationships in villages-in-the-city. For migrants in the city, villages-in-the-city provide more than simply cheap accommodation. They are an assemblage of socio-spatial connections and resources, allowing migrants to develop their own living strategies in the city. Through these resources and connections, migrants become engaged in a broader, socio-cultural, urban system and are shaped as urban subjects. Villages-in-the-city are thus dynamic and creative places which connect migrants to their homes, the urban sphere and even beyond Guangzhou. The village-in-the-city is bounded by physical space but its dynamic extends far beyond its boundary.