Desperately seeking my wages: justice,media logic,and the politics of voice in urban China

A tale of three workers

On the afternoon of 24 October 2003, China’s Premier Wen Jiabo went on an inspection tour in the rural areas of Chongqing, in central China. A peasant woman, Xiong Deming, found herself sitting next to Premier Wen. In spite of the village cadres’ warning to village folks not to engage in any ‘loose talk’ during Premier Wen’s tour, Xiong fronted up to Premier Wen and asked if he could do something about her husband’s wage arrears. She said that more than one year since her husband had finished the job, he still had not received wages. Upon hearing this, the Premier promised to do what he could. By 11 p.m. the same day – six hours after the chat – Xiong Deming and her husband received the wages owed to them. Following this, Xiong acquired celebrity status, and she received 66 visits from media reporters and more than 1000 visits from migrant workers asking for her help to seek wages owned to them (Xie, 2004).

On 11 May 2005, Wang Bingyu, a 27-year-old construction worker in Gansu Province, north-west China, went to his boss’s residence to ask for 5000 yuan in wages owed to him. Prior to that, Wang had sought unpaid wages through the legal system, but soon realized that the legal process would take at least six months. He was then referred to the labour arbitration system. Again, Wang’s case went nowhere. With his father in need of medical treatment, Wang, in desperation, decided to take the matter into his own hands. However, instead of getting paid, he was badly beaten and publicly humiliated. Wang could no longer contain his rage. With a knife, he killed four people at the scene and then turned himself in. A month later, he was sentenced to death. While waiting to be executed, Wang was interviewed by Xinhua, China’s official News Agency, for more than 10 hours in total, and his story was published in September. The Xinhua story was sympathetic to Wang and his fellow migrant workers, and made an appeal for the improvement of social and economic justice in China (Zhao, 2008).

On 7 December 2002, Huang, the wife of a rural migrant worker in Shenzhen, one of China’s Special Economic Zones, climbed onto the top of a 30-meter-tall pole near her husband’s construction site. Her husband, Luo, had been injured while at work, but was too poor to pay for medical expenses. The company which employed Luo refused to pay. In desperation, Luo’s wife wanted to kill herself. Passers-by saw her and alerted the police. Rescue efforts were successful, and with the mediation of the local police, the company agreed to pay medical expenses upfront (Renmin wang [People’s Daily Online], 2003). This incident was extensively covered by the Chinese media, particularly the southern press, which is well known for its coverage of social justice issues. But there was clear polarization in the media, with some commentators lamenting on the gross injustices suffered by the migrant workers, the most disadvantaged social group in China, and others criticizing migrant workers for their ‘crazy’, ‘irrational’ and ignorant (of law) tendency to resort to extreme measures. A month later, another construction worker found himself in a dispute with the same company, also over the issue of work injury compensation. Following the example of his co-worker, he mounted the building threatening to jump. He was rescued by the police, but then was subsequently detained for 15 days for disrupting police work (Renmin wang [People’s Daily Online], 2003).

Despite their dramatically different outcomes, each of these stories features three key actors: the rural migrant worker, the media and the Party-state. Indeed, none of these three workers’ desperate struggles for economic justice would have become public knowledge without the presence or intervention of the media. In seeking justice, each migrant individual carves out a specific relationship with the media. At the same time, the media’s decisions to act (or not to act) in certain ways are informed, if not dictated, by the Party-state, which at various junctures resorts to different, or even contradictory, strategies for managing rural migrants in the name of social harmony (he xie) and the preservation of political stability (wei wen). In an interview with Global Media and Communication, a leading media and communication journal, Lü Xinyu, a Marxist scholar in Fudan University, Shanghai, poses this question: how and why is it that Chinese workers and peasants, who used to be the political and moral backbone of socialist China, so large in number and so indispensable to its revolutionary history, have well and truly become the ‘subaltern’ class in Chinese contemporary polity (Zhao, 2010)? In invoking an insight from the postcolonial theory of subalterneity, Lü alerts us to an opportunity to develop a broader theoretical argument about the importance of bringing subaltern studies perspectives – developed most prominently in the Indian and Latin American contexts – to bear on the contemporary Chinese society, whereby growing inequalities and socio-economic stratification have given rise to deepening class-based subjugation. Furthermore, by focusing on the subaltern position of the rural migrant workers and media, this article draws on a wide range of perspectives from subaltern studies scholarship – including voice, agency, power and construction of social identity – to inform critical media analysis.

In contemporary China, having a voice or having access to means of voice-giving is in reality often contingent on an urban residential status, a good education, sufficient cultural and social capital, or plenty of money – none of which are readily available to rural migrant workers. To date, much has been written about the working conditions, experiences of injustice and exploitation, and the formation of the working class in the construction sector in China (Pun and Lu, 2010a, 2010b). However, this literature, while framing workers’ struggle and resistance as evidence of class tensions and social conflict, tends to leave out the communicative aspect of workers’ experience. In fact, little attempt has been made to consider the complex and complicit relationship between the state, capital, media, and workers from China’s most disadvantaged social groups, and there is little attempt to understand migrant workers’ successes or failures within the larger framework of the cultural politics of public visibility, voice and power. What, for example, are the prerequisites to be met before rural migrants’ voice is deemed ‘worthy’ of inclusion in the media? Second, who are the major players in giving or denying a voice to migrant workers? In other words, how do media operate to amplify, reduce or alter the voice, in order to narrate a particular kind of life story?

The question of cultural citizenship is central to these questions. This is because the concept of cultural citizenship goes beyond and extends the traditional political theme of citizenship into the realm of cultural and information rights and claims. In addition, it recognizes the uneven and varied nature of citizenship among the population, and stresses the struggle to attain and maintain existing levels of citizenship in cultural as well as political/civic realms (Couldry, 2008; Dahlgren and Sparks, 1991; Stevenson, 2003). Finally, the framework of cultural citizenship stresses the mediated nature of citizenship in that it is through media production and consumption (watching TV, reading news, seeing films) that publics are reached, taught and turned into citizens (Hartley, 1996).

Taking its cue from Couldry, who treats voice as an ‘embodied process’ (2010: 8), this article explores the potential of a voice-gaining political strategy engaged in by migrant workers. In doing so, it also seeks to identify a number of factors that work to enable or constrain the realization of such potential. Set in the context of profoundly deepened social inequality and entrenched neoliberalism in China (Harvey, 2005), this discussion starts the process of unravelling the changing relations between the media, the Party-state and rural migrant workers in contemporary China. In other words, I suggest that the motivation and actions of the workers involved are inseparable from the question of the relationship between the media, the Party-state and their treatment of workers. Furthermore, I argue that to treat them as separate processes is to risk missing the picture of the dynamics and the diverse politics of agency, involving the rural migrant worker, the media and the Party-state, and an ever-changing web of coalition, negotiation, coercion, complicity and domination.

In what follows, I start by briefly laying out the socio-economic experience of rural migrant construction workers, which is increasingly marked by a ‘culture of violence’. Then, I explore the politics of voice, by which I mean the ways in which the logic of the media and the desire of the Party-state interact to produce (un)favourable conditions for migrant workers’ struggle for voice, recognition and compensation. Finally, I consider the actions and statements of migrant workers with a view to making sense of their complex and diverse agency, which, when directed against external forces, produces uneven and often unpredictable outcomes.

Rural migrant construction workers and the culture of violence

China’s long-standing and deeply ingrained household registration (hukou) system has effectively differentiated the nation along urban–rural lines, with up to 70 percent of the population having rural hukou (household registration). Reforms in the hukou system over the past few decades have made it possible for ‘ruralites’ to leave home in search of labour opportunities. Since the start of economic reforms in the late 1970s, the number of internal migrants, many of whom have rural hukou, has increased exponentially. The 2010 Chinese Census reveals that the number of China’s internal migrants has reached 221 million, constituting more than a quarter of the world’s mobile population. However, despite the reforms, the discriminatory mechanism of the system – involving unequal access to employment, housing, education and health care between urban and rural citizens – remains mostly intact (Chan and Buckingham, 2008; Solinger, 1999). The Chinese construction industry now employs more than 40 million people, most of them rural migrant workers who have come from all over the country. Statistically, this means about 30 percent of all migrant workers from the countryside work in this industry (Pun and Lu, 2010a; Pun and Lu, 2010b).

Sociological scholarship on rural migrant construction workers tells us that there are at least three reasons for the phenomenon of wages arrears. First, there is no workers’ union in China which operates independently of the Chinese state and which effectively functions to protect the rights of rural migrant workers. Second, despite the government’s requirement for construction companies to sign labour contracts with individual workers, only a small percentage of workers enter such a contractual relationship, and most rural migrants work on a casual basis. Third, the construction industry in reform-era China is characterized by a complex and complicit arrangement between the state and capital, resulting in a multiplicity of (sub)contractual tiers, with intense competition and clear demarcation of labour roles within each phase of construction (Pun and Lu, 2010a; Pun and Lu, 2010b).

The socio-economic context of China’s massive rural-to-urban migration and the life and work of rural migrant workers in China’s construction industry, though important in its own right, is not the focus here. But suffice it to say that the widespread, entrenched and consistent problem of wage arrears and wage reduction has bred among migrant construction workers a culture of violence (Pun and Lu, 2010a, 2010b). Li Qiang, one of the best-known labour sociologists in China, paints a devastating picture of desperation:

Social conflicts resulting from dispossession exist everywhere in China. Conflicts intensified by problems of wage arrears and wage reduction occur frequently. In order to receive the money owed to them, some migrant workers threaten suicide; some indeed kill themselves in the process. When failing to receive the wages owed to them, some die from jumping from tall buildings, or hurl their bodies against brick walls, or overdose on sleeping pills; some self-immolate, or jump from tall cranes. Incidents such as these are far too numerous, even if we only count those reported in the media. (Li Qiang, 2004: 263)

Based on my own ethnographic interaction with migrant construction workers over the past several years, I have come to realize that what is uppermost in their minds is being paid the promised amount and being paid on time, and that workers often have to weigh up the risks and benefits involved in defending this right. For two weeks in October 2010, accompanied by a member of a Beijing-based rural migrant advocacy group, I made daily visits to a number of dormitories on the outskirts of Haidian District, west of Beijing. These were makeshift dormitories that provided temporary accommodation to rural construction workers. ¹ One day, on one of these routine visits, we realized that something was afoot even before we entered the dormitory compound. The atmosphere was palpably tense. Although no violence was in sight, voices were raised and workers’ facial expressions suggested anger and agitation. We sidled up to one of the workers and made inquiries. He told us that they were supposed to have been paid after working for a couple of months, but the boss who had made the promise was nowhere to be found. In desperation, workers had detained the local project manager (by forming a circle around him), making it practically impossible for him to leave. Sensing the physical danger of being overpowered by more than a dozen men, the project manager, a local Beijinger, was wise enough not even to try to get away. By the time we got there, the stand-off had lasted for half a day, and a big crowd of spectators had formed to watch the conflict as it unfolded. The project manager was at pains to explain that he did not know where the boss was, and that the boss’s disappearance had nothing to do with him. He also said – repeatedly – that unless he was let go, he would ring the police. The workers were not to be persuaded. He eventually did ring the police on his mobile phone, and half an hour later, two policemen turned up in a police van. Having listened to the accounts from both sides, a senior police officer first turned to the local project manager and said, ‘Call your boss now and tell him that he must find the money to pay the workers straight away.’ He then turned to the workers and said, ‘Choose two representatives to go with him and get the money.’ On hearing this, some workers said that they would like to go together, as they were worried about being beaten up if only two were allowed to go to the boss’s place. But the police officer would not have that. ‘What have you got to be scared of? You have the law on your side’, he assured them. But the workers’ worry remained unassuaged. Fearing violent retribution, nobody ended up volunteering. The project manager was allowed to leave the site while the police were still present, and the crowd finally dispersed, having achieved nothing at the end of the day.

A potentially violent clash was avoided through the intervention of the police, but at the same time, the workers’ demand for payment of their wages again went unfulfilled – at least on that day. My Beijing colleague told me that such conflicts between workers and management were a common occurrence on construction sites, and did not always involve the police. Reflecting on the incident I had witnessed, I wrote the following in my fieldwork notebook at the end of the day:

Incidents such as this encapsulate the feeling of desperation which drives most migrant workers contemplating more extreme actions. They are the precursors to the more dramatic, mediatized spectacles of jumping from tall buildings, which we see on television and read in newspapers from time to time. Intuitively, and without much theoretical knowledge of the power of media, migrant workers nevertheless realized that they may need to escalate their action to the next level of publicity in order to gain voice, recognition and compensation.

Given this culture of violence, the seemingly extreme and desperate measures adopted by disgruntled migrant workers – be it whistle-blowing to the Premier, staging a spectacle of suicide or going on a killing rampage – become more understandable.

The politics of voice and visibility

The first story of the construction worker (which begins this article) seeking economic justice has the happiest ending. Involving a peasant and the Premier, it is a typical news story one finds in the official news coverage involving migrant workers. The Party-state’s compassion and concern for the ‘little people’, rather than the reality of exploitation, is the ‘main melody’ of the news story. However, in real life, for rural migrant workers, meeting top country leaders with an ear willing to listen or being able to door-stop the mayor is the stuff of fairy tales rather than realistic expectation. By a ‘once in a blue moon’ chance, and having the unbelievable luck of being in the right place at the right time, ordinary peasant woman Xiong Deming realized, with utter disbelief, that her words cut through the thick noise of government bureaucracy, media censorship and local intimidation to reach the entire nation. Her unexpected and brief exchange with the Premier had become a catalyst for a nation-wide ‘wage-seeking storm’ (taoxin fengbao), prompting central and local governments to launch numerous rules and regulations prohibiting wages arrears. A nation-wide 100-day crack down on the practice of wages arrears followed, resulting in the closure and punishment of numerous offending construction companies and payment to more than 90 million workers of wages totalling 100 billion yuan.

This is the political fairy tale par excellence in reformed China, with the Premier and his government as the charming prince incarnate, ready to save the struggling peasant woman and the 300 million Chinese peasants she represents. In the same way that media and popular culture anywhere in the world relish producing fairy tales, the Chinese media were enamoured with the Wen-Xiong story. Xiong Deming, an obscure farmer in hinterland rural China, became an overnight household name in China. She was voted one of CCTV’s (China Central Television) People of the Year in China in 2003 and became known as the woman whose few words touched the whole nation. Keen to keep the myth of the Xiong-Wen fairy tale alive, media, as recently as the end of 2009, told readers that Xiong has now started a successful piggery and has just patented her pork products using her own name (Xu, 2009). It seems that whatever she wants to say, the media stand ready to listen.

The second story ends tragically; but ironically and most tellingly, it is the only one in which the rural migrant resorts to the law in the first instance. In the film entitled You Owe Me RMB 15,000, a rural migrant worker leaves no stone unturned in his efforts to seek medical compensation for his brother who is injured at work. While waiting outside a lawyer’s office, Er Wang receives a free lesson from another client:

There is no point trying to get the lawyer to help you. If you are ready to risk anything, I suggest that you go and wait outside the Mayor’s office. If you manage to move the Mayor, your problem will be resolved straight away.

Rural migrant workers learn from their own experience that pursuing justice through the law is time-consuming and costly, and is thus not a viable option. As one Chinese commentator observes of these migrant workers’ choiceless choice, when public and social mechanisms of seeking justice cannot operate as they should, and where rational and legal channels of voice-seeking are blocked, unusual, extraordinary and individually devised means become the only choice available (Xu, 2007). As the third story indicates, the first reported incident of rural migrant workers threatening suicide on top of tall buildings took place towards the end of 2002, precipitating a steady and widespread increase in similar incidents across the country in the subsequent year or so, within a general frame of portraying with sympathy the social and economic injustices experienced by rural migrants (e.g. Chen, 2004; Wei, 2004).

Spectacles of death or self-inflicted injury have many elements of a ‘good story’, providing drama, suspense, conflict and resolution. Apart from its sensationalist value, which has direct commercial benefit, media professionals are also aware that they are directly intervening in the course of improving China’s social justice by giving voice to the most socially and economically marginalized social groups in China, thereby assisting the Party-state in curbing unscrupulous practices on the part of maverick businesses. In other words, the social justice agenda, combined with tangible commercial value, dovetailed with the Hu-Wen government’s growing recognition of the need to rechart the waters of economic reform. Since 2002, a number of central and local policies have been issued, providing the theoretical and legal basis from which to defend workers’ rights. These policies were an acknowledgement that almost two decades of economic rationalism and efficiency had created drastic social inequality, and unless people at the bottom feel the benefit of the economic reforms, there would be grave concerns for social stability and, by implication, political legitimacy. In other words, by giving voice to migrant workers with grievances to air, the media found a new power to champion its social justice cause, shame the economic players who do not play by the rules, and still have the political support of the government, which seemed only too happy to let the media function as its ‘watchdog’.

But the media soon realized that its social justice agenda was a double-edged sword. It was felt that too much publicity given to distraught migrant workers on top of buildings, cranes and in public spaces may have the adverse effect of accentuating social conflicts. Media’s reliable presence at the scene of these events would also by implication suggest that so far the government’s efforts to rein in illegal or unethical business practices had been ineffectual. Putting businesses in the media’s negative spotlight and emphasizing the need to tighten rules and scrutinize business operations may also risk alienating or frightening off potential investors and capital, thereby potentially affecting economic growth. When I talked to a news producer from CCTV at the beginning of 2009, I took the opportunity to complain of the Chinese media’s failure to report on the widespread issue of wages arrears, to which she explained that ‘the timing hasn’t been right’. As she elaborated subsequently, the Beijing Olympics and several years leading up to the Games had been a politically sensitive period, in which news coverage of any kind suggesting social disharmony was to be avoided. And when the Olympic Games finished in 2008, China, like the rest of the world, was then hit by the global financial crisis, which meant that, as a general rule, unfavourable reports of business malpractices and exploitation of workers were to be suspended, in order to avoid alienating potential or actual investors.

In other words, giving voice to rural migrants does happen, but when it does, it is often the means of achieving a larger political goal. It is not surprising that in the first two years of the Hu-Wen government (2002–3), incidents of workers jumping off tall buildings and the like were most frequently reported. Two years into its reign, the Hu-Wen government signalled a significant shift in its political rhetoric by launching the doctrine of social harmony (shehui hexie). First mentioned during the fourth Plenum of the 16th Meeting of the Party Central Committee in September 2004, the doctrine of social harmony sent a clear signal to media: social conflicts are to be represented mostly as ‘internal differences between people’ (neibu maodun), not class struggles, and media and cultural producers should do their best to promote social harmony rather than draw attention to ‘isolated’ incidents of disharmony between individuals.

This discursive shift is evidenced in the media’s coverage of the wage arrears issue in a number of ways. Instead of responding to calls and rushing to the scene to cover the incident, the media prefer to take a back seat and leave it to the police and local authorities to deal with the matter at hand. It was felt the absence of the media would constitute a major disincentive for migrant workers contemplating extreme action. Meanwhile, media now tend to seek out examples workers succeeding in getting paid through legal means. And when individual workers take drastic action, the incident tends to be covered in a way that emphasizes the message that migrant workers should exercise reason and respect the law. On 10 December 2009, Guo, a rural migrant, mounted the highest statue in the city square of Weihai City, Shandong Province, holding a bottle of petrol and a placard with the words ‘seeking unpaid wages’ on it. After repeated persuasion from a newspaper reporter and individuals at the scene, Guo agreed to come down. Following the advice of the journalist, he sought the help of the local labour arbitration bureau, whose intervention and efforts at mediation resulted in a payment of 9000 yuan to Guo two weeks later. The story, published in the local Weihai Evening News, concludes by saying that Guo ‘regrets his extreme action’ and urges his fellow workers to seek justice through relevant legal channels. ‘Everyone has the right to defend themselves through law’, he is quoted saying (Shen, 2009).

It is instructive to trace the permutation of these ‘building-jumping’ narratives. To be sure, the first case of ‘jumping off a tall building’ in 2002 (in the third story that begins this article) precipitated a ‘stock narrative’ (Bird and Dardenne, 1988) response comprised mainly of sympathy for the workers and criticism of the unconscionable conduct of management. However, these narratives, originally imbued with the pathos of tragedy and a strong sense of injustice, gradually became more jaded and jaundiced. Instead of being moved to action and intervention, cutting a heroic figure by seeking social justice on behalf of the weak, journalists, having lost the political support and in-kind back-up from the government, experienced what Cohen (1973) refers to as ‘compassion fatigue’. They gradually adopted a more detached stance, so much so that workers are depicted as copycats, prone to melodrama and, though deserving of sympathy for the injustice they suffer, not capable of defending their rights appropriately. In fact, media reports of similar incidents in recent years tend to argue, explicitly or by imputation, that migrant workers perform these dramatic acts merely ‘for show’ (zuo xiu), and urban spectators of such shows, including the journalists themselves, cannot help but feel, as the proverb goes, ‘sorry for their misfortunes, yet angry for their misdemeanours’ (ai qi bu xin, nu qi bu zheng) (Wei, 2004).

The tone of media stories has also changed, from compassion to mockery. Describing their acts of struggle as a ‘reality show’ implies a reduced level of desperation on the part of the workers, and, accordingly, a disavowal of their moral legitimacy. Likening Chinese migrant construction workers’ struggles to reality TV is not only misleading but also deeply offensive to the grieved workers. Cui Yongyuan, a well-known television host from CCTV, widely respected for speaking out on behalf of socially marginalized people, has this to say:

Calling migrant workers’ protests a show is deeply insulting. To those who describe these building-jumping suicide attempts as shows, I’d say this: OK, if you call this a show, why don’t you show me yourself? You must realize that these are highly volatile moments, and if attempts to defuse the situation fail, lives may be lost. (Jiang, 2010)

Framing workers’ actions as spectacles, publicity stunts and artful manipulations implies that since these marginalized individuals are also inducted into the media logic of celebrity, ‘we’ the spectators can then ‘lighten up’ and do not need to invest in undue empathy. Adding the word ‘show’ to the description of the workers’ struggles facilitates a rhetorical shift, from the poetic (tragedy) to the prosaic (comedy), and from the sublime to the ridiculous. For this reason, it is not simply the addition of a word; it represents a profound revamping of what Hall et al. (1978) call the ‘primary definition’ of the situation. With this sleight of hand on the part of the media professionals and urban spectators, a symbolic violence is inflicted on the body of rural migrant workers, taking away their one and only ‘viable’ moral – in the eyes of individual workers – avenue to justice. While the motive, the modus operandi and the pathos of actors involved remain unchanged, these actors are no longer perceived as fighters for justice; instead, they are portrayed as, on the one hand, amateur performers of reality shows whose claim for authenticity and recognition bears less connection to real life and more to the logic of media, and, on the other, as ignorant of law, unruly, and prone to irrational and disruptive behaviour.

In recent years, the politics of recognition, mandated by the need to promote ‘social harmony’ and maintain ‘political stability’, has led the media increasingly to resort to the strategy of appeasement. The CCTV 2011 Spring Festival Gala, for instance, featured an impressive dance routine performed by rural migrant workers from Shenzhen. Dressed in identical blue work uniforms and hard hats, more than 30 joyous, vibrant young men performed impossibly difficult feats on the stage, break-dance style, each holding a brick in his hand. They were supposed to be construction workers, and the Spring Festival Gala sought to portray them as part of a picture of national harmony and widespread happiness. But nothing could be further from the widespread issue of wage arrears that is the daily reality for many such workers.

A similar performance was repeated in ‘Ode to Labour’ a few months later – another CCTV Gala to mark Labour Day on 1 May. This Gala also featured a comedy routine, in which rural migrants post online messages inquiring about the new collective bargaining plan – a recent initiative launched by the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), which aims to establish a collective bargaining framework in the labour force in the next few years. Though such a scheme is still just a pipe dream, the migrant workers in the comedy sketch appear overjoyed. This was perhaps as close as state television gala events have ever come to hinting at the reality of social inequality and economic injustice, and as such it represents a noticeable shift from complete avoidance to tokenistic gesture as far as representing the social experience of rural migrants is concerned.

Successes and failures of migrant workers’ media strategy

My conversations with many workers suggest that, although migrant construction workers do not know much about law, they understand the simple logic of economic justice – you get paid for your work. Propelled by no loftier desire than to make money, and guided by a universal and primordial conviction that one should get paid for working, rural migrants come to the city only to realize their right to economic justice is violated on daily basis and there is little they can do about it. This desperate position is both a consequence, as well as a symptom, of disempowerment in both material and symbolic terms. Deprived of the means to speak and to be heard, some migrant workers resort to extra-legal means, and others are driven to the point of losing rationality and reason, inflicting violence on themselves or others in order to vent pent-up anger. Here, struggles for voice do not take the – relatively milder – form of striving for acceptance of difference or celebration of alternative lifestyles, or the preservation of marginalized cultural practices, as we often see in the West; it is, rather, a matter of life and death, and takes the most visceral and corporeal form of protest (against injustice), supplication (for media and public sympathy) and self-expression (of indignation, despair and, more importantly, hope). Intended, as public intellectual Xu Xin observes of the motive behind the actions of these desperate workers, to ‘send out signals of distress, cry for help, arouse public attention, form public pressure, resolve disputes, and ultimately defend one’s rights’ (Xu, 2007: 117), it is a strategy of the most desperate, precarious, potentially tragic, kind. By contrast, the hegemonic language of the ruling classes is, as Barthes points out, ‘rich, multiform, supple, with all the possible degrees of dignity at its disposal’ (1972: 148). Juxtaposing workers’ attempts at media publicity with those of hegemonic media forms throws the differential power relations into sharp relief, revealing a state-tolerated (if not sanctioned) process of double violence – the dispossession of the workers at a symbolic as well as material level.

On the other hand, however, although these extreme actions have lost their initial pathos of tragedy in the eyes of media and the urban public, they are now considered cause for genuine concern from the point of view of the local government and capital, both of which are shy of negative media exposure. This fear of triggering emotional and violent reactions from workers that could attract media exposure may in some cases function as a deterrent to potential offenders. Eager to assure me that his workers were happy with their working conditions, a low-level manager on a construction site in Beijing defended his bosses by saying that companies could no longer afford to owe workers money:

You may not have heard this: migrant workers are the God now; you have got to keep them happy, otherwise, they can get into all sorts of stuff, including mounting the crane, tall buildings, blocking the management office, or obstructing public traffic, and contact the media. ²

This fear is also evidenced in a remark made by a CEO in a boardroom discussion regarding wage arrears, in You Owe Me RMB 15,000, a popular Chinese film centring on the dispute between construction workers and the company: ‘Matters to do with rural migrants need to be handled carefully. Now with television, newspapers and the internet everywhere, bad publicity may strike us anytime.’

However, almost a decade after the first rural migrant threatened to jump off a building, the problem of wage arrears still persists today. One survey in 2007 shows that out of 82 cases of reported suicide attempts, 34 constituted genuine suicide attempts and 48 were gestures of suicide. The rate of successful dispute resolution was a mere 30 percent (Xu, 2007) and, more tragically, 10 cases resulted in death. However, despite these sobering figures, cash-strapped and emotionally distraught workers continue to stage suicidal threats with varying degrees of success, and struggles to speak and to be heard go on. And the media continue to play a crucial role in shaping the moral and narrative parameters of these events. Many workers I talked to still believed that attempting suicide seemed to be most ‘effective’, and they were far from being irrational. I reproduce an excerpt from the transcript of my conversation with workers in a focus group setting in May 2011 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province.

Workers have also learned that a more ‘rational’ strategy of involving the media normally would not work either. In August 2005, 40 construction workers in Xi’an, Sha’anxi Province invited local journalists to a press conference, hoping that the presence of media would lend moral force to their case of seeking unpaid wages. Nine hours after the media left, workers’ negotiations with their companies were abruptly brought to an end when more than 30 ‘hired guns’ suddenly turned up and violently attacked these migrant workers, resulting in the injury of six people, including two who were severely wounded (Xu, 2007). Migrant workers soon realize that due to a lack of access to legal representation and cultural resources – all of which urban middle-class citizens take as given – their economic rights cannot be taken for granted. As a consequence, in addition to working hard on the construction sites, workers living with the psychological stress of not knowing when and if they will be paid find themselves learning from one another the pros and cons of various strategies and tactics of negotiating with management. Dormitories sometimes become the tutorial space where experiences are shared and strategies discussed (Pun and Lu, 2010a). I witnessed these ‘tutoring sessions’ many times during my visits to the dormitories.

Zhang Jinhe is one such ‘tutor’. One day in December 2007, holding a suicide note in his hand, Zhang mounted a 30-storey building in Wuhan City, Hubei Province, and threatened to jump unless he received wages owed to him. Zhang got what he wanted. Buoyed by his success, Zhang became a self-appointed adviser to many fellow workers. From 2007 to 2009, he helped numerous workers in a similar situation, including devising strategies on crucial details, down to the number of workers to jump, which building to jump from, what kind of suicide notes to write, the wording on their placards, which government departments to contact, which media outlets to talk to and the kind of promises which must be secured before ‘quitting’ the act. Zhang claimed that so far, threatening to kill oneself was still the most effective way of seeking economic justice, but he also stressed that he learned his lessons the hard way. When Zhang and his fellow workers found that their bosses had run away without paying them a few years previously, initially they did the ‘right thing’: they went to the management, only to be told that the subcontractors had already been paid; they then went to the labour arbitration office, which gave the same advice; they went to the court, but were required to pay 1000 yuan in initial fees. Finally they went to the media, and were told that ‘there were too many cases seeking unpaid wages’, and there was nothing the media could do about it (Xinjing Bao [Beijing News], 2009). With all ‘viable’ options closed off, and as a cry of desperation, Zhang staged his publicity stunt. His successes in his own and other cases helped earn him the reputation as, in the words of the media, the director of ‘jumping-off-building shows’ (tiao lou xiu).

Workers’ penchant for exploiting media publicity does not stop at producing spectacular images of protest on television, newspapers and the internet. Once images of protesting workers putting themselves in dangerous places are produced, they proliferate in a plethora of new social media spaces, which can be further downloaded to individual phones, computers and email attachments. The ‘career’ of these images may have a much longer time span than expected of traditional media, especially given the well-documented high uptake and creative use of the mobile phone and low-end ICT (information and communication technologies) among migrant workers (Qiu, 2009). In his analysis of the role of media (especially new media and technologies) in reporting on a series of tragedies involving police brutality, government control and the deaths of youths in Chinese cities, Qiu argues that while ‘new media events’ are dramatically different from televised events, rituals and ceremonies – which are sleek in presentation, grand in scale and often take place in important spaces – they can nevertheless raise public awareness and effect real social change. The actions of construction workers discussed here seem capable of producing a similar social consequence to that of the marginalized youths described by Qiu, but the circumstances in which death is configured in these struggles is fundamentally different. In Qiu’s studies, the deaths of marginalized youths, once reported by the media (including new media), became catalysts for public support and social change, whereas in the case of migrant construction workers, the spectacle of their deaths or attempted suicides would not have taken place without the presence of media.

Conclusion

I have traced the emergence and decline of a minor media practice widely utilized by China’s rural migrant workers, particularly male workers in the construction sector. This account cautions against a linear and simplistic account of winning or losing in migrant workers’ struggles. This discussion uncovers a fundamental paradox. Staging spectacles of ‘extreme actions’ may beget mediation and mediatization, and, for this reason, has the potential for rights-seeking on the part of the subaltern speaking subjects. But, at the same time, the circumstances in which mediation and mediatization are taken up as strategies of resistance and struggle change over time, and are subject to the vagaries of politics, which can shape, if not determine, the effectiveness of these tactics. Migrant workers’ struggles for voice, recognition and justice may be increasingly informed by media logic, but, more importantly, they are invariably dictated by the structure-versus-agency dialectic which shapes their struggles. These discoveries go some way towards opening up a much broader debate on how to approach the media’s configurations of subaltern figures in the contemporary world, especially in transitional societies where the media are strictly controlled by the Party-state and where there is a deepening of social inequalities.

Put in the context of contemporary China, the question of cultural citizenship has taken on an extra dimension. Inequality is about whether rural migrants have access to a range of material benefits – health care, education, employment and housing. But precisely because of this, the issue of unequal access to discursive resources – whether mainstream media and cultural institutions give voice to points of view of rural migrant workers and whether rural migrants possess the means for effectively communicating their concerns in the public domain – become doubly pressing.

Finally, this discussion provides compelling evidence pointing to both the enabling and constraining factors that underscore rural migrant workers’ struggles for voice, recognition and economic compensation. The take-home message here – both empirical and theoretical – is worth noting. First, the agency of rural migrant workers is not only culturally and socially situated but is also expressed in a diverse range of settings, sometimes within social structures and sometimes in opposition to them, with varying degrees of effectiveness. Furthermore, since the agenda and agency of each actor – the migrant individual, the media and the state – are articulated together in this process, the political, social and economic agency of rural migrant workers cannot be meaningfully explored without also considering the (dis)empowering actions of media and Party-state. Finally, the presence or absence of rural migrant agency is not to be simply confirmed or stated; instead, we must examine the ‘particular moments and ways in which individuals speak/act themselves into existence’ (Hilsdon, 2008: 136). This includes the ways in which rural migrants speak about those state and media practices that seek to constrain or deny their agency, as well as the ways in which they communicate their own experience of inequality and injustice to the Party-state and the media.